The Invisible (Wo)Man

May 24, 2020 General Insights No Comments

What is invisible is invisible. Therefore, it’s invisible.

Let me start with a hallucination

Or whatever you want to call it.

I like ‘vision’ more. Years ago, I was at a meditation retreat for several days. At the end of the third day – always a more decisive one – I kept sitting a while on my own in the zendo where some 20 others and I had spent the day on our cushions.

Yes, I can exaggerate a bit, sometimes.

Then it happened that the others were gone and still there. Vague. Extremely friendly. A bit scary. Beautiful. Present.

In Zen-talk: Buddha-nature.

In AURELIS-talk: deeper self.

You may still call it a hallucination. The point doesn’t lie in the seeing, but the meaningfulness.

The meaning of the invisible

In everyday life, we tend not to see Buddha-nature. However, my hallucination taught me that it’s always there, in everyone, everywhere. In people. In animals. It’s gradual.

This Buddha-nature (or deeper self) = meaning. Whenever you encounter meaning, it’s this. An object may ‘carry meaning,’ but it is not meaning. Meaning is invisible. The meaning-man is an invisible man. You take this out of a human being and you may not see a difference. Yet meaning has gone. I think this is happening more and more over the years.

But that can change.

Did you ever see meaning?

No.

It is invisible because it is invisible, therefore it is invisible. Of course, this way, it will never be visible unless people learn to see. In Buddhism, this is called ‘awakening.’ We can call it a diminishment of dissociation.

This is absolutely needed in all domains of life. Dissociation, the absence of deeper meaningfulness, is the reverse of Compassion. Unfortunately, the invisibleness doesn’t diminish its negative influence, which is also the reverse of Compassion. In short, it hinders human growth. It heightens human suffering.

Peek-a-boo

As long as it cannot be openly seen, it shows itself in weird ways. Conceptualized religion is one of these ways. That is: the most improbably weird stuff can become a ‘carrier of meaning’ because in it, at least, something is visible. It may be completely impossible, defying sanity, with different religions entirely contradicting one another. But as long as it puts something visible on the altar, it will prevail against the invisible. And yet, it is itself a search for meaning. In that sense, religions have helped humanity over the centuries in not altogether losing the invisible.

Fortunately, in a few years time, the invisible will become visible due to advances in technology. This is like a telescope towards inside. As with telescopes towards outside, what we don’t see with bare eyes becomes visible nevertheless, then to become common knowledge. It happened with galaxies and pulsars and black holes; it will happen with ourselves.

Peek-a-boo, here are you!

Meanwhile: disaster

Even in extreme circumstances as we are living now – corona times – invisible man remains invisible. This way, there is a lot of unnecessary suffering and death. Statistics are meaningless without the meaningfulness of the individual person. Otherwise said: there is prose in living. There is poetry in Living. I ask myself: what is living without Living? Is there any sense?

What is man without invisible man? What is woman without invisible woman?

And vice versa?

We are an impossible dream.