“The Pen”

In dharma studies recently, our instructor told us about the analogy of “the pen” to illustrate for us emptiness and karma. She held up a pen and asked us what it was. Of course, the whole room agreed that it was a pen. But then, she asked, “and if a dog saw this, what would the dog see?”

There was some debate. Maybe, the dog wouldn’t even notice. Likely, though, the dog would see a chew toy of some sort.

“Humans see ‘pen’ and dogs see ‘chew toy.’”

The exercise was to show us that your mind is where the meaning is made about anything, any person, or any object. Everything and everyone are empty, and it’s our karmic seeds and our mental projections that give things their weight, their meaning, and also, our suffering.

I began to think more deeply about the pen, and about emptiness. I mentally trekked back to pandemic times, swirling around with thoughts of someone I considered a light bearer and teacher.

I spoke very openly about it with a friend, who said to me:

“Andee, you were in love. He could have taken a shit, and you would have said ‘THAT is the most beautiful shit anyone has ever taken.'”

It was quite profound for me to think back to those times. I was experiencing space in my mind for the first time in years, and in the mornings, I heard nothing but quiet and promise. There was finally an “out” for me, from all the rigor and repetition and abuse from strangers at a job I held for 11 years. I was also just a few months out of addiction, and I was awake.

I loved him since I first heard his voice. He had a simple delivery, and I understood the words that he said.

When my mind started making space in those quiet, uncertain months, I didn’t know how to love whatever I was feeling. Those mornings in solitude running ten miles and then sitting for an hour watching the water… I would stretch as I watched him stretch. His body was my body. His spirit was my spirit.

I made him the figure in my mind that represented freedom.

I read the books he told me to read, listened to the things he told me to listen to, and all those teachings permeated my mind as my feet thump thumped, one after the other, every day. Every minute, more healing. Every moment, my brain repairing itself, becoming creative, becoming coherent.

I re-listened to one of his mediations from two years ago recently and I heard in it just a regular guy, saying regular words. When did the words of this man I once likened to a great messiah become regular?

As I think back on it now, it was the opening of my inner enveloped heart that was bliss; the long mornings and connection with myself, and the absence of anyone to infiltrate the purity of this new being I was channeling. This new being was whom I was to build, and as I floated and disassociated from old story, I anchored to him. But he was just “regular.”

And I know more than ever, it was never him. I was waking up, and I didn’t know how to be awake, so I said “it’s him. He does this.”

It wasn’t him. It was me. He was the pen.