Aloneness

I believe Thich Nhat Hanh said that a westerner practicing Buddhism as it is practiced in the East will always feel like oil in water. By this I understand that we must express practice through our lives in a way which is relevant to our lives; the forms must be towards the Way not just idolatry.

But it is not just in the practice of a religion that the question of feeling like oil in water arises. How many of us feel at home in all the aspects of our lives. Fish as they say don't see the water. When we fit, when we feel at home we often times don't notice. Sometimes we need to be a bit amphibious; then we see the fish and the water. The trouble is that the fish just see the fishy part of the amphibian and also some weired stuff; they don't get the land bit. Sometimes the amphibian bit feels like the land bit isn't shared with anyone else, that's aloneness. And we're all like this in different respects I think.

We tend to think of our physical body as having a definite boundary to it; the surface of the skin. But of course it's a lot more permeable than this; we take in and pass out; air, water, food, information and all sorts of things. Except they are not things either, they too are much more permeable. Things might be seen as bounded by interconnected semipermeable membranes. I like the idea of frames which are convenient ways of bits of totality making sense of its self. I've used the word this way before. So I think of the universe looking back on bits of its self. It's the restricted area of view that gives the separation. And the separation is the reality of a life as well as the connectivity.

I think different people spend different amounts of life moving between the water and the land and different amounts of life feeling like oil in water.

A non-Buddhist view might see the interconnectedness but still consider a human life to be one life with a start, a duration and an end; separate and together but with an ego that needs to get out of life what it can because this is it. That view may still end up with a value system driving a life much like that of someone with a Buddhist view. Of course the Buddhist view is that all views are just 'fingers pointing at the moon' and not the moon. I like the expression 'the Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao'.

Is it the oil drop of ego passing through the water of samsara or is it something or no-thing else. I think there can be no answer, the answer is there is no answer. We might want to see it all as 'fingers pointing at the moon' but we are still left with the reality of our life; we still need to be form interacting with form. And at times we will feel square pegs in round holes.

To make it all the more complex we reinvent our past too. So we keep making our peggyness and trying to work out the shape of the hole and the peg. But that's for an other post, or perhaps not.