Life comes to us as water falls on a landscape

There's a lot of beautiful writing, thoughts, and inspiration in Iain McGilchrist's scholarly yet engrossing book, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World."

(I've blogged about the book here, here, here, and here.)

I loved these passages. Deeply moving. If it resonates with you also, great. It sure did with me.

The feeling we have of experience happening -- that even if we stop doing something and just sit and stare, time is still passing, our bodies are changing, our senses are picking up sights and sounds, smells, and tactile sensations, and so on -- is an expression of the fact that life comes to us. 

Whatever it is out there that exists apart from us comes into contact with us as the water falls on a particular landscape. The water falls and the landscape resists. One can see a river as restlessly searching out its path across the landscape, but in fact no activity is taking place in the sense that there is no will involved.

One can see the landscape as blocking the path of the water so that it has to turn another way, but again the water just falls in the way that water has to, and the landscape resists its path, in the way it has to. The result of the amorphous water and the form of the landscape is a river.

The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has 'changed' and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say 'yes' to the river. It merely says 'no' to the water -- or does not say 'no' to the water, and, by its not saying 'no' to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being.

The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being in the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say 'no' or not say 'no.' 

Similarly there is 'whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves,' but 'whatever it is that exists' only comes to be as what it is as it finds out in the encounter with ourselves what it is, and we only find out and make ourselves what we are in our encounter with 'whatever it is that exists.' 

...In creation we are not actively putting together something we already know, but finding something which is coming into being through our knowing, at the same time that our knowing depends on it coming into being; as Pushkin says of Evgeny Onegin, in the middle of the work itself, that he did not know where it was going, it was an unfinished path, a journey, an exploration, of whatever it was that was coming into being between himself and the imaginative world.

That's life. An unfinished path, a journey, an exploration. Continually coming into being. We all are rivers formed by rain falling on a mysteriously unknown landscape. 

Comments

[Janya Barrish]

"We all are rivers formed by rain falling on a mysteriously unknown landscape."

I lucked out and found this book in my old box of books - its called the The Art of Glowing Health by Wen-Shan Huang; got some interesting physical exercises in it as well.

A tangible para from it:

"In ancient times the holy sages made the Book of Changes thus: Their purpose was to follow the order of their nature and of fate. Therefore, they determined the Tao of Heaven and called it the Yin and Yang. They determined the Tao of the earth and called it yielding and the firm. They determined the Tao of man and called it love and rectitude."