Showing posts with label lower higher self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lower higher self. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Face It
I sit here in this chair, and I am alone in the universe,
and I alone am the universe; outside of every system ever conceived.
How could this have ever occurred? …
Why do I look at the baby in the stroller across the room and only see myself? Not as a literal projection, but as something that is not separate from this organism.
I am not really sure why, or that it even matters.
I am keen to find out, however.
Takuin Minamoto, Emptiness and Levels of Consciousness
I think it started with FaceBook.
Carin, a childhood friend I’ve not seen in 40 years, posted a picture of David, just one of the people we went to high school with - David a year older, Class of 1967.
Now, there he was, 2011, smiling in a pink shirt, blond hair spiking just a bit.
God, he looked great!
And I thought, "David?" The name was so familiar, but I could hardly remember. What had he been like? - a nice guy, student council type.
And as I clicked to find out more there was one other photo: He and another handsome fellow, both in tuxes, silk vests, and boutonniere.
Underneath, a woman had commented, “I thought he was married to Philip.”
My god!
People in Decatur Illinois talking about gay marriage as if it were the most normal thing in the world?
I was deeply moved, because I know what that path was like from the clueless closet of MacArthur High School to 2011.
And now, I can count four of us as having made it. Who else? Who else shared that path?
That night I had a dream.
I was at David’s house, the lawn set out with white clothed tables awaiting the reception. As the guests arrived I was amazed to see all these old high school acquaintances.
Face after face.
It was delightful and heart rending. It was wonderful to see those who’d largely just meant pain.
Then I saw him, Carin’s father.
He was old. Not at all the robust beer drinking, cigarette puffing joker of my youth, but an old man with watery eyes. His name was Bill, but my folks had always called him Henry.
I went to him and we shared the softest kiss.
Then I stood back waiting for my hug. But, he was not about to reach out.
Puzzlement. Then he said, “If I were to hug you, I’d never let you go.”
With those words such love exploded. With a jolt I was awake.
Lying there in my bed I discovered I was crying.
I lay there for a moment trying to orient myself.
It was then I noticed there was this small burning pinhole of light right in the middle of my heart.
What a strange way for one’s heart to break.
I thought of Carin. I would write her in the morning and tell her, “I dreamed of your dad last night.”
A couple months ago via FaceBook she had told me, “He has his good days and his bad now.”
I thought of Carin’s mother, how when Pop died my mom had told me she had gotten a phone call: “Rusty, it’s Fuzzy.”
At first, that was all they’d needed to say. And I could hear exactly how Carin’s mom had sounded.
“Rusty, it’s Fuzzy.” …stop, beyond all words, just stop.
So, I’ve learned a strange thing from these FaceBook encounters, from these reunions with old friends and even with the ones I’d thought hadn’t really mattered.
They all mattered. Every single one.
They all matter because I have discovered that they no longer exist as separate entities.
Retreating into memory and mind they have become a part of me.
They constitute my Life.
I love them as myself.
I am so surprised to understand that.
I wish I’d known that all along.
What does it mean to believe in a perception?
It means that you are unconsciously assuming that the world you are perceiving is real....
it means you are assuming that whatever is perceived, is really there as something in and of itself; as having an independent nature; a solid existence...
When we realize this ...we stop solidifying our experience as being a single entity in a world full of other individual objects and people...
Whether you have your eyes open and believe you perceive 'external stimuli' or whether you have your eyes closed and experience your thoughts, emotions, or even meditational states ...
All is just that same perception of awareness. Just like the movie screen will always be the movie screen and the projection will always be the projection, regardless of what is shown.
Bentinho Massaro
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
What is the Grass: Part Two
Awakening is instantaneous. Clarity takes place in space-time.
Attributed to Jean Klein
I had lunch last Sunday with two old friends from my TM teaching days. I’d not seen either in almost thirty years, though I have been chatting with one fellow this past year via email.
But, this was the first time we’d sat together sharing warm food and physical presence.
It was not just a coming home to my youth, but also to my spiritual roots; a thirty year check-in regarding what we had learned? And, what had become of our hopes?
Mark has taken Buddhist vows. Graham is a yoga instructor. And still we seek.
I asked them to look within and tell me the answer to; “Who are you?”
We all experienced the simple awareness that is the screen for all the play of Life.
However, no one would claim awakening or enlightenment (the word we’d set our hearts on).
Each had a reason for denial: Mark still freaked about money. Graham, dear Graham so gentle and smooth, spoke of insomnia.
And I got totally confused.
Yes, it seems I have found my true Self… but there is also sometimes a “no-self.”
Self is a fullness that experiences.
So, what is this experience of “no-self?
There is no one there: No one to have a thought, No one to feel the emotion.
That seems to be the answer Inquiry seeks.
And I just don’t see how that could ultimately be as I obviously have a self and not a no-self.
“What is no-self?” I felt quite desperate, knotted up, holding my head.
Mark said, “No small-self.”
Well, DUH! I knew that!
“No-self” extinguishes small-self. It was as if something untwisted in my psyche, as if belief and assumptions exists physically. And then like some rubber band, the twist wants to reassert itself and immediately confusion returns.
I take small-self as something small and illusory… like a tree, or a truck.
Illusory trees and trucks make much sense to me. I experience them as illusory, not really real.
And too, I respect their solidity. I’ve live with this paradox each day for years.
Now more lately, small-self seems like the trucks: merely a ghost, but a ghost that’s still in play.
Personal identity remains. Call out, “Patty!” and I turn around.
The next day, I came across these words:
Feeling myself as somebody experiencing Truth, that changed into I am That.
So there was no longer somebody experiencing Truth…. Before that moment there was still a separation… a going into freedom and then back into experience of personality. Like they were two separate experiences… [after that] it was simultaneous.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 50.
These words rang a bell with me. “Somebody experiencing Truth… still a separation.”
Yes! I am waiting for the epiphany in which, “I am That,” tolls out.
Why?
Well, I read it in a book. I heard it in a video. I have this belief that that is what happens.
And then, you are awake.
(I’m smiling. Are you?)
The me-story is like a fan going. You can turn off the switch and it takes a while to slow down. When this slowed down I stopped allowing my energy going into the me-story… Now that’s automatic… The me-story is “swoosh!”… but the triggers can still happen, the body gets like kind of a hit and feels fear, or whatever can be there, and the body knows this is the moment to meet what wants to be free.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 55.
Now these words reminded me very much of what Adyashanti said regarding what it’s like to be awake:
A thought can come that can cause an instant of grasping, that can cause a momentary experience of a certain separateness… when it does happen, the gap between it happening and the seeing through it is very small… at a certain point, the gap between the arising of a sticky thought and its disappearance becomes so narrow that the arising and disappearing is almost simultaneous.
Adya interview with Tami Simon
Coincidentally, as I looked for the above quote, I also came across these words which took me by complete surprise. Strangely, I had remembered the above words and apparently forgotten these from the very same interview:
Awakening is not experiencing vast, infinite space, feeling spacious or expanded or blissful or whatever. These feelings may be by-products of awakening…
Awakening … is a change of perspective.
Everything we thought was real is seen to not be real at all; it’s more like a dream that’s happening within the infinite expanse of emptiness.
What is actually real is the infinite expanse of emptiness.
Oh well, there you go. (laughing) That seems really straight forward. This is the story of the illusory trucks.
One final thought. A friend sent me this link to Shinzen Young, with the simple explanation, “Saw this and thought of you.”
At the time, a couple days before my Sunday brunch, I thought it excellent and beautiful, really not much help… except, it kind of grew on me.
Attributed to Jean Klein
I had lunch last Sunday with two old friends from my TM teaching days. I’d not seen either in almost thirty years, though I have been chatting with one fellow this past year via email.
But, this was the first time we’d sat together sharing warm food and physical presence.
It was not just a coming home to my youth, but also to my spiritual roots; a thirty year check-in regarding what we had learned? And, what had become of our hopes?
Mark has taken Buddhist vows. Graham is a yoga instructor. And still we seek.
I asked them to look within and tell me the answer to; “Who are you?”
We all experienced the simple awareness that is the screen for all the play of Life.
However, no one would claim awakening or enlightenment (the word we’d set our hearts on).
Each had a reason for denial: Mark still freaked about money. Graham, dear Graham so gentle and smooth, spoke of insomnia.
And I got totally confused.
Yes, it seems I have found my true Self… but there is also sometimes a “no-self.”
Self is a fullness that experiences.
So, what is this experience of “no-self?
There is no one there: No one to have a thought, No one to feel the emotion.
That seems to be the answer Inquiry seeks.
And I just don’t see how that could ultimately be as I obviously have a self and not a no-self.
“What is no-self?” I felt quite desperate, knotted up, holding my head.
Mark said, “No small-self.”
Well, DUH! I knew that!
“No-self” extinguishes small-self. It was as if something untwisted in my psyche, as if belief and assumptions exists physically. And then like some rubber band, the twist wants to reassert itself and immediately confusion returns.
I take small-self as something small and illusory… like a tree, or a truck.
Illusory trees and trucks make much sense to me. I experience them as illusory, not really real.
And too, I respect their solidity. I’ve live with this paradox each day for years.
Now more lately, small-self seems like the trucks: merely a ghost, but a ghost that’s still in play.
Personal identity remains. Call out, “Patty!” and I turn around.
The next day, I came across these words:
Feeling myself as somebody experiencing Truth, that changed into I am That.
So there was no longer somebody experiencing Truth…. Before that moment there was still a separation… a going into freedom and then back into experience of personality. Like they were two separate experiences… [after that] it was simultaneous.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 50.
These words rang a bell with me. “Somebody experiencing Truth… still a separation.”
Yes! I am waiting for the epiphany in which, “I am That,” tolls out.
Why?
Well, I read it in a book. I heard it in a video. I have this belief that that is what happens.
And then, you are awake.
(I’m smiling. Are you?)
The me-story is like a fan going. You can turn off the switch and it takes a while to slow down. When this slowed down I stopped allowing my energy going into the me-story… Now that’s automatic… The me-story is “swoosh!”… but the triggers can still happen, the body gets like kind of a hit and feels fear, or whatever can be there, and the body knows this is the moment to meet what wants to be free.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 55.
Now these words reminded me very much of what Adyashanti said regarding what it’s like to be awake:
A thought can come that can cause an instant of grasping, that can cause a momentary experience of a certain separateness… when it does happen, the gap between it happening and the seeing through it is very small… at a certain point, the gap between the arising of a sticky thought and its disappearance becomes so narrow that the arising and disappearing is almost simultaneous.
Adya interview with Tami Simon
Coincidentally, as I looked for the above quote, I also came across these words which took me by complete surprise. Strangely, I had remembered the above words and apparently forgotten these from the very same interview:
Awakening is not experiencing vast, infinite space, feeling spacious or expanded or blissful or whatever. These feelings may be by-products of awakening…
Awakening … is a change of perspective.
Everything we thought was real is seen to not be real at all; it’s more like a dream that’s happening within the infinite expanse of emptiness.
What is actually real is the infinite expanse of emptiness.
Oh well, there you go. (laughing) That seems really straight forward. This is the story of the illusory trucks.
One final thought. A friend sent me this link to Shinzen Young, with the simple explanation, “Saw this and thought of you.”
At the time, a couple days before my Sunday brunch, I thought it excellent and beautiful, really not much help… except, it kind of grew on me.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Sometimes We Need a Story
Medical journals educate physicians with statistical information and are not interested in stories about unexpected remissions and recovery.
Yet stories can change beliefs and beliefs affect us at the cellular level.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Close to the Bone, chapter 7: sometimes we need a story.
Emotions are not in the head. There’s a cellular consciousness. There’s a wisdom in every cell. Every single cell has receptors on it. The emotional energy comes first, and then peptides are released all over…. Consciousness precedes matter. It’s not like a peptide creates the feeling. The feeling creates the peptide, on some level.
Candace Pert, in Close to the Bone
There is no such thing as false hope.
Michael Lerner, in Close to the Bone
Mary and I met with Evie the evening before she was to start her next go round of chemo. It was our prelude to what Evie had called the atomic bomb of chemo and the stem cell transplant.
The day before I had sent around a story I’d found about a fellow, Bob Ellal, who had undergone two stem cell transplants and been given by his doctor one chance in 20,000 of it working. Well, he’s been cancer free for more than 12 years now. And he has a nice concise list of what to do. We’ve been doing most of this, but it was good to just see it written out so plainly, and he included one point we haven’t articulated real clearly:
Find someone in your life—besides yourself—to live for. This may seem like a strange statement—isn’t it enough to want to survive? You will find that after large doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation you will sometimes be so sick that you will feel like quitting. That’s the time to remember that other people need you to survive.
I liked this particularly.
As it turned out, many of us had gotten a boost from Bob Ellal’s story, and so we were gathering to meditate already feeling some momentum of “being ready.” Still, Evie spoke of how she'd turned inside. She didn't know if it was hiding like retreating to a cave, but she knew it brought a piece.
It seemed to me she was giving her own words for going into her soul, her higher self.
As a closing exercise we decided that Eve would try getting in touch with an animal form or what my Taoist teacher calls “the lower higher self.”
Eve thought for a moment, saying she wasn’t sure what that animal would be. She liked the butterfly. The turtle had come up with the tumor they’d removed, but more recently she was coming across the bear as healing energy.
“Oh,” I said. “You don’t choose the animal. They come to you and take ahold.”
With that we did bows and began.
Afterwards, I asked, “Who came?” She said – the snake.
We had a good laugh over that.
I had really hoped for a mammal of some sort, something strong and furry. Or a power-bird with warrior feathers – that would be just fine.
But a snake? Eewww!
Then, I recalled Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddess in Everywoman, a book I had loved back in the ‘80s. It was there I first learned of women and snakes. When women come into their power they tend to have a lot of dreams about snakes:
The image of the snake is one of the major symbols that you might be drawn to. It may show up in a dream about transformation and transition.
The next day I went on a search to see what exactly Dr. Bolen said about snakes. I discovered she had written a new book, Close to the Bone: Life Threatening Illness as a Journey of the Soul.
I have ordered it from Amazon, but wanted to share some of her words today:
Whenever or however that line from health to illness is crossed, we enter the realm of soul...
We lose an innocence, we know vulnerability, we are no longer who we were before this event, and we will never be the same.
A life threatening illness calls to the soul, taps into spiritual resources, and can be an initiation into the soul realm for the patient and for anyone else who is touched by the mystery that accompanies the possibility of death.
Once we take soul seriously, a whole different premise opens up.
If we have a soul--and this is one of the innate beliefs that human beings do have--then we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path.
The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road.
What did I come to do? …
What did I come to learn?
Who did I come to love?
… and How long do they need me to love them?
These are good questions for all of us.
The answers will be the stories we need.
The answers will reveal how truly blessed we are.
Yet stories can change beliefs and beliefs affect us at the cellular level.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Close to the Bone, chapter 7: sometimes we need a story.
Emotions are not in the head. There’s a cellular consciousness. There’s a wisdom in every cell. Every single cell has receptors on it. The emotional energy comes first, and then peptides are released all over…. Consciousness precedes matter. It’s not like a peptide creates the feeling. The feeling creates the peptide, on some level.
Candace Pert, in Close to the Bone
There is no such thing as false hope.
Michael Lerner, in Close to the Bone
Mary and I met with Evie the evening before she was to start her next go round of chemo. It was our prelude to what Evie had called the atomic bomb of chemo and the stem cell transplant.
The day before I had sent around a story I’d found about a fellow, Bob Ellal, who had undergone two stem cell transplants and been given by his doctor one chance in 20,000 of it working. Well, he’s been cancer free for more than 12 years now. And he has a nice concise list of what to do. We’ve been doing most of this, but it was good to just see it written out so plainly, and he included one point we haven’t articulated real clearly:
Find someone in your life—besides yourself—to live for. This may seem like a strange statement—isn’t it enough to want to survive? You will find that after large doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation you will sometimes be so sick that you will feel like quitting. That’s the time to remember that other people need you to survive.
I liked this particularly.
As it turned out, many of us had gotten a boost from Bob Ellal’s story, and so we were gathering to meditate already feeling some momentum of “being ready.” Still, Evie spoke of how she'd turned inside. She didn't know if it was hiding like retreating to a cave, but she knew it brought a piece.
It seemed to me she was giving her own words for going into her soul, her higher self.
As a closing exercise we decided that Eve would try getting in touch with an animal form or what my Taoist teacher calls “the lower higher self.”
Eve thought for a moment, saying she wasn’t sure what that animal would be. She liked the butterfly. The turtle had come up with the tumor they’d removed, but more recently she was coming across the bear as healing energy.
“Oh,” I said. “You don’t choose the animal. They come to you and take ahold.”
With that we did bows and began.
Afterwards, I asked, “Who came?” She said – the snake.
We had a good laugh over that.
I had really hoped for a mammal of some sort, something strong and furry. Or a power-bird with warrior feathers – that would be just fine.
But a snake? Eewww!
Then, I recalled Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddess in Everywoman, a book I had loved back in the ‘80s. It was there I first learned of women and snakes. When women come into their power they tend to have a lot of dreams about snakes:
The image of the snake is one of the major symbols that you might be drawn to. It may show up in a dream about transformation and transition.
The next day I went on a search to see what exactly Dr. Bolen said about snakes. I discovered she had written a new book, Close to the Bone: Life Threatening Illness as a Journey of the Soul.
I have ordered it from Amazon, but wanted to share some of her words today:
Whenever or however that line from health to illness is crossed, we enter the realm of soul...
We lose an innocence, we know vulnerability, we are no longer who we were before this event, and we will never be the same.
A life threatening illness calls to the soul, taps into spiritual resources, and can be an initiation into the soul realm for the patient and for anyone else who is touched by the mystery that accompanies the possibility of death.
Once we take soul seriously, a whole different premise opens up.
If we have a soul--and this is one of the innate beliefs that human beings do have--then we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path.
The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road.
What did I come to do? …
What did I come to learn?
Who did I come to love?
… and How long do they need me to love them?
These are good questions for all of us.
The answers will be the stories we need.
The answers will reveal how truly blessed we are.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Axolotl
I went by the woman in the mercado who sells medicinal herbs and asked her what was good for sore throats. She sold me a bottle of something called Jarabe de Ajolote.
It turns out that Jarabe just means syrup, but Ajolote (which at first I thought was a version of ajo or garlic) is actually this reptile!
I received this email from Mexico, and while Ajolote is actually a salamander, my friend’s sore throat had led her right into the mythic.
And that face! Hadn’t I seen it before?
Ajolote translates as axolotl. Ah, yes!
Axolotl are famous in biology for incredible powers of regeneration. Chop off a limb and it will grow right back.
But my friend was adamant. The animal is pre-Columbian and mythic in Mexico. And I'm beginning to believe her.
Enjoy this short story by Julio Cortazar which I excerpt here (or better still, read the unedited original):
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent… I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else…
That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank… I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said) like cod?liver oil…
I began to go every morning, morning and afternoon some days. The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together…
I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery…
Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head - difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.
It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility…
Above all else, their eyes obsessed me…The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy…
It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining…
They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?
…there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.
Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my world…
Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.
He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit…
I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.
from The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar.
For a while the other night during our coven meditation, I turned into a minotaur. Such a strange beast he was! Not at all like the monkey or lion or mythic bird that have transformed me in the past and that the Taoists call “the lower higher self.”
So who are you? Are we? And where?
Happy New Year.
It turns out that Jarabe just means syrup, but Ajolote (which at first I thought was a version of ajo or garlic) is actually this reptile!
I received this email from Mexico, and while Ajolote is actually a salamander, my friend’s sore throat had led her right into the mythic.
And that face! Hadn’t I seen it before?
Ajolote translates as axolotl. Ah, yes!
Axolotl are famous in biology for incredible powers of regeneration. Chop off a limb and it will grow right back.
But my friend was adamant. The animal is pre-Columbian and mythic in Mexico. And I'm beginning to believe her.
Enjoy this short story by Julio Cortazar which I excerpt here (or better still, read the unedited original):
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent… I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else…
That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank… I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said) like cod?liver oil…
I began to go every morning, morning and afternoon some days. The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together…
I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery…
Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head - difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.
It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility…
Above all else, their eyes obsessed me…The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy…
It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining…
They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?
…there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.
Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my world…
Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.
He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit…
I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.
from The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar.
For a while the other night during our coven meditation, I turned into a minotaur. Such a strange beast he was! Not at all like the monkey or lion or mythic bird that have transformed me in the past and that the Taoists call “the lower higher self.”
So who are you? Are we? And where?
Happy New Year.
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