Korridorium

♫ Anāt­man ♫

---

193/398

II enter the cor­ri­dor with slumped shoul­ders. It’s dread­ful to have dis­ap­pointed the mas­ter. He put such effort into me, try­ing again and again to dis­ci­pline my mind and make it clear to me that every­thing I expe­ri­ence is mere illu­sion, a mirage, the froth of all things.

Yet I sim­ply can­not get rid of the illu­sion that I, I myself, the focus of this expe­ri­ence, am real. That I really exist. I do think, I feel, I have expe­ri­ences! How could I not exist and be mere imag­i­na­tion then?

What has the mas­ter not already tried with me?

From

• logic (there is no con­scious­ness in the plural),
• phi­los­o­phy (Atman and Brah­man are one),
• para­dox (the kōan of the one hand clap­ping),
• dream yoga (the mas­ter’s vis­its in my dreams to show me that I too am just a dream, dream­ing itself),
• sci­ence (Susan Black­more’s Grand Illu­sion videos),
• mys­ti­cism (“In You, this honey is dis­solved, O milk of life, so mild, so fine!”)

to

• med­i­ta­tive dis­ci­pline (sit­ting for days in a state of non-think­ing),
• sur­re­al­ism (Jim Hen­son’s The Cube: straw­berry jam) and even
• vio­lence (unex­pected punches to the face, which are said to have brought some adepts enlight­en­ment)

and on to

• a “snooze but­ton” for my thoughts (which he sought to anchor in me through NLP),
• per­sis­tent ignor­ing (not only of my ques­tions, but also of my increas­ing hunger),
• exten­sive man­dala con­tem­pla­tion (M.C. Escher tes­sel­la­tions with the ques­tion “Where is the cen­ter?”), and even
• Bud­dhist dark ther­apy.

Yet my sup­pos­edly illu­sory self remained unim­pressed by all this. Not my idea of being an indi­vid­ual crum­bled under this onslaught, but my idea that there was some­thing like a solid world around me.

Finally, my mas­ter gave up his efforts. I had already seen it com­ing that he would even­tu­ally send me to the leg­endary place of which his stu­dents only speak in hushed tones: the cor­ri­dor of the fail­ures, the cor­ri­dor of the solip­sists. It is said that no one ever returned from this pas­sage which the water of the small river had eaten into the belly of the moun­tain, where it then dis­ap­pears with­out a trace.

I too will dis­ap­pear with­out a trace. For a few days, maybe weeks, my fel­low pupils will still speak my name, in hushed tones, as a cau­tion­ary tale of some­one stub­born, unteach­able, some­one cling­ing to the great illu­sion and sim­ply unable to let go. But soon, soon I will be for­got­ten and gone.

The descent into dark­ness is dif­fi­cult. I am already com­pletely soaked; the cold seeps into my core. My whole body trem­bles, also because mor­tal dread grips me. That the self can­not die because it does not even exist can­not com­fort me, not even now. I hear des­per­ate wail­ing, and after some time I real­ize it is com­ing from my own mouth. I fall silent.

From the sound of the water I can tell that I am enter­ing a large cave. I think I per­ceive a glim­mer of light high above me. Is that a stair­case carved into the rock face? It leads up, towards the glim­mer. I sit down in lotus posi­tion on the bare rock and close my eyes. Maybe the years of train­ing have some­how paid off after all.

It won’t be me climb­ing those steps and ascend­ing. Not me.

Kōan of the Sound of One Hand:

Jim Henson’s The Cube (ca. 1 h):