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Contemplative field note: I responded to a thread about dreams with some weirdness about symbol and reality. This dynamic doesn’t have to be woo though: when you look at a flower this is at play. This obviously relates to art, but also to suffering & society, less obviously.
I was going to dive into a thread, but I find it incredibly hard to convert my thoughts about this into something that doesn't just come off as nonsense, or common sense at best. I've talked to four people about this, and only one of them could go down this rabbit hole with me.
3/ Fuck it. I'll sound silly, take it lightly. A thread is not the right place, but I'm going to try, as play.
4/ via conversations I realised that this way of thinking - highly visual in nature - is itself a symbol via which I learnt to relate to the orderly-chaos of social realities. Part nonsense, part poetry. Everyone has symbolic models for reality, not everyone notices them.
5/ As a kid/young-teen, when I observed what people do and the effect it has, I began to see - in the mind's eye - a visual model of simple human interaction. This is how I learnt to act pretty normal, even in aggressive spaces like investment banking and sports teams.
6/ In spite of the power I discovered in this area of thinking, rationality isn't a very helpful tool in understanding it. One has to be able to relate to the conversation as a symbolic means of suggestion, like saṃdhyā-bhāṣā, 'twilight language' of Vajrayana traditions.
7/ We are firmly in the realm of silly nonsense - so I'll attempt to bring this thread a bit closer to something more relatable as a 'contemplative field-note':
8/ Most people live almost entirely in the world of symbol: deeply attached to their thoughts about themselves and their world.
9/ The limited/solid sense of self & world arises out of the constellation of thoughts & emotions, which are to a significant degree determined by the context in which the body-mind exists.
10/ Of course, it’s easy to fall into denial - bypassing - of those limited patterns of symbol. This will sound extremely familiar to anyone even vaguely versed in Buddhism/meditation.
11/ But generally: my career, my property, my money, my partner, my race, my disability, my health, etc - almost entirely fixated symbol. Still, one can and must play on the boundaries of symbol and reality.
12/ No matter how good you get at relating to sensory 'reality', noticing the transparency of symbol, it will always be embedded within symbolic worlds. We are always, and everywhere between worlds. Even when we are asleep. Even when we die, the symbol will normally continue.
13/ You can’t just go chasing some pure, 'authentic' ultimate really real reality. You can try, but can’t really extricate one from the other. You have to play with both sides...in theory.
14/ Emotion is a good example for people to access these ideas. It sounds a lot, a lot like form/emptiness. I have a reasonable contact with the somatic experience of emotion, but I really struggle to slap a symbol onto that. I can conceptually identify some big ones though.
15/ Eg: Most people think anger is really real...and it is, kind of. What is anger actually? Anger is a fixated symbol of a sensory reality. That sensory experience itself is not ‘anger’.
16/ In fact, some emotional experience goes unnoticed precisely because you don't have a symbol for it. I suspect it's the same for neurotypicals: psychologists call it alexithymia IIRC.
17/ This area of symbol and reality kind of makes sense when we consider it from a meditative point of view - but it gets a bit weirder when you see the same patterns at work in different contexts.
18/ As this is supposed to somehow relate to mediation, I'll close with an experiment for you: when you look at a flower, what is symbol and what is reality? Look at the visual experience, look at the emotional sensations, look look look!
19/ Now, think of someone heart-quakingly inspirational to you, or someone who you have deep gratitude perhaps. What is symbol and what is reality here? How is the person different from the flower?
20/ Last step - take the flower as a symbolic representation of that person. Do the same exercise. It is shocking the degree to which your entire experience is saturated with/as symbol. Imagination is a powerful thing.
21/ I've had someone get viscerally angry at me for talking like this. They dismissed my claims as 'social-contructivist crap' when we ventured into the 'War on Terror' and other symbolically justified horrors of humanity. People like their symbolic reality non-symbolic, thanks.
22/ The beeper just went on my dinner. So you'll all have to imagine all the other silly words I could say on the topic. The End.
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