Essay #31:  Trompe l’Oeil:  The Illusion of Separateness

And what’s the trick if not to make
The eye believe that what it thinks
It sees is all there is and none to take
From heaven but some little drinks?

I look upon a crowd and what do I see?  Do I see people who are different from me or the same?   What constitutes difference and what sameness?  The little girl who wears a size 4 bathing suit and flops her legs around in the pool like a duck:  is she the same as me or different?   Surely, I could not fit into her bathing suit.  Her wet blonde tresses would not look suitable against my aging face.  The squeals of laughter and excitement that come from her mouth are not mine.  Nonetheless, I seem to be able to understand her better than I ought.  The lines on her face convey instant meaning to me whether they are shaped into frowns or smiles.  Even her pensive musing over a beetle at the water’s edge holds meaning for me.  Do I imagine seeing the beetle through her small eyes or am I actually seeing it or both?  Why is it that I seem to be able to relate so intimately to the little cock of her head and the parting of her lips?  What is so appealing to me about her inquisitiveness and how is it that I can virtually feel the touch of her tongue perched against her upper lip as she moves in for a closer look?

Of those who are very different from me, their differences catch hold of my eye first.  The spectacle of difference is an invitation to my imagination to indulge in all kinds of invention.  The “not me” of comparative awareness splinters off of the “me” in a thousand directions like fireworks emerging from a common center.  However, the closest I can get to the center—to the “me”—is a collection of physical characteristics, emotional qualities, and thought forms that are actually aggregates of qualities just like those I identify as “different”.  Surely, these aggregates are different insofar as they are not the very same ones I perceive “over there.”  Yet what I actually assume is that it is the “something-something” inside those aggregates that differentiates “me” from “you.”  I assume that there is a deeper center still—the individual self or mind—that wears these aggregates as a kind of sign or badge of its own irreplicable uniqueness.  I believe that, certainly, some of these aggregates might be exchanged for those over there; nevertheless, my identity is not in question.  Were it even the case that all these aggregates were exchanged for those, still, I would be me, and you would be you.  If suddenly I got the little girl’s tresses, could fit into her suit, and wore her very face staring at that beetle, even then I would still be me and not her, nor would she be me.  So beguiled are we by the spectacle of our differences that we work backwards toward the center and mindlessly assign to it the same kind of difference we find at the periphery.  However, if we stop and study the firework, we really cannot find its center.  The center is assumed, and assumed to be different in the case of each firework.  That makes sense to us because the fireworks themselves are different.  Some are gold.  Some are red.  Others are combinations of silver and green, and so forth.  Were we to superimpose multiple fireworks one upon the other, then we would perceive no difference between their centers.  They would all appear equally empty and completely identical.  Then we would begin to realize the abstraction from the periphery which artificially identified or delineated each center for us.

Awareness is exactly the same.  It is differentiated entirely by the objects at its periphery, that is, by the qualities or aggregates held in awareness.  Were I to overshadow the girl and become aware of all her qualities that we would classify as physical, and again aware of all those we would classify as mental and emotional and even spiritual—and were she to become aware in the same way of all the qualities overshadowing her—then there would be not two distinct awarenesses but one.  In essence, there would be one awareness inhabiting two bodies, which is very difficult to comprehend until we realize that de-localization does not magically create two separate selves any more than a separation between fireworks creates two real and substantive centers.  De-localization only creates the impression of separateness and uniqueness, as do any of the other particular qualities that awareness attends to.

In the case of fireworks, despite their de-localization all their centers remain identical because they are actually empty.  Emptiness in one location is actually no different at all from emptiness in another.  Or its difference is purely abstract and contingent.  Likewise, in the case of awareness, yours is no different from mine or from anybody else’s.  This is why—despite the beguiling and bewitching hold qualitative differences have on our eye—we are nevertheless often able to understand their inner significance in a heartbeat.  We see them exteriorly but we come at them interiorly, that is, as if we owned them because, in fact, we do.  It is especially evident with those we love and have known for years that, as the Bible says, “they have become of one flesh.”  What has one flesh has one mind also, and so it seems to intimate partners as they bind their lives together over time.  It is not uncommon for such partners to be able to “read one another’s thoughts,” complete each other’s sentences, and to step into each other’s shoes and on occasion fulfill their wishes or obligations just as if they were the partner themselves.  The curious feeling that allows such things to happen is—paradoxically—not fullness but emptiness.  Emptiness is not only a feeling but a reality.  It is because one partner is able to see himself as empty in relation to the other that he is able to become filled with her qualities, predilections, and ways of thinking and seeing the world.  Put differently, the partner realizes that nothing that fills him is so substantive or important that it should be allowed to fill the space where the other lives inside of him.  In other words, it should not be allowed to displace that emptiness, which would then preclude mutual understanding and identification.  In this case, subtraction becomes addition.  The subtraction of qualities which the self or ego falsely identifies as itself makes room for the qualities of the other.  Then these, too, can ultimately be subtracted out leaving only mutual emptiness and total identification of one with the other.  This, of course, happens only during relatively brief periods in worldly life until the press of objects upon the mind differentiates it again into two seemingly separate attentions.  But it should serve as a clue as to what we are missing.

Looking again into a crowd, I can choose to see differences.  Normally, this is not a choice.  It is what I do and am accustomed to doing without thinking.  It is just how my attention is usually thrown and tossed about.  In the face of this spectacle, what I typically do is to cleave to what I think I know and particularly to what I believe I know as “me.”  I quickly differentiate “myself” from all those “others” and also my own preferred and comfortable experiences from all those I imagine as foreign, unpredictable, and unfriendly.  I choose to swim in my own pond, where I know the tide, the depths, the hazards, and the pleasures.  All those and all that which I perceive as “different” I may quickly classify as shallows and shoals or at best as “to be visited with caution.”  Or I may map them out as “pleasure zones” to be explored whenever possible but never without knowing the path back to the safest shore.  All that is seen is typically viewed as one would view my pond straight down from above.  We could say it is just a reflection taken straight up from the sky.  I have no sense of anything or anyone beyond the banks of my pond.  Hemmed in by the illusion of individual awareness or self, I perceive all things under the limit of this illusion.  Whatever rains from heaven directly above is what fills my pond.  It is what I drink.  It is what I know.  And it defines both my bounty and my ignorance.

Everything begins to change once I wake up to the fact that I am choosing to see differences.  Once this perception comes off of automatic and becomes a choice, then the shape of the world begins to alter significantly.  For when I awaken to this choice, then necessarily I also awaken to the possibility that I could alternatively choose to see sameness.  In other words, instead of mapping all the different qualities I perceive as if they were features of my own individual pond, I could “practice emptiness.”  I could begin to see them not as features of my pond alone but as features of other ponds also.  The very notion of “other ponds” requires me to become relatively empty of attachment to or identification with my own pond.  Otherwise, the very habit of identification keeps the banks securely in place and prevents me from seeing beyond them into nearby ponds.  Whatever I do see, I quickly and neatly label as features of my own pond, even if they are ones that I do not particularly like and decide not to visit often or at all.  To see these very qualities or aggregates not as different and distant or disliked but the same as the ones I call “safest” in my familiar pond requires that I at least be able to imagine them as safe in some nearby pond.  Such imagination breaks through the banks of my former limited awareness.  It begins to catch a glimmer that there is more to take from heaven than the little drinks my pond has been accustomed to containing.  It leads to the discovery that many, many ponds drink from heaven a variety of qualitative downpours.  From the awareness of this discovery, qualities and aggregates that I formerly labeled as “different” and relegated to one or another corner of my pond appear as channels leading into whole new ponds.  In order to get to these ponds, my awareness has to egress and to enter new territory.  I cannot get there while staying safely moored at home.  However, the good news is that I don’t have to.  The same channel by which I exit into another pond gives the waters of that pond entrance into mine.  The very notion of “home” or even of “territory” begins to become blurred the wider the channel becomes that gives access in both directions.  Widen the channel enough and we cease to speak of two ponds at all but of one larger pond with more features.  Such a larger pond reflects more of the sky and drinks from a larger swath.  It encompasses greater biodiversity.

In terms of the mind for which this is a metaphor, such an expanded awareness benefits from greater physical diversity and interest, a much larger emotional range, expanded rational intelligence, and far deeper psychological security.  The mind that chooses to see sameness or oneness begins to see in a crowd new reflections of the sky—that is, of reality itself—which it can potentially also reflect,–not, however, judged and cataloged as different features of its own limited landscape but as new vistas requiring an elevated awareness to apprehend.  Thus, each person presents something of true interest.  Each promises some degree of freedom through their diverse preferences in departure from my narrow obsessions with the same.  Each offers a new degree of emptiness and spaciousness revealed through the juxtaposition or overlap of that very diversity of loves and hatreds together with those labeled “my own.”¹  Like fireworks that happen to be concentric, they reveal the almost arbitrary nature of all that colors us and gives us sparkle when taken with reference to the common center or emptiness in whose spaciousness all these brilliant colors take shape.  Thus we can come to view the de-localization of each person—and of objects and living things in general—not as proof of impregnable individuality and difference but as a further trick of the mind causing us to see as limited what has virtually unlimited potential.  De-localization, of course, includes not only the general perception that other persons and things lie “outside” myself but also the differentiation of all their qualities as “different from me” and “not mine.”

Riding in my subway car are two black women in their thirties with ample flesh bulging from their tight tops and dresses.  Their legs are tattooed.  Their fingernails are long and painted brightly.  They are adorned with jewelry.  Their hair is done up into fancy shapes.  They make a lively splash as they bump back and forth in happy, animated conversation, their colorful dresses twisting around them.  When I see them my first response is to become conscious of our difference.  I look at various parts of them and note confusion in myself.  I register discomfort.  Then I witness all this sliding into dislike.  I find myself cowering behind my defenses:  thoughts of what feels safe to me, reminders of what awaits me that is familiar and undisturbed:  car, driving home, home, snack, bed.  But then I catch myself and realize what I am doing.  I realize that I am choosing to see only difference.  I stop, step back a moment and study the choice. I begin to see that out beyond the edges of the viewpoint of difference is a sameness that has much to teach me.  What about all those bright colors?  Instead of foreign terrain could they become an invitation to live out a stronger embrace with all the flamboyant bounty of the Earth?  Could even the fingernails become like fireworks taken in hand to highlight their already heartfelt expressions of gladness?   Aha!  I start to remember my own very different ways of celebrating the Earth, my own different gladness,–only they strike me now as much less different than before.  The expressions are different, but the difference seems much shallower than before.  Now I see that just beneath the surface difference begins to yield to sameness, whereas earlier I had imagined that it continued unabated to the core.  I am encountering the de-localization of qualities from myself, but now I am not allowing this to bewitch my awareness back into its self-limiting enclosure.  Granted, it is only a thought-experiment or imagination regarding the significance of the two women’s colors.  I may not be intuiting their purpose with full correctness.  Nevertheless, I can choose to trust the essence of my intuition.  I realize that I can choose to see sameness as well as difference and to let that apperception guide me to recovery from the mind’s trompe l’oeil.  That is the trick that keeps me seeing only difference and hiding the channels of new awareness that can lead to re-emergence into fuller identification and oneness with all.

Recovery from this trompe l’oeil need not mean and does not mean a complete abandonment of all physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries between persons.  Insofar as this is a world of samsara, we are limited to the degree that we can actually perceive our oneness with each other and with all things.  Where true awareness is lacking we proceed dangerously unguided if we behave as if we could anticipate it.  Nevertheless, we need not worry overmuch about this caution.  For there is much of heaven we can recover in our outlook.  There is so much of unity, compassion, and mutual affection for our neighbor in what we can awaken to that Jesus was right to call it the greatest commandment “to love your neighbor as yourself.”  Oneness is inherent in this commandment and in the outlook it extols.  And we already feel it without being commanded to do so.²  The small child playing by the water’s edge awakens us to it as do so many of the wonders of our neighbors in the natural world.  Even two fellow travelers in a subway quite unlike us may quicken our grasp of it by the liveliness of their presentation once we catch that this, too, is an invitation to advance, live larger, and cross over into a more bountiful awareness.

 

Notes:

1.Here we may recall the Prayer of St. Francis, which revolves around the viewpoint that allows the free exchange of receiving for giving:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

To become an instrument of peace, one must die to the viewpoint defined solely by personal consolation, understanding, and love.  The identification with others draws us out and puts us at odds with our self-defined and limiting predilections.  This gives us tensile strength:  the strength of an instrument.  It re-births us into a much larger life, a life that may be called “eternal” by virtue of the fact that it relinquishes attachment to temporal and other limitations of individual life.  The hatred I find in my delimited universe may be sown with love in the larger universe I am born into through identification with love in “the other.”  And the hatred that I meet there may be sown with love through the antidote of the love I bring to others.  Where others are injured or broken I may bring healing and wholeness to bear and find wholeness “out there” for the brokenness that remains unhealed “in here.”  To personal darkness I may bring “otherly” light and shine light where others are shadowed in darkness.  What alone and isolated behind the mind’s illusory fixation is sadness becomes joy through the consolation of shared experiences, empathy, and compassion out beyond that artificial wall.  When we begin to live this prayer, we start to see that it is through pardoning others for their separation from us that we become pardoned.  We are thereby reclaimed to ourselves, and invited to live larger and more harmoniously with everyone and all that is bequeathed to us beneath the sky.

2.We have a natural thirst for union with all things that pre-exists any religious exhortation. As Buddha taught, it is the nature of mind to wake up even if it takes a long time. Religion and religious practices may or may not be helpful in eliciting the mind’s true nature.