In the latest book of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, the eleventh and last of the Wizard’s Rules is revealed —not taught but rather shown, in the form of a highly sought after book. The book is unveiled to be all blank.
[as explained by the Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander] The rule of all rules. The rule unwritten. The rule unspoken since the dawn of history […] The only way to express it, to make sure that you would grasp what he was intending to tell you, was to give you a book unwritten to signify the rule unwritten.
“The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
The random quote today led me to a comment in the group story I wrote a little more than a year from now.
I found in it a renewed resonance this morning…
(*) After he sent his reply to Yann, Yurick took a deep breath in appreciation of all that had been done the last past days.
However tedious, all in all, it had allowed him to stay away from other people’s trauma, and stay focused on his own issues. Now, the feeling of the energy at hand was starting to become lighter. Like a thin ray of light poking through a thick layer of rainy clouds, announcing that the silver lining was more than just a consolation. It was announcing the sun to come.
He took the book of stories that had been unburied (like his pleasure to write) from the bottom of the sofa’s cushions when they’d received hosts last week-end, and looked with amusement at the opening note about the “random quotes”.
A strong sense of an inkling started to dawn at him.
Thanks to the random quotes — or more appropriately said, to convenient synchronicities — “stuff” was never lost or buried in the insides of that ever-growing story, which was eating with gluttony at the edges of its expansion. Things were popping up here and there, reminding of old loose threads, or pertinent inclusions or links to be made.
But there was more. He, for a long time, had thought that imagination was expanding things to make physical reality look smaller in proportion than it was. Like when they’d looked at Dory’s pictures, and everything looked so big on them. Even the mere thought of nine dogs was huge. But when they’d met her, and Dan, and the dogs, it was all so much smaller. Even seeing Dory manage her dogs made having nine dogs seem manageable.
But the reverse was true: physical reality had its way of dwarfing imagination. Not so much making it smaller, but compacting it, making it fit in an unbelievably condensed and small space.
Take that book. Thousands of words, billions of probabilities, endless threads and hundreds of characters, all packaged in a small stack of inked paper. The trick was that when you look at it that way, when you got that small stack of paper in your hands, it all seems so manageable; one starts to get accustomed to it, then fails to see the newness in it each time it’s opened to tell a story.
Imagination is the true gauge of the vastness of the universe. It’s so easy to forget…
Spontaneity—genuine spontaneity— beyond what appearances might tell us, is not something that comes easily, especially given our usual upbringing which tends to bend or harness it into something productive for society.
The Surrealist movement in the 1920s is remembered among other things for artistic and playful experiments that led to expanding our boundaries and views of reality by practising spontaneity without allowing the thought process to hold the full prominence it usually gets. Automatic writing —and automatic drawing— were in fact techniques that Surrealists developed extensively, before they were used by pioneers of conscious exploration such as Jane Roberts.
One of their games/experiments in particular was known as “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse). It required a group of people to collaborate in order to compose something (initially sentences, but by extension, drawing, collage etc.) without having a complete view of what the others had contributed to the creation.
In these times we’re living in, success is more often than not valued by the end result. Little is thought of the process leading up to it, not to mention the lengthy detours that may have been required in the making.
At one point in the cult movie Donnie Darko (2001), the hero (Donnie) confronts his health instructor’s simplistic view of the spectrum of human emotions, based on the “teachings” of a local new-age celebrity.
Emo scale
Basically, even if a voluntary over-simplification and caricature of some new-age philosophies (positive part of the emotional scale versus negative one; feels good/feels bad dichotomy), this is an interesting point that is being made.
In this kind of view of our emotions, we tend to consider that we are a point on an infinite line, which gives us only two possibilities: go “forward”, or “backward”, no matter what direction it may entail. It reinforces our striving for getting “better”, and classifying all our experiences as worse or better than something else.
In a sense, it’s a perfect draft for all of our social systems, education being one of them.
Another view of the emotions spectrum is given by the age old Chinese philosophies.
Cycle of Emotions, Chinese view
This diagram is a representation of the view of the emotions of classical Chinese medicine. Each of our main organs are represented by an element (there are five elements in the Chinese system: fire, metal, earth, water and wood), and these elements interact with each other to create the whole spectrum.
What is interesting is that there are different types of interactions, as some elements are “nourishing” others (the blue arrows on the diagram; for instance water nourished the wood etc.) and some are “controlling” others (represented by the dark arrows; for instance, water controls fire; metal control the growth of the wood etc.).
Each of the elements have a pole of emotions which are composing a balance. For instance, the emotions of the heart (element fire) are joy/panic; for the lungs (element metal) these are serenity/sorrow etc.
How you can easily counteract an unwanted emotion is by using the “controlling” cycle. For instance, fear controls love/joy. Uh-uh… seen that somewhere? Yes, it is rather interesting to notice that this line on the blackboard of the teacher is but one spike of the wheel of emotions.
And furthermore, we could object to this simplistic teaching of going towards love as well: if you feel fear, trying to manifest the opposite emotion by striving towards love isn’t necessarily going to make things easier. There is a natural flow of these emotions, that it is one’s responsibility to find out for oneself. Otherwise, it would be like saying “as fire counteracts ice, anytime you feel cold, burn something to feel hot”. You may end up with no clothes at all at this rate.
Once we notice that not one emotion is more desirable, everything can become clearer. Going to each extreme of the arrows is only tantamount to spinning the wheel more quickly while the goal of Chinese medicine is to restore a sense of balance and harmony.
It only can be achieved by understanding the whole picture and accepting the whole spectrum of our emotions, and not touting one as better than the other and risk the consequences of severing its links with the rest.
The Duke Huán was reading a book in his pavilion. Piān the wheelwright, who was carving a wheel in the courtyard below, set his mallet and chisel aside and climbed in the pavilion to ask the Duke:
— “The book that your Highness is reading, whose words is it?“
— “These are the words of the wise Elders,” said the Duke.
— “Are the Elders in this world?“
— “They’re long gone,” said the Duke.
— “In this case, what you read is nothing but the scrap of the Elders“
— “A wheelwright dares to comment on the books that I read!” said the Duke,“If you have any explanation so be it, otherwise it’s your life!”
Piān the wheelwright said “Your subject looks at this with the point of view from his own work. When I carve a wheel, if the strokes of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and does not notch. But if they are too strong, it cuts in, but won’t budge. Not too slowly nor too violently. You can feel it in your hand and in your mind, but words cannot explain it although there is a technique. I can teach my son or he can learn it from me. Seventy years have passed, and I’m still carving wheels. When the Elders are dead, they took with them everything that could be transmitted. What you read is nothing but the scrap of the Elders.”
(I initially published this bit here to illustrate a little script that I pieced together to do automatic linking of Chinese characters to some online resources like dictionaries etc.)
In French
Le duc Huán était en train de lire un livre dans son pavillon. Le charron Piān, qui était dans la cour du bas à tailler une roue posa son maillet et son ciseau, grimpa dans le pavillon et demanda au Duc :
« — Ce livre que lit Monseigneur, de qui rapporte-t-il les paroles ? »
« — Ce sont les paroles des Sages » répondit le Duc.
« — Ces Sages sont-ils de ce monde ? »
« — Morts de longue date » répondit le Duc.
« — Dans ce cas, ce que vous lisez n’est rien d’autre que les déchets des Anciens »
« — Un charron se permet de commenter les livres que je lis! » reprit le Duc « si tu as quelque explication valable, fort bien, sinon c’est ta vie »
Le charron Piān dit alors « Votre sujet regarde cela du point de vue de son propre travail. Quand je taille une roue, si les coups du maillet sont trop doux, le ciseau glisse et ne fait pas d’entaille. Mais s’ils sont trop forts, il pénètre mais ne bouge plus. Pas trop doucement, ni trop violemment. Vous pouvez le sentir dans votre main et dans votre esprit, mais les mots ne peuvent l’expliquer bien qu’il y ait une technique. Je ne puis l’enseigner à mon fils, ni lui l’apprendre de moi. Soixante-dix ans ont passé, et je taille toujours des roues. Quand les Anciens sont morts, ils ont emporté avec eux tout ce qui ne pouvait être transmis. Ce que vous lisez n’est donc rien d’autre que les déchets des Anciens ».
This is my personal blog where I discuss a variety of subjects ranging from technology to arts (graphical or culinary) or metaphysics. I’m also known as Elikozoe which is the name of my website/portfolio.
This is my personal blog where I discuss a variety of subjects ranging from technology to arts (graphical or culinary) or metaphysics. I’m also known as Elikozoe which is the name of
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