The Feel of the moment – Image by Elisa from Pixabay  https://pixabay.com/photos/evening-atmosphere-grass-sunset-4315445/

If you’re like me, you’re never entirely sure how much your feelings and perceptions reflect the circumstances in which you find yourself, and how much of your experience is dictated by the moods and expectations you bring with you into that situation.

I’m presently reading a chapter in a book (Keys of Knowledge, by Tarthang Tulku) that is exploring such questions, but doing so in such an unfamiliar way that I was ready to go on to another chapter that wouldn’t be so challenging for my trusted ways of understanding this world and my life in it.

But the author is someone whose insights I trust more than many of my usual ways of understanding; and so, I have returned to trying to fathom what he is talking about.

I’m not going to share all the language and strange analogies he uses to explore themes that are unusual in themselves, even for the forms of Buddhism I have previously encountered. But one thing is clear: he is using Western concepts to capture the spirit of a non-western way of viewing the dynamic unfolding of our human lives.

I realize that many of the concepts on which I rely are attempts to understand a cosmos that is far richer than can be captured conceptually. Using them can feel like painting a picture of a thrilling sunset with the bristles on the edge of a push broom. Anyone who attempts to use the English language to describe understandings that have arisen in other times and other cultures would surely face that same challenge.

One of the themes in these unfathomed pages for which I can at least find analogies is how the suffix ‘ness’ alters nouns to which it is appended. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but when we add “ness” to a noun (such as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’) we turn it into “a state of mind” (such as ‘happiness” or ‘sadness’). And that changes things.

“A certain ‘ness’ seems to be the key ingredient that gives continuity to our experience in time. The sky’s color may change, but the sky reliably remains the sky: it has ‘sky-ness”.

Similarly, to be happy or sad may be a passing mood, like the scent of rain or pine needles passing through on the back of the wind, but happiness and sadness are states of mind, which we identify from our past. Watching the sun setting across an open sea, we can be sad for a moment, because we have lost someone who would have appreciated it with us if they were still here. But adding ‘ness’ to “sad” turns our experience into an object: “sadness”.

When sadness settles in, we are like a coat-rack on which a familiar jacket is draped after a trek in the woods. Those feelings stick around when we label them as the state of mind we call ‘sadness’. But if those feelings were free to be part of the community of feelings with which we return from our walk, we are more likely to remember our burst of joy when an avalanche of fresh snow fell from a pine bough warmed in the early sunlight.

When we allow ourselves to change our moods, no particular feeling sticks around beyond its time; we remain free to follow the invitations of momentary experiences that are foreclosed when we assign them to a state of mind, such as ‘sadness’.

We can have a generous or stingy impulse in the flying moment, but when “kindness” or “stinginess” becomes a personal attribute to be cultivated or avoided, a distance is inserted between direct engagement and how we view ourselves.

What are some other nouns that are altered by appending the suffix ‘ness’?

Between ‘wit’ and ‘witness” there is the usual conversion of a momentary flourishing into a condition of mind; but the word ‘witness” is also used to assign a fundamental characteristic to the self. The self is the one who witnesses and owns our experience of being in this world.

‘Wit’ provides a playful engagement with life’s circumstances–allowing even painful occurrences to be lightened within a frame that exposes the temporary nature of particular events. But a ‘witness’ is called upon to observe, interpret and testify. To be a witness is to be an observer in a world of things; a subject in a passing parade of objects.

As witnesses and bystanders, we constantly report on events that occur around us, whether or not we have really been paying attention. But when we have ‘wit’ in how we view our experience, we sidestep our usual commitment to “the way things are” (as defined by an education in which we were often passive recipients of our culture’s biases and unexamined assumptions). Instead, we can access alternatives that have not been established by our familiar states of mind.

Oscar Wilde comes to mind as a famous wit of his time. On his deathbed, turning toward the wall beside his bed, his last words were reportedly: “Either this wallpaper or I have to go.” That offensive wallpaper may still be there in some garret room, but he is not.

Wilde’s wit was more powerful than the witnesses for the prosecution, who put him in jail because they couldn’t value the creative gift of a being who lived among them.