Thanks for the comments Christopher. I think your feedback has really helped shape the direction of my ‘musings’. It is a difficult balancing act trying to write about the ‘things’ that precede language.

I am currently reading ‘Killing Commendatore’ and am struck by the prevalence of the circle at the heart of his writings. The circle is opened, often by a symbolic act, allowing ‘things’ to get out and ‘things’ to get in. The ‘world’ is thus changed and then, ‘what has been opened, must be closed’. Murakami often uses the symbol of a door or portal that needs to be sealed, which often entails a sacrifice on the part of the closer. (If it can’t be ‘stoppered up’ then our world is in danger of being washed away)

Yes. ‘duality’ necessarily feeds into the often unfulfilling taste of the contradictory and ‘topsy turvy’.

The imagery, from ‘our side’, of the small, distant and heavily compressed ‘stone’, resting in the seemingly unsurmountable mass of debris and detritus, is contrasted starkly by the ‘view from the stone’; A vision of infinitely expansive crisp air and clear fresh waters; A timeless state where what needs to happen, happens, without rush or hurry. The once insurmountable mass that was imagined to surround it, now a half-forgotten phantom. How did we imagine that it could possibly surround all this?

A taste of this is to ‘be in the zone’. As you say, ‘pure channeling’. The ‘self’ that is the stone, while appearing smaller, turns out to be vastly encompassing. The now ‘fallen king’; the small self is relegated.

The larger self turns out, not to be just an awareness in a drama and setting; We find that it actually is also the drama and the setting.