Human Under Construction: 2010-03

2010-03-29

2010-03-11

You make the grass green.

“As Ezra Pound writes in one of the latter cantos, ‘The water-bug’s mittens show on the bright rock below him.’ DUH! Interaction. You know how the water bug’s mittens on the bright rock, without the water bug, the rock, and the sun to cast a shadow, and of course you need a planet that will produce a water bug and a rock, and you need human eyes to see it all. That’s Tao-Duh, interacting processing. One of the introductory koans in Zen Buddhism is “Who is the great magician who makes the grass green?”

Who is the great magician who makes the grass green? Who creates every reality?

The word “yoga” means “union.” Yoga comes from the same root as the English yoke: two things hitched together. You need a human brain — dogs see grass differently — you need the human brain and the grass, hitched together to make the yoga which we call the greenness of the grass. Everybody thinks it’s very hard to be a mystic — you gotta go through a helluva lot of effort to realize your union with everything — but actually you’re experiencing your union with everything all of the time. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be experiencing anything. You make the grass green. You make your highs and you make your lows. But you don’t make it alone. You are making it out of your union with the universe. And so everything is a coincidence of contraries, a coincidence of you being there, and the universe being there. And everything is one at the same time, because there’s no green without the grass and there’s no green without you. So the greenness is a transaction that ties you and the grass together.

There’s an infinite expanse of signals flooding into our nervous systems and being processed by our higher neural centers in the brain. We’re all organizing and orchestrating according to our own particular life history, our genetic background, our early imprints, our conditioning, our learning, or any re-imprinting techniques we may have learned since then. So we’re all living in different worlds. It’s astonishing that we can communicate at all.

You are the co-creator of the sights you see, the sounds you hear, and your general impression of the universe. Our experiences are generated out of us. We’re not generating it out of nothing, but we are generating it. We are creating the reality tunnel we are experiencing moment to moment. So this total unity between you and the universe, whether you are aware of it or not, the universe you live in is your creation. You’re not doing it consciously.

When you have seen the one who makes the grass green, it’s like meeting your own father in a crowd — you’ll have no doubt whatsoever.”