Pattern

Talking about deep silence in a recent interview, the poet David Whyte mentioned “The ability to see to the center of the pattern.”

The ability to see to the center of the pattern.

That phrase is written on a big imaginary piece of paper in my mind today, towards the left side of the paper. Closer to the center is the experience that I had for a brief moment as I was packing up in the office the other day. It was dark-ish, because the overhead lights had gone out, due to lack of motion. Interior doors were closed, and I realized that I was the last one out, rare for me. And then I experienced a moment of a particular flavor of existential terror. This has come over me a few times in the past, much more strongly, when I was depressed: When I realized that the sun was setting, I would be filled with terror. That was over twenty years ago now.

But in the office the other day, the terror was fleeting, and it came with the image of a seam in the fabric of things. The fabric is the day; it’s the fabric of life, and it covers most of whatever’s behind it. The fabric is my team, our camaraderie, our smooth interactions with each other, our respect and love for each other, the way we greet each other and work together. And it’s different from the way other teams work with themselves, and so we have our uniqueness. And in my moment of terror, I was the unwilling witness to a gap, a seam, a place where a rip might tear open at any moment and reveal the emptiness—the nothing. Behind which is silence, behind which is… ??

David Whyte said that Meister Eckhart said, “God is pure absence.” That’s also on today’s imaginary piece of paper.

And over towards the right side of the paper is something about pattern in the story “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang. The beings in Chiang’s story are alive so long as a pattern inside them is shifting. The pattern shifts as air (in this case, argon gas) flows past tiny gold leaf components in the creatures’ brains; when the air stops flowing, the pattern stops moving, and the creature dies. The configuration of the gold leaf is lost. The movement, the shifting pattern, is consciousness, and when the pattern stops moving, it is death. The story’s protagonist says, after discovering how his own consciousness works by vivisecting his own brain, “I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily.”

That idea is somewhere on the piece of paper too.

In the nanosecond when I had that flash of intensity come from the other side through that troubling seam, or rip, or slice in the fabric, maybe the thing that I sensed was not really emptiness, but intensity of experience. In the interview I mentioned above, Whyte talks about the experience of pure grief as it is expressed in the body. I had such a moment when my mother died. I was next to her, and I realized she was gone, and I threw myself over her body and sobbed. My body simply did that, without any conscious decision. The intensity emptied my mind of everything except for that moment, that experience.

It’s an example of the intensity of experience that once in a while breaks through the fabric of the quotidian. The experience could also be dread, selfless love, white-hot anger, sexual abandon. Moments when self-consciousness and self-control are pushed aside by the purity of an experience that is not planned, not civilized. These things have a similarity with my moment of existential terror and absence: Maybe what I’m talking about has something to do with the vacuum of the God-space, Meister Eckhart’s purely absent God?

Anyway, the reason I’m alert to the word “pattern” these days is that I’m trying to find a direction in which to write, something that will serve as a sequel to my novel, Soul Boundary. One of the parts that interests me most about the book (and whether it interests anyone else or not, I don’t know!) is the idea of soul as pattern. Toward the beginning of Soul Boundary, one of my characters says, “The continual shifting of a macro quantum pattern [i.e., “soul”] is part of the pattern.”

The shifting is, in itself, a something. What we are is always changing; maybe our deepest selves are like filaments of gold leaf continuously rippled and reconfigured by the flow of events, Spirit, choices, powers we know not of, and more. My soul is a thing in motion, ever recreated as God and I and the world interact and live out the possibilities.

… And thus ends the tour of today’s big imaginary piece of paper.