GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING

by Stanley

“Come over here and look out of the window”.

She obeyed.

“Look at the clouds”, he said. “What colour are they?”

“White”, she said. Then she paused, still looking at the clouds. “No …they’re ….green and yellow and silver and..”

He smiled at her. Although she was just a housemaid, she had got it.

This was a scene from the movie (and the novel) Girl with the Pearl Earring in which the Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, encounters the servant girl who is to be his model for the famous painting. Vermeer must have seen something about the girl that attracted him and prompted him to find out whether she had that special quality with which he himself was endowed – a quality which his wife, although he loved her, lacked.

What was that special quality? Put very simply, it is the ability to see. It sounds so very simple. Everybody knows that clouds are white, grass is green and the sky is blue. But these words are labels, symbols, ciphers – they are not colours.

Most of the time we live in Cipher-Land. Consider the world of trade, business and economy. This is a complex game with ciphers where we manipulate things called dollars. A dollar is a symbol of worth, it is not worth itself. In a sense it isn’t real life; and yet it seems like real life; and in a way it is. The elaborate world we live in would not function without these secondary systems, the world of ciphers.

When you first abandon Cipher-Land and cross over into reality, you look at the clouds and have no idea what colour they are. You are unsure. Could be this, could be that. The old labels don’t mean anything. When you really taste the clouds the old ciphers are irrelevant. Taste is a good analogy. Have you ever put something new to your tongue and tried to describe the taste. It’s impossibly difficult, isn’t it? Taste is so direct, immediate and untranslatable.

It’s the same when you look at your inner landscape. Your feelings aren’t just sad or happy, resentful or jealous, angry or painful. These are just ciphers. In my work I have come to know exactly when a person is tasting themselves, or whether they are talking in ciphers. When you cross over into really experiencing yourself, tasting yourself, the old ciphers don’t fit. You fumble to say exactly how you feel. Then, like Vermeer, I am please because I know you’ve got it. I’m not interested in the ciphers, except when they point to the experience. As they say in Zen, ‘Not the finger pointing to the moon – but the moon!’

When I try to do therapy in Cipher-Land I ‘consider’ my feelings; I ‘reflect’ on how I feel. I shuffle my ideas around on the mental chessboard. When I look past Cipher-Land and into the real taste of myself I find only the sensation of my body as it usually is: a surface skin and an inner darkness – maybe a few of the usual discomforts. Nothing more.

Neither should there be anything more, for I have stepped into a new place, beyond the chess-game of the mind. I am where I can begin to use my taste-buds. I don’t worry. It’s like getting used to the dark. I know that, as I continue, my discernment will get more sensitive, and surprising vistas will emerge – colours and scenes unfamiliar, yet in some way reminiscent! But definitely outside the box.

Achieving this is not just a matter of passively meditating. The thinking level has a resistance, insisting on doing things its own way. I feel a bit diffident about writing a blog like this because I know how what happens: one reads it and finds it interesting, but that’s as far as it goes. That’s as far as it can go because it is too difficult to do by oneself. It needs to be done within a relationship – I mean, a therapeutic not a romantic – relationship. And that takes time, which is why short term counselling is only of limited value.