by Tod Davies
I once saw an eight foot tall black and white outline drawing of the Tibetan Buddhist Goddess Green Tara. It hung in the air in the middle of a public room. I could see through its outlines to the scene behind it; I could make out every detail. No one else could see it, hovering there about a foot off the ground, as if it had unrolled from a scroll hanging off the ceiling. I knew it was not really there, but nevertheless, it was quite easy to see. There was nothing alarming about it. It didn't distract me from the reality–or what we've agreed is the reality–around me.
I did ponder, as I sat there looking at it, what was the figure's meaning: so large, so intricate, so clear, so immobile. After awhile, I thought: "It means that the case will have a good outcome. It means that justice will, for once, be done."
And when I glanced up to the front, at the magistrates' bench there, while a policeman gave testimony in the witness box (for that was where I was, in a courtroom), I saw one of the magistrates had turned deep red. His face darkened and darkened as he listened. And I knew he was very angry.
He was very angry because the policeman lied. Was lying. He was lying in the witness box about the arrest of a friend of mine. This was in Liverpool, in the north of England, in the magistrates' court, and my friend was accused of drunk driving.
He hadn't been driving when he was arrested, my friend. He had been sitting in his parked car, outside of where we both worked, with his car keys in his pocket, talking on a cell phone to a woman he wasn't married to, but who he loved with a violent and short-lived passion. He had left a group of friends in the corner pub to have this conversation in secret. He wasn't going to drive the car anywhere. He never did drive home when he went to the pub of an evening. He didn't live very far. On nights like this, he always walked home.
The two policemen who saw him sitting there, in a white neighborhood where all the media related businesses of Liverpool tended to cluster, they thought–I think they hoped–that he was trying to steal the car. My friend is black, of course, and the police were used to easy busts of this kind. But then frustrated by the undeniable fact that the black guy on the cell phone actually owned the car he was sitting in, they compromised, and arrested him instead for drunk driving.
The procedure in a case in magistrates' court in England is that the witnesses come in one by one. They're barred from hearing any other testimony. So the first policeman told a completely different story from the second. What had actually happened was quite plain to everyone in the courtroom.
A group of us had come to the hearing, to sit in the front row: all of looking exactly like what we were, a bunch of white professionals. We identified ourselves to the magistrates as my friend's co-workers, which we were. His lawyer had said it would, alas, show the magistrates more clearly than anything else that the police had picked on the wrong guy.
Alas.
As I sat there thinking about all of this, feeling badly for my friend who had to admit to a secret love affair in front of all of us, feeling badly that our skin color and the way we were dressed inevitably stood bail for him, whose skin color was a little different…while I was thinking this, she appeared, the black and white outline of the goddess Green Tara. She shimmered into view, and though you could see through the immobile black lines of her picture, those lines were as solid as if they were some computer projection, or a movie special effect, hanging in the air.
She was easy enough for me to recognize. I lived–live now–part of the year in an Oregon alpine valley, far away from Liverpool, and in that valley is a Tibetan Buddhist temple, and in front of that temple is a statue garden, and in that garden are two statues of this goddess. And I had read enough books about the religion of my neighbors to recognize the picture I saw right away.
I looked at it carefully. As I said, no one else could see it. I knew full well it was a hallucination of some kind, but it was also, as I said, very clear, very detailed, very plain. I watched my friend's shamefaced testimony about his love affair through the sure strokes of her outline.
And I thought, "It means they'll find him innocent." Of course they did. The red-faced magistrate gave the policemen a masterful and utterly satisfying dressing down in the course of the verdict.
I watched the image fade slowly away, then got up to congratulate my friend and his lawyer with all the rest of our crew.
What was it, then? If I were a medieval peasant, I'd say it was a vision. Or a picture from the devil. If I were a doctor, or a scientist, of the last century (and perhaps even of this one), I'd say it was an illness. A neurosis. Even a psychosis.
The way I understood it that day–now so many years ago–was that I had picked up from the angry magistrate's face what would be the final outcome of the trial. And that intuition, joined with my anxiety for my friend, had combined to form a symbol that projected itself outside my own thought, so I could read what my unconscious mind knew more than my conscious one. So I could read its meaning in the air.
And maybe that was it.
Maybe that was the true explanation. But I'm older now, and maybe I'm not so worried about being thought mad or fanciful, maybe experience has taught me that my perceptions are often correct even (sometimes especially) when they are directly contradicted by the perceptions of others. Other explanations occur to me now.
Or rather, not explanations. Other contexts. Other stories, if you will. Other, more fruitful, lines of thought.
And the older I get, the more I believe–think–feel–that there is a lot more going on in the space around us than we immediately perceive, or allow ourselves to see. But it does, in spite of our fears and defenses, these other (what do we call them? worlds? realities?) ways of being do break through now and then, to our alternate consternation and delight.
And I think it means more, much more, than we have any of us allowed ourselves to think for well on a hundred years now.
When I look back at that hundred years, and contemplate the mess we've made of that precious time, and the mess we are obdurately, ruthlessly, unthinkingly making now, I think: it is time now to put all our assumptions about our world on the table. And look at them one by one, and in looking at them, transform them into something wiser, something more complex, as is fitting when viewing the complexity and beauty of Nature. Transform them into something, if not new, than at least into something old seen with new eyes. With new respect for old stories.
To make those old stories our own by joining them with what is best of our own new knowledge. And armed with those new/old stories, continue to fight our way out of ignorance, arrogance, blindness, and premature death.