Dancing with the butterfly
Only fools mistake reflection for reality
Being seen (or the suggestion of being seen) has a curious effect on a person’s mind.
Less than a week ago, I got a notice from the Medium team that I was being promoted to Top Writer in the Photography and Art categories.
That was a bit of an ego boost, since the explanation read that Medium lists ‘the top 50 writers whose stories are most influential on that topic. These lists update daily and show writers who are publishing quality content about a specific topic on a regular basis’.
An obvious side-effect of this ranking is that you become more visible. Almost overnight I have seen my number of followers triple. (It was a modest number to begin with, so don’t expect four digits here, but still.)
If there’s anything a writer wants, it’s the results of her lovingly crafted efforts being read. And as an amateur photographer, hell — I’m quite happy about the photography thing, too.
However.
Susan G. Holland wrote about it, and now I understand exactly what she meant. A fair share of my new followers are anonymous. There’s a name to their profile, but nothing else. It’s a strange feeling,- if you’re suddenly being followed by a number of people who have no face, no shared or written stories. It feels like being watched by ghosts.
I’ve always had a liking for ghosts, so I am not freaking out over this. Yet.
For now it mainly has me wondering about the need we humans have to be looked at. To be seen.
About a year ago, my best friend told me about her experience using hallucinogenic mushrooms.
She described how she sat in her garden, surrounded by luscious shrubs and flowers on all sides, and felt like dancing. So she did. There were no boundaries between her and her surroundings anymore. A butterfly landed on her arm, and danced with her.
Only when her conscious mind stepped in, noticing the butterfly, the tiny creature started and flew off, the connection severed by the interruption of her mental dialogue.
When she told me about the experience, I understood for the very first time, deeply and intuitively, how our conscious human mind is both our blessing and our curse. It is the tool with which we develop our intellect in ways never before available to any other animal, but at the same time it’s our cage.
We are all too often taught — by parents, scholars and religious leaders of various traditions alike — that as human beings we are somehow above nature, not of it. The most common justification for this premisse is that we are capable of consciously perceiving ourselves, whereas the rest of creation is not.
But to me, my friend’s story about the butterfly held the piercing insight that our conscious minds are also the very thing that keeps us seperate from the rest of creation. Only when lulled to sleep by intense meditation, trance or mind-altering substances, it relinquishes its grap on our consciousness and we finally experience the world like all other life forms do: as one immense, intense web of interconnectedness.
The human species has gained a lot from the development of our frontal cortex, to be sure. But it seems to me it also came with some serious drawbacks.
Depth-psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft and Nature and the human soul, has this to say:
‘A necessary feature of our conscious self-awareness is the fragment of our psyche (the ego, the conscious self) that functions as the locus of this capacity to know that we know. Before we were human, we had no way to observe our selves and know what, or who, we were observing. Later, it was as if we became human by taking a part of ourselves and extending it some distance, so that this part could look back at itself.’
Reading this, I see the image of a life form with a mirror on a stick protruding from its brain. In that mirror it can see a reflection of itself, from an arm’s length away.
The mirror is the ego. And it’s firmly convinced that the reflection it captures is all there is to see. But sadly it has little or no knowledge of what’s going on inside the image, or any deeper or wider level of existence.
Quoting from the Osho Zen Tarot (Clouds 10 — Rebirth; a card that depicts the evolution of consciousness, based on Nietzsche’s triad of Camel, Lion and Child): ‘The camel is sleepy, dull, self-satisfied. He lives in delusion, thinking he’s a mountain peak, but really he is so concerned with others’ opinion that he hardly has energy of his own.’
Poor ego, thinking so highly of itself… Only it’s not quite the mountain peak it believes itself to be.
Plotkin again, in the same chapter of Nature and the human soul:
‘If it weren’t for the existence of the ego, we wouldn’t wonder about our true place in the world. We would simply take it. It’s our ego that does the wondering. Without egos, we would take our place instinctively, as everything else does, and like everything else, we would not know that we know our place. (…) Conscious self-awareness, in other words, appears to be the source of both our greatest failings and our greatest potentials — our pivotal crises and opportunities.
(…) The hazard then, of possessing the capacity to know that you know is the vulnerability of becoming truly lost in a way no other creature can — unable to find your place and therefore unable to flower.’
So what happens, when the ego finally finds out it’s been fooling itself?
Let’s not throw stones.
We all go a long way in fooling ourselves. There’s no real shame in this. Sometimes, sadly, we even waste our entire lives on it, caught in Narcissus’ snare. (Thank you again, Susan G. Holland, for that other very pertinent post that adresses this very issue quite eloquently.)
Yet hopefully, at one point, we do wake up.
That’s when we realize the ego is just what Plotkin asserts it is: a feature of our minds, a fragment of a bigger whole. Allowing it to control our existence is like granting your ten-year old access to the family credit card and the car keys. The catastrophe this heralds, both psychologically and ecologically, for society and the planet, is covered in the daily newspapers.
There are far deeper and wiser aspects of our selves to whom we can entrust the steering wheel and the family check book. Only for this to happen, we have to get in touch with those wiser aspects, the parts of us who know how to dance with the butterfly, and reconnect with the innocent but powerful thrust of all creation.
And the ego has to back down a little. If it refuses to, we have to teach it how. We will still love it, to be sure, and we will take care of it. But it is only a mirror, and a surface one at that.
Reflections are beautiful, and they can teach us all sorts of things about ourselves.
But only fools mistake reflection for reality.
