And so I have found myself slightly swimming about in strange waters. DC and I are in the process of moving house. It's been a bit of a rollercoaster but we're increasingly becoming excited by the proposal. What of course is so stressful about moving house is that it is not just a big financial step to sell and buy a house but that it is fundamentally moving home. And it is home which is questioned here. What do we want our new home to be, to be about? What is home in the deeper, spiritual sense. The second question informing the first. And so practical questions about physical location, build quality, and all related potential unknowns merge into the most important existential question of all. A question that this morning DC and I found ourselves sharing whilst getting ready for the day in the bathroom (such is the wonderful mix of the mundane and the profound that is our habit). It seems we had both been sitting with it - him in his traditional Indian singing practice earlier and me both on and off my cushion (ie in formal and everyday meditation). The conversation unfolded so as to posit an axis spanning the materialist view at one end and the mystical at the other and set parallel with an axis of there is no God at one end to we are all God / Source / Buddha at the another. The conversational path towards these axes traversing for DC the notion of an all powerful, all seeing and perhaps directing or intervening God in the western Christian sense as existing or not, whilst for me traversing the way in which our karma, our conditioning, reveals our Buddha nature, for we are conditioned beings. And so together we stood there and came to that place where the ever present but more often than not hiding in plain sight question came into focus- what is the relation between our everyday experience and the deepest reality? With life somewhat shutdown due to covid restrictions, social interactions curtailed and the world viewed through the window of video conferencing (MS Teams, Zoom and WhatsApp video calls) DC and I have been other than our constitutional walk around the local streets and for me very occasional site visits for work, largely holed up in our hutch together. And it has been a busy time not just due to the potential house move but also with work. (I am grateful for that and find I really enjoy my work and like my colleagues.) So, due to covid it has been for almost a year now a different sort of everyday to that which we are used. For some covid has meant a time for inward reflection and there has been time for that. However, as I've been still working I've not had the space to go on an inward journey in the way that can be renewing spiritually. And because I've not been able to properly meet up with the folk who in one way or another make up my sangha I've been feeling my way through all these recent months have been bringing up in a somewhat haphazard way I suppose. So this morning in the bathroom when DC asked me about karma I understood straight away that what we were both sitting with was something that might be put thus: is the unknowable ground of being to be seen in simple rational western philosophical terms, ie to acknowledge that there is no Archimedean point but to believe that that alone does not have any mystical significance, or in terms of the perennial philosophy, ie to make that acknowledgement leads naturally to believe in a greater significance. Or to put this more succinctly where are each of us sitting in our experience of emptiness. Those strange waters are a kind of testing of faith. A faith in nothing which somehow becomes everything. I walked from the bathroom to my study, to the book shelf, to look for something which might ground this (no doubt through the poetic) in to some... I went to The Gateless Gate book of koans and flicked through the introduction and contents pages. DC joined me as I read from Mumonkan, Memorial to the Throne:
Blue sky, broad daylight, and a peal of thunder,
The earth and creatures' eyes are opened;
All the universe is making profound bows,
Mount Sumeru dances to the ancient music.
I was just considering this, did it speak to me now, might it convey something to DC... when DC said yes! And we both at that time alighted on the thought that a work of art does this - it lets us see something deeper. I could feel our question encompassing the nature of a work of art; it is an illuminating consideration but I feared we might loose the purity of the original existential question in philosophical contemplation. My intuition was to stick with the felt sense of the unspoken question; the nature of the divine.
It's now evening and I've written this post in exploration of those waters- just what are they? What are those thoughts and emotions? What has come to me is captured by the title I've given this post and is I think perhaps summed up thus; it is our engagement with life as a dialogue internal and external, that is both mundane and profound, our own experience and yet not separate from anything or anyone, empty in the fullest way and in many ways immediate and yet unknown, that is our our home. Where is it and who is it that sits there? Do we not somehow know that we are so much more than we can see? I sense we do.
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