Maybe efforts to pierce through the limitations of experience are futile. That is what I feel in the mornings after meditation, after half an hour, or forty minutes, spent battling with thoughts and distractions and trying simply to be aware. My mind is full of what I saw on TV the night before, of what I have been reading, of what is going on in the family, of wishful daydreams, of regrets and nostalgia. And it seems that this is all I am, ephemeral tosh, and that, perhaps, all my efforts – which seem so puny and ineffectual – are a waste of time.
It is all very well thinking about reality, about life/death, about the distinction between nihility and nothingness, but the reality of experience is nothing so grand. It is banal. How could it be otherwise? And so I am caught between the reality of everyday experience and memories of moments of transcendence when the fabric of the world became translucent.
Thinking further about two-dimensional beings – if the surface of their world was textured they could not know it. In passing over ridges and troughs they would not be aware of the changing spatial relationship of one part of their bodies to another, one part higher, another lower. A crack in the surface would be something analogous to a black hole in our cosmos – an event horizon beyond which two-dimensional reality could no longer exist as such. So too with us. In our dull and everyday ordinariness we search for glimpses of the transcendent, for the footprints of the ox.
Thinking too about Nishitani’s emphasis on the cold indifference of nature. Indifferent – yes, cold, I am not so sure. I feel neither cold nor indifferent towards nature. It is part of my being. I respond to it, resonate to its beauty. Is it the case that it is indifferent to me and cares not whether I live or die? This is an anthropomorphic way of putting things. Nature is neither different or indifferent. It is not personal and yet it is of me and I am of it. This was Richard Jefferies problem. In his intense experience of union with nature he desperately wanted it to be personal and was tortured by its seeming indifference. It is so difficult to see otherwise than from the perspective of self.