Discovering Awareness of Space

There is definitely a discernible shift occurring in my consciousness after just a few days in Japan.  In an environment with both depth and intensity, the sensory stimuli can be overwhelming when one attempts to approach it from an old way of being.  In my old world there is a tendency to attach labels to things, and this is called "knowing."  In listening to one another speak people rush to conclusions as to the meanings of sounds, unconsciously assuming that a particular vocalized pattern inherently means whatever the associated mental box says it means, and as a result communication comes to function as a mathematical equation (A + B x 2C/3D = I disagree) and conversations become mechanical and depersonalized.  We inevitably get distracted from the individual in front of us; we are no longer present to their subjectivity and the possibility that their mental boxes do not reflect the same assumptions as ours.  We get trapped in this mental space that is neither here nor there, where we are neither in the world nor truly within ourselves, for whatever finite structure we project upon the world we must also project upon ourselves, abstraction supplanting reality and truth.  Yet it's a whole other story when you have no frame of reference for the emergent cultural and linguistic context in which you find yourself.

The old way of listening was largely a passive process, you pay attention just enough to pick up on the details that allow you to decide what box to place it in.  I don't speak Japanese, or at least very little, and have but a painfully limited understanding of the nuances of Japanese culture, so to attempt to engage in this environment on such a superficial level would leave me either void of any comprehension and continuity or overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance.   Though I've lived abroad before, I find myself now more deeply embedded in foreignness.  European environs reflect a kinship in their cultures to that of the United State, which hearkens back to their common origin.  In Japan that is largely not the case, though internationalization has done much to bridge the gap.  Whereas in Germany I could at least sound out the words I couldn't yet comprehend, in Japan I am at a loss, for they have not one but two phonetic alphabets, and these have only limited use in writing as most words are written as kanji, Chinese symbols with little to no phonetic correlation at all. 

As a result, I find as I enter into this world, the old practice of habitually attaching preconceptions onto the forms in my environment finds no footing, and so I find myself naturally shifting into a space where I let those old habits go and I simply become present to my circumstances.  I immerse myself in the experience without becoming entangled in associations.  My left-brained tendencies toward linear thought and structured reason recede to give way to a softer and more intuitive fluidity of consciousness.  Spoken language becomes music and its written word registers as would a work of art, my attention being drawn as much to the space in between as to the forms themselves.

My brain lets go of thoughts and analysis, opening wide to the full range of possible perspectives.  And I find that this foreign world seems to naturally lend itself to this frame of mind.  I find it in the temples and shrines with their vaulted spaces holding pockets of serenity within the confines of structures both massive and archaic.  They provide an immediate and dynamic contrast to the hustle and bustle of the omnipresent tangle of concrete and modernity.  I find it in the gardens that balance cultivated design with natural beauty.  I find it in the food that comes prepared to feed the eyes as well as the palette.  I see it in written language where words are drawn more than spelled.  It shocks the senses out of their ego-driven nether region of the mind into a state of awareness of something more.  It awakens something that is capable of seeing beyond the mental boxes, through the veil of assumptions and preconceptions into the very face of what is.  It is the very space of consciousness itself, the room out of and into which the thoughtforms emerge and are able to exist.

blue sky is hidden

behind the darkening clouds

sun shines unhindered