First there is a mountain...

The Zensters have a saying (they always seem to have the best ones), "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is". Arlo Guthrie sang a song about that a zillion years ago. I had no idea what it meant at the time (I was probably 18 or 19) and thought it was sorta silly. It was explained to me recently and I have been (and am) experiencing it.

Near as I can figure it means that first there is the experience that we are all separate beings, that the tree is a tree and the house is a house and that other person is another person. All of these things are separate from who we are. The mountain is a separate thing, a pile of rocks that has nothing really to do with me. "First there is a mountain." Even God or whatever word you want to use to describe the divine is a separate entity from us.

At some point, not through any effort on our part other than simply observing what is true, maybe not from a logical standpoint, but from an experience that occurs without mind, we may come to know that there is no separation, that there is only one thing and that we are no more separate from it than a drop of ocean water blowing off the top of a wave is separate from the ocean. Suddenly we discover that "There is no mountain" or at least that there is no mountain that is something separate from me. The mountain is me, the bum on the street corner is me, the bird at the feeder is me or really that I am none of these things, but all of these things including me are just waves and patterns of energy that are part of the whole. If that makes sense, then you're probably using your mind too much. Yeah, we can hold it as a concept or a belief, but that's different from the lived experience of it. It feels pretty amazing maybe and is the experience of 'no self'. It's heart breaking, all inclusive, freeing.

Over the many years of my spiritual seeking there has been an occasional glimpse of this, fleeting moments where I felt all at once this huge expansion and freedom. Then it would pretty immediately dissipate and might not return for months or a year and then another fleeting experience and then it would be gone again, leaving me more than a little bereft. For me and apparently for many, it's an experience that we want to hang on to. It feels good, we want more of it, we want to live in it, maybe there is an attempt to tighten our grip around it and like tightening our grip on a handful of water it is often gone as soon as we try to grasp it.

After much time alone in the wilderness over the many years of my life and strengthened by the experience of aloneness on this recent trip I seemed to be living consistently in the place of 'no mountain', no separation from anything, or to put it in a more positive frame, 'oneness'. It sounds all gooshy and ethereal but it wasn't. It's just like living in a different landscape. It feels right and proper and without any kind of judgment of 'better'. It just is.

I felt protective of it. Not so much grasping, but just enjoying and wanting to stay there. When I went to Sedona, the separation came back in. I felt it, watched it, invited it to some degree. "I'm just an egg" as Michael says in Heinlins, Stranger in a Strange Land. I don't grok all this in fullness. It's new territory for me.

Clearly it's time, as I've said in previous posts, to re-engage with the world. There is a mountain again. It is a separate entity from 'me'. And now I'm curious, not struggling (most of the time) to interact with the mountain and with other people, to hear the sirens and the airplanes and wander around in town and interface with humans while having the experience (again, not through effort, but through consistent observation from a place that doesn't use the mind) that there is no separation. It comes as it comes, it leaves when it leaves. Like the weather patterns.

More to become here. Until I grok in fullness.