It Had to Be (Not-)You

[Image: “the sixth discontinuity,” by user “woodleywonderworks” on (where else?) Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) Quoting from a work which I haven’t read, the Flickr description says of astronomy that it revealed “we were a minor tribe huddled on a small speck circling a nondescript star at the outer edge of an immense average galaxy floating among a trillion others in one small corner of the universe. The noble distinction between us and the rest of the universe was eliminated to reveal a continuous continuity of existence. Our perceived exceptionalism was demoted to the ordinary. Within the universe, we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.”]

From whiskey river:

The Master is not trapped in opposites.
His this is also a that.
He sees that life becomes death
and death becomes life, that right
has a kernel of wrong within it
and wrong a kernel of right,
that the true turns into the false
and the false into the true.
He understands that nothing is absolute,
that since every point of view
depends on the viewer,
affirmation and denial
are equally beside the point.

The place where the this and the that
are not opposed to each other
is called “the pivot of the Tao.”
When we find this pivot, we find ourselves
at the center of the circle,
and here we sit, serene,
while Yes and No keep chasing each other
around the circumference, endlessly.

commentary

Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through.

The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It doesn’t believe that this is a this or that that is a that. Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn’t exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop? When you do, you realize that you were the only one running. Yes was you, No was you, the whole circumference, with its colored banners, its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds—that was you as well.

At the center, the eyes open and again it’s the sweet morning of the world. There’s nothing here to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference. In fact, there’s no one here—not even you.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and:

The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being.

(Ken McLeod [source])

…and:

An Old Story

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.

A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.

(Tracy K. Smith [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Map of the World Confused with Its Territory

In a drawer I found a map of the world,
folded into eighths and then once again
and each country bore the wrong name because
the map of the world is an orphanage.

The edges of the earth had a margin
as frayed as the hem of the falling night
and a crease moved down toward the center of
the earth, halving the identical stars.

Every river ran with its thin blue
brother out from the heart of a country:
there cedars twisted toward the southern sky
and reeds plumed eastward like an augur’s pens.

No dates on the wrinkles of that broad face,
no slow grinding of mountains and sand, for—
all at once, like a knife on a whetstone—
the map of the world spoke in snakes and tongues.

The hard-topped roads of the western suburbs
and the distant lights of the capitol
each pull away from the yellowed beaches
and step into the lost sea of daybreak.

The map of the world is a canvas turning
away from the painter’s ink-stained hands
while the pigments cake in their little glass
jars and the brushes grow stiff with forgetting.

There is no model, shy and half-undressed,
no open window and flickering lamp,
yet someone has left this sealed blue letter,
this gypsy’s bandana on the darkening

Table, each corner held down by a conch
shell. What does the body remember at
dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map
of the world, erased and drawn again and

Again, then covered with rivers and earth.

(Susan Stewart [source])

…and:

#99: Funny thing, this “I” — sitting at the center of the world, known and unknown, crisp and sharp at the center and blurring towards the edges, blurring but never quite going away, either, and the longer you look at it the less you know about it, the less distinct from its context, from the Is all around it… Funny thing nostalgia, too, random facts called “memories” inseparable from the experiences in which they became memories. Bolivia exports tin, I remember, and I remember because that fact, those words, lay at the center of a tale told by Jean Shepherd on a stage in Philadelphia where I sat in an audience and listened, watched, as Jean Shepherd’s I blurred outward and commingled with — became — our own, and now I can’t decide where Jean Shepherd ends and I begin…

All those stories you tell — tell to yourself as well as to others — not a one of them lies separate from its telling, from its teller. Every one therefore nothing special; every one therefore the most special thing under the sky.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)