Yorkshire Souls experiencing the Brahman

"And then a scholar said, Speak of Talking. And he answered, saying...
In much of your talking, thinking is half-murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings, but cannot fly."

From The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.

The words were on my mind because my family and I were at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last weekend. We encountered these Yorkshire Souls: these alphabet-lattice figures sitting under a tree hugging their knees. From certain angles, or in certain light, they were hardly apparent, they melted into the background. From other angles, they looked solid.

We walked through the Yorkshire Souls, and their big brother The House of Knowledge, and looked out at the world through their alphabet lattices. The view from inside the Yorkshire Souls was sort of like my view of the world itself. I perceive the world through words, symbols, which automatically distances and separates me from the world I am perceiving.

The way Paul Simon put it:

"...From the shelter of my mind,
Through the window of my eyes..."

The world seen through words and alphabets is maya, only an illusion. I have to step out of the beautiful alphabet-lattice of maya, step out of the Yorkshire Soul, to experience truth, to experience the Brahman. Many spiritual practices are about escaping this illusion of maya and directly experiencing reality: Vipassana Yoga, or the Trappist practice of silence, or the Japanese tea ceremony, or perhaps even the Mevlevi dervishes, dancing themselves into a trance to escape the boundaries of the self. Today, I could taste a little of that sense of liberation, just by looking through the alphabet-lattice of the Yorkshire Souls and stepping back into the sunlight. Wow.

Were other people who came across the Yorkshire Souls similarly reminded of maya and the Brahman?

I wasn't sure. So I asked my daughters what they made of the Yorkshire Souls. My nine-year old said "They must be chatterboxes. They have so much to say." My six-year old was reminded of a trick the children play on Mam'zelle in Malory Towers. Mam'zelle sat on a stool and came away with a bright pink "OI" on her black-skirted behind. Maybe the children played a similar trick on the Yorkshire Souls' beds, so they were completely covered with alphabets. Which makes sense, because the Brahman can be experienced by a chatterbox, or in children's pranks, just as much as it can be experienced in the sanctum sanctorum of St Peter's Basilica, or in an ice-cave at Gangotri.

More pictures of the Yorkshire Souls and The House of Knowledge are here. The Jaume Plensa exhibit that these Yorkshire Souls are a part of is still on, and is totally worth a visit.