Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on a stone pier jutting out into the lake along the terrace just watching the sun go down.  My mind was utterly still, clear, open, and empty.  I was not there in a very real sense.  There was only everything.  The medium in which I dissolved, like the vast expanse of air whittling the lake and braiding my hair, was a tasteless, formless, nameless loving bliss as ineffable and pungent as sunlight.

I was so awake and luminous, so undelineated from the surroundings, I felt like I could walk on water.  I could taste the surface with my bare feet only inches from the water.  I had a playful little fantasy about stepping out onto the water and walking across.  Then I thought, facetiously, “Okay now I know I’m nuts.  I’ve lost touch with reality.”  Yet, I never felt so in touch.  Reality is not the scene before your eyes.  Reality is that which does the looking.

Just seconds later, a man in a boat out on the water wearing clothes, shoes, and a backpack stepped out of his boat and onto the water.  He placed his feet on a surface I could not see, a surfboard I think.  He stood on the board and gently paddled his way to another boat about twenty feet away.  I watched him glide along the surface with the setting sun behind him, and it looked just as though he was walking on water.  I had to laugh.

Tree Brains

The outer world responds to the inner world, but is there really an “inner” world?  The day before, I was lying on my back on a big stone in the forest.  I closed my eyes and recalled a conversation with a Zen Buddhist friend whose interest in neuroscience led him to conjecture about what happens in the brain when you become enlightened or awake.  What are the neurons doing when you become aware of the greater awareness that permeates everything?

The question is misguided, I think, because it presumes that the mind’s conception of the brain is an accurate picture of the essential nature of the mind.  But, the conception itself is the mind, so why resort to mental images of neurons forming connections when your mental image itself is a direct experience of what it is like to be a cluster of neurons?

At just that moment, I heard a thonk above me.  I opened my eyes and watched as two trees towering overhead began to touch one another as the wind blew them to and fro.  The very tips of the branches of one tree touched and interlocked with the branches of the other.  It looked precisely like the formation of a synapse between an axon and the dendritic tree of another neuron.  I cocked my head and watched, wordlessly, for a long while.  There was something here, an insight.  What was it?

I continued gazing at the swaying branches, great neuron mock ups.  Still no thoughts came to mind.  Ah, there it was.  My gazing itself.  The gazing is the mind; the gazing is the brain; the gazing… is the wind blowing through the trees.

Writing the Future

Yesterday morning, I rediscovered a short story I wrote one year ago, and it described events that happened in my life later that year.  One of the characters in my story was a direct reference to Philip K. Dick, a prolific science fiction writer who wrote the stories upon which many popular movies were based, including The Matrix, Total Recall, Minority Report, Next, and Through a Scanner Darkly.  He was well known for questioning the nature of reality.  He also experienced numerous inexplicable paranormal events.  For an entertaining, illustrated account, see The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Dick.  In the book, Entangled Minds, by Dean Radin, which presents research evidence and a plausible scientific explanation for psychic phenomena, Radin recounts that one of Philip’s novels described events and characters that Philip encountered a year or so later in virtually every detail.  I buy this, because it has happened to me so many times before.  These days I am careful about what I write.

In my short story, Cold, Hard Reality and a String of Nonsense, I wrote about a character with a tattoo of a large eye on his arm.  After writing that portion of the story, I was introduced to the fiance of a friend who had a tattoo of a large eye on the crook of his arm.  He looked like the character I described, and he was the same age.

Later in the story, two cops bring a woman to a psychiatric ward.  Later that year, two people in my life compelled me to seek psychiatric help for my dark night of the soul, and only after I left that world did I find wholeness again.  And sanity.  While in the hospital, I met a woman who quite clearly suffered more from her encounters with psychiatry than any real problem.  Like the main character in Cold, Hard Reality, I reassured her that she was fundamentally whole.

If you are endeavoring to experience spiritual awakening, I recommend avoiding the mental health care system, which pathologizes suffering, fails to recognize empathic perception, and invalidates the role of the mind and heart in shaping reality.  Psychiatry is extremely mechanistic.  Long-term Buddhist meditators, in contrast, quickly acquire a different view of reality in which the unity of consciousness is a fact of existence.  In many meditation circles and among experienced spiritual teachers, extrasensory awareness is a common experience, and the responsivity of one’s outer world to one’s inner world is a common observation.

Both the short story and my year ended with an awakening and deep opening of the heart.

We create our own reality and receive everything we are looking for, but the ability to tell a clear story, or to tell no story at all, is lost in the turbulence of the undisciplined mind.  If you are not inclinded towards meditation, you can take a different approach to awakening:

• Take care the stories you weave.  They become realities in this communal dream.
• More importantly, take notice.  Watch how everything you experience was once an element of your own imagination and desire.
• Take responsibility.  Your outer world will always follow from your inner world.
• Finally, take heart.  If you ask the universe for an orange, don’t get all confused and upset when your apple tree dies, because you insist on barking up the wrong tree.  I lost a lot of apple trees last year.  This year, I am feasting on oranges.