Things Are More Than What They Are: Part 2

Nature Notes - September 2024

In this essay, Dr. Inabinet discusses how to reach an inner calm, a  place where internal and external voices quiet. 

- Story by James Inabinet

“The river is not pushed from behind, nor is it pulled from ahead. It falls with gravity.” – Alan Watts

​In the last essay, I introduced the idea that our bodies, more than flesh and bone, have a spiritual dimension. They are also (as per Owen Barfield) spiritual wind harps that respond to spirit, an airy breath that moves about “where it listeth.” Ostensibly, when this breath moves across the strings of our harp-body, a vibration begins that’s resonant with the spirit that animates them. 

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This resonance is like a pair of tuning forks. When one vibrates, proximal ones vibrate in sympathetic resonance. The vibrating strings of my harp-body are felt, unexpectedly, when I am uncontrived, allowing myself to just “be.” At such times I fall naturally towards my true nature even as I live in my world, not unlike the river that naturally, effortlessly falls in its “life-world,” which is between the banks.
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If spirit ever breathes across our harp strings, why isn’t meaningful resonance an everyday occurrence? Our greatest gift, waking consciousness, that makes the blessings of human life possible, gets in the way. We are so tuned-in to conscious awareness and its shining light, we think this light to be everything. Immersed, we stare into it blithely unaware of its unconscious underpinnings–and the wind harp itself. By keeping exclusively to bright conscious daylight, we are consumed with thinking and the internal roar. We talk to ourselves constantly, propping up the daylight world that keeps the lower one at bay. In so doing we force into manifestation, too, many of the products of thinking: ideas, deeds, constructions. The more this holds true, the farther we seem to get from meaning, the farther we get from natural wisdom, the farther we get from intimate connection to the growing world around us. In such a state we don’t fall like gravity into ourselves. We don’t seem to get there at all, like we’re chasing our tails.
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To feel meaningful resonance, what’s most required is that we get out of our own way. Trying to force the issue just pushes it away. The philosopher Alan Watts says that getting out of the way can be performed by “not-forcing.” Taoists call this “wu wei,” which specifically refers to the unconscious wisdom of the body. It literally means “non-action.” From the Tao Te Ching: “The Way is ever without action, yet nothing is left undone.” In practice, wu wei entails acting – just doing the normal doings of the day – with a joyful spontaneity, a rolling with the flow that can situate body-as-harp out into the path of spirit’s breath.

Wu wei does not take place in a vacuum, though. We might picture its proper domain to be a guru’s life of sitting day after day, alone, in quiet meditation, far removed from the “ten thousand things of the world.” I’ve always been struck by the unreality of such an image; it’s uninteresting, too. What interests me is the possibility of being in the world with all its vagaries and trials and yet still managing to bring one’s deepest self into being through “non-action that does everything.” This doesn’t happen through rarefied removal as much as through connection and relationship.

With joyful spontaneity, we engage with the beasts and plants and toads and insects and whole ecosystems, even street corners and coffee shops, intimately, with deep connection and love in our hearts. The philosopher Martin Buber puts the focus of being-in-the-world on such relations. He advocates an “I-Thou” relation as distinct from “I-It.” The latter is a relation of separation, which can be little or no relation at all. Making an It into a You is the path to I-Thou: “The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation.” Buber says that for a person-tree relationship to become I-Thou all the tree is goes into the relation just as all I am goes into it as well. “One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” This is indwelling; part of me dwells with the other, and vice versa. The soul of the one interacts with the soul of the other in reciprocity. The two vibrate softly in sympathetic resonance. Deep meaning ensues.

To begin, we must dim conscious light to privilege the unconscious – just a little – no forcing! This is really harder than it sounds but it can be accomplished by simply entering into a gentle contemplative state while remaining fully awake, in the world, naturally, peacefully. Here, parallel, global unconscious processes literally see more than linear consciousness. Unconsciously is how we recognize the face of a loved one or see elephants in clouds. When consciousness dims, the imaginative attitude awakens, yet we really don’t do anything at all but act spontaneously.

In this milieu of attention and care, the imaginative attitude supplements what we see. Imagination is not satisfied with our first sense of reality. To go further, to see more, we take whatever comes, in a disinterested sort of way, ever mindful of images that arise, insights that form, feelings that come over us. Animated filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki declared that “reality is for people who lack imagination.” In the imaginative attitude, we dive deep into the other, into what’s beyond and beneath mere appearance to reach a sort of shared “soul-space,” again, felt rather than seen. In this space of soul-meets-soul, reality becomes more porous, not so rigid perhaps, or not quite congealed, in a word: unfinished. Now, in this place of being things become more than what they are.
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