Discerning Yasha

I Deininger Moment

Viewed close in, sculptor Thomas Deininger’s assemblages of found objects look arbitrary and mismatched; severed doll parts appear to be randomly jumbled alongside bits of bicycle chain and broken shards of mirror. But from just the right vantage point, the flotsam coalesces into a finely detailed rendering of a recognizable object—a fish, Monet’s water lilies, or a portrait of Marilyn Monroe.i Patterns and over-arching wholisms come into focus when the viewer backs up to the right focal distance. There, the artist’s vision awaits us, and we can experience his genius as the intended design emerges.ii From the subtext of Deininger’s art we learn this: coherence can be entirely a matter of perspective.

As if we were wading amidst the broken shards of Deininger’s found objects, we live with our faces pressed up against the newsreel garbage. Never before in the history of humankind have we been asked to absorb such a profusion of reported inhumanities as daily floods our minds.iii Once we were sheltered by distance from hearing the world’s gruesome news; but now, because of the Internet, even school children are continually barraged by unspeakable cruelties. We focus our gaze on sociopaths, serial rapists and terrorists as if horror will help us along a path to greater peace.

Down through the ages, such Deininger-like moments have come to poets and philosophers, wise thinkers and shamans. Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota shaman, received such a clarifying vision. He recounts:

I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.iv

Black Elk was shown a moment of Deininger coalescence, that we are all part of a dynamic work of art: the seemingly arbitrary mismatch of discarded rubbish and individuality we live in came suddenly into focus for him and revealed a complexity of many hoops encircling a holy shelter for unity.

Traumatic illness also can bring similar glimmers of enlightenment.v Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuro-anatomist, who suffered a severe brain hemorrhage and describes the after-effects of her stroke:

Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated….I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there…. I [was] now at one with the Universe.vi

By escaping her usually analytical left brain, Taylor encountered a completely different actuality; she describes experiencing well-being, peace and “unity among all living entities.”vii Similarly, near-deathers who have left the discrete confines of the body often find a spiritual sense of onenessviii or as one Atlantic article describes it, “a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love.”ix Though some argue these experiences are merely the fabrication of pre-wiring in our brains, fascination resides in the uniformity of the near-death experience.x Perhaps we are all pre-wired such that, in certain situations, we can apprehend a unity that supersedes our earthly experience of division.

Can we learn how to access these glimpses of unity through simple and practical changes of perspective such as the one that came to His Holiness the Dalai Lama? He describes:

One of the most powerful visions I have experienced was the first photograph of the earth from outer space. The image of a blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little house. I was flooded with the feeling of how ridiculous are the various disagreements and squabbles within the human family. I saw how futile it is to cling so tenaciously to the differences that divide us.xi

This vision was prompted from a mere photograph. Looking at this image, our individual ambitions, scurry, worry, effort and wrangling went quiet in his mind, and the supremacy of the bond we share emerged. For us to be able to pursue unity, perhaps we too need simply to view ourselves in a larger context— the individual longings of each human not obliterated, still of import, but caught in massed and undulating movements, like krill in sea water or murmuration of starlings.

I also recently experienced a Deininger-like moment looking down on the earth from afar. En-route to the UK, my flight tracked the edge of night so that the sun seemed to rise and set for hours. As I stared at the cloudbank’s transitioning hues, my forehead pressed against the tiny plane window, my thoughts began to turn toward the movement and pulse of the beings on earth far beneath me. I became aware of the entire history of our corporate humanity coming into focus as one timeless being.xii Usually, I think of humans as fleeting and evanescent, flourishing for only a moment and then gone. But, from my faraway vantage point, I sensed our mysterious, coalesced wholism, a seamless and complete object knit of a fabric that transcends our individuality as well as space and time.

What if we begin to grow a collective awareness of our surrounding story, glimpsed at in the wisdom literature and echoed in warp and weft of the philosophical and spiritual thought life down through the ages? Perhaps if we turn a listening ear, we will begin to hear the tale of our communal selfhood told, a paradigm rich with inherent possibilities.

From a seer of the first century comes another revelation in which individual lives and collective embodiment meld. Similar to Black Elk’s vision, Saint John is taken to a high mountain and given a vision of a city teeming with people living in harmony, free from shame and deceit:

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband….One of the seven angels…said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal….The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone… The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. —excerpt from Revelations 21 NIV

The city St. John sees is perfect in beauty, a functional wonder of individualistic churn and hum. At the same time, this city has the alternate identity of a bride readied for her wedding, at once an embodied wholism and a collection of people-cells who form her while fulfilling their differentiated tasks.

In both these examples we see the quantum simultaneous existence of the particle and the wave. We are both individuals with differentiated tasks (particles) and one embodied structure (wave). This dual nature makes evident our need to observe both aspects of our being. In recent history we have overfocused on and exalted our individualism and now need to turn our attention and observership to our corporate being; doing so will help us touch down to our deep longing for the interwoven life of our wholism.

It was philosopher Martin Buber who defined this longing for us. He wrote, “The instinct for communion…is the longing for the world to become present to us as a person.”xvii In other words, what we are hungrily seeking is an encounter with Jung’s true rhizome life, but more than a root system. We are searching for this rhizome risen mandrake-like as an embodied form. Buber also noted that this form derives from our relationships.xviii He wrote:

The structures of the communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodied form from the saturation of this force by the spirit.xix

Our gathered relational force forms a substantial bulk, creates an intercellular matrix that binds us. The spirit saturates this connective tissue grown between us, igniting an embodied life.

i. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/09/sculptural-assemblages-by-thomasdeininger/?fbclid=IwAR2TS2nGAd_Pm3WAu6syh-SCgiMpPFtgVgnn5Y2kSVAdxa0z0w9aqhpZzMU accessed on 10.31.2018

ii. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell names this place axis mundi, “The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi…the central point, the pole star around which all revolves.” Campbell understood axis mundi as the place from which one could see a vision of the world in a sacred manner. See Joseph Campbell, interview with Bill Moyers, http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-thefirst-storytellers-audio/ accessed on 9.18.2019

iii. For further interesting arguments regarding news see http://www.dobelli.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/03/Avoid_News_Part1_TEXT.pdf

iv. John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, Bison Books, 2014 p. 26

v. “Near death experiences can happen under many circumstances but survivors often describe similar, mysterious sensations. Some people report floating above their bodies and viewing the world from high up. Others say they traveled through a dark tunnel to light. Some visit a heaven-like place and meet spirits or dead relatives. Many feel a sense of connectedness or a sudden understanding of the world.” from Inside a Dying Brain, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-deathexperiences/386231/

vi. Jill Bolte Taylor, TED talk

vii. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, Penguin Books Reprint edition (May 26, 2009) Reprint edition (May 26, 2009), p.141.

vii. Near death experiences can happen under many circumstances but survivors often describe similar, mysterious sensations. Some people report floating above their bodies and viewing the world from high up. Others say they traveled through a dark tunnel to light. Some visit a heaven-like place and meet spirits or dead relatives. Many feel a sense of connectedness or a sudden understanding of the world.” from Inside a Dying Brain, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-deathexperiences/386231/

ix. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-deathexperiences/386231/ accessed on March 25, 2019.

x. Near death experiences can happen under many circumstances but survivors often describe similar, mysterious sensations. Some people report floating above their bodies and viewing the world from high up. Others say they traveled through a dark tunnel to light. Some visit a heaven-like place and meet spirits or dead relatives. Many feel a sense of connectedness or a sudden understanding of the world.” from Inside a Dying Brain, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-deathexperiences/386231/

xi. The Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom, (Random House, 2005), p. 201.

xii. The Einstein’s colleague Hermann Minkowski spoke of this timeless quality, in which eras overlay and interweave within one space-time fabric. Minkowski writes: Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. See http://www.spacetimesociety.org/minkowski.html accessed 9.15.19.

Astronomer Dr. Sten Odenwald describes this fabric:

In 1906, soon after Albert Einstein announced his special theory of relativity, his former college teacher in mathematics, Hermann Minkowski, developed a new scheme for thinking about space and time that emphasized its geometric qualities. In his famous quotation delivered at a public lecture on relativity, he announced that,

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

This new reality was that space and time, as physical constructs, have to be combined into a new mathematical/physical entity called space-time, because the equations of relativity show that both the space and time coordinates of any event must get mixed together by the mathematics, in order to accurately describe what we see. Because space consists of 3 dimensions, and time is 1-dimensional, space-time must, therefore, be a 4-dimensional object. It is believed to be a continuum because so far as we know, there are no missing points in space or instants in time, and both can be subdivided without any apparent limit in size or duration. So, physicists now routinely consider our world to be embedded in this 4-dimensional Space- Time continuum, and all events, places, moments in history, actions and so on are described in terms of their location in Space-Time.

Space-time does not evolve, it simply exists. When we examine a particular object from the stand point of its space-time representation, every particle is located along its world-line. This is a spaghetti-like line that stretches from the past to the future showing the spatial location of the particle at every instant in time. This world-line exists as a complete object which may be sliced here and there so that you can see where the particle is located in space at a particular instant. Once you determine the complete world line of a particle from the forces acting upon it, you have solved for its complete history. This world-line does not change with time, but simply exists as a timeless object. Similarly, in general relativity, when you solve equations for the shape of space-time, this shape does not change in time, but exists as a complete timeless object. You can slice it here and there to examine what the geometry of space looks like at a particular instant. Examining consecutive slices in time will let you see whether, for example, the universe is expanding or not.

Astronomist Dr. Sten Odenwald(RaytheonSTX) from https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q411.html

xiii. The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi, do you know, the central point, the pole star around which all revolves.

xiv. Ibid

xv. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/does-the-universe-exist-if-werenot-looking

xvi. C.G. Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1989 Random House ed. P.4.

xvii. Buber, I and Thou, Roland Gregor Smith, p. 49

xviii. Martin Buber, I and Thou, (need info here) p. 99

xix. Buber, I and Thou, Roland Gregor Smith, p.. 49

xx. Credit Shawn Wong for this idea, “in holistic health my understanding is that individual cells are influenced by factors such as stress, food, physical activity and environmental factors, like cleaning chemicals. From a holistic perspective, health problems develop when there is an imbalance in the body from these factors. Typically not one thing caused the expressed symptom and everyone’s tipping point or what pulls the trigger to a particular health problem is different. Factors above influence a persons toxic load and in turn influence their micro biome, health of cells, immune system, etc. So in the holistic paradigm sickness is a sign that something is out of balance and a patient works with a practitioner to look at all possible factors that might be contributing to that imbalance. In the example of ibuprofen, taking it would mask the symptom not address the imbalance and so in the long run things may get worse because the imbalance has not been addressed, and you have added another toxin to the system. Something like cancer, for example, not cleaning your body out but a sign of an balance where cells not regulating themselves properly. Instead their growth runs amok. So, again, a holistic practitioner would work with the patient to correct the imbalance and allow for the body to heal or in case of cancer, work towards stopping cancer cells from multiplying.”