Ice Cubes and Blocks

Sometimes ice melts slowly and silently, sometimes it cracks and groans. Yesterday my son and his friend were playing with a block of dry ice in the kitchen sink. Pouring water on it made a lot of steam, and pushing at it with a fork made a chattering whining scream, "like a baby banshee or a lot of bees buzzing at the same time–but very small bees," he described.

That situation of shrieking ice reminded me of what it has felt like sometimes as a separate self that is being melted back into the loving embrace of the all. Whatever it is that resists unity, that still believes there is salvation in separation and something to fear about god, knows that it is not going to endure that warmth. So sometimes there is some frantic inner protest to awakening, some clinginess that is in vain since there is nothing solid to cling to once the ruse is up, once the truth is glimpsed–if ever so briefly.

Having glimpses, once for weeks at a time, of being the vast ocean of awareness–and everything in it–rather than just the "me" ice cube, opened that view of possibility. For a while it was a huge relief, and effortless to reside in, but it was not an abiding awareness. After a while the aperture closed down again. But what was left of the sense of self was now aware of its own fictionality. "I'm melting, m e l t i n g!" There was no longer a sense of containment as a particular self, just an assemblage of parts that were not fundamentally that thing called a self.

Snap together plastic building blocks are another way of looking at this. You can pick up some pieces and make something with them, but you would not long call it a bus or plane or castle, there would simply be that form temporarily. Being a self is like that. There are a multitude of memories, bits of information, bygone experiences, dreams, visions, feelings, apparently concrete reference points ("my" house, "my" painting) which can be temporarily assembled by life as life lives itself. Life might live as the form of my parents and their daughter, my children and their mother, but even the feel of these roles changes from day to day and year to year.

There has been the appearance of a continuum from my birth through childhood and into adulthood, but whatever I learned about boundaries and being a separate self is all getting turned inside out and upside down and backwards, becoming undone at the seams, melting away. The self that still seems to be here seems more transparent than ever. I still say "I" and "you" and "me", "myself" and "others", but there is a knowing that can't be unknown, now that it's been remembered, that all of this is really all one thing, all one self, all one dream or play, one being, one mind. 

And in this dream I'm aware of looking out from blue eyes in a kitchen that needs cleaning, and this sort of practical activity engages this body so there is not as much egoic banshee screaming around here. If there is engagement with and surrender into ordinary life, rather than fixation on the boundaries that no longer exist, then there can be availability for unexpected experiences–such as playing with dry ice, as amused as the other children.