Ornately-painted box

October 6, 2006

Early yogic and other Asian traditions gave great attention to inner space. It was the science of that day, and like the science of any other day, it was a human attempt to understand the nature of existence, employing the clearest and most powerful tools available. The closest subject, and the one which yielded the greatest wealth of insight, was one’s own physical and psychic being; the experiments, rather than being humbled by what we might imagine a lack of powerful technology, resulted in empirical knowledge, which developed over time into philosophical and physical traditions which have lasted millennia.

Those masters lacked our tools, but were not without tools: they themselves were both subject and object of the experiment, at once objective and subjective, and through meditative and awareness practices developed the skill to become both the actor and the watcher. As such, with the subtlety of surgeons, they moved into a stillness so profound that the slightest nuances of energy and emotion could be traced, so that gross motor movements, as well as movements of thought or energy, could be traced along identifiable channels within the “subtle body”. Thus the Chinese knew of the nervous system before they knew of nerves, and the yogis intimately understood the endocrine system before they had elaborated glands.

What we consider empirical today cannot rely on such information: once the subject is aware that he or she is part of an experiment, particularly in one of the “soft” social sciences, the experiment will have been modified by that awareness, and the results are suspect, if not considered completely invalid. The science of inner study as was practiced for thousands of years cannot be allowed in the door, cannot be quantified, cannot be accepted as irrefutable. The paradigm which has brought us so much technical prowess has in effect barred us from easy access to an entire world of knowledge, not so much scoffing at such intangibles, as having no formula by which to evaluate their virtues, other than those tools which constructed our own engineered world. Imagine the depth and breadth of modern Western Knowledge to be a box – a large, and shining, stainless-steel box, filled with stents and nuclear power, electric cars and moon-rockets, vaccines and buildings the height of small mountains. Filled as well with bullets and chemical and biological weapons, terrorists whose lives are time bombs, surveillance tools, ubiquitous and controlled media, and personal isolation. (Pandora wasn’t so archaic, after all, was she?) The stainless box is not filled with ignorance. Ignorance does not fill a box, it is a lack of filling, it is all that exists outside the box.

Now imagine another box, ornately decorated, decorated with hours and hours of free time and with spiritual dedication, with paints which are different than our paints because they were made by hand, and imbued with the quality of imperfect human manufacture. If modern engineering could see this box from the outside – where the ability to peek over the edge of one’s own box is never evident, unless that skill is cultivated – it would judge the box’s paint inferior, as it fades and chips against the test of time; it would judge the box dangerous, because bacteria and disease could easily exist on its non-stainless surface; it would judge the box quaint, archaic, and essentially irrelevant.

If someone from the stainless box could actually look into the painted box, it might appear completely empty. Or, what was inside would be so foreign as to threaten, or confuse, or offend.

The gift of life is in its fullness, and your choice is clear: to continue to grow in understanding, and through understanding compassion, or to remain safe and limited within a highly-polished cage. If you are called out, and you answer that calling, you will stretch your legs, stand up out of the crouched seat, stand up like a man, stand up like a woman. The walls of the box aren’t so high as one thinks. When you stand up, you begin to see all of the ways of thinking, see their limitations and their beauties. This is when life really bears fruit, where every day brings something sweet and unanticipated, and where you can rest at the end of this amazing river of days, leaving life while filled by life.

If you stretch those legs and look around…

Don’t become confused by the voices mumbling from within the walls of some other box. If your guide is unable to see into your box, he or she will simply be helping you from one limitation to another. If someone tells you that, to grow, you must discard all you know, that they own the truth, you will know their truth is as small as the walls which contain it. You can recognize the real guide because she will say: there are no walls. He will say: all of these works of human understanding describe the same thing: the same human body, the same human motivations, the same earth underfoot, the same firmament overhead.

Consider the model of the flat earth – or of the heavens that revolved around us, instead of vice-versa. What were those humans seeing, what did it mean, and how was it valuable for so many centuries? What have we lost by changing our perspective? Since every box contains human knowledge about the same phenomena, everything is a metaphor for everything else; every pattern is repeated infinitely from the grandest scale to the most minute. The poets know this, it is the raw material of their trade. Teachers must know this, as each new and more inclusive idea is metaphor resting upon a foundation of past experience.

It is worth watching the shadows cast by the events of our lives: when we look right at something, we don’t often catch the metaphor, we tend to see things as small and isolated moments, we tend to keep them in the same stainless box we inhabit. Rest assured that everything that happens is part of something much larger than a moment, larger than what you imagine to be your individual life; watch the size of the shadow cast, that reaches out of the familiar and mundane, stretches up and over the walls you live within, reaches a quiet finger out to point (perhaps?) toward new ways of seeing, and the mysteries of an ornately-painted box.