Heroes Not Zombies

I came across this old stone bowl in the middle of a forest over ten years ago. The bowl was full to the brim with water. I don’t know what the bowl was doing there. I don’t know if someone threw it away, or placed it carefully here. I don’t know if they filled it with water, or if the rain fell day after day, between, and onto, the leaves of the trees which surround it. I don’t know its history.

But it stopped me in my tracks because of its beauty. Beauty can do that. It can be what we call “arresting beauty” because it captures us, catches our attention, slows right down and pulls us in.

I crouched down and took this photo. This is one of my photos which I return to again and again. Yes, partly because it gives me pleasure just to gaze at it. Within seconds I’m transported back into the depths of the forest. I can smell the damp bark of the trees, see the rich diversity of greens in the ferns, the bushes, the mosses and the trees. I can hear the birds singing.

But also because this is one of those images for me which works as a powerful metaphor of the mind.

When I look inside the bowl, the first thing I notice is the surrounding forest reflected on the still surface of the water. Isn’t that interesting? The first thing I notice is the world represented in the bowl. The first thing I notice is not the water itself. In fact, it’s quite hard to really see the water. When I look more closely I see ferns and I see tall trees and I see patches of blue sky above the roof of the forest.

Isn’t this a bit like how we perceive the world? Don’t we allow all the stimuli from the environment to set off cascades of chemicals and electricity inside our bodies and send them up towards the right cerebral hemisphere where we explore them, appreciate them, connect to them, and hand off some of that activity to the left cerebral hemisphere where we re-present it all to ourselves, match it against memories and knowledge, re-cognise it, analyse it, name and categorise it? Then send out the ripples and waves of that mental activity back towards the right hemisphere to be re-integrated into the whole, to offer it back to ourselves to give us the opportunity to make sense of it all, to seek meaning in it and weave the threads into our unique, personal stories.

I look more closely into the bowl to try to see the water itself, but it’s still not so easy. After all, how do we manage to see our own minds? How do we manage to see the processes which are going on which allow us to have this experience?

What do I see next? The hint of something below the surface. Are those brown leaves lying there? What else lies in the depths of the bowl? That gets me wondering again about the unconscious – all that activity which goes on just beyond our ability to be aware of it – all the processes of the mind and body which keep us alive, which nourish us, which defend us, which promote our growth. Now and again we catch some glimpse of what might being going on below the surface of awareness, of consciousness. We might glimpse it in our dreams. We might glimpse it in coincidences, synchronicities, in our imagination. We might glimpse it in meditation.

And what if the water in this bowl represents the self, the ego, the “I” who perceives and experiences? The water, the consciousness, which is filled with the reflections of the world in which we live our embedded, embodied lives?

The water, the deep subconscious below, and the bright reflective, surface above?

And after all this wondering, and mind wandering, I return to the sheer beauty, the magic, of this simple, old bowl of water lying in the depths of the forest, waiting for the opportunity to make my day special.