There was a time when I could share stories with my grandchildren about wonderful mysterious animals. There was the Garufula, a four-legged bear-like animal that had various configurations depending on the telling. Sometimes it was yellow, sometimes red, but always with vivid polka dots and a colorful tale. There were many adventures to speak of.
Then there was the pink Giraffe with blue dots, a green tale and bright yellow eyes. His/her head would often appear at night in my grandkids second floor window. He could also serve as an easy slide down a big tree in the back yard or a ladder to climb heights. It was lots of fun.
As it does, there came a time when the young ones were proud to announce that there are no Garfulas or pink Giraffes. From where I do not know, but in response, Zoe, my oldest granddaughter, blurted out – “There are some things you can see but are not real and there are some things that are real that you cannot see.” Amazed, I thought I had found my next teacher. Unknown to herself, Zoe was speaking that enduring accessibility to a natural wisdom, present but obscured in most of us, that revealed itself in those simple words.
I reflected in her words. A desert mirage, an echo, train tracks appearing to meet in the distance, and magic tricks are among those experiences that we can see or hear, but they are not actually real. These are sensory-based illusions that we initially think are real, but later learn that they are not real.
Love, kindness, patience, and spirit cannot be directly seen. They have no form, shape, texture, color, weight, or location. We cannot touch, feel, see or smell them. However, we would all agree that they are real.
If we doubt their reality our lives would be quite bleak.
I think I have touched on this enough to honor Zoe’s revelation that there are things seen that are not real and things that cannot be seen that are real. I would like to take this to a bit more subtle level by extending her words. I would like to suggest that from an ultimate perspective all experiences are unreal – sensory based or mind based.
What do I mean by this? Here I must add another statement: all experiences are transient expressions of our foundational consciousness/awareness. My visual sensory apparatus experiences light waves reflecting on an outer object. These form an imprint on my retina which is converted to electrical activity that travels to my visual brain cortex where it is converted into chemical reactions. By some unknow mystery this appears in consciousness as a mental image that I label, as learned from culture, a tree.
But, this is not the object outside. That I can never truly know. It is a mental representation that is labeled and projected outward, magically appearing in front of me. The experience I have of the tree is not the real object outside. It is a transient expression of consciousness. Although we can conventionally consider it to be the tree in front of us it really isn’t. Like all other experience, including our personal self, it seems real to conventional experience but in reality it is unreal. Experiences do not exist in the manner in which they appear to exist. That is the most subtle understanding of reality.
Yet it all works and functions as we understand that underlying ordinary life is the true essence of reality, an all-manifesting consciousness. If we forget this, as we do, we get attached and desirous of that which is ultimately transient and unreal. The result is confusion about how self and life really exist and invariable loss, distress, and suffering.
So ultimately, Garufulas, polka dot Giraffes and all other experiences have an equal nature. They are all simple manifestations of consciousness, neither real nor unreal. They just arise and dissolve on their own. Some are catalyzed by our senses, some by memory, and some by imagination. As we dive deeper into our understanding of how things really are, we can play in our ordinary world of experiences, all of them, without holding on. And that is joy and bliss.
That brings me back to my grandchildren. Pela, my second grandchild, was the most insistent several years ago that in the “real” world these wonderful animals don’t exist. A wonderful artist, she surprised me for my birthday with a painting of our beloved Giraffe. Like everything else it was both real and unreal. Its true home was in consciousness along with love and kindness. Actually, it was love and kindness.