All things pass. And yet, at the same time, the whole enterprise of life is living. In our lives we are born, age and die, all of us. A fine meditation, but not really ultra compelling in all ways, to me. That is to say, in a moment of tranquil sitting meditation if a loved one should start hooting and hollering in pain from the other room, would not “this too will pass” be the wrong way to respond? Would not the proper loving response be to go to them in a bit of a panic to figure out what has gone awry and how it may be remedied, even if in the end the passing of both the pain and the healing is inevitable?
Essentially, both realities are such simultaneously. And in a life torn between eastern philosophy and western philosophy it is only the meeting of non-attachment and pragmatism that will suffice for me, at least at the moment.
For a thing to be true at the same time is for there to be room for our assumptions to be incomplete. Two things being true at once is the allowance of the depths of reality’s beauty to pervade. It is to recognize the poetry of Buddhism in Christianity and vice versa. It is to taste the oneness of the heavenly places.
Comparing and contrasting are both worthy endeavors. Because one thing is like another, or, very much not like another, is not cause to say that one is ultimately good or the other ultimately bad. It is a matter of relativity. For the council of “shoulder your cross” to be true and also “pay attention to the turnings of mind” to be true is not to say that one is inferior or proper but to say that both are boldly important and empowering. Both are invitations to a better way of living.
We ought to be responsible. We ought to keep our backs upright and our ways just. We ought also be attentive. We ought to see plainly the colors of the rainbow in their majesty and the way that only through hunger is there reason to eat is there satiation. All is a divine mystery and one that ought be accepted and submitted to with a fullness of heart and a discernment of mind.
At the same time is the persuasion of conservatism valid that it is liberalism valid. Both are open for dissection. And again, this is not to say wholly that one is better or that they are equal or that they really hold water at all, either of them.
At the same time does the war in Ukraine rage that I drift through my pool in the early sunlight. At the very same time all is. What’s to be done about that is not perfectly clear but it perfectly is so.
At the very same time is it incumbent upon a busy household to make sure that they take out the trash and wash the dishes it is that the plastics in the ocean stack and the rivers dry up. Are not both legitimate realities? Is not the myopia of modern first world living not a legitimate impediment to the tackling of huge globe stretching existential crises?
Is not a trip to McDonald’s both detrimental to the human body’s health and simultaneously kind to a person’s wallet? Is not the amount of USD in circulation ever expanding while the need for money to feed oneself and one’s family ever present?
This experiment of not leaving anything out is a daunting one. It’s also an imperative one. Is it even something that the human mind is capable of? Possibly not but that’s where the notion of “God” comes in. The notion holds that our limited humanity is not all that is; that there is a certain karma which supersedes human existence while encompassing it.
There is a new phenomena, which was initially introduced to me via a lovely documentary, called “wilding.” It is the deliberate human act of taking a parcel of land and creating the conditions for plant & wild life to begin to, again, thrive. It is an act of human submission and responsibility. It is an act of faith in both what can be done by an individual and what can be done by the divine all. At the same time does human action count that a human is not as a function of their own existence the great Yahweh.
Essentially here the proposition is that in life it’s not so much this way or that way it is all of the ways. Not because all ways or edicts or philosophies or spiritual practices will produce the same results, but that all of human action is to some degree or another futile in lue of the grandness of the cosmos. No amount of wilding will ever change the fact that a comet could— well I guess NASA just proved that we are capable of blowing up comets so that analogy doesn’t work… let me try again. No amount of wilding will ever change the fact that the whole of our solar system could be swept up in a black hole at a moment’s notice.
And yet the spectre of the black hole does not change the fact that I still need to visit the bathroom when I wake up in the morning. It doesn’t change the fact that when I stub my toe I feel a great coarsing pain. Both the black hole and the toe stubbing compose reality. And how wonderful is that?
It is not the life of the solitary that is the life of most esteem. It is not the life of the socialite that remains after the fire of eternity has burned away all else. Both are of life and of humanity. The outdoor cat and the indoor cat are one in the same, distinquished from one another by the thin veil of a roof and a few walls.
The real tough thing to grasp in regards to this whole everything is everything thing is the sheer is-ness of it. And here we revisit the solitary for a moment and conceive of a question fitting for a true fool on a hill. How do you do it? As a bit of person-who-enjoys-sitting-alone-and-listening-to-the-wind myself, I would posit this response. It cannot be me who does the “grasping” of the “is-ness.”
Besides, what are words in the face of this great art? What is a “me” anyways? But that is for another time. But then what’s time?
Nondual, heaven, yoga, nirvana, union, ecstasy, God. These are words used to poke at this sense of “not me but also me but sort of something living through me but then maybe being the thing that’s doing the living through but also being none of it and also…”
Where Thomas Merton was fond of the legalistic in thing whole domain, I am less so. I don’t care what you call it. I don’t care if you claim it to be you or god or allah or jehovah or lady gaga, it is what it is.
Of course to borrow from biblical tongue, the person too caught up in the “it’s me” aspect is apt to fall from the lofty places down to the pit of endless suffering. And in this it goes back to the insufficiency of words to describe the indescribable. And again here the essence is the sentiment of “at the same time.”
J.W. 