Essay #38:  The Top of the Pendulum:  Perceiving Suchness; the Blindness that Sees

The ray of light that heaven sends
To glide across the ground
Reveals the tree but then, forfend, 
Itself cannot be found.

The koi that shimmers in the pond
Swims faster than the wand
The trickster waves to cast his spell
And bring it in his hand.

What do we see that cannot be seen?  What do we not see that can be seen and always is, whether we notice or not?  The answer–the short answer–is suchness.

Suchness is the Buddhist answer to the question of “What is?”  The mind does not like this answer.  It finds it ceaselessly confusing and annoying.  What is “suchness” anyway?  What is it apart from the mind’s names, assignations, and predilections?  The mind wants to fixate on that which is, to hold it in place, to differentiate it, to judge it, and then to claim it or to shun it.  The mind wants to take its place among things.  Moreover, it wants to be king over them, to dictate to them, to rule them, or to magically control them.

On the chess board of life the mind wants to command.  The mind can move in any direction.  However, the problem is that it can only move one square at a time.  The conditioned reality moves much faster and cannot be “taken to hand.”  In the monstrously twisted game of life, long before the mind has refined and settled its attachment, its prey has disappeared and skillfully substituted something quite different from what was sought.  The meat has rotted before it could even be salted.  The fish has crept onto land, grown legs, and fled leaving chicken feathers in its place.  We think we are so clever in hemming in our game, setting our sights on our target, slowly pulling the trigger, and allowing ourselves to taste the roast even before it has been caught and cooked.  Our shot goes off, there is a rustling in the woods, our hound pounces, and all of a sudden we are struck down by a Malaysian man trap.  All of our green expectations and desires have suddenly become the dead wood of that from which all savor has drained and evaporated.  The game is nowhere to be found–or only its carcass is–and yet we are as hemmed in as it ever was and this by a mean trick spawned from our own efforts.  The harder we try to win at this sport, the more definitively do we fail.  The more persistently do we try to see–and see in a way that fixes our gaze and attempts to fix in place that which we behold–the blinder we become.

Jesus said:

         For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those        who see will become blind.

“For judgment,” means to afford judgment, to restore a person’s ability to judge by teaching from his own example.  And what did Jesus not do?  He did not fix his gaze upon any one of a number of outcasts from society and condemn them as those in positions of authority or judgment surely did.  In his sight he made himself blind–blind to all that which those in self-service latched onto as justifications for their derision.  In and through this “blindness” Jesus saw.  He saw that in the human spirit which oscillated in and out of sickness.  In order to see it, he had to become blind to what he first thought he saw, which those around him were largely unwilling to relinquish.  Then in his blindness, he could see that thought and also that which was unseen and lay beyond thought and the sickness born of thought.

It is a curious thing indeed that this blind seeing does indeed see.

      Where are all your accusers? Jesus asked the harlot. Has anyone condemned you?Therefore, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more.

Jesus did not fail to see her sin.  But he did not condemn her, and this was his blindness.  He blinded her accusers along with himself by showing them the utter futility of attempting to fashion judgment out of their own sinlessness.  In essence, he showed them their own oscillation in and out of sickness .

      Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone, he taunted.

However, strength born of sinlessness is non-existent; thus exposed no one could pick up a stone.  In essence, they were blinded and could not see who to stone unless also themselves.  Then it was just suicide to stone anyone.  It had lost its savor.  It had ceased to hold the salt of judgment and become a rotten opinion.

Such exposed judgment re-emerges as second sight that does not miss sin and also does not miss the oscillation in and out of sin.  It sees the darkness and it sees the light and hovers above both in a position of pure beholding.  At the same time, we would mislead if we said that judgment was “aloof” and “detached.”  Jesus always strikes us as intimately involved with anyone in his presence.  There is no aloofness in Jesus and none in the Buddha or in any other Bodhisattva.  Their immersion in the human condition is total.  In fact, it far surpasses what any authoritarian can tolerate.  Hatred can only be maintained from afar and without intimate knowledge of its object.  For close association always breeds ambiguity, instills blindness, tends to reverse polarities, and thereby elicits compassion and forgiveness.  Hence, those who hate must remain aloof rather than truly immersed in the human condition.

Something similar applies to attachment born of love.  The closer we approach the object of attachment the more dubious our affection becomes. There is a point at which our eyes cross then uncross and find only ourselves being stared back at by the object of affection.  In other words, what we seem to see and love so dearly and unconditionally in things and persons beyond a certain point does not really stem from knowledge of them but rather from a projection onto them of what we love about ourselves and want more of.  Then, of course, all the ambiguity with which we regard ourselves also fully infects the object of our affection.  Jesus was right.  We can only love anyone or anything to the extent that we can love ourselves–and that, of course, means incompletely. Hence, the person who professes complete or unconditional love for another has, as it were, passed through an authentic immersion in the human condition and dropped into a kind of obsessive attachment that is actually detached from humanness.  Here, for example, belongs the kind of parent who professes that they will never hate their child but only ever love them.  Then the day arrives whereupon the child has done something truly egregious and hateful and rather than use this experience to self-correct and appropriately hate their child, the parent detaches from the humanness of the situation and latches onto a fantasy projection of the inherent goodness and lovableness of the child.

It is not and never was an immersion in the human condition that upended us.  We have always been upended.  That is, we have always been oscillating between light and dark.  This is not a condemnation of humankind.  Rather, this is what it means to be human.  What upends us is not this immersion but the failure to see it for what it is. The mind which not only beholds light and dark, good and evil, but gets stuck in them–trapped, as it were–is the mind whose judgment Jesus came to restore.  It is human to oscillate between light and dark.  We become inhuman when we ignorantly obsess over the attachments and aversions that surround light and dark.

The inhuman is like a creature stuck to a pendulum already in motion.  Every move the creature makes to try and stop the pendulum just adds to its swing–often in unpredictable ways.  It can cling to it and it can try to push away from it.  No matter, the pendulum continues to swing.  Judgment in the corrupt small-minded sense means looking across the pendulum and shouting something like:  “Hey you!  Stop moving around and causing this thing to swing.”  It is usually accompanied by a thought or statement like:  “I’m not moving; you are!”  In other words, we again find ourselves confronting the two most fundamental premises of the game of life:  (1) I am an individual separate from you and everyone else, and (2) I can win this thing if I can control the outcomes and bring everything to a standstill in my favor.

Now we can see more clearly that it is the mind’s very stuckness to the gaming table that is the problem.  It is stuckness in perverse judgment.  Judgment itself is as much a part of the human condition as are good and evil.  However, when there is limited dimensionality to judgement, then it is perverse.  In the previous essay we spoke of a vertical rise off the gaming table as a kind of antidote to the game of life.  We spoke of it as permeability to other dimensions, a nascent sense of Universal Mind within conditioned mind, described in Buddhism as a quality of mind under the term bodhichitta.  It was useful earlier to help convey the limited nature of mind to portray bodhichitta as a quality of openness to a higher Universal Mind, a Source Mind as it were, in comparison to which the human mind is derivative.  It could then be said that freedom from the game of life could be found in a vertical ascent, an upward movement toward such qualities as pure love, supreme wisdom, and limitless compassion.  Of course, the difficulty with this approach is coming clear here as we have stressed and explored immersion in the human condition.  This is a necessary refinement.  Otherwise, we would continue to imply the very dualism that carries mind beyond its human condition into all manner of projections, attachments, and so on.  Hence, we have to aim to define bodhichitta in purely human terms and within the limits of the human condition.

Here we are choosing to portray bodhichitta as a vantage point at which we are both sighted and blind without resorting to the metaphor of Universal Mind.  Universal Mind is not knowable directly.  It is neither a being nor a thing that we can point to nor even strictly a source of phenomena that we can observe.  At this point, to develop further insight we must become accustomed to talking about what we cannot observe, cannot know, and cannot fully express or even declare to exist in the way that everything we interact with exists.  What we previously called “Universal Mind” now becomes a referent not to anything substantial in this world but rather to a kind of elasticity to things that has no basis in the things themselves.

We may consider that every pendulum has a point of relatively motionless attachment in addition to its swing.  We have to imagine, though, that this point of attachment is invisible to us.  It is known only indirectly, through subtle observation of phenomena themselves.  And it is insubstantial.  We cannot point to it as a “something.”  Yet it is also not nothing.  It is like the hole in the wheel the Taoists refer to as the “source of usefulness.”  It is not really there, but without it, what is there could have no utility.  The hole is that round which everything moves while it not only does not move but does not even strictly exist.  Likewise, the anchor of the pendulum is like an aether out of which all oscillations of light and dark appear and into which they disappear.

How is it that light becomes dark and dark becomes light?  How is it that good becomes evil and evil becomes good?  These polarities are like vibrations that go back and forth, one to the other.  However, they do not really change into each other.  If light and dark are separate and not the same, then how can they change into each other?  Separate substances or energies do not directly change into one another.  Oil remains oil and water remains water, so to speak.  That is, unless one or the other passes out of existence and one passes into existence.  In fact, things are passing into and out of this aether all the time, not only substantial material things but energies.  For example, emotional energies are coming into being and disappearing all the time.  Where do they come from, and where do they go?  Often we would say, “out of nowhere” and “into the void.”  If we were to dwell on that just a little bit longer it might dawn on us that without this void and the room it affords there would be no oscillation between emotions.  In fact, no change would be possible at all.

The Ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides, claimed that the ultimate nature of reality is a plenum–a fundamental solid in which no change is possible.  Therefore, he argued that all change is an illusion.  Be that as it may, the point to note here is that without some sort of gap or relief from material solidity, change cannot occur.  Matter and energy are both substantial.  What’s needed is a non-substantial reality for any change between or among them to occur.  Similarly, a pendulum cannot really swing without its fixed anchor.  Both the notion of the anchor and that of aether are metaphorical.  They point beyond themselves to what cannot be directly described.  However, it can be inferred.

This brings us back to “suchness.”  That which is, is constantly in motion.  The qualities of what we call “matter” and “energy” undergo constant conditioning and transformation.  The mind, itself conditioned, wants to pounce as it were and either fix and immortalize certain qualities in its experience to which it has become attached, or remove and annihilate those qualities to which it has become averse.  However, the mind’s conditioning in attachment and aversion is only tenuously related to the conditioning of the qualities of persons and things that occasioned it.  Typically, as we have noted, the mind’s conditioning is ponderously slow compared with the changes afoot in the mind’s objects.  Hence, the mind that is subsumed and preoccupied by its own conditioning is bound to miss the true nature of things.

The typical human mind is caught up in its own obsessions and is far more interested in its interpretations, predilections, aversions, fears, and so on, than in reality itself.  Jesus was good at exposing human obsessions.  And Buddhism has taken the study of so-called “human thought forms” as a major point of departure.  Any thought-form can be the beginning of dissociation from reality.  This amounts to a break in attention that substitutes some kind of fixation for the light and fluid attention to what is that Buddhists call “mindfulness.”  In contrast to thought-forms and interpretations of reality, mindfulness pays attention to the bare nature of reality or “suchness.”  In so doing, it discovers the oscillatory nature of the qualities of energy and matter.  It observes change without trying to stop it and takes note of preferences, judgments, and commitments without lapsing into trenchant individualism and opposition. Mindfulness is able to observe the human condition while maintaining both intimacy and freedom.

The key to this ability is exactly that which we have been inferring but have not been able to describe directly.  It is that which illuminates the mind but cannot be seen directly.  It also illuminates all thought-forms and objects, perceived with bare attention.  Hence, suchness itself is nothing other than the reality of things unbound from the mind’s seeing them as this or as that.  Even the mind’s own judgments, its personal history, its ego, etc., can be perceived in their suchness rather than through the mind’s interpretations and the constricted lens of perverse judgment.  The only way to differentiate the bare perception of judgment from entrenched or perverse judgment is with reference to this unspeakable vantage point or illumination.  It is inherent in the mind to be able to access this vantage point.  Once again, the mind’s ability to do so may be called bodhicitta.  But it is far less important what it is called than to indicate–even obliquely–what it is and what it allows.

By the route of total immersion in the human condition, then, one avoids the dissociation from what is that is the pitfall of dualism, including all projections of a higher or source reality or substance.  Instead the use of a referent to what is non-substantial expresses insight that we can infer from immersion in and contact with our world but not deduce.  In other words, it is not from thinking about our world that this insight emerges.  At the level of thought, conditioning and change happen with all the felt and compelling intimacy we know so well.  This is the sturm und drang–and much else–innate to the human condition.  Inasmuch as we are thinking beings–which pretty much defines what humans are–we are enmeshed in the conditioning that goes on in the world.  At the same time, however, we are–so to speak–more than human.  Without indulging in the nomenclature that would call us “divine,” there is nevertheless an aspect of our awareness or a vantage point to it from which we are set free from the human condition while conceptually and emotionally still fully engaged there.  There is a “heavenly ray” within our awareness that gives rise to or is a liberating insight or knowing of the nature of things while not a thought or concept with a material reality as its object.

The language describing this insight or awareness becomes strange partly because the insight itself is so fundamental and irreducible.  It is insight not only into the faculty of perception itself but also into the elasticity of all that is perceived.  Its object–if it even has an object–is suchness.  Suchness, then, brings together the faculty of perception, reality and truth, and the freedom that comes from impermanence and change in a way that breaks the boundaries of mere thinking.

The koi that shimmers in the pond swims faster than the trickster’s wand, and we should be glad it does.  This means that reality itself is made to guide and teach us.  The human condition need not be escaped or controlled after all even though it will always to some extent be the penchant of our thoughts and feelings to affect outcomes.  It is the breeding ground for our wisdom and ultimately for the insight that neither because of the very oscillation of good and evil, of light and dark—nor despite it—reality is benign.  But this will have to be brought out further in what follows.