RIDDLE PRIME: Across Space and Time

The stars reflected in the sea

Are just as beautiful

As if reality.

Though they lie below,

And not above,

Still they fill our hearts with love.

 

SENSE OF SELF: AN ACQUIRED HABIT?

Self-awareness is weird, isn’t it?

Ask any plant or animal.  They won’t even know what you’re talking about!

When do we learn, “I’m me — I’m here”?  At a very young age, no doubt.  Because once we learn it, we’re it.  This feeling is my feeling.  This thinking is my thinking.  This body is my body.

That’s fine.  Who wants to not be human?  Consider the alternatives!  So we walk around with a pretty reliable, but largely unexamined, sense of “I’m me — I’m here“.

O.K., I’m I.  But really, where is “here”?

Eating leftover lasagne and jasmine rice tonight, and pausing to consider motionless emptiness, it hit me that true skill in taiji is when you can think, “I’m not here… I’m here!”   And mean it.

“You” are a piece on a chessboard.  There is only one piece.  There is only one board.  There is only one player.  Or, there is no player.  There is no player until you learn to play, learn to see the board, learn to move the piece.  Then you’re on your way to becoming chessmaster, not pawn.

That’s the masterly way to change empty for full, and vice versa.  Still just words!  But it does make a big difference if a chesspiece occupies this square, or that one.  How can it not?  Who will move me?  If I don’t choose to be here or there, I will still end up somewhere.  Taiji quan speaks always of following.  Following something, fill in the blanks.  And arriving.

If there is fullness, how do you empty it?  By relocation.  To an empty place.  Your move doesn’t reach my chessboard, which you can’t see.