The Tiger and The Goats

My former Asian Philosophies professor, John Koller, has written an excellent arrangement of an old Indian story that describes the bondage incurred when one confuses visible reality with ultimate reality:

The tiger's mother had died, and the poor little tiger was left all alone in the world. Fortunately, the goats were compassionate and adopted the little tiger, teaching him how to eat grass with his pointed teeth and how to bleat like they did. Time passed and the little tiger assumed that he was just a little goat.

But one day an old tiger came upon this little band of goats. They all fled in terror, except for the tiger-goat, now about half-grown, who for some unknown reason felt no fear. As the savage jungle beast approached, the cub began to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. To cover his self-consciousness, he began to bleat and nibble some grass. The old tiger roared at the little tiger in amazement and anger, asking him what he was doing eating grass and bleating like a goat. But the little tiger was too embarrassed by all this to answer and continued to nibble grass. Thoroughly outraged by this behavior, the jungle tiger grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and carried him to a nearby pond. Holding him over the water he told him to look at himself. 'Is that the pot face of a tiger or the long face of a goat?' he roared.

The cub was still too frightened to answer, so the old tiger carried him to his cave and thrust a huge chunk of juicy, red, raw meat between his jaws. As the juices trickled into his stomach the cub began to feel a new strength and a new power. No longer mistaking himself for a goat, the little tiger lashed his tail from side to side and roared like the tiger he was. Having achieved Tiger-realization, he no longer took himself to be a goat.

The Wind

Dr. Bach-y-Rita is a neurologist who has developed a device that allows blind people to see. The machine works by transmitting information from a small camera to a laptop, which then sends electrical signals to a small electrode matrix. Depending on how bright a spot on the image is, that point on the matrix has either more or less current. By placing this electrode matrix on your tongue, and attaching the camera to your forehead, your brain associates the stimulation with sight sensations. During one of their tests, an assistant encourages a subject, blind mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer, to try looking at a candle. Immediately, another assistant becomes excited and both Dr. Paul-y-Rita and Dr. Kamm describe some past experiences with subjects and the candle:

"So my question to you is: did you expect the candle flame to be taller shorter? Again, we've had all sorts of remarks from children. For example, one said, 'Why is the flame so small? When I hold my hand over my birthday candles I can feel it all the way up.' So he was expecting the flame to go all the way up." - Dr. Paul-y-Rita

"I have one subject, Allison, who absolutely loves the wind; and, when I showed her the flame, she was like, 'Is that what wind looks like?'" - Dr. Kamm

Summer Song

At the end of last semester, Princess played the most disturbing show I've ever seen. Yet... they inspire this macabre curiosity that makes it tough to stop listening. Near the end of the show, they belted out their "Summer Song"... I asked Alexis about it (which is where I got the lyrics — I tried to preserve his handwriting, but the emphasis is mine), and he said it was really just a series of rhymes that seemed to flow... The ironic origin takes its meta-commentary and self-reference one step further into the absurd:

spin it and I sing song
from treetops to king kong ping pong
ready set it wet it get it
medics let it pet it debit or credit
a fetish embellish u rellish n perish

Get it Get it going gone
these songs are arms trying to grasp
the world they Built
tilt down with a pound the sound
of clowns' frown abound
night gowns spin round n round
tight would might crown the night
sunlight at sunset jet set
magenta lent a particular bent
to the waves refraction
for a fraction of an instant
and we missed it

Time and Permanence

Seung Sahn, in The Compass of Zen, describes time using the metaphor of a movie:

The film projector moves the frames very quickly, and all of these frames run past the lens very fast, so the action on-screen seems to happen nonstop. There is no break in the movement of things. But actually when you take this strip of film and hold it up to the light with your hands, there is nothing moving at all. Each frame is complete.

The idea, of course, is that reality is nothing but the "now" — that motionless film reel — and our mind is the projector, creating the illusion of time. But there's a very simple problem with this metaphor: the projector can only create this illusion by ordering the frames, and this ordering happens over time.

Instead of associating ourselves with the eternal Now, "Unity" itself, it seems more practical to say that we are a path through Now (just as the projector follows the path of the reel). Rather than being an illusion, time becomes a byproduct of our perspective (which isn't a false representation of reality, just incomplete).

This topic does clarify my primary issue with Buddhism: the origin of our desire for permanence seems to go unconsidered. But if you assume we are one with everything, the reason for this dispensability is obvious: we are essentially permanent entities (rather, entity) deceived by an illusory world — it's trivially true that we'd want to return to reality. (The other obvious solution is to explain it away with psychology.)