This week, I unexpectedly find myself waiting for someone I don’t really know and end up reading a copy of Ken Wilber’s collected writings. Winter has finally come. The purest and loveliest of snowfalls fills up our world. I wait much longer than I had guessed. A woman comes in to sweep the floor, and we talk for a bit. Sunlight pours through enormous windows.

Here’s some Ken Wilber I soaked in:

You know the Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Usually, of course, we need two hands to clap – and that is the structure of typical experience. We have a sense of ourselves as a subject in here, and the world as an object out there. We have these “two hands” of experience, the subject and the object. And typical experience is a smashing of these two hands together to make a commotion, a sound. The object out there smashes into me as a subject, and I have an experience – the two hands clap together and experience emerges.

And so the typical structure of experience is like a punch in the face. The ordinary self is the battered self – it is utterly battered by the universe “out there.” The ordinary self is a series of bruises, of scars, the results of these two hands of experience smashing together. This bruising is called “dukkha,” suffering. As Krishnamurti used to say, in that gap between the subject and the object lies the entire misery of humankind.

On my way home, I do something I’ve never done in the winter. I park along the edge of an unfamiliar road. I’ve forgotten my hat. The wind is wild, as if I’m on a stormy sea. My hair tangles over my eyes. Oh sun, oh wind, oh endless snow.

Midwinter, here.