I woke up one morning feeling as though I’d been impaled on a spike, helpless, vulnerable, and shivering with agony. My world was spinning. Everything I was holding onto had disappeared. When I looked into the future, I saw a bleak landscape, barren and isolated, where I would soon meet my death.
My body was quaking so violently, I thought my muscles would snap. My mind was racing so rapidly, darting in and out of any possible solution, that another thought would begin before the last had finished. I felt exactly like I was tumbling through the atmosphere in a tailspin with only seconds to act before slamming into the ground and breaking into a thousand gory pieces. Apparently, when it comes to generating believable simulations of experience, I am a virtuoso.
At lunch, I went to a zendo in town and sat in meditation for an hour. My mind continued to race, but my body was motionless. The concepts exploding in my mind could no longer take full form, because my body would not move in sync with them.
The participation of the body is required to construct a believable mental world, one which we take to be the actual world. Even if we move only slightly, altering our posture and patterns of tension and energy, we can live in our mentally constructed worlds. They cease to be mere intellectual foreplay and become our reality.
We literally feel the ground drop out from underneath us. We feel ourselves plummeting. We feel the world spinning. We feel the sensations of crashing, anticipating the devastation. This inner reenactment of sudden death supports our views that our current situation in life is completely untenable, the losses too great to survive.
However, in the meditation posture, the body literally defies our imagination, bringing us into the reality of the present moment. Sitting in a strict meditation posture while our mind goes about creating worlds gradually hinders us from living in those worlds. The concepts become disembodied and subsequently fade from view.
After the meditation, an esteemed Zen teacher and former military pilot shared a story with me. Pilots are trained to fly while experiencing severe vertigo. They induce vertigo in a flight simulator. Your plane might be tilted a bit to the right, but your body is telling you that the world is upside down, spinning out of control. He said that the challenge is to believe what the instruments are telling you and fly by the instruments, because your body is telling you something entirely different.
That really woke me up. My body was telling me that I was in a tailspin approaching my death. I have always used the signals from my body to fly. When the signals are accurate, I’m good at it. I feel like a finely tuned, sensitive instrument. When the signals are way off the charts, however, I’m veering all over the place, completely freaking out. My body was telling me death was imminent, and I was totally buying into it.
Pilots without training have a hard time flying by the instruments, because they’re so persuaded by their visceral signals. With training, you learn to trust the instruments and neglect the body. I do have training in flying by instruments, sixteen years of Zazen and Dzogchen meditation. I know how. His story broke the spell.
Upon seeing through the illusion, my body stopped telling me that the world was coming to an end. Everything became very clear and colorful. I felt very sharp yet relaxed, present and awake. I had a sense that I could plunge into vertigo again if I chose, so I felt very much like a pilot having to make decisive effort to fly correctly, but the sky was clear, the sun shining. All is mind.
