Blowing bubbles to unlock the doors?
If you want to delight children, there is no sound more guaranteed to do this than the simple noise of a bubble popping. Blowing bubbles and popping them can entertain an entire horde for the best part of an afternoon, watching, chasing, catching them in your mouth, but why are they so fascinating, the gravity defeating flying element helps and that they make them out of soapy water with their own breathe, something out of nothing. However what is really magical is that they are so momentary, they are here and then they are gone, each bubble is different in size, speed, you have to pay attention to the rainbow spheres with everything you have got to be able to tell the difference and it is that act of pouring your awareness into them and forgetting yourself, that is where the real joy is. That is the lesson that children have to give to adults, especially if the adults are wise enough to give them the same attention that the children do to the bubbles.
Whenever and however you start observing, what is crucial is that it is the act of pure seeing without self-awareness that is the key to the ability to randomly generate joy that the children have and adults have such difficulty relearning. The bubbles are the perfect object to pay attention as well as being delightful so that you want to put your awareness into them, they also contain everything you need to know about the world to experience it as it truly is, which is what the Buddhists call the three characteristics that all reality contains of impermanence, dissatisfaction and non-self.
Bubbles demonstrate it so clearly because for a moment they have the illusion of permanence and perfection. When that bubble is flying it is amazing, for a child it is completely real, it is exactly what it is, a magical rainbow sphere floating in the air and then the illusion is popped, the first time this happens it can make some inexperienced infants cry in horror that something so beautiful is gone but they quickly learn that this is part of the process, and so they learn to pay extra attention whilst expecting the pop, and in time they are even delighted by the pop, by the ending of things, they appreciate that everything has a beginning, middle and end, and they are fully awareness of that.
A bubble is a simple metaphor for reality as it only has impermanence and dissatisfaction (the pop), no one thinks that the bubble has a sense of self, and by reducing the characteristics of reality from three to two it is easier to see, simpler to understand and find joy in. If we thought that bubbles felt pain, if they cried instead of popped, if they complained that they were doomed to pop, that they were nothing but a pretty sphere, it might be a more horrifying experience for everyone involved. If they were under the illusion that they were going to last forever, that life was only joyful floating through the air, and they were self-aware with the knowledge of their fate that the illusion was going to end, we would have a tragedy, a cruel joke and that we would be delighting in that fate would be cruel beyond belief.
Now you might reasonably be saying, I am not a bubble and you would be right (we last for a lot longer), but we do have the knowledge that we do not last forever, that life has suffering and most importantly we experience our own existence, whilst the bubble does not have self-awareness, that is why it is a simple model that helps us understand impermanence and dissatisfaction (the pop that always comes at the end). However turning that self-awareness into the illusion of self is what makes our lives so much more complicated, by not being simple, we increase our suffering, by not just enjoying the brief ride into the sky, by not delighting in something that is going to be over, by worrying about the pop, we forget to be aware of the beauty of this moment we call life, we worry about the end and forget to pay attention to the middle.
It is the three illusion that there is a self, that the bubble has a self that is separate from it's bubbliness that the trouble starts for us, being separate, having a duality, being the bubble and an observer, a watcher of the bubble that is part of the bubble and that ends when the bubble ends is the source of so much of our suffering. That is not to say the pop does not come, it does, but concentrating on the pop to the exclusion of the sheer delight of being a bubble of consciousness is dangerous for our happiness, by being separate from the bubble instead of firmly in the bubble means we miss out on so much joy, we miss out on being a bubble, doing bubbly things, floating higher than any other bubble, defeating the gravity of our lives, being free in the moment of our bubbliness. To be clear we only get one moment to be a part of the bubble, one journey from being made and into the sky and nothingness again, and what stops us is the illusion that we are separate, and it is an illusion, a very convincing illusion, and the illusion is part of being the bubble that is a human.
However if we are able to see past the illusion, we are able to just be a bubble again, intact and experiencing life exactly as it is, that is what the Buddhist mean when they say that non-self is an illusion, that is why they spend so much time investigating the three illusions, so that they can experience being the bubble rather than just observing the bubble of life as it floats past us. When you examine experience, that is bringing concentration to the consciousness of the six sense doors (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and thought) you can recognise the three characteristics, impermanence, dissatisfaction and non-self, that is reality, and by breaking our illusion we get to move past it, reintegrate ourselves in to the experience of being a bubble in time and space. It is by truly seeing a bubble as it is, that you would see that it has those three same characteristics the same as us, whilst it only has two of the illusions that we do, we have an extra illusion to dispel.
That illusion of separateness is the most difficult to move past as we are in the middle of it, we are trapped by the sense of agency and permanency of our being, holding on to it like it is the most important thing in the world, and by doing so, we are missing out on the experience of being exactly what we are, the experience of doing, growing, learning, listening, feeling what is happening now. Giving up the illusion allows you to be present, rather than lost in the past or future, you are able to pay attention to the actual moment you are in, the people you are with, the energy that you process in the moment and that is beautiful, that is where the joy is always present, it never somewhere else, it is exactly where you are, so stop putting a distance between yourself and the moment you are in, and be within the bubble that you are now.
