Analyzing the data for my dissertation is highlighting for me the limits of intellectual knowing. Welcome to the Zen of graduate school! Every time I look at my data, I get a different take on it. It should not be so complicated, but the results are highly dependent on a number of factors, and I get a wildly different story depending on what cross section of data or interesction of factors I’m looking at. Each approach to the analysis seems as justified as any other, although of course I could be wrong.
I fell asleep in Walmart this afternoon. I haven’t done that in a long time, I realize now. I was pushing my cart down the aisles looking for a new garden hose, and suddenly I was reminded of the slew of dreams I had last night. In moments, I was back in my dreams. After nearly thirty minutes, I realized I’d been browsing the aisles in a deep stage of sleep. I felt as though hours had passed, a day even. I was disoriented, hardly able to track the train of mental activity that led me from my entrance into the store until my exit. I don’t understand why, but in the past twenty four hours, it feels as though ten or twenty days have passed.
When I got home, I set up a garden sprinkler for my children to enjoy, and within minutes, it was upside down and twisted. They called for help, and when I ran to fix it, I realized I had dreamed of fixing an upside down, twisted sprinkler the night before. The parallel was so vivid, that I had to sit down. Most of my dreams materialize within days or weeks, depending on the intensity of the experience. Often, I feel as though “real” life is a rerun of my dreams.
In such moments, the temptation is to feel as though I’m losing touch with reality, but I think the “reality” that is slipping away is the fabricated one, the one we habitually turn to as a touchstone. Waking up spiritually is essentially this same process on a deeper level, losing touch with our false realities, a process of profound unknowing. Letting go of the attachment to knowing opens up a whole new way of experiencing reality.
I’ve come to believe that the Bible Belt is the rehab center for thinking addiction. As an academic scholar with an obsession for philosophy and a craving for science, thinking is my heroin. Since I moved here in July, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been in severe withdrawal. The only university here is structured around religious fundamentalism. Growing up, I could see the City of Faith from my bedroom window, three gold plated skyscrapers emblazened with crosses where Oral Roberts once broadcast his pleas for money. After a bankruptcy, the City of Faith became a call center for a variety of credit card companies. The crosses were somehow removed from the gold windows. The buildings seem darker now. Oddly, since then, three or four people have suffered injuries due to mechanical failures in the elevator system. They were rising in an elevator when it suddenly snapped and fell. I laughed when I heard this story. In the very structures people once entered to rise to heaven, people are plummeting towards hell.
Last week, I drove behind a pick up truck with a bumper sticker showing an image of Obama reading a newspaper. The sticker said, “Our nation needs a leader, not a reader.” I cringed. How, pray tell, would such a message propagate without the capacity to read?
On a few occassions, I have felt like the most intelligent, well educated person in the state, a most arrogant and certainly false perception, but there it was, that feeling inside me. For even thinking such a thing, the universe ought to humble me, I thought, by thrusting me into a room with far more educated people. I found myself contemplating how nice that would be, but knowing how these things work, I would probably get punched in the face by the fellow in that pick up truck and end up in the emergency room. Wish granted! Oh, the hours I would enjoy babbling incoherently to the neurologist in charge of my case!
My brother, who works in a machine shop here, also struggles with a longing for fellow intellectuals. As I was writing this, he found comic relief by posting a status update in Facebook with the following message:
Secret to life:
-.. .-. .. -. -.- | — …- .- .-.. – .. -. .
The message: DRINK OVALTINE. (For the reference, see this movie excerpt.)
I have nearly given up on dating. My search for a kindred spirit is too driven by the need for someone with whom I can “talk shop.” I went to dinner with a kind and attractive dancer. Though quite intelligent, scholarly thinking was not his drug of choice. The evening was lovely, but I longed to talk about science and philosophy, subjects that did not go over well. I felt like the narrator from Nova backstage with an adolescent rock band, a complete alien. The next day, my seven year old son explained to me the logic of wormholes and exclaimed, “Did you know Stephen Hawking lost the black hole race?” I sighed and thought, “I would love to meet a man who could talk with me the way I can talk with my seven year old.”
We reminisced about the contributions of Leonard Suskind to the understanding of black holes. Suskind disagreed with Hawking’s assertion that information is irrevocably lost when matter and energy enter a black hole and demonstrated that, in fact, information is retained.
In other words, even in the crushing jaws of a singularity, the universe still “knows.”
From the perspective of analytical thought, information is lost the moment the puzzle pieces become hopelessly scattered. In the realm of pure being, however, the puzzle is always complete.
Last year I had a vision during meditation that I was standing in a circular room surrounded by windows looking out across a landscape, and every window offered such a different view that it did not seem like the same landscape, and some voice said, “There are many perspectives on the same thing.” Examining data from my experiments reminded me of my dream. Like holding up a crystal to the sun and getting different displays of light depending on how you tilt it, the conclusions change so dramatically with even the slightest shift in perspective, but the crystal is always the same.
Which perspective is the right one? Consider the possibility that they are all true. In the movie Shutter Island, a federal marshall arrives on an island harboring a mental hospital for the criminally insane. He spends the entire movie trying to get to the truth, trying to uncover reality, and he apparently succeeds. Imagine though, if you ever watch it, that every part of the movie is just as true as any other. What if reality changes as one’s perspective changes, so that every part of the movie is actually perfectly true at the time? What if, instead of uncovering the truth, he is creating it, even to the very end?
I often get the distinct sense that we can change our reality in this moment so completely that we acquire a new past. Ursula K. LeGuin explored this possibility in The Lathe of Heaven. If reality were a dream taking place in an eternal now, even the past could be recreated. The story we tell about our past seems just as malleable as our aspirations for the future. All you need to do is approach the data in a slightly different way. Tilt the crystal in the sun ever so slightly. Cut out a different cross section of your history. Examine a different slice.
Knowing is premised on the belief that there is something external and separate to be known, that our task is to somehow reach out and ascertain the objective reality, allowing it to impress itself upon our senses, but what happens when awareness itself is the fundamental nature of what lies “out there?” When you reach out with your measuring instrument, you create the data you are struggling to discover. Look at the measuring instrument itself. In the desire to know what is, you are the very thing you are trying to know.
After watching Shutter Island, I had vivid dreams that I was going into other people’s dreams and teaching them how to navigate reality. One person was trying to jump up from the ground onto a high ledge, but he couldn’t do it. I sat next to him and explained that the thing to understand is that you never actually move. Instead, it’s the scenery that changes, so if you want to jump high in a dream, you have to imagine the sight of the ground becoming the sight of the ledge. In other words, you have to imagine a new perspective. You don’t actually go anywhere, but suddenly, you’re reality changes, and you’re on the ledge, and that’s how you get from point A to point B. In the next portion of my dream, a girl had jumped from a ledge and fallen to the ground. When she realized she had died, my task was to teach her not to punish herself or be disturbed by her own death. Before long, she was riding a white pony through a vast meadow, happy and content. I’ve had this sort of dream for years, dreams in which I’m helping people learn to navigate reality by showing them that they are creating the very terrain they are navigating.
While waking up, I saw a game board, unusually vivid, calming and serene. The board was a representation of the many elements of my reality causing me confusion, except I could see all the playing pieces, every single data point, all at once, and everything made sense. Slices of data that had evoked pain were integrated with slices of data that had evoked joy and love, and the whole picture was truly sublime.
How, in all of this confusion, does one find tranquility and joy? Pain and confusion are products of thought, or grasping at particular perspectives. Analytical thought never takes everything in at once. Only being does that. Being is vastly more intelligent, because it is all the data points. In Joy and Healing, Torkom Saraydarian wrote, “I saw a man watching the sunset. He was all joy. He was in worship. He was the rays of the Sun. He was the symphony of the forms of colors.”
Study the sun to appease the analytical mind. Become the sun to appease the heart.
v
