Article 66: Tethered to Form
Long ago, the Chinese noticed yin and yang, two aspects of one overall process, moreover that this dynamic plays out in all observable, experienced processes. That’s a bit of a leap so let’s go step by step.
Yin and Yang: the classic example is the sunny and shaded side of a mountain. In the morning the East-facing side is warm and sunny and the West-facing side is cool and shaded; this reverses in the afternoon as the sun passages from East to West. So there is no such ‘thing’ as yin or yang even though they are perceivable. Yes, temperatures can be taken and degrees of light or shade gauged, but those measurements don’t measure ‘yang’ or ‘yin’ which are mutually relative terms. Perhaps it is more helpful to regard yin and yang as two mutually relative aspects of one overall dynamic process. It’s because the process is an ever-changing dynamic that the terms were developed, noting something that is a constant (a sunny and shady side, or two sides) but never exactly the same yet in one overall dynamic.
Now – and more importantly – look at what happens to our minds when using terms like yin and yang. Our minds immediately want to make them into something definite, tangible, measurable even though in our mountain example they are changing from moment to moment and in any case aren’t really measurable things at all, rather relationships.
Let’s take another pairing which is similar but different: form and space or form and formless. In order for something with a clear shape to be distinguished and perceived there must be space around it. Traditionally this is described as the ‘six directions’ namely the four directions plus above and below. Unless there is space around an object it cannot be perceived as an independent object with measurable dimensions. The way our minds work, though, we can grock an object with measurable dimensions – height, width, weight etc. – but we cannot grock the space around it, which is seemingly non-existent, a blank.
Space is a strange thing. It has no shape, dimension or substance and yet it is limited somehow. If you have two trees two feet apart, you cannot fit in a building that is ten feet by ten feet. But if you think further it’s not the space that creates the limitation but the relative position of the two forms between which there is only two feet distance. That limitation in distance is created by the forms, not the space accommodating them – indeed we could say that the space accommodates the limitation. So we cannot measure space any more than we can ‘puncture it with an arrow’ as an old dzogchen analogy likes to put it, only note that there is such a thing even though it isn’t a thing. This is similar to yin and yang not being forms even though they are observable phenomena. Materialists who like to claim that only the physical, only that with form, is real, essentially insist that our experience of things like colours, textures and qualities are not; for them experience is an illusion, or as one person I was discussing this with recently on a forum put it: ‘the experience of redness is phantom’ because redness is a cognitively generated illusion from beams of light or some such. This is like arguing that the story told on a TV screen isn’t ‘real’ because it is only made of light pixels on a screen and vibrations in a speaker. The story isn’t physical, true, but it is experienced. (Whether it is ‘real’ or not perhaps ‘really’ doesn’t matter?)
The way our minds work, we see the form but not the space, which is invisible – literally ‘out of sight out of mind.’ Not only that, but it seems that our minds are habituated to seeking out the forms, hunting for them, grabbing them, consuming them, manipulating them, coveting them, desiring them, combating them, denying them and so forth. We live in a world of jostling forms, no end of forms which our minds are continuously involved in perceiving, evaluating and dealing with, and all this time we do not see the space in which all forms manifest.
Now an additional little twist: there are both physical and mental forms. In the above example we used trees as an example of forms but they represent any perceivable physical objects – chairs, tables, glasses, baseball bats, bodies, cars, buildings and so forth. But in the realm of our personally experienced minds, the realm of ‘me’ we carry around in our bodies everywhere we go (even in dreams!), there is the mental equivalent of form and space. There are the mental forms which arise and which we perceive, usually called ‘thoughts.’ Each individual thought, usually a word or image, has a specific form and a defined set of meanings, just like objects. (A tree, for example, can be viewed from different angles and also has different associations – it is stable, or beautiful, or provides shade etc.) And just as with physical objects, there is the form itself – say a thought of a tree either in verbal or image form – and the space around that form which, just as with seeming external space, is ‘out of sight, out of mind.’
But is it? Is the space of mind in which mental forms arise entirely invisible? Is an element with which we perceive itself outside the ken of perception? In Buddhist meditation parlance, we talk about first becoming aware of the movement of mind and taming it until it is more or less still, but within that stillness thoughts – or experiences is perhaps a better word – arise; they come and go much like yin and yang is continuously changing. So what is tamed and still is not the thoughts and perceptions themselves, rather the background comes more into the foreground, for the background is what remains unmoved and unmoving just like the space doesn’t change however objects move around in a garden: if the wind blows and the leaves move or the wind doesn’t blow and the leaves don’t move the space in which they all take place does not change in the slightest. Similarly in the mind no matter what thoughts, emotions, perceptions or whatever arise, the background container, the space of mind, the nature of mind, does not change in the slightest.
Iain McGilchrest has written two huge books coming out of extensive study about the left and right brains. I have not read all his materials on this but my ‘down and dirty’ understanding is that the left brain tackles problems in the world we have to navigate through by creating a representation, essentially a map. A map is not the terrain but a re-presentation of it so that one can find one’s way through the actual terrain. The problem is that if one relies too much on the left brain, one begins to mistake the representation for the reality. Meanwhile the right brain likes to see the whole picture, the entire context, and is more open, vast and intuitive, less constrained by the mapping functions of the left brain. So with our form and space contemplation it seems like the perception of forms is principally like left brain processes whereas the awareness of the space accommodating such forms is the right brain processes. Something like that.
So: back to the title: Tethered to Form. It seems that when we lose track of space awareness that we become glommed onto form and this becomes habitual given that we keep going from one form to the next without any seeming gap. We might ask: who is doing the tethering here, and we could answer, like good little Buddhist students, ‘the ego, the ego is tethering our mind to forms, the ego is creating these habits.’ But that is only halfway. Why not phrase it as: ‘the ego is what we call the process by which mind tethers itself to only perceiving forms.’ In other words, the process of glomming onto forms and only forms, not seeing the space in which they arise, is what can be called ‘ego.’ In other words, a bit like yin and yang, ego is not a thing but an observable process. A Welsh teacher (Nagchang Rinpoche) insists that ego is not a thing but a process – like walking. Whilst we are walking there is a phenomenon called ‘walking’ but when we stop walking there is no more ‘walking.’ Similarly, whilst we tether the mind to form without awareness there is ‘egoing’ but when we let go of that tether and become aware of both form and spacious awareness together, there is no more ‘egoing.’
In some schools of Buddhism there are the terms ‘egolessness of self’ and ‘egolessness of other.’ The latter doesn’t make much sense in English, frankly, but the former means the tethering of the mind to form regarding one’s own experience and the latter means the tethering of the mind to form regarding seemingly external experience. So the ‘ego’ quotient is the tethering, the glomming.
It happens in an instant. As we perceive form it consumes our entire experiential space and we tune out the background, the context, the atmosphere. Those who have developed ‘egolessness’ never lose awareness, which means awareness of the space around objects which perhaps we can better describe as ‘particulars in the experiential field.’
There is another term: ‘mindfulness of mind.’ This is gradually becoming as aware of the background as the objects within it. Mind, as it turns out, is not dead, empty and lifeless. It is empty of form, yes, but it is the essence of life, it is awake, aware. (This wakefulness is what the word Buddha refers to.) We live in an ocean of awareness. And this is as true of external as internal space.
Modern materialist mentality has a very hard time understanding, let alone accepting this. If we wanted to be mean we could call them ‘awareness deniers’ or even ‘life deniers.’ Of course we won’t do that even though on some level it is true. By insisting that everything can only be regarded in left-brain representational mode we ignore the living, wakeful space in which it all takes place.
So let us cast off habitual tethering and roam free….
Food for thought…
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