Shadow Play
Shadow Play
Liminal Spaces: All I really need to know I learned in the unseen world
Ricky Gervais: Armageddon
I think we live too long. That’s why we have time to worry about all this. We’re not meant to live this long. As a species, we’re about 300,000 years old, as Homo sapiens. We’ve been around as hominids for a few million years, and of course, along with every other life-form that exists at the moment, we’ve been evolving for three and a half billion years. Everything that exists at the moment all came from the same little blob of organic matter three and a half billion years ago. That’s why it annoys me when people say, “Oh, yeah, humans, we’re the most evolved.” We’re not the most evolved. We’re no more evolved than the slug or the snail. People go, “Oh, come on, look at ’em.” Yeah, they got it right early doors. Nature keeps testing ’em. “Do you want eyes?” “No. Not really. No.”1
Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Wolves of Eternity
Colours were something I couldn’t grasp either, even when I’d had them explained to me. Because if colours didn’t exist in themselves, but were actually different wavelengths of light that the brain turned into colours, what was it we saw when we saw colours then? Colours were an illusion, they didn’t exist, and yet we saw them, so they did exist, not outside, in the world, but inside us.
But how did they get there?
Colours are all in the head, my teacher had told me when I’d asked about it. Colours are a product of our sensory system.
But where in the head?
‘Now you’re being belligerent, Syvert,’ he said. ‘Light entering through the pupil is detected by the retina and converted into electrical signals that are sent to the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. There are cells in the retina called cones and rods, which react differently to different wavelengths of light, and the electrical signals they send out determine whether we see colours or black and white. But we don’t actually see colour until those signals are processed in the visual cortex.’
‘But I see colour,’ I said. ‘Not signals.’
‘It all happens in the visual cortex,’ he said. ‘Now, no more questions about the eye. Everything’s perfectly well explained in your textbook.’
But it wasn’t.
The world was outside us, it was something we were in. But seeing it, it became a part of us. So wasn’t the world then inside us? If it was only on the outside and nothing of it got in, everything would just be dark. The same surely applied to hearing and smell and touch. Our senses took what was external and turned it into something internal. If the world couldn’t get inside us, it wouldn’t exist.
That would be like the way a stone existed in the world. Nothing in the world got in, the stone couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste or feel anything, so the world as far as it was concerned didn’t exist. A stone didn’t even know it existed itself. Was that what life was?
Was that what set it apart from what was not living? What was living was living because it internalised the world? And both the world and what was living were thereby felt to exist?
That had to be it.
But how did the visible world get inside us?
That was the bit about light entering through the pupils.
It was from there on it got hard to grasp.
The world came in as two narrow beams of light, and that light contained so much information that the brain could construct for us an identical image of the world on that basis alone.
Where was that image?
It seemed like it was outside us.
The river was down there, not inside me.
And then there was the fact that colours were something added on. Like some kind of emotion.
Was everything in the world colourless?
It had to be.
Could there be other things that were added on too? Things that didn’t exist, which we constructed and believed to exist?
Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: A Way of Being - The Unseen
The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.
The word spirituality may not speak to those who dwell chiefly in the intellect or those who equate the word with organized religion. If you prefer to think of spirituality as simply believing in connection, that’s fine. If you choose to think of it as believing in magic, that’s fine too. The things we believe carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.
No matter what tools you use to create, the true instrument is you. And through you, the universe that surrounds us all comes into focus.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown - S12 E3: Indonesia
Woman: Okay, so when the universe was created—the universe is like an egg that broke. From the shell is this fellow here; he's called Togog. From the yellow, the yolk, [is] the teacher, Batara Guru. And the white of the egg is Semar. Semar is to accompany the good. So [Togog] is to accompany the bad, the demon. [Semar] is to accompany the good.
Man: So the philosophy is, without this [Togog], there is no this [Semar]. Without this [Semar], there is no this [Togog].
Woman: There is no right without wrong. There is no dark without light, but each interconnects. That is the main philosophy. The existence comes from the same egg.
Kadek Adidharma (Narration): For a thousand years, the wayang, or shadow play, has been entertainment for both mortals and the gods. In the shadow world, everything has its opposites. At work within every man are forces both divine and animalistic. The philosophy of the shadow play is to strive for balance. You cannot kill the dominant animal urges within. You must harness them, yet not be controlled by them.
Man: From the very beginning of the universe, it's dark. Darkness. The universe can see lighting by knowledge, by science. But, unfortunately, science makes the shadows. It is the paradox. Without light, you can't see anything. By lighting—lighting meaning knowledge, science, consciousness—you can see everything. But everything makes shadows.
Adidharma (Narration): Watch the shadows, not the puppets. The right in constant struggle with the left. Forces of light and darkness in an endless fight for supremacy. Neither prevailing. What is good? What is evil? Who is the hero? Who is the villain? What is up or down, black or white? What is right or wrong? In shadow play, no such final conclusion exists.
Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols - Approaching the Unconsciousness
It is this state of affairs that explains the peculiar feeling of helplessness of so many people in Western societies. They have begun to realize that the difficulties confronting us are moral problems, and that the attempts to answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear arms or by economic “competition” is achieving little, for it cuts both ways. Many of us now understand that moral and mental means would be more efficient, since they could provide us with psychic immunity against the ever-increasing infection.
But all such attempts have proved singularly ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they (i.e., our opponents) who are wrong. It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation. As matters now stand, we lay ourselves open to every infection, because we are really doing practically the same thing as they. Only we have the additional disadvantage that we neither see nor want to understand what we ourselves are doing, under the cover of good manners.
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown - S12 E3: Indonesia
Anthony Bourdain: You first arrived in Indonesia in '65, right?
Lawrence Blair: That's right. But it was pretty hairy then.
Bourdain: Given that you arrived at absolutely the worst possible time, what was it about the place that compelled you to come back?
Blair: Unexplored regions, tropical animals, ancient civilizations, long memory amongst the people, mysticism—everything a schoolboy would obviously love.
Bourdain: Your training—correct me if I'm wrong—psycho-anthropology?
Blair: Yes.
Bourdain: Now, are there through-lines? Is there any connectivity between belief systems?
Blair: They're different, but they're all united by a common theme—that they believe in the reality of the invisible world. They believe it's stronger than what we think is the reality—what we can touch and measure and weigh. They would all share the belief that this is illusion, that this is only the surface of another, greater reality beneath it. In that, they're fairly constant.
Adyashanti: The Awakened Life - Attending to Freedom
We are taught to think that anything you can't see, anything you can’t touch, anything you can't grab hold of, is not really real. [...] If you can't see it, taste it, touch it, grasp it, look at it, measure it, then it's not really real, then it sort of belongs to some weird, strange spiritual thing that you can't quite pin down. But our lives take place within that which you can't touch or grasp or see with your eyes. Your life is constantly being molded by things you can't see and touch and grasp.
You can't see and touch and grasp love, compassion. [...] You can see the results of it. But you can't see the thing itself. What does love look like? You can see the result of love, but you can't see love itself. What's the color of compassion? How heavy is it? You can't find compassion, but there it is: compassion.
For the negative things as well. Depression. Where is depression? You can see the results of it, but where is it?
Envy. You experience envy or jealousy, but where is it? It's not something you can grasp. You can't weigh it. You can't put it under a microscope. But nonetheless, there it is.
Joy.
Happiness.
So, a lot of the things that are actually essential to one's human experience, are actually things you can't grasp and weigh and measure. And yet they're as real as the ground that you walk on.
Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols - Approaching the Unconsciousness
It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.
Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.
Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spiritual leaders unfortunately were more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the mystery that symbols present. In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man’s strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be so afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man’s fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown - S12 E3: Indonesia
Bourdain: In the West, we tend to think of things in a binary way. There's good and evil, life, death. You've seen every variety of human behavior in this part of the world—always a notion of light and dark, good and evil ... just not absolute ones?
Blair: We call Bali "the island of the gods." That's a sort of slogan for the tourism industry, but it's equally an island of the demons. I've always found it useful, in anthropology, this concept of the left and right cranial hemispheres. The left is the thing that we are over-dominant in in the West; it handles the rational, practical, consecutive thought. Here, it's the opposite imbalance. It's the other way round. The right is the intuitive, holistic, access to everything we've ever been, access to our genetic memory.
Bourdain: So they know stuff we don't know?
Blair: They definitely know stuff we don't know.
Bourdain: Given all the time you've spent in Indonesia, do you experience life differently, or in any way similarly to the way people here look at it?
Blair: No, I don't think I do see it the way people here see it. I like to think that I can see what it is that they're seeing, as it were, but I've got a broader perspective because I'm a Westerner, and a foreigner in a strange land. I'll never be considered an Indonesian. But I'm enriched by being here, because there's a greater variety of human experience going on here.
Bourdain: Tell me about the funerals. Because we're attending one?
Blair: The Balinese funeral is a very sobering phenomenon, especially for us Westerners, who distance ourselves from death. They spend quite a long time doing these beautiful offerings—all of it to go up in flames. So it's ephemeral art. And the idea is that we, too, are ephemeral. And this is why it's quite an extraordinary thing, that you actually light the match that consumes your loved one. It's in your face that we are not our bodies. Because they really believe in an afterlife. They really believe that you will be coming back and you will be joining your ancestors in the meantime. They may be wrong, but it's wonderful to be able to believe that, and to derive all the warmth and strength and benefit of it. Is this all human poetry? Or is there something in it?
Adidharma: Wayang is not necessarily entertainment for the people. Most of the time, it's performed for the unseen. That's why it's a shadow play. It's also for the shadow world. The Balinese have a lot of magical thinking. Often, we believe that what happens in the real world is a consequence of what is happening in the shadow world. That's why there's so much offerings and appeasements. Every day, we make offerings: love notes, thank-you notes, left around to the spirits, saying, "Thank you for keeping everything in balance."
Adidharma: Today is the final rites of the human. Once the ashes are scattered to the sea, then begin the rites of the spirit.
Bourdain: So who will attend the funeral today?
Adidharma: The family, of course, but cremations in Bali are very much a communal affair, so the village runs it. It's not just the family.
Bourdain: People's attitudes towards the passing of a life, towards death, funerals, wakes—different here than in the West.
Adidharma: Very much so.
Bourdain: No weeping and rending of garments.
Adidharma: Oh, there is a lot of that.
Bourdain: There is?
Adidharma: It's at the bathing ceremony of the body, that is when the mournful event becomes a joyous occasion.
Bourdain: Right, but the funeral itself ...
Adidharma: It's a joyous occasion. Especially the cremation. It's a big send-off. It's a big party to send the spirit to the afterlife.
Bourdain: We are not talking about the end.
Adidharma: No. Life is cyclical. It's very much a circle.
Bourdain: So this is something to be happy about.
Adidharma: Yes, definitely.
Adidharma (Narration): The shadow play story of Bhima Swarga is often told as part of funerary rites for many reasons. Heaven and hell are allegories, not truths. Heaven and hell exist right here, on the mortal plane. No tears should be shed during the cremation ceremony. Tears only hold back the soul of the departed. At sundown, ashes will be released, returned to the purity of the sea. Time is circular, as is life. Death is but the beginning of another journey.
Adyashanti: The Awakened Life - Seeing Ego Clearly
Self isn't something or someone that grabs hold or pushes away. Self is grasping or pushing away. When there is no grasping and there is no pushing away, there is no longer the experience of self.
When [the self is] seen enough, it's like you just never bite the hook. Just because you've seen it enough. And what's shown that to you is, yes, probably some moments of great insight, but also just many, many hundreds of moments of seeing the way the "me" operates, the ego itself operates. And when you're way beyond judging it, and condemning it—because that does nothing but sustain it … When you're no longer trying to justify it, prove its rightness or goodness or anything else—or wrongness. … But when you see it in all off its various forms, or most of its various forms, that self, or that ego, becomes truly empty.
Which doesn't mean it's not there. Because we need an orienting principle. Ego is also an orienting principle. It's not just an image and an idea of yourself, and a self-reflective burden and all that kind of stuff. It also orients you in the world. It's that which can differentiate, and can have wise judgments instead of being judgmental, and can reflect in a good and positive way. There's many aspects to it that you don't just want to throw out the window, right? So it's not necessarily that we fall into some absolutely undifferentiated state of being. We need something to orient us in life. And that orienting principle can actually operate and be empty—I mean experientially empty—at the same time. Then you just have the functional aspect of the ego without the identity aspect. […] That's the trick, isn't it? It's how to have that functional principle—whether we call it self or ego, or whatever we call it—but without its core, without its identity, without its solidity. That it's literally a function. More like the clothes you wear. They're a function. So we can have self as a function without self as a reality.
When I give a talk like this, the inevitable question—and it's a reasonable question—is, Well, how does that occur? What can I do? Well, you catch yourself. That's what you do. You catch yourself. […] There's like a hook that's dangled inside of your mind. You can bite it, or not. At some point, you become a wise fish. You see the lure. […] And that's really the freedom that we have. That's the freedom that's not an acquisition. It’s not an attainment. But it's a freedom nonetheless.
I think the most painful part of it all is that egocentric perspective—which is a process; it's a perspective; it's not a thing—maybe one of the most challenging parts of it is that it creates a sense that you are this one entity in this immensity of life. Generally that's called separation. But what does separation really mean? It's something like: the feeling, the sense, that you are essentially “other” to everything in existence. That's what I call the presumption of relatedness […] The presumption is the presumption of separateness, of otherness. And I think that's what keeps a lot of the struggle going, is when you feel other. Because the world is not something that we are in. The world is something that we are. And I mean that experientially. You could experience it even if you didn't believe it. Of course, when you've experienced it, good luck at not believing it, but there is a difference. And that's probably the fundamental wound of self-consciousness: [the feeling that] I'm other. I'm other from you, you're other than me, I'm other than the world. And then I have this immensity of life that I'm trying to negotiate with. And that's the fundamental presumption. And in the end, it's nothing more than a persistent fiction. It's a process. It's self-reflective consciousness hijacked by self-image and self-idea.
And underneath that sense of wrongness that so many people have, our lack, our unworthiness—and obviously, there can be a hundred reasons of things that happened in your life that seem to reinforce that sense [...] but there's something essential that's even deeper than all the particulars of one's life. And that is: At the core of the ego structure—at the core of it, the inside of it—is nothing. And to me, that's meditation. Because all of this is happening every time you sit down and take a look. It's right there. It's not hidden. You don't have to search in the minutiae of unbelievably subtle experience to find the right thing, the sort of spiritual needle in the haystack that's going to bring you liberation. No, you just need to open your eyes to what's right there, right on the surface, all the time. Because nothing that I've said is particularly complicated. It's not even particularly profound, actually. Right? I mean, it's just right there, all the time, operating in plain sight, which is exactly where you want to put something in order for nobody to find it. Hide it in plain sight, man! They'll never see it!
Because, boy, we really do need this connectedness. It's the most intimate experience of being, the most heartful experience of being, that one could possibly have. The most meaningful experience of being. And all you have to do is see it.
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Technically, slugs and snails both have visual systems. But I think the joke still works, and the point still holds.