If we want to begin to restore some imagination to our political and social lives, which our future may depend upon, where do we start? A good place might be the 13th Century. That’s when Japanese Zen master Dogen told us we could embrace a billion worlds in a single moment.
That’s a lot of worlds and possibilities that go with them. By “a billion worlds” Dogen meant the vast, interconnected Universe and all its stuff. We’re not going to count it all up on our fingers and toes.
Dogen’s promise came to mind after reading a new book, An Immense World, by Ed Yong. Writing about the nearly infinite variety of sensory abilities enjoyed by creatures great and small, Yong says, “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness.”
We are such an animal, of course, and a lot of “reality’s fullness” escapes our notice. So it goes. Our error is assuming that what we sense is all that there is to sense. Dogen is trying to liberate us from that error. He wants us to keep reaching for new worlds, new possibilities, and not just grasp those we think we know.
While walking with our little dog Taffy not long ago, I could see that her very being was immersed in a world I couldn’t know. Worlds opened to her every breath. Yong had tipped me to what was happening. “To a dog, a simple walk is an odyssey of olfactory exploration.” We think our dogs are just sniffing pee, but for them, with their noses to the ground, life abounds.
I got kind of dizzy walking along pretending I could somehow see, hear, smell, taste or feel all the sensing going on around me by the squirrels, blue jays, cardinals, ants, mosquitos, cats, foxes (there’s at least one with a lair near us) and other critters. Imagine if for just one moment such a super-sense was possible. Our experience would explode in magnificent colors, symphonies of sound, the world turned into a bakery of odors, the plucked blade of grass deeply textured. We would surely want to taste it all.
Marcel Proust hinted at such an experience when he wrote:
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
There’s more than fancy to all this. If we’re to find our way through the dark thicket of crises we’ve wandered into, we’re going to have to use our imaginations. We’re going to have to open our senses to the wider world, and to do that we’ll have to drop the notion that we already see, already know, what is there to see.
In Grimm’s tale of Briar Rose, the sleeping princess was hidden behind a seemingly impenetrable hedge of thorns. A century passed before a prince arrived who saw flowers where others saw only thorns and so discovered a path to the castle beyond.
In a modern tale, filmmaker Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the title character is obsessed with building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon where he plans to have Enrico Caruso perform for the grand opening. To do so he must haul a steamship up and over a small mountain. He fails, of course. Along the way he pays little attention to what he might have seen if he’d opened his heart and mind to the spirituality of the indigenous people and the incredible rainforest around him. To him, it was all a hedge of thorns that he was certain he could cut his way through.
Herzog called his film “a great metaphor,” leaving unsaid what it’s a metaphor for. Well, I think it’s a metaphor for me, and by me I mean us.
Doesn’t it seem to you that today’s political world is dominated by folks who are stubbornly focused on hauling their steamships over mountains in the Amazon? I know I make the error, putting my head down and assuming if I just push a little harder, chop away at the hedge of thorns with a little more energy, that somehow, things will change.
The deficit of cultural imagination is not limited to politics. Musician and music historian Ted Gioia writes at the Honest Broker that “when cultures stop innovating, they soon lose the essential skills they need for their survival.” He goes on:
There have been other periods of artistic stagnation in the past, and they usually signaled a collapse in other spheres of society too. You can’t lose creativity in the arts—its natural home—without seeing a rise of close-mindedness in other fields as well.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and we don’t need a top-down revolution of some sort to help return some imagination to our world. The late philosopher Bruce Wilshire writes, “The world is always pregnant with More, always presenting us with unseeable potential, with as-yet-unknown and ultimately unknowable possibility.” Each of us, individually, can search for the More.
Think of it as a Do-It-Yourself project. That’s what we’re going to try to do at A Billion Worlds. And, while you’re dreaming of your next DIY project, enjoy Bob Dylan singing a standard from 1940, Imagination. Dylan makes it new.
Hi Glenn!
Great article! Thanks for sending – and of course I do want to be on the mailing list. You have a gift for writing and unifying a theme to different places and times.
A healthy, imaginative and creative collective seems inextricably linked to a larger underlying principal that glues society together. At the individual level, I have come to recognize that it is the heart that guides this exploration. It’s the landscape shared by Dogen and Proust, as well as the place Ted Giola senses disarray if it is truncated.
Our nation has lost its heart, the space where optimism, creativity and the mystical reside. Yet I know there are others who see it right in front of us – like Ed Yong, and your sparkling prose. Your post did put a spring in my step! I really strive not to lose sight of my heart…and it is always good to be re-reminded. That was some good tonic Glenn. Thanks for being on the planet to give us all a reminder, and perhaps a little poke as well. Keep it up!
Thanks, John. I replied to your email before I saw this. Really appreciate you taking the time to respond. It matters much to me.