The Dialogue

The Neophyte relates the story of a Dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe to a gathering of empty chairs that ghosts and spirits use without anyone knowing.  He has the free will to speak yet much difficulty expressing himself, for his soul is the one channeling the Dialogue. He gives his hands the freedom to write down the exchange, yet his written words hardly reveal his soul within. Should he burn them all only to keep the simplest expression?

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond

A frog jumped into water

A deep resonance.

There is something utterly poetic about verses stripped bare that cut through a profound idea, seemingly dropping an anchor in our minds. What is it about an ancient pool, a frog leaping, and a splash of water that awakens our souls? Here, certainly, another encounter of kindred spirits took place beyond time. Long after the Poet Bashō described his awakening, the Poet Tagore commented: “An ancient pool, dark, silent, … As soon as a frog leaps into it, sound is heard… The picture of this old pool must be sketched in the mind; consequently, only that much has been suggested by the poet; anything more would be unnecessary.” And so understood it the translator Nobuyuki Yuasa.

Tagore and Einstein once touched upon the role of chance. They debated the nature of reality. Could reality resonate with the soul as simply and clearly as an ancient pool, a frog leaping, and a splash of water? The simplicity of its basic foundation may look vague, for neither cycles nor causality prevent the elusiveness of reality. The Juggler, built of bubble-like concepts, carries the weight of its vague expression on its shoulders. 

By hinting at the shadowy knowledge of what is yet to be discovered, vagueness is subject to interpretation for words as much as concepts and the ‘beyond’ itself remain vague. Is reality a construct of the human mind or independent of it, something beyond human understanding, consequently without mathematical expressibility? Observers generally identify reality as conventionally agreed upon, reasonably accepted, and empirically accessible. 

The Universe, though, reveals itself in a precarious state.  At some point, we jump off the train of human existence while it is still going so that no one knows its destination. All along, our souls reach out to other souls — ephemeral beings who have long moved on peacefully — to hear their take on the laws of Nature. In spatiotemporal terms, what is reality? And what is the extent of its reach? Linked by a bond of spiritual unity, Einstein and Tagore disagreed, for they tackled the problem from two different angles. Einstein’s mission was to answer the question of what sort of a thing the Universe is in its ultimate and simplest nature, while Tagore addressed the question of how it feels like to be the Universe. Both perspectives mirror each other. 

Does our collective state of being imply the sameness of our experience? Our reality is filled with multiple layers that are deep and dynamic, like the movement of a wave. While observers above the surface calculate its "statistical order," beneath the surface, they estimate its probability. Not only does reality reveal itself in such a sectionalized way, its state of being is not numerically alone but a crowding of ghosts. Reality does not exist in isolation. It is 'haunted' by spatiotemporal points, parameters, seeds, and remnants.

Yet, in a most unlikely way, we experience it one world at a time. It is the unique character of the experience that refutes the possibility of different states of the same system or different states of the same observer. The clouds, Einstein argued, look like one from a distance. But if you look closer, they are “disorderly drops of water.” They, too, point to the coexistence of antecedents in multidimensionality. Could it be the perfect comprehension of the nature of reality? 

Legend has it that monks engaged in perpetual debates about the nature of reality found themselves entangled in discussions about a banner swaying in the wind. The first disciple asserted, "The banner is not sentient; it is the wind that propels it." The second countered, "Both the wind and the banner aren’t sentient; how then can they generate movement?" The third observed, "In harmonious alignment of conditions, the wind and the banner collaboratively bring forth motion." The fourth contended, "The banner is not waving; it is the wind circulating naturally."A fervent and endless debate ensued within the community. In hindsight, Tagore would have agreed with the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, who intervened at last by saying, "The banner, like everything else, is not waving. The perceived movement is a creation of the human mind itself.”

Does the mind comprehend our shared observed reality? Does the Universe, “whose experiences are through our experiences,” comprehend the mind? Or do they intertwine endlessly? Tagore believed that there is nothing outside of a conscious experience. What he called the infinite human personality is the individual merged in the infinity, the greatly elongated human form with its considerable extension in time that holds within strings of resonance. Einstein was convinced that “truth must be conceived as a truth that is valid independent of humanity,” Regardless of how deep we feel immersed into its infinity, reality involves on its outskirts a rhizomatic Nothingness and a historically recorded Universe whose web-like structure weaves spacetime points with lingering feelings. The randomness of every throw of dice dislocalizes the continuous rhizomatic domain of Nothingness.

On a foggy morning where ground, water, and sky blur together, the Neophyte, feeling the expanse of the Universe, answers its calling. He squints his eyes, hoping to cut through the blanket of fog to see the calligraphy of stars on the universal sheet that hangs beyond the light of day. In and out of the human gaze, he spots from afar starburst-driven galactic outflows and hears the fainting heart of neutron stars. At his feet, all the empty chairs float in the mist. Feeling out of place, he asks, “Do drops of water speak? Do they communicate when water boils, ocean waves rise and swell, snow crunches, ice cracks, and waterfalls plunge?”

Pouring rain dripping makes the wood expand and swell. The wooden floor becomes the surface of a pond under which lies the bottom of the sea. The Neophyte has shrunk into a tiny frog dreaming of being human at the edge of the Unseen, quenching his thirst at every fountain — even those entrenched in the divide. He breaks the silence of an ancient pond where wiser frogs once dwelled. He is a frog-poet who hopes to wade across the Ocean to faraway shores. Waves rock the Neophyte to sleep.

Eugene Ionesco, Les Chaises, Farce tragique

Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and other travel sketches translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa

Thomas Merton, Woods, shore, desert: a notebook, May 1968

Rabindranath Tagore, A Tagore reader

Kanako Nishi, "Burn" translated by Allison Markin Powell in Freeman's Power

Alix Paré & Valérie Sueur-Hermel, The Fantastic Gustave Doré