Becoming transparent
At the moment I’m on my deck, watching my dog sniffing very intently in the gaps between the timber boards of the floor. He’s a little dachshund and is clearly cute (see picture below). Apparently, dachshunds were bred for hunting badgers and other burrow-dwelling critters - so here he is clearly in his element (though, unfortunately for him, there are no badgers in Australia!).
I wonder what his consciousness is like, as he is absorbed in his floorboard “hunting”. We can be certain that there are no concepts, no defined “thoughts” or words mediating his experience. He just is - living completely present to his activity, responding to the rich scents that his fabulously sensitive nose is detecting, playing out his hunting “program” that has evolved over millions of years, perhaps experiencing a sense of great pleasure.
He is not hunting while thinking about something else. He is, in a sense, transparent to reality. There is no internal mechanism that disconnects him from what is, in each and every moment. His experience, we might assume, is one of continual “flow” - a rich experience of sensory input, pleasures, pain, and actions.
Not so with us humans. We are perhaps the only creatures who can be doing one thing while experiencing a fantasy world divorced from our surroundings. We build conceptual worlds with our intellect, fantasies that don’t necessarily relate to the “real” in any meaningful sense. Many of us are completely lost in these fantasy worlds, and never spend more than fleeting moments in the present, savouring the real.
Let’s say I am playing a board game with my children. Instead of engaging with them, experiencing their joy and excitement, I’m thinking of all the work I need to get done after the game is finished. I have departed the present, and am instead mostly living in a world of plans, deadlines, ambitions and control. This world that I am living in is a mix of truths and falsehoods. Perhaps I do indeed have lots of things that need to be done - that may be true and therefore that concept is in some sense in touch with reality. Yet it is mixed with the falsehood that I need to constantly ruminate on my plans in order for them to properly come to fruition. It is mixed with the falsehood that thinking about these things is more important than spending time with my children. It may also be mixed with the falsehood that my job is in jeopardy, and that the well-being of my family is in danger of being compromised.
While the mental world I am living in is, due to these falsehoods, a kind of fantasy, its effects are nevertheless quite real. Because of these thoughts, I find myself stressed. I become impatient with my children when they take too long to make their move in the game. I am looking for ways to cut our game short, instead of enjoying spending time with them. I am diminishing the enjoyment of my children in spending time with their Dad, and planting small seeds of thoughts like “Dad doesn’t want to spend time with me”.
There is something wonderful and mysterious about being present to the present. When all concepts, thoughts and fantasy worlds slip away and we “touch” reality as it is, rather than some mediated or distracted version of it. When we let it flood in on us, with no resistance - we become transparent to it, rather than blocking it with all our little mental resistances and dislocations. We become like little children and enter the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of His Is-ness.
As a Catholic, I obviously can’t affirm all that Buddhism says about the world and still remain a notionally observant Catholic. Nevertheless, I can profitably appreciate what they have to say on this topic. Take the following saying from the Buddhist mindfulness master Thich Nhat Hanh:
We should be able to enjoy the wonders of life in us and everywhere around us. The whispers of rustling pine boughs. Flowers blooming. The beautiful blue sky. Fluffy white clouds. The smile of a neighbor. Each of these is a small miracle of life that has the capacity to nourish and heal us. They’re there for us right now. The question is: are we there for them? If we’re constantly running around, if our mind is caught up in endless planning and worrying, it’s as if all these wonders don’t even exist.
The Kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha is right here. We should practice to enjoy the Kingdom with every step we take.
Peace is Every Breath, page 79
If you are, forgive me, an overly scrupulous Catholic, please ignore the equating of the Kingdom of God with the Pure Land of the Buddha and instead focus on the core message - God has created a thoroughly, magnificently beautiful world around us, yet we miss it! We instead walk around living in fearful, angry, anxious mental worlds of much lesser quality than the actual world that God has given us. What a waste! What ingratitude to our creator!
Imagine you are the greatest artist who has ever lived, and nobody takes the time to view your paintings, instead they walk past them with their faces in their phones. That is us if we can’t figure out a way of becoming present with the world, becoming transparent to the Kingdom of God that has been so graciously given to us.
Buddhist and Zen writers are particularly good at pointing this out to us. Catholics and other Christians - we don’t need to be scandalised by this. Because other religions don’t have the revelation of Christ, yet they still have the beautiful Kingdom all around them, they are perhaps going to sometimes emphasize and dwell on things that we may miss or underemphasize in our own tradition. We should be thankful for the good that they can sometimes help us see more clearly.
In saying that, we certainly have plenty of writers in the Catholic tradition who talk about the present moment, the need to be recollected and so on. Consider the great Fr Wilfrid Stinissen O.C.D.:
The present is the meeting place between man and God. Outside of the present, we only meet ourselves, or, more correctly, a counterfeit of ourselves: our dissapointments, dreams, and illusions.
Eternity in the Midst of Time, page 151
“Outside of the present, we only meet ourselves” - exactly. We meet the strange worlds which we concoct in our over-active, out of control minds. God does not “know” these worlds, He does not “know” who we are when we live exclusively in those worlds.
We know that the Kingdom of God will arrive in its fullness only at the eschaton. However, as Christians baptised into Christ who have inherited the Spirit, we can experience His Kingdom now. Again, Fr Stinissen:
A Christian is always directed toward eternal life. He seeks “the city which is to come” (Heb 13:14). It seems that concentration on the future is the dominating element in Christian time. But the paradox with Christianity is that the future is fundamentally already the present. The future has shifted to the present. In and with Christ, the kingdom of heaven has come. “The kingdom of God is in your midst” (Lk 17:21). “I really don’t see” writes Saint Therese of Lisieux, “what I’ll have after death that I don’t already possess in this life. I shall see God, true; but as far as being in His presence, I am totally there here on earth”.
Eternity in the Midst of Time, page 147
We need to be nourished by the present, by God who we meet there in His Kingdom. It is only in His peace, which we find right now, that we can joyfully accept and give thanks for all things (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). It is only there that we can see Christ in the other, where we can clearly see the tricks and lies of the enemy, where we can notice the Spirit’s inspirations, and where we can notice the first stirrings of temptations and old hatreds.
How much we need to remember to be present, to be transparent to reality as it is, in our current world! If we so choose, we can be distracted at almost every moment of our lives. Even stuck in a line, or waiting for a train, we have all our books, music, social media, videos and so on literally in the palm of our hand. We can live in this world that God created for us, yet, in a way, not really live in it at all. We can “walk past” His great masterpiece, with our faces buried in our phones.
If you’re feeling strung out, a little bit thin and ragged around the edges, it may be time to put down the phone*, take some deep breaths, say a little prayer and enter into the Kingdom of God. In a future newsletter, I’ll share some thoughts about how we might be able to live more of our lives in the Kingdom of His present moment.
* Yes, I realise the irony that you may be reading this very newsletter on your phone!
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All the best.