Free The World is My Mirror by Richard Bates Page A

once again.
     
    Apparent personal lives appear like clouds: they form, hang around for a moment with a short display and then appear invisible. The cloud has not gone anywhere because it never existed; life appeared cloudy for a while and now it is appearing as blue sky. This is Wholeness at work appearing different and maintaining itself at the same time. The consensus view of reality will not allow this formulation to take root, simply because one cannot maintain personal identity and Wholeness at the same time. Like the lucid dream described earlier on, once the dream is seen for what it is, it simply fades away.
     
    There is no need to place science on trial for conspiracy, though. Science is an activity like everything else. I quite like computer technology, motor cars and anaesthetic while my leg is being removed; it feels good. Science has removed many diseases that would have claimed lives years ago. We have running water and electric light. But comfort is not your comfort or my comfort; it is just comfort for no one. Wholeness seems to prefer comfort over discomfort, but creates both to form a contrast.
     
    We feel that everything that is happening is happening to a ‘me’. There is not just depression; there is my depression. There is not just money; there is my money, and so on. Trying to own something and make it ‘mine’ is a product of seeming individuality. It cannot be avoided. It is what happens along the way and causes joy and grief as a result. However, at some level there is a feeling of disquiet and loss. Worldly activities become a symptom of something else. Like Freud’s formulation of unconscious forces which shape observable behaviour without consent, this constant longing for something else is a longing to come home. It is not a negation of the world and a desire to reside in a cave on top of a mountain; it is the feeling of belonging we want. Wholeness wants to recognise itself in everything, not in quiet contemplation on a cushion somewhere. It wants to look at creation and see novelty without separation. It wants to see difference without isolation.
     
    The apparent creation of solid, separate objects will eventually turn out to be more than a person can bear, and so collapse is inevitable. It will be at ‘physical death’ like the little puddle, or when the puddle realises it is made out of water and cloud and rests in everything for eternity.
     
     

Abstraction and Concepts
     
    Do you remember your English lessons at school where you started to deconstruct language into verbs, adjectives and nouns, etc? Nouns, we were told, refer to things‌—‌objects. They form the subject of our sentences and tell us who did what to whom: ‘John threw the ball’ seems straightforward enough and we can, without much difficulty, identify the actor, the action and the receiver of the action.
     
    However, our sentences can also contain nouns that do not refer to anything we can touch, smell, taste, see or hear. I am thinking about abstract nouns. Justice, love, hope, fear and time can fit into this classification nicely. We can talk about these things over dinner and engage with them through the themes of our favourite novels, but we cannot taste them the same way we can our food or drink. Food and drink, we are told, are tangible‌—‌they have a reality to them; time and love do not‌—‌they are intangible. A nice, neat division it would seem: some things are concrete; some things are ideas. Ideas are not present in the same way a body or planet Earth seem to be.
     
    The reason I mention this is not to tell you something you already think you know; it is to challenge this division, this common sense notion that objects exist independently and ‘out there’ for all to see, but abstract ideas have to be brought to life through discussion and debate.
     
    Objects have no more reality to them than time, love and justice do: they are all abstractions‌—‌none are present. Let me try