Making connections

IMAGINE the emotions that seized human consciousness as its first possessors began to realise the enormity of the mystery that they’d been thrust into. They had the same minds and intellectual powers as we do but none of our media-mongered notions, formal learning or complicated ideas.

Which, of course, is the way that each of us is born today: as “primitives”, vulnerable to particular, personal and possibly unusual experiences. As we grow up, we learn to put a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’: we become “sophisticated” while our ancient ancestors remain, to us, “primitive”. Our origins are something we like to think we’ve moved beyond, and elevated ourselves above. We tend to think vertically about such things, forgetting that it’s still earth that lies beneath our feet.

Our earliest ancestors were impressive by many of the standards we cherish today. They were tough, courageous, innovative, curious and insightful. We may not know much about the details of their lives or thoughts, but we can learn from them none the less. They were faced, as we come to be faced, with the knowledge that we have been created by forces we can neither explain nor control, and that at every breathing moment we are still nakedly vulnerable — so… what are we to do? Ultimately, the order we devise in our lives is illusory and we are each of us inescapably alone. We experience nothing except by way our own, unique, personal consciousness. And each of us must face the infinite alone.

It was a powerful experience of that when I was about 18 that kicked in my awareness of a different “self”.

I’d been skin-diving alone and was coming out of the water onto the remote boulder beach of an isolated island… I still like times of solitude.

It was dusk, a storm was imminent and the light was getting low. There was a sudden crackle of lightning and a crash of thunder. Great heavy drops of rain began to pound down from a flashing ogre-sky heaped with red-tinged blackness and power. The drops of rain burst on the sea-swell, which seemed to breathe, every drawn-out rise and fall rolling rocks about so they chuckled and clinked. And I was standing naked in the rain on the rocks.

So enormous seemed the moment that time looped and coiled within it while the shore chuckled and pea-sized raindrops, bitterly cold, struck my flesh like bites from a whip. I was transfixed. My teeth chattered and the wind rose and the lightning snapped and harried the bulk of the clouds that rolled and tumbled about but never parted, although the sinking sun daubed fleeting blushes of orange and deep red here and there. I felt I could not move no matter how much I willed it. And, through the coldness, there began to break a feeling at first of something like panic, and then of transparency.

Everything dissolved into far bigger kind of everything, filled with every sound and every feeling — a magnificent immensity in which I seemed to be feeling all of my emotions and ideas simultaneously, and they were just a tiny part of what I was experiencing. They blew apart in the wind and I lost awareness of my body and my identity. I felt I needed to pull my being to a centre before I vanished, but the core I was clenching myself around was strange to me, something new: a perceiving but motionless place and, as I closed around it, the cold passed and then the sky darkened altogether. It became very still, but the stillness was mine.

I lit a fire and warmed up, the stars came out and I felt transformed. I had no words or imagination for what I’d experienced but slept that night in a pure kind of peace. Since then, I’ve been very aware of a vast, unknowable but immediately present reality to the universe, myself and other people that envelops the few dimensions that are open to our casual experience.

It’s as though what we inhabit in the “everyday” is the dusty surface of just one face of a multifaceted diamond: a flat surface we crawl around on as though that’s all there is. And we have to let go of that “everyday” to be startled into life by the inexplicable infinities that lie both “out there” and within. In that brilliance, we become transparent. When we cling to our little selves, the brilliance fades. It’s a reality that came to me as something wholly strange and that I’ve since needed to explore.

It’s a mystery within which there are no directions. It gave me a tear-loosening awareness of beauty and how precious it is to the core of our being, and how available it is: there is not, for example, one single colour or natural form that is of itself unbeautiful. And, since that evening, I have never had a nightmare, nor do remember feeling afraid. I still can recover that feeling at will, and I go there in solitary reflection. It changes me and challenges me.

I’m lifted whenever I re-kindle the embers of that experience. I’ve described it very poorly here but, for want of better words, and without knowing or believing or hypothesising what the word “god” might identify, It gave me a great calm of trust in the unknowable; in the mystery, in “god” if you like. Whatever it may be, some array of forces and energies brought us to this point and gives us everything we know or can possibly know… who are we to be picky? Besides, we’re in no position to change the actuality of existence… be it our own, or anything else’s.

The experience is one that’s potentially available to everyone — and I’m sure it’s one that many of my ancestors knew. The North American people called it, or something very like it, a “vision quest” and all boys — and, I understand, many women — traditionally sought it as a necessary gateway to adulthood.

I SHOULD add that the sea for me back then in my youth was more than a playground; it was a second home. I entered it with feelings of respect, but also of familiarity, and more happily than any safely sequestered schoolroom. I was born and grew up in New Zealand and a huge amount of my time was spent in, on, under or beside the Pacific Ocean or Tasman Sea. As kids, we played there year-round. It was where many of us adventured, learned and matured. Everything we needed was there: excitement, life, sun and wind and snack food (there were no snack bars: we simply feasted on raw shellfish). I learned to swim as a pre-schooler, began diving with a mask and snorkel when I was eight or nine, and sailing and surfing when I was around 12.

From fish, I learned something about risk and to know what a “food chain” is: fish live in a predator-prey world, a fundamental relationship that’s made endurable by satiation (getting full) and by circumstance. Prey fish and penguins have no fear of a shark that’s recently fed. A feasted shark becomes lethargic, easeful and relatively placid. A hunting shark gives out entirely different signals, and they are unmistakable. I learned young to have no great fear of sharks or orcas (killer whales); a friend and I swam with them readily: a shark under water is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful creatures alive. The level of popular fear in relation to sharks is inexplicable: a beachgoer’s chances of being attacked by a shark has been reckoned at fewer than one in 264 million. Bees, dogs and horses are much more deadly and, if you’re on the water, a boat is more likely to kill you than a shark. More people are killed by lightning than by sharks.

Sharks are graceful, agile and powerful creatures. We mostly played with harmless school sharks, but we saw hammerheads and a few mako underwater. Being near a mako shark like that is electrifying. There’s an assertion of significance that radiates from the streamlined muscularity, the grace, the languid power and sheer presence of a mako. It is there, and then in an instant vanishes. Each time I saw a mako, I wondered afterwards whether I might not have imagined its presence.

And to be peered at and appraised by the tranquil eye of an orca three feet away changed my sense of selfhood, compelled as I was by that stare to know that there was a consciousness in there, far more wisely attuned to the sea than I could ever be, and probably smarter. I also found I could get to know and be known by families of reef fish.

It’s occurred to me that maybe the level of generalised fearfulness in our society has something to do with our never satiating. We’ve found ways to make consumption endless, and not just through online shopping and 24/7 malls. On one hand, money lets us postpone consumption but to hoard the potential to consume; on the other, debt enables us to have now what we can’t pay for until later. And economists keep telling us that a lack of growth — stability — is failure. The treadmill has to keep accelerating, whereas the shark swims by.

ANOTHER environment that was always close at hand to me as a child was the beautiful New Zealand bush. Thanks to an interestingly enlightened biology teacher, I learned to listen from birds. A bird called the “tui”, like whales, has family-specific and region-specific calls. If you spend enough time in the bush, you begin to know what part of the country you are in from the tui calls. The whole fabric of bush life is somehow held together acoustically: by bird and insect calls.

I could lie in the bush and close my eyes and listen as the thick press of plants became transparent. I learned that I could experience and remember a place of things heard… as vivid and as interesting as the place of things seen. I preferred that to movies as a kid, partly because my friends and I rarely got to go to the local cinema anyway and, as my parents had no television, the conventions were alien to me… but also because they never got things “right”: I always wanted to understand my own experience in those days before entertainment mattered.

ALL of this, became, for me, “spirit-scape”. I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to define “spirit” or “soul” any further than I have, except to suggest that maybe it’s got hard to find because we want to see it as a “thing” or a substance, when it’s really an assortment of seemingly disparate experiences.

We’ve got so overly used to thinking in terms of “things” that I’m sure a caterpillar’s similarity to other caterpillars far clearer to us than its similarity to the chrysalis it becomes or the butterfly that emerges.

The essence of things is easily overlooked but, with no sense of it, we are poorly equipped to understand ourselves, let alone caterpillars. The caterpillar is the same living creature as the butterfly, and what I think of as “my spirit” is, in as essential a way, a constant experiential reality. It’s there… it just shape-shifts and looks different, depending on what’s going on.

Mutability, not invariability, is where the greater truth seems to lie… and for us, perhaps the necessary mutability is within, in consciousness.

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Also see: Looking for truth