Road-runner… nose to nose with Wyle E. Coyote…
from the Warner Brothers film To Beep or not to Beep !
Sentences from James’ teachings have often – thankfully – ‘stopped me in my tracks’… and caused me to reflect…sometimes for a long time, acting like a koan…
‘Stopped me in my tracks’ is rather a telling phrase … it’s as if we have train-tracks underneath our feet… that we are unwittingly running on until we shift tracks, the tracks shifts… or something shifts us!
The audio-recording of the Introduction to Chapter 3 of the book, the Open Door of Emptiness is now published… and I was struck by this sentence referring to the construction of the different stories that we tell to different kinds of people: ‘The stories may seem quite true as we tell them, yet we can’t quite escape the knowledge that they are constructs, that in the telling of them we are creating the ground we are standing on.’
As I was unpacking that…as I see it … that the ‘ground’ we create in this way acts as a temporary platform, or jumping off point, for further expression and is, of course, not the self-existing ground… but more a moment by moment investment in selected aspects of the of the mind’s creativity … yet how in a confused way, as we busily link one thought-formation with another, we imbue the result… (which, if one were to give shape etc. to it… would have the all the integrity and strength of home-made polystyrene tile)… with stability validity and credibility … some vivid imagery arose – of a new scenario for a Looney Tunes cartoon!
I watched these cartoons a very long time ago!
There was Road-runner… the very tall ‘chicken’ who was such an incredibly fast runner…
So amazingly fast that he left a trail of smoke behind him as he happily sped through the Arizona desert…often fanatically pursued by the hapless Wyle E. Coyote…who was intent on destroying him.
As humans we are a bit like Wyle E. Coyote…with a plan to fulfil our desires by deploying a special dualistic conditioning kit bought cheaply from the Acme store (don’t buy from them – believe me, they never work!).
When Road-runner comes to an obstacle, like a canyon…no problem… down… and then up the other side he would go… quick as a flash.
So in this imaginary scenario Wyle Coyote plans to catch him as he shoots back up the other side of the canyon… by getting across the canyon before him, crossing directly… in a straight line – through the air… After all, the fastest way between two points is a straight line, isn’t it?
(Some wiser ones will know that this is not always so…it would depend on the terrain and many other factors… and also be thinking, look before you leap…but anyway…!)
So he buys an ‘air-suspension-bridge’ kit from Acme.
On delivery, he discovers the kit is comprised of a generous supply of short wooden planks in a bag … and the instructions for their effective deployment.
The instructions tell him to carry the bag under one arm and run very very fast towards the canyons edge… then use the other arm to start laying out the track, throwing the pieces out in front of him so quickly that, letting momentum carry him forward … he would be able to run onto the next piece before it fell to the ground.
So much quicker than going down one side and up the other…he thought!!!
Maybe you can picture the scene as he runs onto the track… as it briefly extends towards the other side … through the air across the chasm…
before panning down to a coyote-shaped depression in the canyon floor…as road-runner passes going ‘Beep Beep!
Life in samsara ; )
If he had turned the plan over, perhaps he would have found its deconstruction…another sentence from the introduction… and given up the dualistic chase, for:
‘To locate a moment in the arc of time, you have to apply an interpretive structure…which disguises the immediate actuality of the moment’
…and finding his way to the truth of that, would surely be a less painful and more satisfying way of spending his days!
Screenshot–image thanks to Wikipedia…under fair use policy…