Upani-Buddha-shads

One year ago my yin came home as I was cleaning up from making yogurt, which marked a turning in my ability to deny my descent into hippiedom. A kitchen, at least in my old way of thinking, is place for storing food rather than growing it.

As recent as three weeks ago, however, I was fermenting pickles in the cupboard above our refrigerator. Taste-wise, they came out okay, but the texture was a little off. My best guess is that the heat rising from the refrigerator's compressor sped up the fermentation process, leaving the pickles mushier than one would desire. All this is purely speculation, of course, and it is also thoroughly beside the point.

The point is that later that night, we discussed the relationship between percept, concept, and communication. To illustrate my perspective, I pointed to the book sitting on the nightstand:

me: "What am i pointing to?"

yin: "Buddha."

me: "The book."

yin: "Trick question."

me: "How?"

yin: "The Buddha...

you knew what i would say."

This exercise highlighted the everpresence and malleability of context, the unseen influence of scope and scale, and the assumptions already made before we even speak a word. Had i walked into the room and pointed at the object in exactly the same manner, her answer would have likely been 'book.' The room was the context; the book became the text.

(so to speak.)

But - by picking up the book - the context was collapsed into the rectangle, drawing emphasis to the image and eliciting her answer. All this happens simply by virtue of living and operating in the world. The presumption that our own context (whether large or small) is undeniable, universal, or commonsensical is both absurd and damaging. There are (at least) as many ways of Being as there are beings, and one of the things I love about my yin is her willingness to indulge my fondness for engaging these matters while lying in bed.

(so why the repetition?)

We need to repeat these things because we are constantly forgetting. It is incalculably easy to be pulled back into the quicksand of cultural, historical and existential biases. The book currently on my nightstand, sitting in exactly the same place Osho once occupied has something to say about this:

"Even though we cannot see our own hand in the dark,
we can hear what is said and move toward the person speaking."

from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

We all live in some measure darkness, and we are also those voices speaking in the dark, guiding one another to recognize that the hand we seek is already a part of us...

It is merely a matter of listening, and memory.

"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,
which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining."

- Chris Marker