This following update turned into a combined short story slash observational essay. It’s worth the read if you have the time…

During conversations over the last few months, I have observed myself avoiding explicit statements of truth with a shocking indifference.

It sounds like I just made a spinning euphemism for lying – perhaps I have, as these avoidances vary in hue by only minor degrees from the blanket white. When confronted with that awkwardly infectious silence that anticipates rationale or direction in a conversation, negligible leaps of auxiliary content, judicial swerves in meaning and dazzling obfuscations of interpretation seem acceptable and even expected.

They all fit benignly into the social norm of a category of discussion that we call “small talk”…The definition of a gentleman as someone who ‘thinks one thing and says another’ runs lazily through the back of my mind with, I’m sure, the contrived hope of convincing you of my growing European refinement.

My reasons for lying (or rather ‘avoiding explicit statements of truth’) are explainable and I think understandable, if not justifiable. The specific observations to which I refer can be arbitrarily and whimsically categorized as either

Benevolent Arrogance

An estimation that my audience won’t understand me anyways. This is a form of simplification by no means as erudite as metaphor and intended to be sympathetic to someone with different values.

Efficient Laziness

An Unwillingness to either find or explain the full truth. This is equivalent to the fact that the full truth would have comparably less meaning or relevance anyways.

Hidden Prejudice

An assumption that my audience wants to hear a specific answer. Leading a horse that is not thirsty to a complete idea wastes a lot of energy.

Faithless Insufficiency

A suspicion that my audience won’t believe the truth. Thus, the truth feels somehow insufficient.

For example, a clear St. Patrick’s night found me taking the train back flat 12, Claredale House, a.k.a. home, at 11:30 pm. While descending the stairs to the train platform made orange by the flickering street lights, another soon-to-be passenger with a ridiculously silly giant green Guinness beer hat jovially asked if I was going into town to partake in the on-going festivities. Instead of voicing the negative response immediately reflected in my mind’s voice, I deflected the question with the inference, “It’s St. Patrick’s day, isn’t it?”…A combo of Benevolent Arrogance and Hidden Prejudice: The type of person who would wear such a hat probably wouldn’t understand why I wasn’t going into town and thus expected an affirmation of his own values.

For another example, to the blatantly manipulative statement “You just want to go home because you don’t like us.” levelled in good humour upon my proposed departure from flat 48 one night, I responded with the astute, “Now I’ll have to stay to prove you wrong.” Not satisfied with my current bullied position, I continued with the untruth, “Actually, the food you’re preparing is making me hungry – I should go and make my dinner.” I thought this was a clever and acceptable enough reason to warrant my departure but in the end was both untrue and not really so clever…Efficient Laziness and Faithless Insufficiency perhaps? I couldn’t be bothered to understand the real reason for my desired departure because I felt it was somehow insufficient.

The game, I know its one we all play it – especially in the air family of the work environment. We learn how to kick the football of call and response with the polite veneer of interest only half aware of the current action and even less aware of its subtle consequence. These are minor enough events to be brushed aside with such shocking indifference.

But when kindness becomes a form of manipulation, when its function is reduced to simply the fastest way to get things done, the social ritual truly loses its point and all-powerful Irony assumes the timeless content, priority and figurehead of each situation that once belonged to spirit. The cumulative consequence is a landfill of empty events that flood our lives, amounting to the Zeitgeist of cynical dissatisfaction.

It’s like filling a sieve with water.

The Sieve

Taken from Encounters In Yoga And Zen: Meetings Of Cloth And Stone.

A group of devotees invited a master of meditation to the house of one of them to give them instruction. He told them that they must strive to acquire freedom from strong reactions to the events of daily life, an attitude of habitual reverence, and the regular practice of a method of meditation which he explained in detail. The object was to realize the one divine life pervading all things.

“In the end you must come to this realisation not only in the meditation period, but in daily life. The whole process is like filling a sieve with water.”

He bowed and left.

The little group saw him off, and then one of them turned to the others, fuming. “That’s as good as telling us that we’ll never be able to do it. Filling a sieve with water, I ask you! That’s what happens now, isn’t it? At least, it does with me. I go to hear a sermon, or I pray, or I read one of the holly books, or I help the neighbours with their children and off the merit to God, or something like that, and I feel uplifted. My character does improve for a bit – I don’t get so impatient, and I don’t gossip so much. But it soon drops off, and I’m just like I was before. It is like water in a sieve, he’s right there. But now he’s telling us this is all we shall ever be able to do.”

They pondered on the image of the sieve without getting any solution which satisfied them all. Some thought he was telling them that people like themselves in the world could expect only temporary upliftment; some though he was just laughing at them. Some thought he was tilling them there was something fundamentally wrong with their ideas. Others thought he might be referring to something in the classics which he had expected them to know; they looked for references to a sieve, without success.

In the end the whole thing dropped away from all of them except one woman, who made up her mind to see the master.

He gave her a sieve and a cup, and they went to the nearby seashore, where they stood on a rock with the waves breaking round them.

“Show me how you fill the sieve with water.” he said.

She bent down, held the sieve in one hand and scooped the water into it with the cup. It barely appeared at the bottom of the sieve, and then was gone.

“It’s just like that with spiritual practice too,” he said, “while one stands on the rock of I-ness, and tries to ladle the divine realization into it. That’s not the way to fill the sieve with water, or the self with divine life.”

“How do you do it then?” she asked.

He took the sieve from her hand, and threw it far out into the sea, where it floated momentarily and then sank.

“Now it’s full of water,” he said, “and it will remain so. That’s the way to fill it with water, and it’s the way to do spiritual practice. It’s not ladling little cupfuls of divine life into the individuality, but throwing the individuality far out into the sea of divine life.”

One of the aspects of this parable that I like is that it tells us what to do and yet does not.

When confronted with the awkward silence that tends to infect all conversations like viruses, we quickly learn how to administer the drug of politics. We don the tuxedo and wave the invented baton as the orchestral conductor playing the symphony of relationships. On this dais, we can attempt to direct the flow of a conversation away from any problematic stagnation and at all costs avoid that awkward silence or that fearful negation that would remind us of our loneliness.

We learn how to dump cupfuls of irony into the sieve of that silence. We hope that it is enough and believe that it is all there is.

Our fear instigates all attempts to fill life with our trivial concerns, our over-programmed agendas and the mythical 160 days we spend on average watching TV commercials per year. We attempt to fill the infinitude of life with the infinitesimal finitude of ourselves using masks, shells, irony and lies – the tools of a real craftsman!

But isn’t it true that it is the reverse that is? Despite all attempts at control, it is life that fills us – not the other way around. Oh, to be like the true master who can without guile, without fear, and without doubt, throw himself into the metaphorical sea and let life fill him up!

Tags: London, spirit