Yesterday, while looking casually for what I might have on the idea of Solve, a Latin word meaning “to dissolve,” I was thinking about the word, “Solution.” It is an old Alchemical idea:
Solve et Coagula.
“To dissolve and to coagulate (or precipitate) something new.”
Keep that in mind!
It seemed accidental that I came across some things I had written 25 years ago. Accidental because at first I did not see why they were filed under “Chinese Alchemy.”
In 1993 I tried to write down what had happened to me one Spring day while sitting under a tree. It was the end of a quest I began in 1956 that reached conclusion in 1968. In 1993, I wrote two slightly different accounts of what had happened at the end of it. I had also thoughtfully written down something of the method I used: nothing more than questions. I am reprinting these below with only minor editing.
1956 - When it started
One Sunday when I was ten, I sat quietly in church not listening to the preacher’s message. I wondered, what is the world made of? I thought, if everything is made of it, then it must be obvious; if I can’t see it, it must be too simple to notice. I thought, ‘simple’ and ‘obvious’ might even be the same things. So, I set about trying to see if I could see what that might be.
— — —
1968 - “What did I ask?”
I chose a tree that I could see before me.
What is it made of? Substances, elements, processes? How does it differ from the things it is made of?
What are its boundaries? Where does it leave off and something else begin? If it has stuff in it (water, air, etc.), then what would it be if that stuff were removed? If it is attached to something else, what would it be if it were detached?
How do I know what it is? How do I recognize it when I see it? Exactly what is the process of recognition? What features or aspects are essential, and what are incidental? How did I come to learn these essential features or aspects, and why are some ‘essential’ while others are not? What if I had learned other essential features or aspects instead? How do other people (or other species) recognize it? Do they recognize it as anything at all?
To what extent is recognition dependent upon words? To what extent is recognition dependent upon an assessment that it is not something else — not something that is nearby, or not something that is far away?
How much do I know about it? I look at it carefully, then look away and think up some question about the way it looks. I try to answer the question the best I can based on what I remember of it, then look at it again to see how well I did. I do this several times. I try to think of many different ways to look at it, both while looking at it and while not looking.
Where did it come from? How did it arise? Here it is now, but was there a time when it did not exist (at least not as it does now)? When did it become what it is now? How gradual or sudden was the change to what it is now? If this seems to change what I mean by essential features or attributes, why does it change? How do I change the way I recognize something? What is it exactly that changes?
What does it remind me of? Is it also symbolic of something? Do the words I use to describe it have other meanings or other uses?
What matters is commitment to getting simple, obvious, and undeniable answers. Give up assumptions. Allow for answers far beyond belief.
— —
1968 “What is this?”
1st version.
For several months, for several hours a day, I had sat under a tree wondering how was it that I knew it was a tree. I was staring at it intently, puzzling over it, growing very frustrated at having so simple a problem become so difficult. For a moment, I gave up on it.
Then I saw, hovering before me in a sort of ethereal space, a tremendous cloud of memories — that is the best word for it — memories about matters of every sort imaginable all tangled up in one another. The so-called tree I had been contemplating was now diffuse and flowing. There were flowing clouds of colored light, clouds within clouds setting themselves apart from one another only in memories, memories that were rapidly disappearing even as I looked. These memories — traces of decisions about what was or was not there, and like matters — were memories only about other memories; they were grounded only in their mutual, fading, and imperfect history.
What emerged from this fading of memory was a single living thing, a shimmering, multi-colored, multi-faceted, unbroken whole. The tree I had been looking at, and everything else I had seen and thought in the previous moments, became completely uninteresting. In reality, there was nothing except that one reality flowing and swirling like a great brilliant stream. Nothing moved (for there were no ‘things’ there to be moved), yet the whole was in constant motion.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. For a moment, as memories returned and deciding began again, roughly just where it had left off moments before, I saw exactly how it all worked, and I knew exactly what trees were and where they came from.
2nd version
Once, I wondered how it is that words have any meaning at all: not just big words like “God,” “Being,” and “Reality,” but even the ordinary words like “tree.” I wondered how I knew a tree was a tree.
I had plenty of time on my hands and I resolved to sort this matter out. I spent many months thinking about it, and on most afternoons I sat in the shade of one tree and looked at another, wondering how I had ever come to know it as it was. One day, suddenly, and only for a few seconds, things looked different indeed.
Only a moment before, I had been looking at that particular tree. Now, however, I saw, hovering before me in a sort of ether, a tremendous cloud of decisions — that is the best word for it — decisions about matters of every sort imaginable all tangled up in one another. In the midst of this cloud there still stood the tree whose tree-ness I had wanted to understand. But this tree was now a diffuse thing: there was part of it here, part of it there. A little bit of it was involved in everything else around it, and within it every other thing was involved as well — I was amazed that I could tell any two things apart, but somehow I could. Wrapped up in the guise of a simple decision that “here was a tree,” there were clouds within clouds, decisions within decisions, intertwined and turning back amongst each other and fading back in time way beyond my recollection.
If in this momentary vision of reality there were ‘real’ or ‘objective’ things about which decisions got made, then I could not distinguish these from all those decisions. Still, there clearly seemed to be an objective reality of some sort upon which all these decisions were based. But the tree was clearly in the deciding and not in that underlying reality.
What I saw was a single living thing, a shimmering, multi-colored, multi-faceted, unbroken whole over which were laid both tree and “tree” — that is, both the thing I call a tree, and the calling it so. There underneath it all, through this cloud I saw the stuff of which all things were made.
And then things simply returned to normal — or at least as normal as could be after such an experience, for my mind raced to try to understand what I had seen. What was that substance that lay underneath all that cloudy history of deciding about things? What was the difference between the I who had seen this and the this that I had momentarily seen?
Later, it occurred to me to wonder why or how I had thought that I and this are two and not one!
—
Today - Ideas
This was the basis for what I wrote in Ch. 5 - Appearing and Appearance in the book,
Reality and Being: The meaning of some common words, and the nature of reality
(Which is free to read or download at The Internet Archive link above). I sometimes casually refer to this chapter as,
“The Appearing of Appearances, and the Appearance of Appearing.”
Chapter 5 is closely related to the subsequent Ch. 6 - Self and Other, which I highly recommend reading right after 5, while still recalling what you have read here. The relevant stories are Seeing a Tree and The Flowering of a Wonderful Law.
The story, Ocean of Light, tells what I did next after seeing the tree. The story begins quite earlier in my life, around 1948, and culminates in 1973 at the Peaceful Ocean. Compared to the tree, this is a calmer, more thorough, and more significant thing.
In the book, these three autobiographical stories are fictionalized to better fit them into the purpose of the book. Other fictionalized autobiographics are The Robin, Memory of Being Born, and The Mystery of the Ordinary.
In all cases, these stories should make more sense if you read whole chapters and not just the stories. Similarly, the book as a whole will make more sense if you read it through from the beginning, paying particular attention to the instructions in the first chapter, “Words (An Introduction).” Read thoughtfully. There is a lot going on in the language that might not be very obvious.
My model audience for Reality and Being was a particularly inquisitive and ambitious 10-year old boy whom I knew well and thought could handle it well if he was patient and if he took time to think for himself about what he was reading and feeling.