014_The way of being
So now we move on to the next layer of human behaviour, the “being” layer. In #010, we saw this layer in its ringo bingo form:
Fold away those parts, distil 想 to its essence, and here’s how it looks:
The “being” layer of human behavior has 目 eye in the triangle. In ringo bingo mode, the square and the circle were used for different eye inputs: one from “out there” in the real world and the other from “in here” in memory. But the triangle is the zone of focus. The eye attends to the object beyond the triangle.
We place the object of attention, 木 tree, in a mental interface (rectangle). We compare the tree “out there” with the tree “in here”. The tree “in here” is the image that 心 heart bounces back to us from the realm (circle) of memory.
The three Canjeez in 想 are easy to “iconize”:
This heart, in fact, can be considered literally iconic. It’s a human being’s built-in “Like” function. A thumbs-up in response to what we perceive in the correspondence between tree and eye.
When you’re shopping, the Like function will prompt you to buy. If you don’t have enough money, it will prompt you to steal. If your friends are doing drugs, a thumbs-up for drugs. If you’re choosing sides in the turbulent conditions of 16th century Japan, you will “heart” Terrifying and Ruthless Warlord A and unfriend Terrifying and Ruthless Warlord B.
In the iconic schema that we are developing, where the circle is concerned, the heart in the “being” layer is separate from the moral compass in the “doing” layer (#013). To mix metaphors, this heart is a gut reaction. It is an unstructured, self-serving Yes, No, or Who Cares? It embodies a positive, or negative, or neutral reaction to whatever we encounter at each fork in the road on the journey of life.
At this particular fork, my thoughts turn to spaghetti.
One formative fork in childhood comes at mealtime, when the heart gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to what’s being served. When I was a young boy, we never ate spaghetti at home. Why, I’m not sure. My mother spent a lot on my education and we didn’t have a great deal of money to spare. So cost was one possible factor. Also, I suspect that spaghetti was still something of a culinary curiosity in far-flung North Devon in the 1960s, and thus not an item that people commonly bought, or even found in the shops.
In fact, writing the above has jogged my memory, dislodging evidence that supports my supposition. On April 1, 1957 the current affairs TV programme Panorama was able to fool at least some people in Britain into thinking that spaghetti grew on trees. (They didn’t fool me! At the age of 10 weeks, I was blissfully immune from deception, gazing indiscriminately at the moon, the walls, the ceiling...)
Nevertheless, by around 1970 spaghetti was among the culinary curiosities being consumed at my school, where it would sometimes be served for lunch. Seated at a table with six or so other students, I’d ask that day’s server (an older student at the head of the table) not to give me the spaghetti bolognese, which to my simple mind was something that other people ate. Of course, if I didn’t eat any spaghetti, there was more for the others. So if I didn’t have any spaghetti, the server was happy, everyone else at the table was happy, and I was happy, although also hungry.
Then came the day when, as usual, I said I didn’t want any spaghetti bolognese, and the student at the head of the table, on that occasion a thoughtful boy, gave me a long look.
“Have you ever eaten it before?”
“No,” I sheepishly replied.
“Then try it,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
So I did. And I did.
The truth was revealed. I was surprised (and vexed) to discover that I had been depriving myself of a delicious meal simply because my heart had closed my mind to the possibility that it would taste good. I had deluded myself into vetoing the exotic fruit of the spaghetti tree. No self-guidance. No assessment. No reflection. Spaghetti was dead to me. Or, more accurately, it had never been alive. I had never let my mind’s eye examine it using the most appropriate sense for that purpose: taste. As a result, my heart’s engagement with spaghetti bolognese was no more than an automatic thumbs-down.
In order to make the most of now, we need a mindset quite the opposite of my juvenile one in that instance. We need a mindset that facilitates engagement with the truth. The truth is far too complex for our feeble brains to apprehend, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. And yet the truth is a monstrously slippery noodle. How do we grapple with this slick adversary?
Let’s use attention as a fork to separate the ingredients in 想. The tree (木) is separate from the eye (目) that perceives the tree. The heart (心) is separate from both eye and tree, and reacts to what’s going on between eye and tree (木 + 目 = 相, see #005).
How will the heart react to a perfectly harmonious correspondence between eye and tree? If it is perfectly receptive, it will ring like a bell. And a baby’s unassuming heart is primed to chime. It is innocent. Loving. Trusting. Vulnerable…
Naive?
No. If we’re serious about this, we need to climb down from our snooty high horse of jaded grown-up cynicism and open up to the world with the heart of a baby.
Canjeez can show us the way.
Here is a Canjeez that means “actual, real, true”: 真. Let’s fork apart the top and bottom of 想 and then glom 真 to each bit.
If you glom 真 to 相 (the top half of 想), you get an accurate perception of what’s really “there”: 真相 truth.
Glom 真 to 心 (the bottom half of 想) and you get 真心 pure, sincere heart.
A pure, sincere heart that is open to the truth represents a perfect way to 想 think about anything. This mindset is the basis of an ideal way of being.
As we listen to the ring of truth, what reality will emerge? What mysteries will be revealed?
Will we finally be able to answer the big questions? Questions like why.
Why, for example, in my spaghetti-free childhood home, was I sometimes eating macaroni and cheese?
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