What Else Is A Whale Going To Do?

I don't talk to my wife about this "stuff" very much. It's okay if I want to pursue it and go on two or three day retreats, just so long as I don't feel the need to talk to her about it. It's too out there, too wackadoodle.

But every now and then the universe speaks through her, and its always a pleasent surprise. We were watching a nature show one night on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel about the humpback whale and its 10,000 mile migration from the Artic sea to Hawaii to Antartica, where for 4 - 6 weeks or so the krill are spawning and proliferating and the whales and other denizens of the sea feast on the krill and each other until same time next year. It's a trip that takes the humpback many months to complete before it turns around and makes the long haul north again.

Filled with a certain amount of sympathy for the whale I turned to my wife and said, "That's an awfully long way to go for a meal, don't you think?"

She measured me over her reading glasses for a moment, put down her cross word puzzle book and said, "What else is a whale going to do? Do you think its got anything better to do?"

When I didn't have a snappy retort, she went back to her cross word puzzle, discussion over. But there was a certain matter-of-factness about those words that echoed in my head like a silent mantra: What else is a whale going to do? What else is a whale going to do?

That's what a whale does, it lives and breathes and swims and eats and breeds and dies in the ocean. It swims 10,000 miles for an exceptional once a year meal. And if a whale were to awaken to its true nature, would it live any differently? Maybe, maybe not. But for sure it would still be a whale swimming in the ocean except now it would be swimming and feeding and breeding and dying consciously. Awakened or not, from a superficial perspective it doesn't seem like the whale transcends its whaleness or the oceans it swims in.

And before he or she awakens, what else would a human being do but chase desires, experience disappointment and sorrow, momentary joy and laughter, pursue a career or toil at a job,create a family or fly solo, winning and losing, succeeding and failing, getting older, losing youth, dreams, health and ultimately the form itself.

Doing what we do every day from the moment we get out of bed in some way is like that whale on its 10,000 mile journey. Except we don't all seem prone to accepting swimming in our ocean as our natural environment or condition but feel this ordinary life of ours needs to be seen through as illusory and transcended for some disembodied bliss and R and R.

But I think, and I could be wrong here, that these bodies of ours are the doorways through which we encounter THAT which we are. On a human scale and cosmic scale simultaneously.

It's something like that Gestalt drawing containing the single face of a young pretty woman or old big-nosed hag depending on how you look at it. You can't see both faces distinctly at the same time, only sequentially. Squinch your eyes one way and see the pretty young woman. Shift your gaze a bit and see the old hag. It's a matter of shifting your focus bewteen foreground and background. You treat the backgound as foreground and the hag appears and vice versa. Whichever one you focus on the other disappears into the background, temporarily hidden from sight until revealed by a shift in perception.

When I view consciousness through conceptual understanding I experience it one way. When I view consciousness through non-conceptual understanding I experience it another way. Even though it's the same consciousness.

This shift in perception is something we can all experience because it's in our naure, it's who and what we are. I find I recognize the shift has occurred not so much because everything looks different - though sometimes things look exceptionally themselves - but because my relation to the world feels different. One moment I feel like a separate being, and the next I experience no separation. And the quickest way for me to lose that feeling of non separation is to over think it.