Not Many Things…Not Separate

As you watch this scene, think of mind, body, and experience where Caine speaks of “bow, target, arrow.” Most of us, after all, knowing nothing of archery; have probably never shot anything but those suction-cup tipped arrows in the playsets we had as children.

But we can identify with the teaching lesson here by merely watching the direction of the metaphor. Caine begins by saying that archery is a form of meditation. Therefore, its metaphors point within, to the most practical and elemental aspects of our lived human experience. Mind and body — the bow and the arrow of the self (it actually doesn’t matter which is which, by the way, because they are symbiotic elements — in simple language, you can’t have one without the other). Their “target” is life, experience, growth, wisdom.

Now we often speak of these as “many things,” “different things.” Yet it is but a convention, an occasional semantic necessity, or as my friend and teacher Carol Anthony describes such conventions, “handholds” (in the sense of rock climbing, that is, handholds on a cliff face or a similar climb). But ultimately, the division of mind and body is a falsehood or at best a half-truth. We can, when we must or when it delivers a point, speak of them with separate words; but we must experience them as one.

In fact, when our practice leads us far enough in our climb up the rockface, we can experience mind and body as beyond one, beyond number. This, I imagine, would be about as far as we can approach anything that could truly be labeled “enlightenment.”