Bursting Bubbles
Portola Valley, CA
18 April 1999
Bursting bubbles is serious business. That may well be why we take such delight in doing it as children. Maybe deep in the psyche we are aware of how serious this will be later in our lives. It is wonderful to watch children scurry about chasing down bubbles and poking them before they have a chance to touch the ground. The squeal of laughter and the look of utter surprise at how rapidly the bubble disappears. It's as if they are learning all about the illusion of substance and the impermanence of stuff. Little buddhas chasing bubbles. As adults we instinctively know that they need to practice this skill to use later when the stakes may be higher than they could ever imagine.
Bubbles burst. It is in their nature. So the most important element here is who does the bursting, and how the bursting happens. Does the bubble fall to the ground, crashing and burning, leaving no survivors? Or do we consciously burst the bubble? Do we confront the illusions that we have carried for so long, that we have protected so assiduously? Protected from predators of our own making. Fierce predators determined to know what is, to know who I am essentially, to know just what the stakes are in living an authentic life.
Bubble bursting is serious business. It is about being in touch with the film that envelops the illusions that float inside the psyche. This film of language and images is protective, keeping the illusions from taking over our lives. They are contained in some way. In a sense we know in a deep kind of knowing that these illusions about our world and ourselves are just that - illusions. This enveloping film may also serve to protect us from experiences that are too powerful to handle in the moment - truths about ourselves that may overwhelm us without the mitigation that words and images can provide.
Bubble bursting is irreversible. There is a Zen saying, You can't unring a bell. Just so, you can't unburst a bubble. The experience we have as children in the face of bursting bubbles may be about the shock we encounter in the face of the irreversibility of it all. I can't take my finger back. I can't unpoke the bubble. I can't reconstitute the illusion that just named itself as it ceased to be.
Bursting bubbles is an act of courage. It takes enormous courage to unleash the fierce angels of our nature to seek out our hidden pockets of falseness, those places in our lives that we have secreted all sorts of misinformation, half-truths, neurotic fears, the way families used to secret their deformed children, letting them out only in the nighttime, hiding their shame. There is tremendous courage embedded in the act of removing the covering and allowing whatever has been lurking in the background to come into the light of awareness.
Bubble bursting is an act of lovingkindness, but only an act of kindness toward ourselves. We are so often eager to burst other's bubbles. We will often go out of our way to be of service to them. We do it for their own good, of course. We do it for altruistic reasons. Yet there is a part of us that knows that this is nothing more than the film of our own bubbles, of our own illusions. We know deeply that every time we burst another's bubble, we are secretly protecting our own.
That is also the game we learn as children, isn't it? One child blows bubbles; the other chases them down relentlessly. The true act of lovingkindness is to chase down our own bubbles, our own illusions.In so doing we release tremendous amounts of loving energy that was previously unavailable. This energy then becomes available to those we love. Love released from illusion can transform itself into courage. This newfound courage can allow those we love to burst their bubbles, thereby becoming more available to us. This unfolding of our true selves deepens the relationship because more of each of us has shown up without all the wrapping, without all the attractive sugar coating. We have fashioned this true self by loving what is so about ourselves and those we love, and what isn't so. We have become real.
Bubble bursting is an act of letting go. It is about letting go of fears and well-entrenched patterns. It is about letting go of the illusory selves, the false selves to which we have grown so accustomed, for whom we may even have affection - an old friend, a houseguest, that we now tolerate because we cannot imagine living in the house alone. It is an act of letting go of the fear that, once the bubble is burst, there will be nothing to hold onto, no protective blanket, nowhere to hide.
Bursting bubbles is serious business. Perhaps this is why children do it so well.