The Snake and the Rope
La serpiente y la cuerda
A reflection on the Indian understanding of reality as that which does not change, and illusion as that which does. Through the images of the snake and the rope, the mirage, and a broken glass cup, the teacher applies this distinction to the question "What am I?"
The Snake and the Rope
A reflection on the Indian understanding of reality as that which does not change, and illusion as that which does. Through the images of the snake and the rope, the mirage, and a broken glass cup, the teacher applies this distinction to the question "What am I?"
Reality is a very slippery concept, and a very important one. That is why philosophy is so valuable: it is the study of truth, of what is true and what is real.
The Indian definition of reality
It was a big revelation for me to encounter the Eastern take on reality, and more specifically, I would say, the Indian take. It has to do with the language of Sanskrit and the semantics of how we define what is. How is reality defined? How is illusion defined? I might be a bit wrong in the details, but the basic definition is this: what is real is the essence of something. The true essence of a thing is that which is real. Illusion is that which a thing appears to be but is not.
This makes quite a bit of sense until you add the next step: what is real is that which does not change, and what is illusion is that which changes. For a Western understanding of real and illusory, this can seem counterintuitive at first. At least it was for me. But then it can really start to clarify one's approach to reality, and it can be very profound.
The snake and the rope
One example comes from a teacher who lived in India near a mountain surrounded by fields. The people he spoke to walked in those fields and on that mountain, so he spoke to them about snakes and ropes. You could be walking along a path and see something, and the mind interprets it as a snake. So you have the experience of fear, of caution, a sense that you are not safe. You could run away, or you could get close to it. If you get close and look more carefully, you recognize that it was actually a rope. The instant you notice it is a rope, the fear disappears. As soon as the illusion dissolves, the fear dissolves.
That is one way of pointing to the difference between illusion and reality. The rope is a metaphor for what is real.
The mirage
The mirage of an oasis in the desert is similar. Most of us are not crossing sandy deserts in our daily lives, but it is something we probably grew up hearing about, and some of us have had a version of the experience. I have. It happens in hot countries. If it is over thirty degrees on a sunny day and you are on a long road that stretches toward the horizon, the concrete of the highway can get so hot that it produces the same effect as the mirage in the desert. Because of the temperature, the light is refracted, and the surface becomes a mirror. When you look down at the road or at the sand, you are actually seeing the sky. You are looking down and seeing a blue sky, and it appears that there is water.
So the reality is that you are seeing the sky. What you are seeing is, in that sense, real. Or you are seeing a rope. But the mental interpretation is snake, or water: one negative, one positive. I want to see water. I do not want to see a snake. But I am actually seeing sky, and rope.
The question "What am I?"
As a metaphor, this applies to the question "What am I? Who am I?" The question poses a similar challenge, because there is an interpretation. When I think about who or what I am, it appears to be very clear. The whole point of this work is to see that this is an interpretation, not reality. It is an illusion, like the snake and the rope, like the water and the sky.
There is something real that I am. What I am is real. I am. But I am not what I appear to be.
The subtlety here lies in understanding that what is real does not change, and that which changes is always illusion. That distinction can bring more clarity to the question of what I am. The body changes. It is born, and it dies. There is constant movement in it; cells age, and everything in the body changes. Therefore, what I am cannot be the body. What I am must be something constant.
There is something rather than nothing
The first step is to know for certain that I am, that what I am is real. One way to see this is through a very simple statement: there is something rather than nothing. Potentially, there could be nothingness. No universe, no people, no consciousness, nothing at all. That is not the case. There is something.
Even if there were nothing, it would be an impossibility, because it would require something to know that there is nothing, and then there would be something. Try to imagine that there never was a universe and nothing ever existed. For the mind, it is pretty terrifying to conceive of that. But it is impossible. And so there is something rather than nothing.
Now consider that what I am is that something which is. One teacher defines consciousness as the reality that is hearing these words. I call it knowingness. There is experience, and there is an awareness, a knowingness, that there is experience. If you think of the word "I," it seems to point to that which knows experience. So "I" is that reality, that which is real, that knows experience.
All of experience is always changing. You would not be able to name a single aspect of any experience anybody has ever had that did not come and go, that was not changing.
The glass cup
Here is another way to understand the nature of self, of illusion, and of identity. Suppose I say I know what I am: a body, a mind. Or suppose I say I know that this is a glass. It is a glass in two senses: the material, and the object we use for drinking, a glass cup. Let's ignore that there is a smoothie in it. If I say the reality of this is a glass cup, I would answer: no, that is exactly the illusion of what it is, because the glass cup is what changes.
If I drop it on the floor, it is no longer a cup. It is no longer something to drink from. I could say that it used to be a cup, but that is only conceptual, a memory. It is not the essential reality of it. I could break it into a million pieces, give it to somebody, and ask what it is. They would not say it is a glass cup. They would say it is a million pieces of glass. Then I could heat those pieces, add a whole lot of other material, and it would no longer be glass at all. The glass cup came and went. That is illusion, in the Eastern sense of the word.
But there was something real there. There is reality there. What is it that is real?
You can take this approach to anything, and more specifically to the sense of self. Its illusory nature, and its reality, are similar to the nature of the glass cup. The whole sense of what it is becomes deconstructed, to the point where nothing of what it appears to be remains, and yet there is still something that is real.
The self as a kaleidoscope
Look at thoughts. Look at sensations. Look at everything that appears to be "I," that appears to be self, and you will see a changing stream of sensations and thoughts. The thoughts themselves are a stream of colors, shapes, concepts, imagination, sounds, inner dialogue. All of it comes and goes, like a kaleidoscope. And we call that self. We take a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms, an imagined person, and say, "That is what I am."
You can take all of that apart through inquiry, or it can simply happen.
The glimpse
This is what we call a glimpse. A glimpse is when the structure in the mind that forms the person "I" stops; the brain stops producing it. We see that imagination like shattered glass dissolving into everything. And I remain as knowingness, as beingness. Something here that knows experience remains, while the sense of being a particular person disappears.
This can happen briefly and temporarily. It can happen partially, where the sense of being a person goes very, very far away. It is a very subtle thing, and what remains is a spacious knowingness. Or it can happen more or less totally, to the degree that not only the sense of being a person stops and disappears, but the whole experience of perception and sensation, the whole world, all of it stops and disappears. And then I remain. Something remains: not a person, not God, not anything. Just pure knowingness.
It is like waking up from a nightmare in the night: "Oh, it was all a dream. I am here." But in this case, all of reality, the whole experience of the universe, of this world of matter and space and persons and history and planets, all of it disappears. It is like waking up from a dream, and something knows that something remains.
I am sharing this because it is a very real possibility. In that glimpse, what is seen and understood very clearly, without any belief system, is that what I thought I was disappeared completely. So it is seen to be illusion. It is seen to be not what I am, because I still remain. Something remains.
And then what can be seen is all of it coming back, and it can be seen to be, in a sense, imaginary. Dreamlike.