Today, as I was walking on the edge of the local forest, I came to stop by a small plot of land on the other side of the road facing the forest. The reason I stopped, was that I was suddenly hearing a soft, almost inaudible “whooshing” sound which was at first not identifyable in my ears.
The sound grew slowly louder and I realized that it was simply the wind passing through the spruce trees’ needles about 60 feet above my head.
The thought came to mind: “Does the “whooshing-sound” belong to the wind or to the trees?”
Is the sound a property of the objects called “trees” or the object called “wind”?
Or does the whooshing-sound only exist as a phenomenon of the interaction between two other phenomena, one being the trees and the other the wind?
Is a tree not defined as a tree because it does make a whooshing-sound when wind blows through the needles?
Would it still be a tree, if it didn’t have that sound when wind would blow through the needles?
If not, then how could one say, that the whooshing-sound is not a property of the tree?
If yes, show me that tree, please.
This is just one phenomenon one could have observed, defining the phenomenon “tree”.
How many more interactional phenomena are there that I haven’t noticed but that also define the “tree”? The symbiosis of roots and funghi, photosynthesis, millions of smallest insects and bacteria which need and interact with the tree…
What then, am I really doing when I see the tree as an “object”?
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Wind blowing through leaves in the trees is not only my favourite manifest experience in all of phenomena (waves breaking on shore is a close second) but it too has served me many times from childhood to my adult age, to contemplate their seeming connection and inherent existence to one another… Something so ordinary but mystical in it’s ability to describe the non dual nature of reality.
Your writing is spectacular and always an enjoyable read @KhyungMar !
I think the whooshing sound was for you. It existed only in your mind as a non-dual interplay between you and the environment around you.
Perhaps there was a deer out there and maybe some squirrels…but they would not have heard the same sound that you did…they would have perceived it differently.
The wind and the needles were dependently coexisting, each bringing the other into form…and in the process creating sound waves that you perceived as whooshing.
Steve, right on!
And Sujata comments from afar by reminding me of my favorite koan:
Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, “The flag is moving.” The other replied, “The wind is moving.” Huineng overheard this. He said, “Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving.”
This is beautiful, along with all the comments and insights along with this post, all is interconnected and interdependent. We perceive all phenomena as separate and dependent, this brings our minds into loneliness and isolation, leading to depression and despair, but when we realize and experience how we are all interconnected with each other and our environment, this fills that hole of isolation and bewilderment. we are never truly alone, we are more than the sum of ourselves.
Just picked up my reading from yesterday and it was talking about the wind: i felt it was very relevant to this post.
“The winds also are instrumental in the functioning of the six consciousnesses or minds (ear, eye, nose, tongue, body, and mental). Consciousnesses are said to “ride” on winds in the same manner that a horseman rides his mount; by traveling on the winds, consciousnesses are able to leave their bases in the sense-powers (located in the eye, ear, and so forth) to contact their objects. Because minds are inoperative without winds to provide a medium for their movement, and because winds lack specific direction without minds, minds are likened to cripples with sight and winds to blind men with legs; the lame climb on the backs of the blind and together they can move about. Because the winds are the medium for the operation of minds, fluctuation in the winds necessarily affects consciousness, and thus it is crucial for tantric yogis who wish to yoke consciousness to gain control over the movement of winds. Tantric yogis engage in a variety of practices to bring about a concentration of the winds, for concentration of the winds leads to concentration of consciousness.”
When we realize that our physical bodies are made up of the exact same building blocks that make up every other part of the universe we also realize that all we need to do to understand our seemingly complex relationship with the world around us…is to know our own self.
And…experience is definitely the key. Great word in today’s WoW…praxis…practice as distinguished from theory.
Thanks for the quote. Absolutely…‘concentration of the winds leads to concentration of consciousness’…however when the Mistral wind is blowing there are cases of murderers being let off due to being driven ‘temporarily insane’ by the strength of the wind!
There’s a good article in Smithsonian Magazine about that. Here is the crux of it:
Drews’ work is founded on the idea that, based on a slew of archeological evidence, it wasn’t actually the Red Sea, but the Eastern Nile Delta, at a body of water called the Lake of Tanis, that did the parting, the Washington Post explains. Given the conditions of the lake a couple thousand years ago, a coastal phenomenon called a “wind setdown”—very strong winds, in other words—could have blown in from the east, pushing the water to create a storm surge in another part of the lake, but completely clearing water from the area where the wind was blowing. As the Washington Post writes, such events have happened fairly recently in parts of Lake Erie and in the Nile Delta.
