Inspiratus

This video is well worth the 9 minutes it takes to watch. It is beautiful because in just 9 minutes it challenges all of those silly, stupid little judgments we make about ourselves, about others, about life.

It reminds us that regardless of what we think, life happens. Or as the old saw goes, life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.

We can imagine ourselves in control, picture the life we want for ourselves, but as this story clearly demonstrates, we are a life being lived, n0t living a life. We can beg for the machine to stop, for a chance to breathe and take stock, but it doesn’t work that way. It just keeps on living us. Until it doesn’t.

One of my favorite (and sometimes most dispiriting) lessons from Robert Adams was his admonition that you can tell how far you’ve come in your spiritual growth by how you behave when life throws you a curve ball. Do you retreat into your shell, throw dishes against the wall, lapse into a depressive funk, reach for the bottle or bong, pout, find fault with the world around you? For 99.99% of us, the answer to one of these is ‘yes.’

People who fancy themselves as well-adjusted, easy-going, or happy-go-lucky are anything but the moment life stops cooperating the way they want. A lost job, disease, the suffering of a loved one, divorce – any number of life’s little tripwires can send us spiraling into ridiculous behavior or modes of thought. And then, when the storm inevitably passes, we behave as if nothing happened. Which helps explain why we keep falling into the same holes over and over again.

The mystics have pointed out that our suffering is a portal into growth, a rich opportunity to break out of our comfort zone and challenge the concepts we hold about ourselves, the world around us, existence itself.

Yet the moment turbulence strikes we seek ways out of it, don’t we? We are miserable, perhaps terrified the unhappiness will remain with us. We cling to the departing mate with whom we may not even be happy, rush out to replace the miserable job with another miserable job, bombard the disease with poisonous chemicals and radiation – anything and everything to stop the pain, to ‘return to normal.’

It rarely occurs to us to inquire into what the hell this ‘normal’ thing really is, to recognize that it – like everything else – is just a mental concept, something we have come to accept as reality or truth.

We awaken in the morning like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But what’s so natural about it? What does natural even me?

Stop and consider your own existence for a moment and it may just jar the hell out of you. I mean, you don’t have to exist, do you? You take for granted that you are a ‘human being’ of a particular name, sex, race, ethnicity, age, pedigree, and on and on and on. Yet they’re just concepts, aren’t they? The only ‘basis in fact’ is a kind of mutual agreement of mental concepts with other humans.

You gaze out the window at the tree stirring in the wind and take for granted that ‘tree’ and ‘wind’ are what you say they are. But these too are labels, aren’t they? Mind stuff. In all the universe there is no such thing as tree or wind or, for that matter, ‘universe.’

Look at that swaying tree again and drop the concepts and what is left? It’s just a, uh, well….

Follow the vision backward and inquire into what it is that is seeing that non-conceptual tree thing. See if you can drop that concept of ‘me, the seer.’ What’s left?

How fascinating is this thing we know as existence. We work so hard to create a comfortable little niche for ourselves and fight like hell when that niche is threatened, like a newborn pup desperately wriggling back to the nipple, back to the warmth and safety of its mother. Back to all the mental concepts that tell us everything is ‘normal.’

Yet it is when we are yanked out of that concept-laden niche that the concepts are ever-so-briefly exposed for what they are.

Not so long ago I caught a snippet of a story about a U.S. drone attack on insurgents in Pakistan. Turns out we killed some villagers including a handful of kids. These things happen, right? The story explained that the U.S. government apologized and offered to pay reparations. A dead kid’s parents would – at least in Pakistani terms – be made rich in lucre if not spirit.

Everyone who reads this blog no doubt is an intelligent individual. You’ve been exposed to the whole “Oneness” thing countless times, probably understand something of Karma, of the Golden Rule. But for most of us, these are mere concepts. You read the words, perhaps nod at them knowingly, and go right back to ignoring their true meaning. And you suffer for it.

Your mind labels everything. There is a tree. Here is a pencil. It is made of tree. The mind does this to navigate a busy world. But in doing this it – pardon the pun – misses the forest for those trees. Chaos theory teaches us that a butterfly’s wings influence the weather a thousand miles away. Physics reminds us that every particle in the universe exerts gravitational force on every other particle. The organic meat of ‘you’ one day will feed other living things.

The Oneness of existence is everywhere we bother to look. It is positively screaming the news – at itself, of course – and we disparate little imaginary beings go right on imagining we are separate and apart from it.

And so back to those Pakistani children. We, the righteous ones in the US of A, the ones carrying out God’s work and the work of freedom and humanity and justice and so on, we did that. But we had to, you see, because of what the Afghans did on September 11. The way they flew innocent people into buildings and Pennsylvania farmland and burned and crushed thousands of others. The drones are an unfortunate side effect of our efforts to stop those marauding Mideasterners from doing more harm to “innocents” elsewhere. But those in the Mideast argue that for as long as they can remember the West has been invading their lands militarily and commercially, sucking away their natural resources to live extravagant lives and at the same time despoiling their way of life with our culture of sex and violence. But, counters the West, we did that because when we first arrived in the lands of Arabia you were little more than warring nomads in need of a civilizing influence and….

Karma. That drone strike kept the great Karmic wheel turning. Now it’s their turn again. And then it will be our turn. And so on.

Jesus tried to hammer home this message in as many ways as he could. If someone whacks you across the cheek, give him the other one as well. If a man steals your coat give him your shirt too. Why? Because what is happening to you is your Karma. And the only way to stop the wheel is to stop pushing it. Stop reacting.

There are immense, unseen forces at work in this universe – forces that you and I cannot possibly hope to understand. But those labeling, conceptualizing minds react and point fingers and keep that Karmic wheel turning and late at night those same brains wonder why there is such suffering – why does God let bad things happen to us good people?

In my teens or maybe early 20s I read a poignant article about the Israeli-Palestine issue. The writer ended the story appropriately enough at a funeral for a man killed in an Israeli airstrike – or maybe it was a Palestinian attack – does it matter, really?

Anyway, the writer wrote of gazing at the man’s son standing at the edge of the hole about to swallow up what remained of his father, about the agony etched in the boy’s face, and about how the writer at that moment knew – truly knew – that he was watching the birth of the next Palestinian ‘freedom’ fighter and that that same boy, in the not-so-distant future, would perpetrate an act that would end with still another child standing at the edge of a funereal abyss waiting to keep the wheel turning.

In the cathartic scene of “Good Will Hunting,” our hero is at last forced to accept that the abuse he endured as a child was not his fault. After a lifetime of marching to an invisible drummer, Will is at last so beaten down that the facade cracks and this truth is allowed in. It is a powerful scene that helped secure the film an Oscar nod for its script and acting.

It’s also true of us all. It’s not your fault or mine or anyone else’s.

In the same way that a spontaneous itch prompts my fingers to spring into gear to scratch it, so too do our thoughts spontaneously arise based on a lifetime of habitual thought. It’s not really deniable. Anyone can sit quietly for a moment and watch the thoughts come and go. Which means that none of this thing you and I call ‘my life’ is, in fact, ‘mine.’

This is the Big Secret behind nonduality and the other great spiritual and religious movements. When Jesus said “I am that I am,” all of the minds conceptualized it into, “This MAN is GOD and we must put all our faith in HIM.” Same with Mohammad and Buddha and the rest. But the gnostic and nondual translations of “I Am” are quite different: I Am is true for the whole shebang, no separation, no this and that, just I Am. One. 

The mind isn’t keen on this. It likes to blame itself (or others) and to gobble up (or eschew) credit. The mind celebrates itself and beats the shit out of itself. And it does it to others. But look past the mind and it’s pretty clear that it’s all playing out of its own accord. Or as many mystics point out, we aren’t living our lives, we are being lived and the ‘we’ is a figment of its own imagination. We’re akin to Dr. Frankenstein gradually bringing ourselves to life through conceptual thought and language. And we’re just as much a fiction.

Like our equally fictitious Mr. Hunting, it’s when the misery of this mind-made self becomes too great that perhaps a little light is let in (or out?). In a poem I recently stumbled across, the author beautifully summarizes the ‘weight’ of depression:

You said it, how despair

Became so full it pushed you out

Squeezed you out, leaving no room,

no time, no you to relate to it, own it.

Leaving no you.

Otherwise the mind maintains its grasp and an imagined me marches onward to tear down and build up, to criticize and to celebrate, to crucify and deify. On and on and on it goes, endless lifetimes and empires and crusades all hellbent on creating and sustaining and destroying and rebuilding and to what end?

The mind interprets this as cause for depression – after all, there MUST be a point to all of it, right? But the mind only can speak and think from a place of memory, so what can it possibly know of now? What, then, can it possible know of love, compassion, humility except what it has been taught, what has been inherited by other equally fictitious minds?

In those rare instances when the awakened speak of ‘enlightenment’ – the dissolution of the self – they speak not of meaninglessness nor do they urge a path of nihilism. Instead they speak of “liberation.” They have been ‘enlightened’ of life’s great weight, that which ‘depresses’ us. Gone is that imaginary self and its endless litany of wants and needs and hopes and fears. And what is left, I suppose (because I am still trapped deep within this imaginary Doug) is the simple magnificence of Being. What else could there be?

What a peculiar prison sentence is this thing we call life. Each of us appears to have been born into captivity, a death sentence hanging over us, only the actual date of our ‘execution’ unknown.

We are shackled to these bodies – bodies that are not of our choosing (otherwise, I’d have chosen the Brad Pitt model, right?) – the prison staff composed of the family and friends who await our arrival at the delivery room gate. Through sheer happenstance the prison may be situated on the tony shores of the Hamptons or the sewage-strewn streets of Calcutta.

Escape from this prison does not seem possible. Unless, of course, we opt for self-execution. Gravity keeps us pinned to the planet and even if we were to jettison ourselves into space the absence of air or the sun’s warmth would do us in.

We know not of whence we came nor, for that matter, where we are going, and the capriciousness (if not outright unfairness) of the whole thing can be maddening.

A strange prison sentence indeed.

So it is that amidst our life’s work (e.g. the struggle for survival, for shelter and safety, for food and companionship and the next cool Apple product) a kind of explanation is concocted, one that wholly depends either on imagination or the ‘scripture’ of those who came before us.

Some tell themselves that none of it matters, we are mere aberrations, blips on the radar screen of life, here today, gone tomorrow, utterly irrelevant to a cosmos without rhyme, reason, or rationale. We came from nothingness, we return to it, enjoy the game while you’ve got some playing time.

For others, there are one or more gods of differing temperament who dispatched us to this place and who await our return, no doubt where they will explain the whole thing to us and perhaps even share a good laugh at all the carnage and pain that for so long seemed unnervingly real.

But perhaps there is another understanding, one that, rather than flipping the equation on its head, suggests the equation itself is the problem (or, more precisely, a belief that it is real).

When I lift my finger into the air and stare at it, the question arises, “Where do I end and the universe begins?” The question is both obvious and ludicrous. Obvious in that each of us wanders through life imagining ourselves to be separate and apart from everything else. Ludicrous in that it is impossible for “me” to be separate from the cosmic soup that both hosts me and comprises me. Look at your own finger and see if those same thoughts do not occur to you.

Over the span of 18-24 months, your entire body regenerates itself. Every cell comes and goes. So from a purely physical perspective, where or what is the substance of you? When quantum physicists peer deeply into the fabric of stuff, they can’t find anything. Literally. The deeper they probe into matter the more confounded they become: There are only probabilities of energetic wave/particles occupying a place in space and time. Only…. space is creating itself and time – well, nobody can prove its existence.

The point being that in all of the history of the world and its billions of human inhabitants and their biggest-brain progeny, not one has ever been able to prove that one of us has ever existed. Think about that.

And then think about who it is that is thinking about that if the thinker itself doesn’t exist? What ARE you?

So if there is no prisoner, how can there be a prison? If there is no individual, how can there be an individual who suffers (or triumphs)? How can there be birth or death, a god or gods, meaning or meaninglessness (by whom would such meaning be assessed)?

This has been a strange and often times paradoxical adventure and nearing the crisp age of 50 I know less now than ever. But I see that growing ignorance as a good sign, because the more I forget all that has been jammed into this noggin (by other lost souls) the more that existence itself is allowed once again to shine through and show itself.

As Wei Wu Wei wrote: “In the West at least, we are nearly all busy polishing our mirrors … instead of understanding that neither the polisher nor mirror has ever or could ever exist. As long as we do not perceive the fatuity of a phenomenon telling itself how marvelous it is, we will never come to the knowledge of that which we are when we have understood that, as phenomena, we are not.”

No prisoner. No prison. No-thing. Just beingness, being. If only our minds could truly be blown by such anti-knowledge, eh?