Dora, the archetype, the form and the Whole

Since the girl “on the right” seems to be the model that inspired the study – the pencil sketch on the left – we can say that the first one is the “subject” taken as a model; in reality, on the contrary, the girl who seems real, perhaps, is the continuation of the sketch, so she could also be the subsequent elaboration of the “study”.

These so-called “right” and “left” are interesting, because we can see how the “project” (the archetype) descends and takes shape in matter which, in turn, constitutes not only an envelope, but also an active base that grows from atoms/molecules/cells until it conforms to the archetype (this said in terms known to the West).

“But this is not a real girl, it’s just a drawing!”
This could also be false, as I have known her and can testify to her physicality, and perhaps that drawing is only to represent her here on the page. Yes, after all this is a world of representations.

This, so far, is within the reach of most. But now comes the best part.

From what has been said so far, one could say that creation, therefore, “rises and falls”, but also that it is timeless (or as is emphatically said “from a time without beginning”), therefore it is motionless and that it happens now and now and now, as well as always, and therefore – perhaps – in specific “thens”, that is, contextual to single or aggregate phenomena such as molecules or planets that are born and end, but we could also say that creation may never happen.

This is the power of Time, which is also Non-Time (we are already swimming in reality and have just barely escaped from the “truth”).
But now let's get to the part of creation that concerns US.
Yes, because since Buddhist meditation practitioners have understood that everything is united (= uni-verse), we ourselves, being part of this everything, are indivisible from the mind (universal) reality that produces, nourishes and harmonizes everything, given that this mind is “us” - even if a more complete “us” - as is also “us” this harmony and this nourishment, due to the contemporary manifestation of all phenomena and the fact that they are interrelated. In fact, for Buddhism, a “universal mind” does not even exist.

In fact: the individual “things” are not only “phenomena” opposed to a motionless and eternal “noumenon” but they co-emerge, that is, they are interrelated without mercy and without the possibility of dividing them; it is only us – as human beings – who decide that the tree is different from its buds, its branches and its leaves, as well as from its shadow or from the forest, as well as from the feeling-of-the-forest-in-us.

In fact, the Buddhist trump card is that these phenomena do not presuppose an “other” noumenon (a divine beginning) or, better said, they show the obvious fact that every thinkable noumenon is, in reality, a “thought” that would segregate some part of this harmonious, oceanic Reality precisely because of the limitation of verbal thought, while the divinity, or the prime mover or noumenon, is not in fact separated from ourselves, who not only enjoy it, but also inevitably participate in it being at the same time 1) an epiphenomenon 2) part of the kaleidoscopic movement 3) the root itself. And the root is not only contemplated but also realized in meditation.

So without the invasion and pervasion of the concept of “divinity” but the presence of the same throughout the universe, we see as “divine” both the girl just sketched, and the painted one, but also the one “thought from the whole”, as well as the one that is in relation with every other phenomenon, but which is also “empty of identity” that is, being above all this identity exploded and oceanic.
Yet “Dora” - that’s her name - is convinced that her boyfriend will give her, on Thursday at dinner in an exotic and secluded restaurant, a diamond ring. Otherwise I fear that she will get angry and given the precedents of her relationship, I could even agree with her, despite her experience in meditation and the fact that she is Buddhist.

“But… All that these Buddhists babble about, hasn’t it already been given to us by birth by the Messiah or the Prophet if not by the Covenant between God and Israel?” some convinced monotheists might ask. In reality, the deepest, most abysmal thinking ability would be a free gift of the inner silence that arises from meditation, but we can embellish it with the most varied phantasmagoria and religious opinions, even making them rise to Truth.
Only one truth, in reality, non-existent and a precursor to all madness.

Reality is what concerns us in all our sincerity as beings who are eternal and transitory at the same time. Listening to the Prophet, the Messiah and the secret recesses of the Pact, we can find the most ancient verb of Gnosis, in whatever way it may have been reconfigured in past centuries. This is my open invitation also to the “monotheistic” religions not to remain only as a residue of a pastoral-epic time in which the story had the same tangible power as reality, producing from this today, unfortunately, the invasive shadow of the Truth. This immense visionary power, today, cannot but take a new, inevitable form. Ultimately, it does not seem to me to be a coincidence that the Buddhist approach of the Abidharma places YOUR relationship with phenomena as a founding factor, which can be – as it is in quantum physics – much more important than the “external” aspects (from me/everything) of the functioning of the world.

Returning to Dora, when she learned that her naked image would end up in a small summary treatise on Buddhism destined to go viral, she got furious and called me. I don't want to report what she shouted at me on the phone; then she calmed down. After all, even though she is rightly the guardian of the dignity of her image, she appreciated the fact that she could make a good impression and possibly find work as a model, actress or singer, given that she has a beautiful voice. She let go of the issue of the "dignity of the female gender", instead she called me personally an "a**hole" (making it a personal matter) but she appreciated the fact that she had become part of an "excellent" pocket presentation of the (NOT!) point of view of Reality according to Buddhism.

In fact, the last twist that Buddhism has in store for us is that everything we have said quite precisely now – from the Buddhist point of view – is actually nonsense, always from the Buddhist point of view (since there is NO “Buddhist point of view”), and this is not because of some compulsive/systemic iconoclastic thinking but because in reality, every form of intuition that we can make manifest in a dialogic way and through concepts is only a poor copy of what in the awakened-primordial mind (Belly-of-the-Awakened or Unsurpassable/Supreme-Awakening or Primordial-State) remains in perfect silence, a silence generally found during the exercise of silent meditation, where all this is intuitively realized even by an illiterate person (if he insists on denuding meditation). And so he can meet not only the coloured Dora, but also the sketched one, as well as the real one but, inevitably co-emerging with the newsagent, with the microbes on the manhole, with the street lamp, but above all with the flowers he saw today at the botanical garden, in particular with the camellias that, rightly, our oceanic, adored Dora prefers more than the other phenomena just mentioned.

Since I speak and write, it is however evident that this internally realized silence does not make me particularly arid; whoever wants to show us the opposite of himself by claiming to reach an "inner void" without return, already knows that he will be kept under surveillance and that sooner or later I will surprise him eating a pizza or happily consuming some chain of syllogisms.

I add that Dora, having been meditating for ten years now, has worn out her meditation cushions; both the one under her legs and the one on which she sits. Instead of doing as I did, in the style of the most ancient and rude Zen masculinity, she has not closed the breaks with duct tape, but has bought herself some cushions covered in Japanese historiated silk, just to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her meditation practice, to sit on a changing shimmer of gold and dark ochre.

Leonardo Anfolsi