The post from the Buddhist blog (below) reminded me of an article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker in July of '03. Relevant to "rain" is the last paragraph in this excerpt from that article:
A dozen years ago, I was sent an extraordinary book called "Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness." The author, John Hull, was a professor of religious education who had grown up in Australia and then moved to England. Hull had developed cataracts at the age of thirteen, and became completely blind in his left eye four years later. Vision in his right eye remained reasonable until he was thirty-five or so, and then started to deteriorate. There followed a decade of steadily failing vision, in which Hull needed stronger and stronger magnifying glasses, and had to write with thicker and thicker pens, until, in 1983, at the age of forty-eight, he became completely blind. "Touching the Rock" is the journal he dictated in the three years that followed. It is full of piercing insights relating to Hull's life as a blind person, but most striking for me is Hull's description of how, in the years after his loss of sight, he experienced a gradual attenuation of visual imagery and memory, and finally a virtual extinction of them (except in dreams)--a state that he calls "deep blindness." By this, Hull meant not only the loss of visual images and memories but a loss of the very idea of seeing, so that concepts like "here,"?"there," and "facing" seemed to lose meaning for him, and even the sense of objects having "appearances," visible characteristics, vanished. At this point, for example, he could no longer imagine how the numeral 3 looked, unless he traced it in the air with his hand. He could construct a "motor" image of a 3, but not a visual one. ... Two years after becoming completely blind, Hull had apparently become so nonvisual as to resemble someone who had been blind from birth. Hull's loss of visuality also reminded me of the sort of "cortical blindness" that can happen if the primary visual cortex is damaged, through a stroke or traumatic brain damage--although in Hull's case there was no direct damage to the visual cortex but, rather, a cutting off from any visual stimulation or input. In a profoundly religious way, and in language sometimes reminiscent of that of St. John of the Cross, Hull enters into this state, surrenders himself, with a sort of acquiescence and joy. And such "deep" blindness he conceives as "an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own. . . . Being a whole-body seer is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions." Being a "whole-body seer," for Hull, means shifting his attention, his center of gravity, to the other senses, and he writes again and again of how these have assumed a new richness and power. Thus he speaks of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, can now delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path is different from its sound as it drums on the lawn, or on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the road. "Rain," he writes, "has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience . . . presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once . . . gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another." ** --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "BillyG." <wg...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Richard M" <compost1uk@> wrote: > > > Ah yes - sound chap that MMY! > > > > > > > BillyG - by chance I was reading a post on a "buddhist" blog by a guy > > called Sachin Modeel (at least I think he may be Buddhist). > > > > He's discussing rain: > > > > "And the rains sang their song, the same lyrics that I had heard since > > I was a child, yet this time I listened to its roar, intimidating yet > > graceful. And after many years the rains decided for the first time to ` > > speak' to me .. There's something about the rain that's beyond this > > world. Though it is noisy yet it is as peaceful as silence. The noise > > of your mind just dissolves in the melodies of the song the rain sings. > > > > Centuries have passed; poets and seers have sung hymns and poems > > praising the symphony of rain. Yet there is sacredness to rain which is > > not of thought, nor of a feeling that can be awakened by thought. This > > sacredness about the rains can't be written down, it is no to be > > thought of. It is not recognizable by thought nor can it exploited by > > thought. Thoughts cannot generate it. But there was a Sacredness to the > > afternoon's rain and every rain, which is untouched by any word or > > symbol. This cannot be communicated. But it is a fact. And I would like > > to take Krishnamurthi's quote to describe what we had realized, "Like > > beauty, it cannot be seen through its opposite for it has no opposite" > > > > http://septicpen.blogspot.com/2009/04/forgotten-rain-sutra.html > > > > Isn't that beautifully put? > > > > (Twitter to self: revisit "Rainy Day, Dream Away" + these > > Buddhists are on to something. Mostly...) > > Auuummmmm, namah shiv vai ya! >
