ON ENCOUNTER IN PRACTICE.

2001-11-11

Professor John White



One night last year, spurred on by a great deal of excellent sake, there was a discussion in which I took part with several of the young priests of Shogyoji. As a result, when I asked them what I should talk about if I came to the temple again, they said it should be a follow-up on the everyday practicalities of encounter. They asked for it and here it is!

An electron, an atom, a virus; a molecule, an amoeba, or a nematode worm two millimetres long, or an insect are all of them almost certainly not conscious in the sense of being self-aware.
However amazing in the complexity of their structure or in the things that they do, they are therefore, for themselves, an indistinguishable part of the whole.

It is we, who are self-aware, and aware of all them as being not self, who make the distinctions, the separations.

Moreover, precisely because we have risen so high on the evolutionary ladder, and evolved self-consciousness, we have also come, in a new and conscious way, to stress how different, how superior, how separate we are from the whole of the rest of creation.

We, most of us, still like to believe that it is only we who can in any way think.

Despite sharing about ninety-seven per cent of our genes with a chimpanzee, and only a fraction less with a mouse, we exclude even the apes and the higher mammals from the sacred circle with which we like to surround ourselves.

Because, for thousands of years we have thought of ourselves as separate, we have largely lost the sense of the all-inclusive unity of the whole and the absence of all distinctions on which Sakyamuni Buddha is said, in the Vagrakkhedika or Diamond Cutter to have insisted.

You might perhaps think that all this has little to do with you and me and our everyday lives, but if you did, it seems to me that you would be wrong.

Our success, as mammals, and in certain ways the dominant biological species in the world, has given a new dimension to the sense that you are you and I am I.

And yet, however apparently great, the differences which separate each of you from each other, and all of you from me, are, at a fundamental level, minuscule.

It is this self-created gulf that we should seek to bridge, not merely in theoretical, philosophical ways, but at a prosaic, everyday level ---at the personal level of encounter.

Yet life, as I have said before, is a paradox at every turn, and in practice one of the most important ways in which we can break down the separations between us is by acute observation of, and interest in, each other as unique individuals.

Only then, with the growth of intuitive understanding, will there truly be an encounter, and out of acknowledged and cherished diversity the re-creation of unity.

Throughout the animal kingdom in its broadest sense, each species, and every individual within it, only sees what it needs to see for survival and for the continuation of that species.

If, when you are in a forest, instead of walking through it and seeing almost nothing of the animal life it contains because they have seen or heard you coming and fled, you stand against a tree or sit absolutely still, you will become, for most of them, completely invisible, and in twenty minutes or so they will come out and carry on with their lives as if you were not there.

I once wrote a long poem in French called, in translation, eThe Song of Eve on the Banks of the River Ainf about a grass-snake that, following its usual path in going about its daily, habitual business, crawled over my outstretched arms as I lay in the sun.

This is because many animals and most predators are only aware of, can only see movement; what is motionless is, to them entirely invisible.

Many years ago, my wife and I had Bedlington Terrier called Pooch, which would chase a moving, bright red ball with its eyes, but which, if the ball stopped when it was still about six or eight feet away, immediately also stopped, however fast it was running, and started to hunt for the now invisible ball with its nose.

If, when the grass was still covered with dew, you threw the ball swiftly into the bushes some forty feet away, it would see the ball leave your hand and disappear into the bushes, but then would immediately quarter the lawn with its nose, and you could watch it using its sense of smell to find each successive spot where the ball had bounced until finally, thoroughly pleased with itself, it retrieved the ball from the bushes.

Although we, as human beings, are not constrained by an instantaneous on-off switch, we too very largely see what we need to see or, because of our developed self-consciousness, what we want to see, what we look for and, by the same token, only hear what we want to hear.

We tend to think of ourselves as objective observers of an outside world and of our senses as passive receivers of incoming signals, whereas in fact we filter out all but the tiniest fraction of the billions and billions of billions of such inputs which bombard us on every day of our lives, and each of us is in fact thoroughly pro-active in creating around ourselves an individual version of reality which suits our own personal psychological makeup and history.

As a result, the only path to true encounter with another person is as far as possible to forget onefs self.

Most of us, when we enter into a discussion, are so concerned with what we ourselves are thinking and want to say next that we do not fully concentrate and, in a real sense, do not fully hear or listen to what is being said to us, and this is still more the case if the discussion turns into an argument.

Then, because of our self-absorption, if the person to whom we are talking holds firmly to an opinion which is contrary to our own, which we of course consider to be objectively, not just subjectively true and, so it seems, perversely refuses to see that we are right and they are wrong, we tend to get cross, or in any case think the whole thing is a waste of time.

It is only if we can see ourselves as the subjective entities that we are and, paradoxically, forget ourselves in the course of the argument and try, as far as we can, to enter into the other personfs mind and see why they are as they are and think as they think, that we subsequently see how seldom discussion is really wasted.

It is only if we are both self-aware and yet able to forget ourselves that we subsequently notice, weeks, months or even years later, that they are repeating as their own thoughts things that we may have said in opposition to them and how much we ourselves have changed in the opposite sense.

Indeed, particularly if we belong to a stratum of British or, for that matter, of Chinese or Japanese society which has been trained to be undemonstrative, not to betray its feelings or, unlike the French or Italians or Greeks, not to gesture and wave our hands continuously as we talk, we only speak, or are spoken to, by a fraction of the person before us.

We tend to forget that mind and body are one; that each of us is a whole, indivisible person, and how much our communication with each other lies not in what it is that we say, or even in our expressions as we speak,

For most of us, it is only if we consciously train ourselves in acute observation of each other in our encounters that we can, in the end, become without thinking or, if you like, intuitively aware of all, or at least a great part of what it actually is that is being communicated.

For years, when I was head of departments in universities, I used, whenever I saw or passed a student, to say gHi, how are things?h

It became, to some, a personal oddity, a peculiar routine habit or sort of joke, but whatever it was, it was certainly not the latter.

If I saw just the back of one of our students reading the departmental notice board and said to them gHow are thingsh and they replied gOh, everythingfs fine Professor Whiteh I would, on many occasions, sweep on by, but on others I felt that, in spite of their answer, something was not quite right and invited them straight to my office for a chat because, in the first place, I had sensed that they were not standing quite in their usual way and then, perhaps, when they spoke, that there seemed to be subtle differences in the timing or tone of what they had said.

Sometimes I was wrong sometimes it was nothing important but often, it would emerge quite soon, or perhaps only after twenty minutes or so, that something profoundly important was at stake beneath the superficial calm of their first response to my seemingly routine question.

But even then, precisely because we were each of us still enclosed in the inescapable subjectivity of the world with which each of us had surrounded ourselves, we were, despite our best efforts to respond to each other, still busily building up our own version, our personal image of who was in front of us, and still only scratching the surface of our encounter.

Even love, which can, at its most profound and far-reaching, come closest to the full realization of the meaning of encounter, can never break down the final barriers to its achievement, and when I was struggling to scrape from the bottom of an increasingly empty barrel something to say to you which was not wholly a repetition of what I had said before, or more than usually boring, I wrote, for no particular reason, while I was seated at a bar having dinner by myself, a poem which has, perhaps, some bearing on what I have now been trying to say, and which I will read to you.



In love,

in seeking to blend ourselves
with another self,

we truly
discover the depths
of our separation.

Yet love 
is the nearest 
we ever come 
to losing our self 
in the self 
beyond ourselves.

In the ultimate
human encounter,

in being ourselves
to the full,

yet seeking 
through love 
our freedom 
from self,

we come close 
to an understanding 
of what we are,

of what, 
in this, 
our one life, 
we can never be;

of how far we are 
from losing ourselves 
in the union 
of all that is.

–

Love
is the beginning,

the consummation
of wisdom,

the ultimate paradox.



Quite apart from being a way to struggle towards giving deeper meaning to our encounters, to strengthen the base of our understanding of each other until it becomes intuitive, the kind of acute observation of each other of which I have just been speaking can also be an immediate source of visual pleasure and excitement.

You will see all about you things you have probably never noticed before.

Those of you who have ever seen a Rembrandt portrait or even a reproduction of one, will have noticed the halo of light which often surrounds the image and probably saw it as being no more than a painterly device to separate it from the background, whereas, in fact it is also a heightened version of what, if we look, we can see every day all around us.

Whenever you see a form that is relatively dark against a light background there is a contrast effect at the junction between the two; the dark rim will seem to be darker still against an intensified rim of light on the other side of the border.

In your dark suits and dresses you carry your halos with you, and nobody seems to notice!

In a similar way the brilliant flesh colours of Rubensf s paintings are firmly based in the world that we see about us, and that is the secret of their power.

If you are woman and wear a red dress, your neck and your jaw-line will change their colour completely and blush with reflected red; a white blouse or collar will turn them white or a grey dress turn your natural colour to deathly grey.

Of those of you who wear make-up, I wonder how many think of such things when you put it on in the morning how many of us except painters and fashion and fabric designers are aware of the full extent to which putting one colour next to another inescapably changes them both.

The same thing occurs in encounters, whether of individuals or of groups, and the closer and deeper the encounter the greater the inescapable changes on both sides; so it is with your encounter with me and mine with you.

A moment ago I touched on one or two of the incidental, purely visual pleasures attendant on closely observing and trying to understand each other in all our endlessly changing aspects.

But however great the pleasures of every kind that we can come to enjoy in our extraordinary lives in this amazing world, we should never allow an attachment to them to take us over.

We should always remember that, in our humanity and our relationships with each other, to forget oneself, to become unaware of oneself in the way that children, in part, much more easily are, lies at the heart of all true encounter, and is, perhaps, the ultimate form of non-attachment, the very foundation of wisdom.

And so, if you ask me once more to the temple, and ask me to speak to you yet again, I will talk about non-attachment, although I am well aware how much more profoundly many of you understand it than I ever can or will.

In case I do actually give such a talk, I will end this particular one by quoting a poem to which Chimyo sama has drawn attention already here in the temple, and which is one way, perhaps, of approaching the subject of non-attachment.



The children
on the beach
have got it right.

They know 
each smallest, 
sea-smooth wavelet 
has a rasping tongue 
to take their castles down.

and laugh and squeal 
to see the turrets 
melt
and sink into the sand.

They only build 
between the tides, 
where nothing lasts, 
and now 
is now.

For them, 
without a thought, 
each castle is 
and then is not.

There are no tears;
there is no loss,

only another tower, 
and another 
and another,

to be built
and washed away.