Painting the Sidewalk with Water by Joan Tollifson

Author:Joan Tollifson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2016-03-12T00:47:42+00:00

Miss Scarlet in the Billiard Room with the Wrench

Nisargadatta famously said that “I am nothing” is wisdom, and “I am everything” is love, and between those two, life flows. The illusion that creates all our suffering is the false notion that I am something. But no “thing” actually exists apart from everything else, and no “thing” persists over time. What looks like solid form is nothing but seamless flux and change. We have a deeply engrained idea that there are separate, persisting things (including me and you). And then, seeing how vulnerable and impermanent every apparent form appears to be, we fear loss and death. That is our human suffering in a nutshell. But the joke is, there is nothing to die. The “me” or the “bodymind” that we think will die never existed in the first place!

We’ve learned to see chairs and tables and dogs and cats, to draw boundary lines conceptually. Babies are not born seeing chairs. They see colors, shapes and movements, and they learn over time where and how to draw the conceptual boundary lines. And pretty soon we lose sight of the fact that this is conceptual. Conceptual conditioning begins to shape perception, and by the time we reach adulthood, this is how we think we actually see everything, as a bunch of separate objects. And, of course, thought has created out of thin air the most seemingly important object of all – “me” – the star of the show, the center of the universe. And in a certain way, this has some truth to it. The true “I,” which is common to everyone, is like that sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere – boundless, seamless unicity, always completely present Here / Now. But we mistakenly think that the “I” is encapsulated inside an object, and that this bodymind is a separate “something” that is rushing along in the flow of life like a raft going down the rapids. This is a scary picture. But that isn’t ever our actual direct experience.

In art class, I remember they told us, if we could truly see something, we could draw it. But the temptation is to draw what you think is there instead of what you actually see. That’s why when most people try to draw a face, it doesn’t look anything like a face. They draw what they think a face is like rather than what they actually see. That’s why painters long ago couldn’t create the illusion of depth because they were painting what they thought was there. When they finally began to paint what they were actually seeing, which was counter-intuitive, then voila! – we had paintings that captured the sense of depth and looked far more real.

If we pay attention right now to our actual direct experience, what do we find? There are sensations that are constantly changing, fleeting thoughts that appear and then vanish, bits of storyline and narrative, flashes of memory, mental images, the sense of being present.

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