the void (or the sphere of sensibility)

Dealing with some loss, and the griefing process, and also still with Shambhala and Pema Chodron,  I've had some.... not depressing thoughts, but... um.... thoughtful thoughts.

I'm not sure when I started thinking about the void.  Maybe it was last week, when I decided to cancel the cable.  I used to be a rabid television watcher, but the first part of this year I stopped almost completely.  (BP?  Oil spill?  Huh?)  Going back to it this summer, I noticed I wasn't really watching it, so much as endlessly flipping through the channels in search of something TO watch.  There was not much interesting to see.  And WAY too many commercials.  Plus, Comcast has added a crawl on the bottom of the screen, something about "digital improvements" blah blah blah - which will either cost me more money per month, or it means I have to buy a new television because mine isn't... digital enough, I guess.

I called Comcast to find out, and the customer service woman implied that I was stealing channels - getting channels that I wasn't paying for.  As if I had hacked it.  Which I didn't.  I can't help it if they can't keep track of what gets piped into my home.  Anyway, she made it very easy to cancel it in an indignant huff.  Plus, I'm getting a new ISP, so I think I'll be able to stream most shows I want to see.  And I have 464 movies on my list at Netflix.  There will be plenty to watch.

Still, there is a sense of losing a connection to the world.  The ability to see things in real time - watching the news on September 11th comes to mind.  But for the most part, it doesn't seem to be information I need to know, or that has any real bearing on my life, or that I can't access elsewhere, like the library or the internet.

It does, however, seem to make me be less present to what is directly around me.

I had this thought, a few days ago, that the only things I can truly know are those things directly in my line of sight.  Or smell, or taste, or touch, or hear.  As if there is a sphere of sensibility that surrounds me, and moves with me, and that is what I can actually know.

And it is all I can know.  Everything beyond, or outside of the sphere, is essentially void.  I cannot know it, I cannot possess it, I cannot control anything outside the sphere.  I have to trust, as I move around, that my body carries the sphere of sensibility with it, so I can be present anywhere - but then the other stuff no longer in the sphere becomes void.

The visual of it is not unlike the photos of the planet Earth as it drifts in space.  All the blackness of the void.  Kinda scary :(

These electronic things - cell phones, internet, television - seem to extend our sphere of sensibility.  Little thin lines of electrons spewing out to and fro, circling the world.  If you are very active... well, there's a reason they call it the web.

Yet, the digital age is so ephemeral.  Not like when you used to get a postcard, or a letter.  If it were special, it gets a pretty box, and the letter lives in it, and the box lives in a special drawer.  Go to the box, open the drawer, take the letter out and look at it again.  Hold it in your hand, and show it to other people.  Eventually, it would show the wear and tear, the patina of the journey, developing a worn spot where your fingers touch it, and a fine progression of wrinkles where the paper bends as you turn it over time and time again.

Now, in our digital age, when the line is cut, it's gone.  No evidence that it - the feeling, the thought, the memory, even the person - even existed.  Disposable.  Don't even have to carry out the trash.

Poof.

It's one reason I think I am really going to like this business that I am starting - silver charms for charm bracelets.  Little shiny memories, feelings and thoughts you can roll around in your fingertips.  Keeping the void at bay.

I know, I know.  That's an illusion, too.  Paper doesn't last.  Silver doesn't last.  In some ways, maybe the digital age is more honest.  The void is ever encroaching, bigger than our powers can comprehend.  

As I said elsewhere, it is why we must be brave.

Sound depressing?  It could be.  But I realized this morning - what Shambhala is trying to teach me is that the only way to live, the only way to keep the darkness at bay as a human being, is to remain open.  To know and accept that the void is there, to shine the light as bright as possible, and to expand the sphere - this gift of existence that I have been given - as much as I can.

Ephemeral or not.  :)
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