The comfort of home.

Joy of conjoined love.

Interdependence.

Time to hit the road.

The memory of water.  I have been fascinated by this phrase for the last several days.

The phrase has nothing doing with me remembering water.  It has to do with water as the repository of memories.  The concept is a bit of a Zen koan for me at the moment.  You know?  Like the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  What is the memory of water?

Like any koan worth its salt, the question is totally non-rational.  One can not puzzle it through logically to some sort of A=B; B=C; therefore A=C conclusion.  Koan “answers” are more like my mother’s answer to the question, “What is love?”  “You’ll know it when it happens, Sweetheart.”  So I am sitting in open affirmation waiting for the memory of water to appear to me.  I am standing in open affirmation.  I am walking, teaching my Spoken English classes, going out for going-away suppers with friends and students, drinking coffee in the morning, trudging up to class, stopping by the garden pond to watch the gold fish, conferring with foreign teachers, having lunch in the canteen on campus, giving final exams – doing all the everyday stuff in open affirmation waiting for the memory of water to surface.

I have been reading an interesting book by Lynn McTaggart called The Field.  She writes about a number of different areas of science which all seem to point toward a human mind’s ability to perceive and to influence what she refers to as the Zero Point Field, a subatomic sea of quantum level energy forces.  I haven’t finished the book so I haven’t read the magic formula yet by which we can all create in the physical universe exactly what we see in our mental universes.  But I digress into cynicism, doubt, and ambiguity.

I think one of the reasons I am enjoying the book so much is that it successfully (at least for me) combines the vocabulary of scientific investigation and a science-based conceptualization of the nature of the universe with tantalizing hints at a different way to describe the spiritual or mystical side of existence.  Those have always been fascinating facets of life to me.

My guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi, used to talk some of his higher level meditation experiences.  Sometimes he let slip that he saw us as balls of light, a comment that I found interesting as it was such a conundrum – the English version of a koan.  With Gururaj one always had to wonder if he was speaking in metaphors or literally.  Since I was born very near the state of Missouri and firmly believed that such airy-fairy comments should have a provable scientific basis, I found such comments by my very own guru hard to dismiss and hard to accept at face value.  Still he was a “guru”, and in those days of my awe-struck innocence, that meant that he was able to see or had already seen things that I was too earth bound to perceive.

On the other hand, I did once have a very interesting meditation experience.  Coming back up a level of conscious awareness, I had the very peculiar experience of being an electron in an atom.  I don’t mean that it was a metaphor.  It “felt” very real.  I remember a clear knowledge that I could easily slip back into a state of energy.  But, I was really enjoying the experience of having form, of having stability instead of flux for the time being.  I felt perfectly balanced and stabile in form because of my proximity to the nucleus of the atom.  We perfectly balanced each other and that balance allowed me to retain form for as long as I wanted to.  Becoming more conscious during my meditation, I began to think and process this very strange “experience” of being an electron.  For all the world it reminded me of sitting comfortably in front of a warm fire in the fireplace on a cold winter’s evening.

After a while contemplating the feel of being an electron and slowly becoming ever more consciously aware that I was in meditation, the Missouri side of my life reasserted itself.  I began to file the curious experience away in an appropriate mental box, Meditation Experiences Interpreted by the Subconscious in Dream-Like Images so as to Make Them Understandable to the Poor Boob Conscious Mind Inhabiting the Body of Thomas.  It’s a big box full of unexplained – maybe not necessary of explanation – kinds of spiritual and mystical experiences.

Still….  It felt very real at the time.

So about the memory of water.  Patience.  That’s the action in resolving the koan today.  I’ll know it when it happens.