To Unsee a Blue Rabbit
Ce n'est pas un lapin bleu.At a dharma talk in the Atlanta Soto Zen Center a few years back, the visiting priest began by mentioning he’d left his notes at home and had instead brought a Magic Eye book with him, which he took out and passed around.
In case you’ve never seen one of these pictures, a Magic Eye appears to be an abstract pattern, but if you stop looking at the paper and look into it instead, setting your focus on infinity, you see the illusion of a three-dimensional object or scene. We helped each other all see the image which was a blue rabbit.
The point was, to see the rabbit we had to stop focusing on the surface of the paper, relax, and allow our ideas of what we were supposed to be seeing drop away. Once our minds stopped trying to make sense of what was on the paper, they allowed the rabbit to eventually emerge.
Obviously, that’s a lot like sitting zazen. At first, anyway.
Everyone notices that time feels slower when we’re younger. Days are longer when we’re small, hours are denser, years are beyond conceiving. As we age, our brains create more and more schema, something like stage scenery or a computer cache, neural patterns our minds can trigger to internally reproduce what’s expected as long as it pretty well matches what’s going on. Over the years, our brains employ more schema more often, saving brain power — attention is resource intensive — and it’s possible that this decline in attention is linked to time seeming to speed up.
The less we actively notice about life, the less dense our hours get and the faster they appear to have passed us by in retrospect.
In zazen, we allow our minds to stop dredging up the schema. Initially, our minds’ default mode goes to plugging the resulting gaps with memories, ruminations, earworms, and such, but over time it learns to settle down too, and we find ourselves paying attention to here now.
When this happens, it may be that our perception of time starts losing its definition, as we no longer imagine reference points in the future or past. Rather than moving forward from the past behind us to the future ahead of us, we become still in time. Everything is in flux, but not into any direction. We attend to our own experience of flux, our own experience as flux. The blue rabbit emerges.
So… we were asked to look again at the picture on the page, and to allow our eyes to relax and see the blue rabbit. Then, staying like that, to see the apparent shape as a shape. Stop thinking of rabbits. There are no rabbits inside the book. Experience the illusion of the shape only as it is, without mental associations.
It was an unimaginable feat. But then, so had been seeing the rabbit, until each of us saw it. We could help one another somewhat, but ultimately we all had to stop interfering with it and allow our own minds to go there and learn how to get back there.
And so, what is the next non-step, not beyond but prior to experiencing ourselves as flux?
To borrow a line from Wallace Stevens, when we become no thing ourselves, we behold no thing that is not there, and the no thing that is.
Image: Creative Commons license via Pixabay