"Husky" was the word on the clothes I wore, at one point. It seems odd to say, but I do not recall seeing the word on juvenile clothing at all when I had kids of my own. "Husky" had lost its allure, in the meantime. Today, I am reminded of "husky" every time I catch sight of my body from the back in a store security mirror. It's a shock because seeing my body from the back is not an experience I can ever have directly. Even to see it in photos or in reflection is a rarity. We have no eyes back there. Life is a foward-moving activity because we have no eyes back there. We face towards cameras and we face towards mirrors, or into them, never away from them. What would be the point of not facing the mirror or the camera? If seeing one's body from the back is rare in reflection and impossible directly, we don't doubt it can make an interesting impression when it's experienced, on account of its novelty.
"Husky." A moment ago, I was six-foot-three, and slender, and smelling of man, and now I am "husky" once again. Oh my God - is that me? Yes. And no. This gives me a chuckle every time I visit the supermarket.
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I heard someone characterize this era that we seem to be sharing as "The Great Re-enchantment." Great is better than good. Were it "The Good Re-enchantment," it would not be as good.
It is also "The Great Disillusionment," which sounds negative but it isn't really. What is an illusion? It is a false appearance. To be disillusioned is to see through the false appearance.
Disillusionment is a state of consciousness that sees through false appearances. It is generally painful, or at least uncomfortable, because it is like something is dying, or has died. What has died is a strong thought attachment to an abstract idea that we have identified with in some part. In other words, I can mistake myself for an idea, perhaps a Philosophy, perhaps a set of religious precepts, or a political cause of some sort. I can forget that the idea has only just arrived, while I have always been right here. The idea is an idea. I am I. I am not this idea, or that idea. To identify with ideas is a lie.
Imagine Disillusionment on a grand scale. It's quite chaotic. We're deep into Yin territory, as some would say. Intellectuals yak all day on You Tube about this crisis and that crisis, and these discussions boil down to this: the death of belief in them. Is this good, bad? Inevitable? Disillusionment in the institutions of culture, of education, of governance, of organized authority generally, is like having the world pulled out from under you. You're going to act out, and rant and rave, and go in some stupid directions for a while. If there's nothing to depend on, nothing to rely upon, nothing at all, then is reality even "real?"
So, to see through an illusion is good, and also painful. But, right now, in this experience of disillusionment, there's an incredible opportunity to turn around and look deeply into the bad-feeling emotions, and ask ourselves, "Who is feeling this?" Of course it helps to have a reason to ask, a glimmer of curiosity. "To Hell with the outside world," you might say, and rightly so, and take the opportunity to turn around - meet yourself again, remember yourself again, the you that you have always been, from before speech, before thought, before beliefs, before ideas. The reason we're all here.
Stay here, and don't forget, we tell ourselves, but - oh, shiny object - and off we go into the deep woods of thought once more. Someone tells us, "You are this," or "you are that." Sooner or later, we're going to get wise to the scam.
What was I before the world had a name? Whatever that is, I am still it. Still here. I am not somebody's ideas.
Now I will say this is overstated for the sake of illustration, and I haven't said anything about whether some ideas are better than others. Clearly, some ideas are better than others, and to argue for an idea is not to be instantly pulled back into the Borg hive, or what have you. Supporting, or favoring, or agreeing with an idea is not the same as confusing yourself with the idea, or forgetting that you come before the idea. No flag, no faith, no family, no culture, no history, comes before you, essentially. You are why there is light, and color, and motion; you are why there are feelings and sensations - in short, you are the reason why there is experience. Whatever that is - that's the "real" you at the level I mean.
"To thine own self be true" - yes? It is not "be true to what authorities have told you that you are." It is not "be true to something that is not your own self."
"To thine own meat puppet be true" - no. You come before the body.
"To thine own thoughts be true" - no. You come before thoughts. You come before sex, before race, before these passing appearances and imaginary identities.
These are merely experiences. You are the experiencer of this experience; you are not the experience. Mistaking who we are (Being) with the contents of temporarily arising experience (Life and Death) is the proverbial "glass ceiling" of our embodied existence.
Disillusionment, or disenchantment, must occur, or the old idea must die, before there is the possibility of the new. At this point one could move towards and grasp onto, and identify with, another idea - perhaps an opposing idea which is just as false but false with a different flavor, like our low intelligence political paradigm that can offer only two abominable options.
Or, a person might also take the opportunity to turn about and face the one who is experiencing ideas, and be the one who is experiencing them. This might extend to include all things experienced, time and matter, or it might remain in the metaphorical realm - doesn't matter. To turn about in this way, to recall "I come before experience," is to be free of enslavement to Identity.
Isn't it odd how much I admire classic "Star Trek" - considering the dogmatic atheism and materialism of its creator and many of its writers? Granted, this philosophical bias would be far more explicit in later incarnations of the Trek universe. The 1960's stories were a little more diverse. Certainly, "Star Trek" was based solidly in the progressive American Empire myth, the Frontier myth, and Manifest Destiny. It is almost cloyingly anachronistic today. But none of that seems to matter to me. I keep finding unintended wisdom in it. I often refer to what I call The Star Trek Sutras.
"For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky" is an episode of the program I frequently refer to. In this story, the Enterprise crew encounter a race of people who live inside an asteroid that they mistakenly take to be the surface of their planet. They are the descendants of the people who built this spaceship within the asteroid, but they are ignorant of this true nature of their world. As the drama opens, an elderly man tells the story of how he climbed the forbidden mountains and made an extraordinary discovery which so traumatizes him that he dies of the exertion. His last words provide the episode with its title: "...for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky!" He had climbed high enough in the forbidden mountains to come into contact with the dome of the sky, which in the case of his world was an actual dome engineered by builders who had lived long before.
It's very like depictions of the world taken from the Biblical creation account. We can imagine attaining an understanding beyond the dome of the sky itself, or an "understanding beyond understanding," as we might say, and that aspiration may be called the root purpose of all religions - even those that have completely forgotten that purpose.
The Star Trek episode was daring and imaginative. What brought it to mind was my earlier use of the term "glass ceiling." I thought of the dome of the sky, which brings us to that Star Trek episode. Breaking through the glass ceiling of body/mind self-identity is more than conceptually grasping the idea that the body and mind are not the Self but merely an experience the Self is having. The direct experience OF this, just as the direct experience of anything, trumps the conceptual understanding and makes our belief-disbelief paradigm vanish. Beliefs cease to instruct the experience (Life), allowing illusion to be seen through.
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