Chandeliers of Smoke and Light

The Uncompromising Nature of Freedom

Our thoughts construct chandeliers of smoke and light; obscuring everything.

It’s really the most extraordinary trick. The most incredible jinx. The inner magician turns a sleight of hand into an awe-inspiring, attention-grabbing, dopamine firing, mind-enchanting, figment of reality.

Samsara is the ghost in the machine.

When we see it, it’s not a bad thing. It’s truly not.

When you see how a magician’s trick works it’s fascinating that it works so well. You feel silly for being duped but it’s still a good show. There’s a kind of magic to the fact that the magic works. And no one really knows exactly how it works. So you don’t lose your wonder, it just sinks a layer deeper.

There’s always more to it than we can see.

And any way, you still need to master the trick.

You have to become the magician.

Does that make sense?

It’s like a deranged version of the old story about the fish-in-water:

One day fishy gets curious about what’s beyond the edge of his reality—he thinks he sees a bright light up there “beyond” everything, but he can’t tell if it’s in his head or not because how can something be beyond everything?

It makes no sense.

But then there’s these weird dolphins that keep saying there’s a whole other reality up there. But the idea of “another reality” also doesn’t make much sense. Any way, they say the dolphins ate too many puffer fish.

But one day, fishy just gets tired of it all.

He gets overwhelmed by curiousity and utterly bored of all the drama in his little fish world. Everything seems “off” and everyone’s going around in circles. His gut tells him that there must be something out there to help with all the misery—everyone eating everyone else and making a fuss about everything.

He desperately wants to help but he just doesn’t know how. For the first time, he admits to himself that he really, really, does not know what’s going on.

So he decides screw it, he’s going to do what the dolphins do.

For real, though.

Lots of fishies pretend to do what the dolphins do because it looks spectacular and they move so gracefully. But they never really go for it, so it always smells a bit off when they talk about it.

But fishy decides he’s willing to die for it.

He first swims deep, deep down to the bottom of his world. He gets as far down into the darkness as he can, further than he’s ever seen anyone go. He’s so deep he can’t see anything, so deep that he doesn’t have a single reference point. There’s no way to know where it leads.

Then, from within the deepest tunnel he starts swimming. He goes faster and faster. He swims with total abandon in the direction of a new truth. He races towards the very edge of the known; that place where the dolphins disappear and re-appear.

Fishy reaches his full speed just before the end-of-the-world and he shuts his eyes and flips his fins one last time as hard as he can, not as if he’s choosing to do it, but as if the ocean itself was driving him forward.

Whoooosh!

To his utter bewilderment, he bursts through into open space.

It was nothing like he had imagined.

His eyes wide open for the first time, he spins around in midair as light glistens from his translucent grey body; his inner world exposed to direct light for the first time. He sees a whole new reality, a whole new world of possibilities, a whole new sense of freedom; a vastness beyond comprehension. He’s never seen so far in every direction. He didn’t even know he could look in every direction; and from nowhere at all!

The amount of light is blinding, yet he has no eyes. Everything is gone, yet everything is right where it’s always been. There’s not a single concern.

In that moment he’s not sure if he’s dead or alive or even whether he exists. In truth, he’s so imminent that he can’t even ask the question. For a moment, he has no memories. He’s not even a fish anymore; he forgot all about the dolphins.

Everything is totally fresh.

He has no vantage point on what’s happening so his little fish brain gets totally reset.

Everything changes. Nothing changes.

He wants to tell the other fish what happened but he knows they won’t understand. He just can’t put it into words. How could he? All his words were about water. All the words are themselves drenched in the feeling of water, no matter what combination he puts them in, they have no reference point outside the known. The other fishies literally can’t think of anything other than water.

So he just mutters to himself, “the dolphins were right”.

But here’s the thing.

He always ends up back in the water.

He gets awfully addicted to the freedom and all the bright light up there—he feels like he has to constantly check that what he saw was real, that it really is up there, always there; that incredible space and light.

He’s terrified of not being able to swim fast enough to see it. That unfathomable, infinite, peace, it’s all his, and yet it haunts him that in the water, it’s all still quite the mess. So he builds up more and more speed and jumps out over and over again, but he always ends up back where he started. No matter how high he jumps.

And any way, it’s tiring, and he has to eat. It’s like he’s discovered a whole new reality but the world hasn’t discovered it. A peculiar divide grows inside him; a strange, new kind of longing arises.

He’s split between two worlds, caught in a spiral of coming and going, light and shade, freedom and function. He talks to some birds out in the open air, but to his amazement, they won’t believe him about the water!

They seem to be just as confused, but in a different way. They’re just flying about, playing in the air, ignoring the fact that in the water everyone is eating everyone else.

They seem completely oblivious to the world below.

It all gets awfully muddled up and he gets increasingly suspicious of the parts of himself who like to be up in the air.

He starts to wonder:

What’s really the difference between him and the other fish? Are the birds and the dolphins really that special, after-all? Is the open air actually better than the water? Is he himself a fish or a bird?

He really doesn’t know any more.

It all just begins to seem the same.

He begins to realize that, whether he’s in the water, the open air - it doesn’t really make a difference.

Slowly, day by day, he finds that he just always is where he is.

He finally begins to see that:

When everything fails to deliver,

then nothing is out of place.

the tender way
is the way of fearless humility
meeting life through the body and heart
forgetting aboveness
forgetting belowness
forgetting even beyondness
at home with things
and people

And you would think that is an ending.

But an ending, my dear fishies, it is not.

Destiny reveals itself as an endless deepening, with infinite new beginnings, and new, strange, forms of suffering—because you now deserve the insights they render.

You must be tested with uncompromising ferocity. You must know your failure so clearly that you can only love the failures of others.

You must die over and over again until death becomes your medicine.

You must become a spec of dust, only then do the obstacles disappear.

And in this unraveling, one question remains forever alive:

How much of the sheerness of this life can you endure!?

And from this imminence all manner of hilarious inscrutability emerges.

It is really, really, quite funny

much love,

Ruben