“The Chicken and the Egg Thing”
I am struggling to create a simple image that will give me an instant vision of the range, of both image and content, as we look and experience the world of “the “Is” unobstructed by and through the filter of the character of our ego’s content of thinking, feeling and doing (willing).
My intent is to enable myself to see when I engage in the content of the writing found beneath and beyond the image, symbol, and appearance. It is an attempt to create a” token” that could be used to remind me when I need to look beyond my reactions, thereby giving me a better response, understanding, and receptivity with less denial and judgment.
It is a challenge to go from word to symbol to content. For now I am going to try to do two things, one is to sketch something that will symbolize the interconnectedness of polarities. The other is to make a list of contradictions to nice/not nice emotional responses. .
A rough table
Balance, emotion, feeling, subconscious
Reaction, response, reflection
Judgment, ignorance, belief
Awareness, understanding, knowledge
Image, appearance, symbol, content
Then there is:
Good / Bad
Functional / Non-functional
Kind / Cruel
Meaning / Meaningless
Generous / Selfish
Rational / Irrational
Informed / Uninformed
What seems to be blocking me is the obstruction of the flow of my knowing. In other words, I am not yet connected to the flow of informing.
This is suddenly strange. I feel lost trying to sort out what I am attempting to do. I need to abandon the pursuit for now, but I am also thinking it has more to do with intellectual thinking than with intuitive alignment, i.e. I am not yet attuned, connected, to the flow from knowing into emptiness, from emptiness into knowing. So, I’m going to continue muddling. I need to find one thing to reach and activate the process. Perhaps the “Joke”?
“You would trade nice for good, fantasy for reality, because you are trying to shape the atmosphere of the reality to accommodate what you feel and believe is what others want and need.” This may be true, but it doesn’t mean it is spiritually healthy.
It is your sense of good taste, conduct, manners and behavior, that block the content of the joke which I sense can take us via humor to revealing the fallacy of the myth of self importance.
Namely, the joke takes us beyond the image of self that we attach to our birthday. It is a device of creating acknowledgment of ourselves as important.
The joke goes to the core of this image, to reveal it as something that blocks the reality of our limited self importance of existing, by sharing the image of ourselves with our “afterbirth” which, if objectified, is the magical package from whence our existence arrived. Then, looking beyond our present self image, we can perhaps learn to see ourselves in a more inclusive and less uptight reference of perspective. In this case a biological acknowledgement of ourselves with more humility.
I had the experience of having celebrated my birthday both on the day and the day after. I called the day after, “Happy Placenta Day!”
The afterbirth belongs in the equation of life in a balanced sense of interdependent egotism.
This is brilliant humor.
So, how do I symbolize this character of image and content? It was a radical symbol and not what she wanted to hear. She was shocked by my saying the word placenta in public.
“Oh. You don’t want me to see you with your clothes off?”, I said.
Not so strange or uncommon, but it blocks the vision of the “Is” beneath. We haven’t grasped the humor or the humility to face life as we are in its presence in time and space. Even more difficult is to let others see ourselves in a perspective of importance and acceptance of our relative unimportance, which is so necessary for a balanced vision of ourselves in the “Is” of living.
P.S. “See what comes if we practice listening?”