I didn't understand the full significance of this scene the first couple of times I saw it. But it's essentially the same thing that happens when a student gets whacked with the zen stick: for a split-second after you get smacked, you experience 'no-mind,' which is what Albert means when he says "you stop thinking."
It's not in the clip, but the scene ends like this:
Albert: It’s like I’m a rock or a dish of mold.
Albert: I’m whatever else is around. So I’m free to just exist.
Tommy: This is the answer. We just have to be this all day, every day.
Look at what happens here. First of all, Albert feels a need to define the experience.
And as soon as he feels the need to define the experience, he starts to lose the experience, to distance himself from it: "It's like I'm a rock or a dish of mold."
After that flash of direct seeing, he reaches into his own mind to come up with something with which to compare it. Since he has no experience at being a rock or a dish of mold (unless you believe in reincarnation), he pulls the comparison, in this case, from his imagination.
And given Albert's personality, it's no accident that he likened the experience to being a dish of mold rather than, say, a sunflower or a songbird. So the direct experience becomes tainted with aspects of Albert's own neuroses.
This is the the challenge, and one with which I struggle: to experience directly, without comparisons, cross-references, suppositions or assumptions. The moment you say, even to yourself, "It's like..." you've lost it.
2 comments:
Getting punched in the head, unpleasant as it can be, often yields similar "Ah, ha!" realizations.
I KNOW! Once we try to describe the momets (because we base our lives linguistically), we lose them in a way. But then again, we recreate them into something brand new: a memory, a poem, a sculpture. We as humans need to reconstruct, rephrase. It's beautiful! I'm doing it right now, and I'm alive!
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