Feeling Discombobulated: When the Universe, Time and Space, Wears Us As A Hat

It’s so easy to feel discombobulated or unbalanced. We might rely too much on one person’s advice and lose sight of ourselves, or care so much about other people’s opinions we no longer know our own. Or we worry so much about a future event we lose touch with the present. We might get sick, anxious, afraid and doubt our ability to recover or face a threat. We might try to check emails while texting or do any two tasks requiring mental focus at the same time and can’t accomplish either very well.

 

Einstein described how space and time were not separated in two but relative to each other. Each needs the other to fully describe either. As far as I can understand it, since light, or the universe is always in motion, describing the distance between any two objects ⎼ or to describe any place anywhere we need both the where and the when. The apple tree by my front door on this gray spring day is so different from what it was last January, or yesterday.

 

If we try to do the impossible and hitch ourselves intellectually or emotionally to only time, then space zooms by. We always need a where as well as a when, the context or the whole of a situation to understand any part.

 

Such is true with any duality. If we consider just one half of any such linked pair, they both disappear. Try describing above without below, a parent without a child, or separating mind from body, self from universe. Or similarly, we might lose touch with ourselves by mentally dividing now from a wished for soon or a lost then. Or when it’s raining, we make ourselves feel even wetter and more miserable by imagining we could’ve been dry.

 

Yet, when we feel chilled, for example, it can be helpful to imagine a warm mini sun above our heads⎼ and its comfort spreading, inch by inch, down through our body. Or when it’s just our hands that are cold, we can picture and feel we’re holding a smooth stone, warmed by the sun cupped in our hands. Visualizing is one thing, but wishing or blaming doesn’t warm us at all.

 

A Zen Master from the 13th Century Japan, named Daito Kokuji, wrote:

No umbrella, getting soaked,

            I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat.

 

I don’t think I can put into words exactly what this means. 13th Century Zen Master Dogen might have done what I couldn’t do, when he recorded his insight that time is not separable from being; that everything and every being is time, or “being-time.” The spring flower, this finger on the keyboard, this beating heart is time. We make a gigantic and painful mistake by thinking of time as only a phenomenon that ebbs and flows, or flies away from us, something we can divorce from beings and things. Dogen shows that when we realize this essential truth about the nature of time, the moment is absolutely alive, present, whole….

 

*The anecdote at the heart of this blog was published before by my own website and The Sunlight Press.

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

A Story of Different Perspectives

In 1969, after graduating from college, I served in the Peace Corps in a rural village in Sierra Leone. I taught English and sometimes math or health. Sierra Leone is on the equator. Much of it is, or was, deeply forested jungle. One day, the headmaster and I were walking together to visit a village deep in the bush. It was near the beginning of the rainy season, so I carried my umbrella with me.

 

As we walked, the headmaster and I got into one of our usual discussions. They were more like debates, and I don’t think I ever won. He often had a twist to his reasoning that put his point of view into a league of experience beyond my own. He was older than me, although I never knew his age. I would guess at forty.

 

As we exited from the tall thick trees of the bush into a clearing, it started raining. We had been debating whether change was possible. Back then, talking about political change in Sierra Leone could be dangerous. People could be imprisoned for what they said. I argued that change was necessary. He argued that change was impossible. I thought he was referring to the fact that corruption was considered a normal way of doing business in his country and so corruption was the only reality. To my mind, change was not only a reality but a necessity because the political and economic conditions in his country were undermining the quality of people’s lives. As the rain increased, I opened the umbrella, held it over our heads, and said: “I changed the situation. We are no longer getting wet.” “No, you changed nothing,” he replied. “It’s still raining.”

 

He taught me a great deal in those months that I knew him. Clearly, our points of reference, our very notions of ourselves were different. He identified more with the natural world around him than I did. For him, changing my position in relation to the rain was no different from changing the position of a raindrop. So, no change occurred. Raining was the world being the world.

 

Both of our perspectives had value. His pushed mine to a new place. By allowing myself to take in his perspective, I was able to learn from him, and think about identity and change in a new way. I learned a valuable lesson about how to think with a deeper and wider perspective. I think such a perspective is an important element of thinking critically, but goes beyond such thinking.

 

A Zen Master from the 13th Century Japan, named Daito Kokuji, wrote:

            No umbrella, getting soaked,

            I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat.

I don’t think I fully understand or can put into words exactly what this means, but I feel the rightness of it. Instead of huddling to get away from the rain, the cold and the miserable feeling of being soaked, I can allow myself to feel the cold and the raindrops as me, too. And then I am no longer a skin wrapped soaking package. I am something much more.

 

In the same way, we all can feel our self-judgments, our pains, as something to learn from and let go, as a raincoat, not our identity.

 

Taking A New Perspective

I served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in 1969, teaching English and sometimes math or health, in a rural village. Sierra Leone is on the equator. Much of it is, or was, deeply forested jungle. One day, the headmaster and I were walking together to visit a village deep in the bush. It was near the beginning of the rainy season, so I carried my umbrella with me.

 

As we walked, the headmaster and I got into one of our usual discussions that were more like debates, and I don’t think I ever won. He often had a twist to his reasoning that put his point of view into a league of experience beyond my own. He was older than me, although I never knew his age. I would guess at forty. At possibly forty, he was already a few years older than the average male from his country.

 

As we exited from the tall thick trees of the bush into a clearing, it started raining. We had been debating whether change was possible. Back then, talking about political change in Sierra Leone could be dangerous. People could be imprisoned for what they said. I argued that change was necessary. He argued that change was impossible. I thought he was referring to the fact that corruption was considered a normal way of doing business and so corruption was the only reality. To my mind, change was not only a constant reality but a necessity. As the rain increased, I opened the umbrella, held it over our heads, and said: “I changed the situation. We are no longer getting wet.” “No, you changed nothing,” he replied. “It’s still raining.”

 

He taught me a great deal in those months that I knew him. Clearly, our points of reference, our very notions of ourselves were different. He identified more with the natural world around him than I did. For him, changing my position in relation to the rain was no different than changing the position of a raindrop. So, no substantive change occurred. Raining was the world being the world.

 

By taking in his perspective, I was able to learn from him, and think about identity and change in a new way. This openness to and empathy for totally new perspectives is important in thinking critically, but goes beyond such thinking. A Zen Master from 13th Century Japan, Daito Kokuji, wrote: “No umbrella, getting soaked,/I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat.”

 

 

Maybe there’s a kinship between the headmaster and the Zen master. What experiences have you had where your perspective was suddenly turned on its head?