This is an article I wrote in 1992 about meditation and perception, it's a favorite of mine.
From the Fall 1992 issue of Center Voice, newsletter of the Center for Sacred Sciences
This afternoon I went for a long walk by the ocean. The beach is rocky here at Yachats and displays a surprising fierceness at high tide. As I walked waves would rush up the narrow inlets between rocky fingers of land and shatter high overhead. In places the water has battered the rocks so hard underground channels have been carved beneath my feet. In one spot a few feet away from where I am now sitting, the roof of one of these channels has caved in and when waves smash into each other inside it, a rainbow-filled geyser crashes uproariously out of the hole.
There are so many singularities here at the ocean’s edge that the power of mindfulness, “a clean, bare attention” to what is happening, seems easy to sustain. Yet noticing the distinct qualities in each realm of consciousness, one of the basic steps in a practice of inquiry, is not easy. The ocean’s presence is so striking, sensory experience feels unified and seamless. How can I divide it up? Here is the sound of ocean. Listening, I try to hear it as sound. What is it that I experience when I hear this? I listen not for the roar of ocean, but the quality of the sound as a part of awareness, distinct from what I see, touch, feel . . .
It’s hard. The sound is so evocative, it’s difficult to distinguish it from a feeling of expansiveness as I sit here, and what is the sense that I feel as pressure and vibration in my body? Sound? Touch? And the rhythmic nature of what I hear—is this sound or something else? I am aware that as I follow what I thought was sound, it runs into multiple channels of awareness, just as the water rises up in a mass and breaks into thousands of separate rivulets on the rocks and trickles down to the sea.
You know those Gestalt images in psychology books, optical illusions in which you can see the profile of a young woman one instant and the profile of an old woman the next—but you can never see the two profiles at once? Each distinct, imaginary image is created from the same set of lines. They’re not really separate: one image becomes foreground, the other background. They’re polarized, symmetric—objects located exactly in the same space. The image you see submerges the other, which goes—where?
Are the boundaries between things, the solid world of objects we experience simply a trick of the way we focus on the whole? When we shift focus we find our easy definitions unraveling. Think—is everything carved out of our awareness like this? “What we see, we see / and seeing is changing, “ Adrienne Rich said in her poem “Planetarium.” As we isolate boundaries with our attention, we begin to see their imaginary nature. But baring enlightenment, new boundaries rise up in their place. Our attention shuttles back and forth, within/without, weaving this seemingly seamless whole (and it is!) into its familiar shape.
Much later—people around me are pointing, binoculars out, staring at the sea. I squint out over the water, amorphous specks in my vision resolving into—seabirds? Anomalies of waves? A puff of froth and a shadow. It’s true, it’s a whale.
He’s not so far out. But he never quite emerges. I see the long dark sleek shape of him rise imperceptibly, so that after the fact I think “oh!” and then he glides by and disappears like the fabled sea serpent, the merest sinuous line on the water’s surface. All the late afternoon he stays, almost in one spot, rising and disappearing like that other fabulous beast, the final object in consciousness, the self, leaving behind only a cloud of vapor. I have been staring so long at the space where he appears that at times I don’t realize if I’m still seeing him or not.
I think perhaps it’s time to go, but I am reluctant to abandon watching him, hoping that he will emerge so I can see him clearly. I feel just as I often do when I meditate, anticipating the reward of insight that remains stubbornly submerged in the familiar sea of habitual experience.
So I’ve been sitting a long time now, the tide is out, and I am aware of how the clarity of the noonday light has changed. The late afternoon sun spreads a milky golden light over the water. Everything calms down, recedes slightly into the distance. A seal’s head pops up in the surf, gilded like everything else with the mellowing light. A haze forms on the horizon. This novelty contains its own reassurance. Even without whales visible there is something to see, something that may not be seen when whales emerge.
—Melody Carr
1 comment:
Dear Melody:
Friday, June 01, 2007
RE: Whales and other submerged phenomena.
May 25, 2007 we enter the ocean to surf in the cove at the southern foot of Cape Kiwanda, Pacific City, Oregon. Memorial Day weekend, the first summer crowd is gathering in retreat to the beach amid the backdrop of dorymen and surfers. Cars and pick-ups scud onto the beach in tests of their all-wheel-drive. Shirtless fraternity brothers are throwing footballs. Dogs are leaping for Frisbees or barking from their leashes. Young girls throw down skim boards, slosh tanning lotion, bare their legs. Grammar scholars whoop with delight as they cavort in the wash. Toddlers pick up handfuls of it all to taste. Summer books are opened. Binoculars are readied at the side of unfolded beach chairs. Middle managers arrive in parking lots in silly shirts. They retrieve their fishing poles in sections from their trunks. The ground stings the exposed flesh of sockless feet. This beach spectacle is being repeated in coastal towns throughout the northern hemisphere.
We are here as tourists too. However, donned in wetsuits we are not suited for much time on the beach. Our neoprene skins and glass covered foam boards separate us from the congregational gathering on the beach. We move through them regarded much the same way as seagulls. The first steps into the water we begin a visceral transformation. There is instant recognition that we came here to enter another world. The cool of the water rising up our wetsuits as we step into the cold North Pacific gives the simultaneous sensation of the utter luxury of insulation from it by our space-age garments, and at once the foreboding sensation of entering a vast and hostile environment. We hold these two sensations in balance.
The surf is tiny. Winter surfers go inland on holiday weekends. We cavort in the waves the same as the beachgoer, a weekend crowd in the water to be sure. We however float. Our feet dangle below us. We cannot see them. We sit offshore, mostly sit and wait for waves. There the transformation occurs. A western Grebe, long-necked fisher with needle beak pops up beside, little more than arms length, it controls the distance of our separation. It perceives no threat, perhaps regards us with curiosity, although not enough to disturb its rhythm of fishing. A Stellar sea lion also pops its head above the water to take a look, its mammalian sentience perhaps more circumspect than a Grebe’s of our behavior. It recognizes with familiarity the behavior of surfing, but not of the odd necessity of our cumbersome clothing and equipment, perhaps muses at our vulnerable inelegant manner of being in water, dangling and thrashing about. No mind we increasingly glory in our fortunes, participation in the bounty of ocean energy with its creatures that encompass us.
This day there are also Gray whales. We bring our knowledge of their natural history with us, who they are, where they are going, what we think they are doing a hundred yards west. Our collective gaggle of water observers sees their spouts, barnacle covered humps and flukes as they leisurely use the surface to snorkel drinks of air, and fish the deepening water beyond the breakers. They loll there for hours, indeed for days we surmise, perhaps the same pairs, one of us perceives a mother and calf from the intermittent data of spouts and humps. We continue in our work of surfing as the Grebe, cognizant, but not about to change our occupation, merely by the fact of their presence.
At some point someone observes more activity in the movement of the whales, an increased tempo of breaths. Then: Is that a dorsal fin? Those fins do not appear that of a whale? They seem to be moving faster than the whales and circling about, porpoising. Someone intones the possibility of a Great White shark. Our gaggle tunes to the word shark, and each spine feels a slight twinge. An involuntary acknowledgement of what else might be going on beneath our playground. At least one person leaves the water with a sense of objective danger. The rest let it pass with our various rationalizations of survival. The whale spouts do not leave the water, not the Grebe, mures, or cormorants. We continue in our play until the exhaustion of moving in the cold and surging ocean overcomes our reservoirs of delight.
Two days later in the parking lot of the Pelican Pub, in the daily convocation, there is talk among the surfers of a recent ocean drama. Mark, a credible veteran from New Zealand, relates the story of a mother Gray whale and her calf being attacked by killer whales just offshore from the cove. A pod of the Orcas separated the calf and devoured it, leaving the mother helpless to intervene. They say that the Great White sharks also arrived to finish the spoils left by the Orcas. He says the event was witnessed and filmed from the beach.
The account left me bewildered as to whether we were present during this event. What we saw from the water was spouts and fins, while our feet dangled. We paid not much mind, did not feel the epic proportion of the drama, nor feel particularly vulnerable to the insatiable hunger of its participants. Such is the nature of living, our limited perception to see all things as they rise and fall in and out of our field of vision. Certainly a self-protection that allows us to continue to live amidst danger, it also can prevent us from empathy or intervening action. To surf, at least we enter that world as a participant, for a moment submerged between worlds. To participate we must also present ourselves as a potential meal for the other who is out of our field of vision. The difference it makes is to produce some empathy, even if retrospective, that we live in communal suffering as well as joy with all beings.
Frank D. Ratti, Eugene, Oregon, 06/01/07
Post a Comment