Chapter 1.1
Awaking to awareness
In the northern darkness there is a fish.
His name is Speck of Roe.
Speck of Roe’s size? It measures I don’t know how many thousands of miles.
He changes and is now a bird.
His name is Of a Flock.
Of a Flock’s back—it spans I don’t know how many thousands of miles.
He rouses vigorously and takes to flight,
his wings like clouds arcing across the heavens.
This bird—
When the tide turns, he’ll migrate to the southern darkness.
* * * * *
This brief, enigmatic story is one of the most profound stories ever written. But to see its profundity we need to shift ourselves into the mythic mindspace.
The mythic mindspace would have been easier for Chuang Tzu’s native readers to occupy than for you and me. One reason for this is that the images in this story jar with our modern picture of the world. Speck of Roe must fill the northern polar ocean like an eel crammed into a specimen jar. Of a Flock’s wings must wrap around our planet, like a moth hugging a marble, and for him to take to flight he’d have to blast off this little ball and out and into the airless void of space. Unlike you and me, Chuang Tzu and his fourth-century-BC readers didn’t live on the surface of a tiny globe with a thin layer of atmosphere. They live in the Realm Under Heaven, a vast terrestrial realm the furthest reaches of which touch up against unexplored mystery. These events are unfolding in a sort of flat-earth cosmos that extends to infinity in all directions. In this unbounded, flat-earth cosmos there is ample room for otherworldly oceans so vast that a fish countless thousands of miles in length is but a speck (like a speck of fish roe), and it makes sense to think of the sky as being so infinitely vast that a bird with a wingspan countless thousands of miles across can just keep on ascending until it looks like a cloud arcing to the horizon.
If you live in the southern hemisphere, bear in mind that Chuang Tzu lived in the northern hemisphere. Whereas for you north is the world of equatorial palm trees and lazy sunlit days, in the Realm Under Heaven north is the unexplored region of mysterious dark. The royal throne faces south, looking out over the sunlit realm.
So forget these things, as best you can: your being on a planet, and your being on the southern hemisphere of this planet (if that’s where you happen to be). Imagine yourself in the Realm Under Heaven, a vast terrestrial realm the northern reaches of which touch up against an unexplored mystery of cold and dark.
Another thing that gets in the way of you and me entering the mythic mindspace is that English moves at a faster pace than Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is like a series of pictures, and these pictures create a mental spaciousness that is difficult to translate into English. You probably read this story quickly. This story, however, wants to be read slowly, with each line savoured, allowed to conjure a visual image, before moving on to the next line, the next image. To reproduce this mood in English I toyed with the idea of giving each line its own page, along with an artistic image. Like a beautifully illustrated children’s book. That’s how slowly, how pictorially, this story wants to be read. So, let’s re-read this story.
In the northern darkness …
Bang! We are not in the everyday world. We are in the mysterious, far north, beyond the furthest reaches of civilisation, beyond the limits of the known world. In this otherworldly, oceanic dark beyond the world …
… there is a fish. His name is Speck of Roe.
This fish is like a minute speck of fish roe, an infinitesimal speck in an infinite expanse of cosmic dark.
Speck of Roe’s size? It measures I don’t know how many thousands of miles.
Wo-ah! What? A speck? No. The camera of our mind’s eye zooms in, and now this fish looms before us impossibly large. We’re soaring across the length of it, dreamlike, traversing thousands of miles, and thousands more. Its size defies us. We cannot grasp it.
He changes and is now a bird.
We blink, and as in a dream, seamlessly, the image rearranges itself and we find ourselves now beholding a bird.
His name is Of a Flock.
A bird? No, many birds. A flock of birds. A thousand egrets, countless thousands, covering a silent wetlands.
Of a Flock’s back—it spans I don’t know how many thousands of miles.
Again we zoom in, as in a dream. We zoom in to just one of these birds, and now its back looms before us. We’re tracking across its back, trying to reach the extent of it. We cover thousands of miles, and thousands more, and still we do not come to the end of it. We have forgotten, now, the other birds. How can there be other birds? This one bird fills our field of vision. This one bird is all the world.
He rouses vigorously and takes to flight …
What momentous energy we sense in this bird, what life force, now, as it rouses, stretches its wings, and takes to flight.
… his wings like clouds arcing across the heavens.
Our entire field of vision is filled with its presence. Its wings arc across the heavens, spanning from horizon to horizon.
This bird—
Ah, this bird. That’s all we can say. We are in silent awe.
When the tide turns, he’ll migrate to the southern darkness.
When the moment is right, this bird will migrate south, to—?
~
And now, my apologies. Now we leave the dream. Here’s you and me back in the daylight world. Rub your eyes, and when you’re ready perhaps we might discuss this dream.
~
Of a Flock is a metaphor for awareness, your here-and-now field of consciousness.
Like Of a Flock, whose wings arc across the heavens, the wings of your consciousness span to the horizon. At the same time, the wings of every other being’s consciousness span to the horizon. You are of a flock, one bird among kin.
If this isn’t making sense, let’s consider a different metaphor: a mirror. Your field of consciousness is the glass in which images come and go. People. Objects. Your thoughts and feelings. Your changing body. In a sense, the glass is not the images: the images come and go, and this coming and going causes no harm to the glass. But at the same time, the glass is not a thing that exists separate from the images: the glass is always reflecting something, and the images that now happen to be present in the glass are present in the glass.
Consciousness—your field of awareness—is like this. The glass in which things are occurring. The wings beneath which things are occurring.
~
Where does consciousness come from?
Your brain is an infinitesimal speck (a speck of roe) in the dark infinity of cosmic space (the oceanic mystery of the northern darkness). An infinitesimal speck, and yet its neuronal networks are unfathomably vast (from head to tail Speck of Roe spans who knows how many thousands of miles). Your field of consciousness arises somehow—you know not how—from your brain (Speck of Roe changes into Of a Flock).
~
Awareness is the most marvellous phenomenon of the cosmos.
The fact that matter exists, and that it arranges itself into stars, and brains, and coffee cups—this too is astonishing. But the existence of awareness—not just suns and brains, but sunsets—is on another level altogether.
And so, Of a Flock is the grandest, most magnificent image in Chuang Tzu’s book. And not just Chuang Tzu’s book. In the entire literature of world mythology is there a creature, a metaphor, that comes even close to the grandeur and magnificence of Of a Flock? The mirror metaphor, for example, does an excellent job of pointing to awareness. Indeed, in many ways the mirror metaphor does a better job of pointing to awareness than the metaphor of Of a Flock. (For many of you the image of Of a Flock will not have made much sense, but then the mirror metaphor might have done the job of helping you to see what I mean by awareness.) But for all the merits of the mirror metaphor, there is nothing grand and magnificent about a mirror. There’s a mirror in my bathroom, and now that I’m remembering its existence I can’t say that my heart is leaping. It’s just a tiny lump of lifeless glass in a wooden frame. But Of a Flock—that image is grand and majestic, attention-grabbingly fantastic, vibrant with life. Of all the metaphors ever created to represent awareness, I know of none that do as good a job as Of a Flock at conveying something of the wonder and awe we feel when we awake to the existence of awareness.
If you ever doubt your worth in the cosmos, remember this: You are not your body. You are not your thoughts and moods. You are not this or that thing. You are the grandest of mythical beings that has ever been imagined in the entirety of world literature. You are the wondrous bird Of a Flock.
And if you ever find yourself questioning the worth of someone else—an annoying neighbour, a barking dog—remember this: They too are the grandest of mythical beings that has ever been imagined in the entirety of world literature. You don’t see it at first. At first all your eyes see is a body, an egret. (The annoying neighbour, the barking dog.) To see it you have to zoom in, right in. And then back out again. Even if the other person, or the barking dog, doesn’t see that they are awareness (and almost no one does), you do. You who have awoken to Of a Flock, you who have zoomed into and through the presenting body, the thoughts and moods, zoomed through and out again into the space beyond, you see that they too, like you, are not their body. You see that they too are the wondrous bird Of a Flock.
You, me, and every other being on this speck of cosmic stardust—we are kin. And what kin! In all the vast infinity of a profoundly deaf and blind cosmos, it is in us, and us alone, that the lights are on. It is we, and we alone, who are light. It is we few—we countless billions, but we few as compared to the infinite expanse of blind matter—who have risen from the northern darkness and spread our horizon-spanning wings.
Me, you, your annoying neighbour, that barking dog—we are precious, miracles beyond our wildest imagining. We are each the grand bird Of a Flock.
When the tide turns, he’ll migrate to the southern darkness.
If the northern darkness is the otherworldly realm of oceanic cold and dark, what is the southern darkness, this place to which Of a Flock is headed?
In the next section we land in the everyday world, the world of books, cicadas, and trees. And at the start of Chapter 2 we land at the southern wall, the bustling area of the city where the common folk live.
The southern darkness is this bustling, sunlit world in which you and I live.
Why describe our bustling, sunlit world as a darkness?
Because almost all of us are in the dark. We are conscious, but unaware that we are consciousness. Failing to see and identify with our field of consciousness, we instead identify with this and that thing, with the result that we cling to this and that thing and fight against that and this thing.
But when the time is right (when the tide turns) we awake to awareness (Of a Flock migrates to the southern darkness).
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