To get things straight. It wasn't the opera directly on stage that my wife and I attended. It was film of the opera, broadcast live throughout the world onto the big screen. This, apparently, is the thing nowadays. Neither was it the actual live performance we saw. It was an 'encore' shown four days after the live event at the Royal Opera House in London. That's what happens when you live in the Highlands of Scotland.
There is indeed a lot to be said for this 'live opera at the cinema' concept. Singers and scenes are seen close up and from a wide variety of angles, giving a more expressive and comprehensive view than is possible if you are attending the live event. There are subtitles, so those whose Italian is rusty (me) or non-existent (my wife) can follow the story easily enough.
We settled into our seats. No popcorn. Down go the lights, and a long but interesting intro ensues. Then the opera. The overture. Rich, clear, sumptuous. I feel nothing in response. Soon the main characters are on stage, and the story begins. It contains many of the silly cliches typical of opera: disguise, mistaken identity, and the rest. Nevertheless, the plot is not completely stupid, involving as it does the claims of two husbands-to-be that their soon-to-be wives are unconditionally faithful, impervious to temptation. A wager is made: will they remain faithful for twenty- four hours while all manner of delight is regaled before them?
The singing is marvellous, the staging magnificent, the music perfect. Yet still I feel nothing. I am not engaged. In fact I feel as if I am witnessing aliens acting out a narrative from a different galaxy. It is all very disconcerting. Betrayal, everlasting love, trickery and deception are the name of the game in 'Cosi Fan Tutte'. You see, these are, I eventually realise, all feelings of people who have a 'self'. Twenty minutes in, I realise this is the crux. I am relating from a position of a person who is no longer a person: who has no self.
By now I am feeling very confused and quite physically ill. My stomach has constricted into a tight ball, a tangled knot, and is giving me considerable pain. This isn't what I signed up for at all. However, instead of feeling a deep calm and tranquility as a result of having left all these self-based feelings behind, I am stricken with a grave sense of wrongness. What have I done to myself? Or, indeed, allowed to pan out, since the practice of no-self is a piece of piss that happens automatically once you are in the habit?
Beginning to realise what has happened, I make an effort to come down into my body, into my feelings, come to my senses. Fortunately, I have not turned into a hard-core no-self robot, and after the interval healthier service is resumed. As we walk home beside the river, I recount my experience to my wife; I think she gets it.
The following day I feel anger and shame. Anger at what I have done to myself. And shame? Well, this is not a familiar feeling these days. It's not a 'nice' feeling at all, is it? But a keen sense of shame at having somehow let myself down. Strayed unconsciously off-track. Once upon a time, in my days of organised Buddhism, these feelings might have been put down to 'resistance' to the process of spiritual growth going on. Or maybe as a reaction from those aspects of myself that aren't into personal development. Nowadays, I think I can distinguish between 'resistance' and 'wrongness'. In fact, they are worlds apart.
It's there in the article by 'John Smith' that I referenced back in September. I just hadn't realised how viscerally true, how central to experience, what he was communicating is. Practice of 'no self' only works properly if your 'reality map' is what he terms 4D (three dimensions of space, plus time) ie the normal, everyday, 'linear' reality we inhabit. If your reality map encompasses multidimensionality in some form or another, then no-self just ain't particularly relevant, or isn't going to work. Go to the opera with a background in the multidimensional nature of the polyverse after a hearty breakfast of no-self, and you end up with stomach cramps and indigestion. Existentially confused.
My afternoon at the opera was in-your-face evidence that John Smith wasn't just writing a theoretical treatise. It's real - dead real, directly felt, and dead serious. Your reality map goes a long way to determining what works or doesn't work in your 'spiritual practice' - or in your life generally, I suppose. I hadn't really got that berfore.
Those emotions which, in my state of no-self I failed to properly experience, are not, as flatland no-selfies may claim, hindrances, or mere by-products of a faulty perception. No. They are part and parcel of the form and structure of universal existence as it manifests in all its glorious, imperfect, uniqueness in, and through - me. Our feelings and emotions are not just consequences, results, or side effects. All aspects of our being have meaning, purpose, their role to play in the divine unfoldment. Even self-based feelings can be echoes of spirit, of the infinite. Or gateways into communion with the source of creation. This is what my reality map is telling me at the moment.
Whatever the interpretation - and I may be wrong in my unfolding analysis - the entire episode shook me up emotionally. I felt psychically contaminated, poisoned; or as if I had been subjected to some kind of psychic vampirism. A couple of days after the trip to the opera, I contracted a head cold. This then morphed into a migraine - the first of any note for quite a long while - and the past few days have been spent in a strange, dreary hybrid of the two. Which is the main reason it's taken so long to write this little piece!
So I am sorry for having got sidetracked into the arid wastelands of a no-self that does not embrace the magnificent multidimensionality of existence - at least not explicitly. That sees voidness, emptiness, without granting equal weight to the infinite meaning-saturated movements that take place within that empty space. If anybody thinks I've got it all wrong, let me know. In the meantime, it's bye-bye no-self, and back on the rollercoaster of authentic felt experience in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Here's that link again:
www.energygrid.com/spirit/2015/04ap-dimensionalperspectives.html
