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One of the amazing parts about this world is that it is filled with innumerable things – and each of these ‘things’ is a direct path to enlightenment.  Indeed, we are surrounded by teachers, both inanimate and animate, each of which will be happy to show us ultimate reality.  They show us because when we look at any one ‘thing’, we are actually looking at our own delusion, and taking a really good look at the nature of our delusion will cause the delusion to dissolve.

So let’s look at the delusion head-on.  Let’s do it by observing one of these things around us.  Let’s look at our pinkie finger.

Lucid Wonder

If you’re one of the majority of people who have a pinkie finger, take a look at it.  Wiggle it around a little.  Notice its lines and curves.  Looks pretty normal, doesn’t it?  But keep looking for a while, maybe a minute or so.  If you do, you’ll begin to notice something odd.  The pinkie isn’t so normal.  In fact, it’s kind of weird.  It has little hairs growing out of it, and this thing called a ‘fingernail’ sort of stuck on the end, and it moves around in the most amazing way.  The longer you look, the odder your pinkie will begin to seem.  You might soon find yourself struck with a strange perception that your pinkie is just about the most peculiar thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

I call this feeling ‘lucid wonder’, because it is a sense of wonder that derives from a new and budding awareness of how the world really is.  You can experience this same strange sense if you stare at a word for a while – the letters begin to dissolve into bizarre squiggles and shapes.  The more you delve into this, the more you can begin to feel this sense of wonder hidden within all the ordinary things around you – the way clouds hang in the sky, the way that one human can  make sounds with its mouth and another human can get a meaningful message from those sounds, they way a seed can turn into a plant, or the way your eyes can skim across this page and turn these black marks into ideas and concepts.  Here is a post that deals with lucid wonder, though I wasn’t calling it that when I wrote it.

This lucid wonder is our first clue that maybe the world isn’t as ordinary as we thought.  Maybe there is something missing from our everyday idea of ‘how things are’.  Let’s ask our pinkie for a few more clues. 

Something’s Suspicious

Do you know what a pinkie is?  Of course you do!  Even a kindergarten student knows what a pinkie is!  But wait a minute.  Do we really?  If we take a look at our pinkie, we can see that it is attached to the rest of our body and that there isn’t a clear dividing line between ‘hand’ and ‘pinkie’.  Indeed, if we opened up our skin, things would only get more confusing.  Tendons, blood, and nerve endings all cross the boundary that we lay between ‘hand’ and ‘pinkie’, and our supposedly individual thing – the pinkie – couldn’t function without its intimate connection with the hand.  The more carefully we look, the more it becomes apparent that the idea of  ‘pinkie’ is only a convention.  Indeed, wherever we draw lines in the world, we are drawing these lines via language and idea – there is no actual line in nature that designates pinkie from hand.

Look around and play this game a little.  Where are the lines in the world?  We can pluck a leaf off a tree and say ‘this is a leaf and this is a tree’, but wait!  Is the stem a part of the leaf, or can we pluck that off too?  What about the veins?  What can we remove and still have a ‘leaf’?  We can do this with anything – a car is another great example.  Try it with a person.  It soon becomes clear that the lines we draw in the world are lines of convention – not lines of reality.

So far, the pinkie has introduced us to the strange sense of lucid wonder, and has showed us that the divisions we make in the world are not as clear as we once supposed.  But the pinkie has more to teach us.

Pinkie Dissolves the Self

Wiggle that pinkie around a little more.  Stop the  motion, then start it again.  Now consider – what initiated the pinkie motion?  At first we might think the answer is simple – we decided to move it, and it moved.  We can repeat the experiment.  We ask our pinkie to move, and it moves.  But now ask yourself how that decision was made.  Did you decide to decide to move your pinkie?  Or was the decision to move your pinkie initiated by nothing or nobody?  If you decided to decide, then who decided to decide to decide?  At some point, it appears that nothing or nobody made the initial decision.

But wait.  Maybe I decided for you.  After all, you wouldn’t have performed this experiment if you hadn’t been reading this.  So did I make the decision for you?  You read this, and then decided to try the experiment.  Which would mean that your ‘free will’ is really not so free – it is intimately connected with my actions.  If you insist that you really do have free will, and that you could have made the decision to move the pinkie or not to move the pinkie, then you’re stuck with the first problem — the problem of a never-ending series of decisions.

As you can see, things become a tangled mess.  Indeed, the whole idea of free will, which is one of the foundation blocks of our idea of ‘Self’, is called into question if we examine it too carefully.  Much easier to collapse into the feeling we’ve all been taught – that we know we can make free will decisions just as easily as we can decide to move our pinkie.  If we simply close our minds at that point, we’ll be safely encased in a comfortable, if unexamined, sense of Self.

On the other hand, if we look carefully at free will and at what makes our pinkie move, our ideas of free will, cause and effect, and linear time will start to tumble apart.  We’ll become true inquirers, instead of blind followers.

Watching Our Minds

If we observe carefully, we’ll see that in each of the pinkie’s lessons, our mind at first comes up with a pat and ready answer.  We know a pinkie is an ordinary thing, we know exactly what it is, and we know that we’re capable of moving it around however we wish.  After that, we begin to see that our pat and ready answers are not, perhaps, as rock-solid as we thought.  After that, we begin to ask questions, and we’ll soon discover that the questions don’t have answers that can be put into words.  This is when a true understanding begins to unfold.

Our pinkie, and all the other objects around us, work in concert to create Maya – a mesmerizing illusion that we all take for reality.  As long as we continue to cultivate our mind’s tendency to settle for pat and ready answers, Maya will continue to dazzle us, and we will weep and laugh and stress and live and die, all in her hypnotic embrace.  There is nothing wrong with this – it is the beautiful and terrible dance we are all dancing, and it is pure in and of itself.  However, there is way to dance without being lost in the delusion.  We don’t lose the ability to dance – we just gain the ability to recognize that we are dancing.  In this way we come full circle, and discover that the convention and delusion that we were working so hard to overcome is just as much a part of ‘reality’ as anything else.  This is our final awakening – coming to see that all of our ideas about enlightenment were only ideas, and that waking up was never about ‘losing the ego’ or ‘discovering the Now’ or any of the other ideas with which we try to frame true experience.  Words won’t work here – just experience.  It’s waiting for all of us if we take the time to fully examine even one single object in this world.  Let your mind settle on no idea – look with your clear perception until there is nowhere left for your mind to rest.  Your answers are waiting there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 1:07 am and is filed under Awakening and Reality. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.