Post #5: All That’s Solid Melts into Air…

1 May 2023

It may be that there is, ultimately, no real solidity in the world. As the high priests of our mysterious modern physics have been proclaiming for a century or more with ever-increasing urgency and evidentiary support, it may all come down, in the end, to tiny packs of energy, or wavelets, or information, or even—the very strangest of possibilities—to nothing at all. (I confess that I cannot wrap my head around this last and most bizarre possibility, but Peter Atkins has some thought-provoking things to say about it in the first chapter of his On Being (Oxford 2011). Perhaps it is no stranger than the emergence of the known universe out of an infinitely small point that is our best explanation of cosmic beginnings, and supposedly documented quite unanswerably by now.)

Advanced practitioners of Vipassana (a thread I shall pick up in one of my next posts) likewise speak of the progressive dissolution of the body as a matter of direct meditative experience. Not that their bodies break down on the mat or start levitating weightlessly off the ground—leave talk of such special effects to other schools—but that the mind seems to be quite at home at higher altitudes, so to speak, where all that is solid melts into air...

Slippery little words like “ultimately” and “in the end” can be dangerous companions on our more ordinary paths through life, however, especially when one is walking under the influence of intensive meditation. Whatever contrary perspectives a look through the microscope or the lens of theoretical physics may suggest, in our everyday lives the solidity of a plain brick wall is quite enough to break our bones and crack our skulls. That is the life-threatening side; on the other, more life-giving hand, plenty such solidities—think only of food and the digestive process, among so many others, to say nothing of the temperature or atmospheric pressure or any of the other myriad requirements of creaturely existence as we know it—are indispensable for keeping us miraculously alive. We seem to require quite a bit of regularity and stability, both physical and mental, to keep our bearings in the otherwise maddening whirl of the world.

Karl Marx, who came up with the phrase about “melting into air” in his Communist Manifesto, was thinking along more economic lines of the corrosive powers he attributed to capitalism. (Not much disagreement there, though I have many with the Marxist narrative; Schumpeter’s related “creative destruction” seems much more felicitous to me, and much less doleful in its historical consequences, but that’s a subject for another day, and perhaps another blog or book.) Whatever view one might take of our economic conditions, however, we can probably all recognize the dizzying sense of a world hurtling at high speed into the unknown, the great whirl as I’ve called it above, which may even turn out to be a cosmic phenomenon if we look closely enough, inasmuch as the movement and the change may turn out to be more real ultimately than our illusions of stability.

Yet we seem to need that sense of stability too, as I’ve said, like an anchor that keeps us from getting blown about so much on the high seas of life that we lose all sense of place and direction. It would have to be flexible enough, this spiritual anchor, to withstand the wild gyrations of our storm-bound journeys without either breaking or turning into a millstone that ends up dragging us under. (While giving us room for maneuver, it cannot be completely arbitrary or infinitely stretchable, or it would cease to serve its purpose—though one is always free to let go and venture beyond without the benefit of its help.) And it would need to furnish an antidote to the vertigo and seasickness that we must face as we are thrown too high into the air and tossed around too violently in all other directions as well. To stay with the nautical metaphors, it should work like a sextant or compass that will tell us, even as we are dragged under water or find ourselves tumbling through the air, which side is up at least, and which direction to move in when we are too disoriented and confused to find it by our everyday instincts anymore. And all that is how I see the Dhamma—in my limited view of it, that is, since I am not willing to say that what I can make of it should be taken for anything close to the thing itself.

The Dhamma itself, we might say, is the Teaching as a fully liberated being might understand it—one who, ironically, no longer needs it himself (or herself, it goes without saying) after having crossed over to the other shore and dispensed with the raft. (In the words of the Pali Scriptures: “When you know the Dhamma to be similar to a raft, a time will come to abandon even the Teaching.” First you need to get all the way across, however, by your own efforts, though not unaided; the far bank cannot come to you, nor can any Buddha carry you over.) The Dhamma-for-us, meanwhile, will be only dimly perceived, intimated as through a looking glass in St Paul’s timeless words—yet it is the voice in which the Teaching speaks to us as imperfect beings who need its help most. By that reckoning, the countless Buddhisms in the world would be the interpretations that have sprung up, among individuals and groups alike, to mediate and make the higher truths accessible to worldlings who, by definition, have no direct access to them yet. In that sense, once again, I should probably not hesitate to call myself a Buddhist, even if it is to open oneself to misunderstandings…

Reading: Majjhima Nikaya 22.13–14 (the Dhamma as a raft to be discarded eventually)