To conduct this experiment you will need at least four friends, one of whom reads out the following instructions, and helps the others to comply with them conscientiously.
Experiment: part one
Each of you is supplied with a card with a head-sized hole in it, and a mirror that's roughly as big as the card.
Hold the card out at arm's length and note how empty that hole in the card is, how imperishable that space is (there's nothing there to perish), how timeless (there's nothing in it to register time with).
Now see how perfectly filled that space is with whatever's on show (with the opposite wall and window and curtains, plus your feet and legs, for instance), and how perfectly united that imperishable emptiness is with its contents, every one of which is perishing.
Observe, however, how this fullness-emptiness has three severe limitations. It's bounded by the card and quite small, it's over there and not here where you are, and it's unconscious.
Now overcome these three limitations by slowly and with total attention putting on the hole in the card as if it were a mask.
And, as soon as you do so, watch for the moment of truth when (i) the card vanishes and the space in it explodes into infinity, (ii) the space is no longer distant but right where you are, and (iii) it wakes up in you and as you: so that the space you were looking at becomes the space you are looking out of, the empty and filled and boundless and imperishable space that is you, that you are.
And now, with your card held on as far as it will go, look round at your friends your funny friends. See that, on present evidence, only you have left behind your humanness with its limitations, and arrived at the limitless and timeless and imperishable fullness-emptiness that's alive to itself as the possessor of these essentially divine attributes. See how your friends are stuck in their cards, stuck with their humanhood, and only you are clean through to your Godhood.
And if all the sentient creatures in the Universe were to be crammed into your sitting-room, and each supplied with a holed card of appropriate design, and persuaded to carry out our experiment along with you, you would still be the only one to jump clear of its little hidey-hole into the OPEN! Every one of those marmot-like creatures would visibly be held up at the mouth of its hole, stuck with its own particular creatureliness. Yes, you are the Alone, the Absolutely Unique One! And your lifelong dedication to your specialness and centrality and importance was more than prophetic. It was perfectly justified, altogether well-founded from the start!
End of experiment - part one.
And the beginning, I guess, of a serious doubt in your mind. I can hear you saying: What's true for me must be true for each of the others, in his or her experience. There's nothing to prevent anyone breaking through to the other side of the card and claiming the uniqueness that I claim. Obviously this uniqueness is nonsense, a subjective delusion. The ultimate delusion of grandeur, at that!
Through the looking glass
Part Two of our Experiment addresses this objection. With one hand hold your card right on, and with the other hand hold out your mirror at arm's length.
You'll not be surprised to see how that familiar person behind glass over there, a metre or so distant from where you are this side of the glass, is stuck, along with the myriads of other marmots, at the mouth of his hole. He's one of them, nothing out of the ordinary, not special at all!
But wait a minute!
See how, this side of the glass, you are still this unbounded and imperishable Space for things to happen in. Observe the total contrast between the human you that side of the glass and the Divine You this side, which is your side, the side you are on. Right here you are still absolutely out of the ordinary, absolutely unique.
How can these two wildly incompatible versions of you coexist? The fact of the matter is that no creature gets through to its divinity as THAT CREATURE. Unable to survive the rigours of that journey of all journeys, it perishes en route. Only the Special One gets through to the Special One. Only the Alone makes it all the way to the Alone. His amazing grace sees to it that you really are through to Him not as you but as Him.
What you now have to do is to take up His invitation and go on seeing your way Home to Him till your seeing becomes much more than seeing. Till it ripens into trusting wholeheartedly the only One that's absolutely trustworthy, and merging wholeheartedly into the only One that can really be merged into. And then you will find that, as Sullivan suggests, the last traces of your neurotic anxiety will dissolve, because your basic existential anxiety about your true Identity is finally dissolved.
From To Be and Not To Be, That is the Answer, copyright by Douglas Harding, published in the UK in 2002 by Watkins Publishing.
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