This morning I stepped onto the L-train into Manhattan, tote bag, physical book, and pencil in hand like the “I’m not like the other guys” guy I am. I’m fortunate to find a seat on one of those two-seaters on the edge. My soon-to-be seatmate glances up at me blankly, unforgivingly manspreading a bit, but I squeeze my way in. As I’m settling, I look across the way and there she is, bordering on the edge of punk and hipster (is there a difference at this point?) reading a book of her own.
I appreciate my fellow subway readers. They’re little glimmers of analog hope in a world dominated by digital.
We say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but we can judge a person by the book they’re reading. I can’t make out the title on hers, but I see a name.
It’s Jung.
That may not mean anything to you — it didn’t for me until a few years ago. I’m referring to Carl Jung, one of the foremost thought leaders on psychology and the imaginal. His work has influenced generations of inner explorers, myself a crumb of the ever growing pie.
As soon as I saw the name on the front cover, I smiled both inside and out. Immediately thinking of a meme I’d later tweet.
Her and I were speaking a language known only to us. A silent understanding that was one-way on my end, one that said “I see you.” Because to hear of Jung, then actually read a book of his while riding the subway implies a certain quality of person…it must.
To me, if you’ve read Jung it implies you’ve done some exploration of your own. Perhaps you’ve danced with your shadows and dissolved a few layers of a conditioned identity. We’re standing on common ground.
But to those who haven’t heard of Jung or explored their inner landscape, she was just another girl. A faceless face they forgot by day’s end—no—when they stepped off the subway car. Or when they glanced back down at their digital home.
To me, she’s still here. Alive. Perhaps gone tomorrow or in a few days, but still here. Now. Making herself known on the page.
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It’s fascinating how we can create an entire story of who someone is through just a few small details. A physique. A tattoo. A favorite song. Whether they take what feels like an intimate call in public. These details allow us to create a character or at least an archetype. One that shapes the world within this world we share in that moment.
But these details are nothing more than conditioned memory. A rolodex of our experiences cataloged for safekeeping so we can instantaneously orient ourselves in the arising moment. In a flash, they tell us how reality appears, but not how reality is. What was initially just a woman reading a book, shapes and colors in a perceptual field, is now “reality” as we know it.
Knowledge does this to us — you might even call it an affliction. From a young age, we’re taught, we learn, we know. Red is the color of tomatoes and clown noses. Sweet is the dollop of honey on our tongues or the burst of a cotton candy grape. We assign meaning to the meaningless. Meaning that invisibly lays veiled over our eyes, resting in our fingertips, coloring every fiber of our being. Taking us away from the simple rapture of life in an emerging-fading moment.
Getting in the way of what is.
This is the human experience. We know, and from knowing we create a world. One told by a story of duality and opposites. Our experiences, clutched as truth, draw us to one end and repel us from the other.
What if she’d been reading Trump’s autobiography or I Will Teach You To Be Rich? Would a smile have emerged? Or an inner “tsk?” I don’t know. She was reading Jung.
You could say I’m describing the spiritual path. Which to you, might not mean anything. And truthfully, it didn’t a year ago. Not like this. Back then, I wasn’t as “deep” as I am now on the path. Not as well read. Not as “knowledgeable”, which I say lightly — if you know you know.
The path is one of unknowing. Of forsaking knowledge in favor of understanding. Wisdom. For knowledge is simply a vehicle for the intellect. Something to categorize our immediate experience into recognizable patterns influenced by memory. Boundaries drawn between what we gladly say “yes” to and what we avoid at all costs.
That’s not to say you or I need to “forget” what we know or that we even can. Rather, our path, our way, is to rest simply in the childlike state before knowledge came into the fold and told us what our immediate experience supposedly is. There, we’re merely being. In wonder and awe of what is simultaneously emerging and disappearing moment by moment, breath by breath.
I wonder, did she glance over and see Wilber on the front cover? Did it mean something to her? Some silent understanding known only to her? Or was I just another faceless face? Just another guy reading a book while riding the subway.
I sorta hope I was. One less layer in the way of what is.