Please be forewarned: this post may mess with your brain a bit. If you are on the edge, looking for a good spin on recent political disasters, or otherwise not doing so well, skip this one.
So, I had a another demon visit me last night. It was right in my face, and unusually stable. I could feel the heat of controlled nervous tension, and chronic anger, but it was not spinning out of control like they normally are.
We conversed back and forth a bit, and finally I asked it “what do you want?” It said: “I want you to stop giving me stories with beginnings and ends.”
Now, psychodynamically, this could be me casting out something tense, angry, and inconsistent. You can only see it when it is on the outside.
I am very certainly inconsistent, in which I say I want to do or be X, Y, or Z, and then give up quickly. I cycle through many selves regularly. It is fear pushing me out of every space I try to occupy. It is trauma making it impossible to relax.
So this could be a clear sign of emotional progress. In fact, I think it is. I am increasingly calming down, such that I get at least moments where the world feels almost OK. If you do not know what terrible trauma feels like, for me it feel like a continuous need to run, no matter where I am or what I am doing, or who I am with, or not with. It does not matter. It is a triggered alarm in my brain that never stops.
On the plus side I can deal well with fears that terrify most people. I have long term daily practice functioning in the face of fear. I am like a 3 gear truck: I can keep going in all conditions, but rarely with anything approaching speed. Still, it gives me survivability, and allows me to see when others can’t, and to keep moving when others are paralyzed.
Here is the larger point I am going to allow myself to make, that of Samsara.
I think, given our default materialistic belief system–one firmly NOT rooted in current science, making it a de facto faith based religious dogma explicable through psychological but not empirical reasoning–most people are gratified to learn that the evidence is good that we survive physical “death”. There are other places, “summer lands”, paradises, places where we reunite with our “tribe”, our soul group, our “people”, who we have known for many eons.
Evidence is good that we reincarnate time after time, each time in pursuit of learning, of growth. Consider consciously, perhaps for the first time, what “learning” is. It consists in growing, does it not? You are one thing one day, then you learn, and you are a bit more the next. Growing is the name of the game.
But what the Hindus and Buddhists and no doubt others ask is this: what is the end game? We grow, yes, and get into better and better heavens, but what is the point? Is there a point? How can one live forever and not lose ones mind? How can we conceive of Infinity anyway, or a place without Time?
Imagine that aliens from distant planets are visiting us. Imagine that they figured all this out long ago, but are even now trying to answer this question: what is the point? They are perhaps watching us, to see if WE can come up with something good. This is not a technological question If we are on this side of life, what do we do, and if we are on THAT side, what do we do? If we build an Earthly, material paradise, how long until ennui and dissolution make it pointless and moot? Does it matter how beautiful it is?
What if demons–and I just edited this post to add this, since I forgot–are beings unable to deal with the immensity of existence? What if they want to CREATE a hell with no change? A heaven with no change still has to alter or change at some point, but does Hell? You do not need to fear its end, and the pain of suffering distracts you from the pain of the infinity of existence. What if demons are just beings who have been broken on the wheel of Samsara?
What if there is a God of infinite light, but that there are never any instructions offered, or that some beings never get close enough to hear them?
Can you not imagine that, in an infinite space and time–FELT as such–that some souls may want to end it all? Apparently Star Trek Next Generation did some episodes about a Q who wanted to die. The Q are immortal, infinitely powerful beings.
How long, it can be asked, would such a condition be gratifying? You may want a new home, or a new car, or a better more beautiful/handsome husband or wife (Beautiful husband, handsome wife). You may just want enough to eat, or shelter from the sun and cold and wind. You may want leisure to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, or to binge watch Game of Thrones again.
What if you get all that, for all the time you need, and then an infinity more? And think big: think of the ability to conjure instantly into existence any reality you can imagine. The best food and wine, beautiful women and men, of EXACTLY the perfection you can imagine. Landscapes beyond belief, dwellings that go on indefinitely. The ability to dance to heavenly music thousands of years on end.
Are you still happy? Most of the time we conceive of happiness as relief from some present stress. If we are intensely hungry, we feel good as soon as we get food. Water, when we drink. Sex, when we get release some way. Most of our extended fantasies are just the next logical steps. You want sex, then good sex, then great sex, then great sex with as many partners as you want.
Here is an idea: imagine that every person that you meet–the homeless people, the CEO of your company, the gal working at Subway–was at one time a king or queen, but found it unsatisfying for some reason or other.
Imagine Bill Gates was a homeless street boy in Bangkok in his last lifetime, and was run over when he was 15 by a trolley, and that he is getting back at the world in this lifetime.
One way of thinking of reincarnation is that of a sort of suicide. You lose your memory. You are amnesiac. And you lose some part of your historical self. Every time you transit out of a birth canal you are squeezed into a new form, emotionally and socially and psychologically. You cease being who you were. And whatever that is eternal endures is not readily consciously available to you.
So reincarnation could be seen as suicide after suicide, in an infinite space, where we feel confused (perhaps).
Maybe we are being visited by many civilizations from other planets who STILL do not have really good answers to these questions. Maybe they have opened the lines of communication between those with physical bodies currently, and those on the other side. Maybe some “families” and tribes have been in contact with one another continually for a million years or more. Maybe they never developed amnesia, and are wondering how well it is working for us.
Here is the point that occurred to me this morning: living in the moment amounts, effectively, to amnesia with respect to the future and the past.
And keep in mind that Nirvana means “cessation”. It means blowing out, like a candle. The Buddha path is a way out of this infinity, but what it leads to is not answerable in words, and not without direct experience. It is very much a case of “that”.
I had this sense a week or two ago that the old sages of Tibet (and everywhere else, but I was seeing the guys and gals in the huts and caves) were unbelievably tough. All these ideas, taken directly, are brutal. They require a sort of coldness, even hostility, to take seriously. They were working on a level most of us, in our decadence, cannot begin to comprehend. We think the phrase “be kind” has something profound in it, as if that needed to be said, as if that principle were not obvious, as if kindness were not natural for all people leading ordinary, authentic and reasonably balanced lives. We have to be told to be kind because we are not, in all too many cases.
I don’t think most of us could handle for a moment the work of those great men and women, some of whom may still exist on this planet in physical form. But it is something to aim for. We have to stop accepting as deep profoundly insipid truisms, and comforting lies. Virya–roughly “manliness”, although of course it applies to women too–is a key virtue on the Buddhist path. It is not all about being nice, and an obsession with being nice makes most interesting and meaningful progress impossible, in my view.
What can you do? Be where you are, and do what you are doing calmly, with connection and love. Samsara is equal to nirvana. This is a teaching of one of the Buddhist schools, I think the Madhyamika.
And think about this: when you imagine a future or a past, it is usually visual first, then perhaps tactile then auditory. Whatever it is, there is a thought, a representation of some sort. Calmness (body) and peace (emotional and intellectual) are existence without creating thoughts and representations. These are both attainable through meditation.
I often seem to myself as a man out of time. Nobody sees me. I am invisible in most respects. My thoughts and visions are my own. I share them here since it seems to make me less lonely, but I can’t see anywhere I would or could go and feel at home. It makes more sense to try and create a home where I am.
I will do that one day, perhaps soon, starting in my own heart.