Prime Time - Jane Fonda [137]
To make it easier for us to grasp the concept, David Bohm used the image of a flowing stream: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”
Okay, so my “true nature” turns out to be a ripple in the cosmic flow. In my midlife this would have been a downright uncomfortable proposition to accept—Don’t tell me that my Workout and all those new muscles we’re creating are just energy waves, or that my Oscars are only abstractions! But now, why not? I’m in my seventies. The wind isn’t at my back anymore; it’s right in my face. Going with the flow is actually a rather comforting notion. The more I can wrap my “mind” around this cosmic view, the more comfortable I’ll be, when the “end” comes, stepping away from being an abstraction and becoming what I actually am—part of the cosmic energy flow. As Buddhists often say, “No thing–ness, or nothingness, is more real than thingness.”
Still, why does this laptop I’m writing on seem so solid and my dog lying against my thigh so warm?
Bohm suggests that we couldn’t get much accomplished in the practical reality of our day-to-day lives if we lived in the constant awareness of the multidimensional reality of ever-changing, interacting fields. So we’ve turned the illusion of a stable, fragmented, atom-based-building-block manifest world into the way things are, the ultimate truth. We’ve made the abstraction into our reality. And mirroring the old scientific view of that reality, a mechanistic culture of individualism, of us and them, of us versus nature, has come into being. What would happen if we were able to accept the manifest abstraction that we call reality as a practical way to get things done (do the laundry, board a plane, fall in love and have sex with a kindred abstraction) while simultaneously holding the awareness that on a deeper, indefinable level, we are all one—not just figuratively but literally?
Who knows if nuns and monks who spend their lives in prayer or yogis who spend theirs in meditation are intuitively tuned in to the cosmic reality. More and more of them are working with scientists to reveal the impact their mindfulness has on the “real” world.
We don’t all have to go to a sanctuary to spend eight days in silent meditation. But we can seek times of solitude as well as activities that allow us to go inward: yoga, tai chi, life review, gardening, walking in nature, painting, meditating, poetry, prayer. These and other contemplative activities let us become permeable to the wisdom we all possess, to the reality of interdependence instead of individualism, to the inevitability of our own death alongside the infinite flow of energy that is also us.
I want to close this chapter by quoting the final portion of “Monet Refuses the Operation,” by Lisel Mueller, the poem I cited in Chapter 1:
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it,
to paint the speed of light!
Our weighed shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
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