I am about to move to Hanoi, Vietnam, and the first thing I will do when I get there is take a shot of cobra blood. They have live cobras in cages and
then they chop off the cobra's head and pour its blood into a glass and top it
off with the cobra heart and then you drink it. And then after a little while I will learn to ride a motorcycle and
motorcycle around everywhere, and maybe even motorcycle the whole length of the
country just so I could smell the rice paddies. I will also speak Vietnamese really well, because I will work hard at
learning it. Of course, I will also make friends and find everything amusing and feel things deeply and be lonely and miss things and take Vietnamese cooking classes and do something entirely unpredictable, like turn into a hippopotamus.
So why am I moving to Vietnam? Question mark, indeed! I
really don't know what I'm doing, but no one ever really does. Our cells are
constantly being replaced--how are we supposed to keep track of ourselves?
Everything is in flux, down to quanta. That is why Buddhists talk
about karma, and why we see complex repercussions across time, space and
matter. There is no layer in the fabric of universal energy that is static,
dead or irrelevant. Even a corpse undergoes changes, and there is no real such
thing as death. All fears are useless. And yet...
How weird are dreams? Why don’t we talk
about them more? A person goes to bed, spends the night wearing fairy wings and
battling giant technicolor robot cabbages and licking their grandma's eyelids, and
wakes up to an alarm clock and thinks, "Time to go to work!" How does that happen?
We know that dreams happen as much as real life does, we just don't
give them as much credit because they take place in a different state of
consciousness. We take for granted and/or deny that we exist in different
planes of consciousness, because it's scary to think of our brain as
duplicitous. We are only
aware of an itty-bitty fraction of what is going around inside and outside of
us. We really are moving within this incredibly bizarre, almost
science-fictiony kind of stretchy cloth; an all-encompassing, sea monsterish
blob of energy fabric that includes literally everything in existence. There
are ridiculously complex interactions occurring all the time on infinite
levels. Matter cannot be created or destroyed; everything both is a consequence and
creates a consequence. This is why we attract what we focus on and why our predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies and why Henry Ford
said, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're
right."
Really, what a measly chunk of reality we get--our perception
filters out most of it, and it still seems immense! Think what would happen if we were non-filtering and received all of reality at
once. Without the happy filter of our perception, infinity would unleash itself upon us like Noah's flood, and the walls of our House of Identity would be blown to smithereens. Maybe we should invent a
Normalcy Defibrillator now just in case someone in the future somehow gains
access to unfiltered reality and suffers an enlightenment heart attack. But really, who knows what kind of berserk neuron dances would happen if the concept of infinity ever truly dawned on us. I’m guessing we would see that all action is simultaneous, that all beings are
limbs of the same being, that we are connected to everything infinitely outward
and infinitely inward, that our bodies are far bigger and more encompassing than we think they are (sorry, dieters), and
that we are just as much a part of nature as a squid blink or a lemur sneeze. Why do children
run around proclaiming, "I'm a tiger!" "I'm a vampire bat!"
"I'm a mutant ninja wombat!" Maybe our brains have access to these imaginary modes
because humans, tigers, vampire bats, and mutant ninja wombats are all made of the same energy fabric, and we
are able to access bizarre, primeval sources of empathy that manifest as games
of pretend.
So, House of Identity. We construct identities as we would dwellings. We all
understand that sometimes our identities can be "shaken," just like
the foundation of a house, and we all trust deeply in our house's ability to
protect us. Some of us have identity walls that are flimsy and easily penetrable---we are little piggies who built our houses out of straw. Some of us have standard wooden
siding and shingled roofs and picket fences. Some of us have identities made of brick, and the Big Bad Wolf of Infinite Truth will never
be able to blow them down, no matter how much it huffs and
puffs. So, have you fashioned your Identity House so that it's immune to the
Big Bad Wolf of Infinite Truth? Are you a person who “puts up walls”? Be the little pig that built the house out of straw! Identities ("egos" in Zen parlance) are not real existing things, but
only protective shields. If I had no identity, I could be easily destroyed. But
if I am tightly bound to my identity, I am limited in my vision of the universe.
So I must be somewhere in between: strong enough to live in a world of
identities, and penetrable enough to let some unfiltered reality seep in.
So what do we do knowing that all things are connected? We bask in the sunshine of nonsense. Surrender to
nonsense and you will have surrendered to the universe and to God (and to lobster claws, and to bunny
slippers). Surrender involves a delight in absurdity and willingness
to enjoy this incomprehensible sea monsterish energy fabric. We are comforted by the
universe because we are stupid children surrounded by forces unfathomably wise,
and we are frightened by the universe for the same reason. You cannot possibly learn very much in your short lifetime, but,
of course, you ought to try to learn as much as you can, because well, I don't know, do what you want. Remember, though, that real money is monopoly money and girls have pink skin and boys have blue skin just like in the game of Life and Obama is King Kandy of Candyland. The most
unfortunate psychological malady is taking oneself too seriously.
Now let’s think about brains that are different from our
own. Would you like to be severely schizophrenic for just one day? What are the
dreams of someone who is blind from birth? Wouldn't you like to experience
someone else's dream--just crawl into their head at night with a bag of
buttered popcorn and watch it like you're in the 1930s going to a talkie? What
are dreams, anyway? Dreams are weird because they are conglomerations of millions of
different memory bits—a reminder that there are infinite possible imaginative
scenarios. Every second of life is incredibly rich in information, and scraps
of this information is manifested in a powerful way while
we sleep.
Back to karma: there is no moment that does not change us in
some small way, and perceivable change is only a result of uncountable, imperceptible repercussions. This is why even twins are radically unique. And yet our ability
to empathize, and our commonality of imaginary experiences (who hasn't had a
dream where they're flying?) reveal the ridiculously heart-warming fact that we
are all one, and, its corollary: “all you need is love.”
Because any harm we inflict on other people or the earth is actually
self-inflicted harm, and the happiest people are the ones who just love, love,
love all over the place and never stop loving. "Hey!" say the lovers, "we all share the same
bathwater! Let’s make it a bubble bath!" Universally shared bathwater--how's that for intimacy? Maybe
bathwater isn't the right word, but neither is turkey vulture or meniscus. And speaking
of memory, are we storehouses of chronological experiences? I doubt it, even
though it might seem intuitively correct. I can't get over the idea that
chronology is sort of a myth that we adopted because it's convenient for
survival (just like mental categorization in general: more useful than it is
true, although of course it's not entirely false either). I guess I subscribe
to the idea that we should not accept even our most intuitive convictions. We
are much too accepting of myths. Some myths are the
result of evolution and others are the result of societal training—we are
contextual beings, in either case. Nothing is self-evident, and our modes of
thought have been handed to us by non-authoritative sources--there is no conscious omniscience, anyway. We receive
philosophical frameworks with which to operate, and if we're dumb, we never
question them. Am I rambling?
The point is, I'm going to Vietnam, where I will drink cobra
blood.
