mass times mass divided by distance squared
swirling in the gravity storm of margarita pitchers, two separate drunken conversations orbited the idea of asking the world for what you want, of being true to your heart, seeking your bliss. if you visualize it and believe it and pursue it, the world will respond. the interconnectedness of all things. is there a subtle benevolence pervading all the meaninglessness? and so on. i am left of center on the issue, ultimately an optimist and romantic, but i feel unsteady without tension in my line to skepticism. or maybe that was the tequila.
it may be because the ideas are cliché and it’s way too easy to affect romantic optimism as a substitute for intimacy with the moment. in the moment there is pain and idiocy and drudgery that are dual to beauty, fulfillment, and meaning. i know people who seem to be in permanent denial of the former list who adorn themselves with flowery enthusiasm for the latter. some of those people have badly mistreated others while affecting flowery, so i’m (perhaps unfairly) wary of flowery. i saw What the Bleep Do We Know and thought it was flimsy and really sort of annoying. kind of like environmentalists arguing that we shouldn’t kill animals because they’re cute. much better, i think, not to lean on ideas over which you do not have unflinching mastery (like, say, quantum physics), but look for truth quietly and ceaselessly where you can; be brutally honest about the experiment that is your life. if it’s all of one cloth — and I think it is — then it doesn’t matter where you look for truth; you’ll find it wherever you choose to look hard enough.
it may be because the universe seemingly treats innocence with no more respect than it does cruelty, and so, for example, six hundred thousand civilians are killed in Iraq for the sake of some small sad man’s ego. religious folk would ask God why He lets this happen.
i suppose i have the same question, sans anthropomorphism.
me: hey, so … this unconscionable injustice thing. what’s the deal, yo?
universe: …
me: hi. hello? yo, homie, what up?
universe: …
me: …
universe: oh, hey: you’re suddenly another year older and closer to death! fancy that!
me: bastard.
okay, anthropomorphism is fun. so sue me.
i think one answer is that on a large enough scale, even the searing injustice of war is lost in the glare of life’s evolving arc. we’re here. so on the whole, something’s going right. somehow, somewhere, there is an ounce of benevolence. perhaps it gets spread really thin.
the mystics might say that the face of God is beyond duality. every aspect of the manifest is a gesture in a dance of formlessness, emptiness. but to manifest, duality must arise. so then suffering and beauty are a dance, not the dancer. what, they suggest you ask, is doing the dance? this kind of story rings true for me, but it’s the kind of insight i must take on faith, having not really experienced it first-hand.
so i don’t know. i can’t side with the folks who claim without caveat that you create your own reality. it is obviously false in straightforward terms: innocent casualties and their surviving families do not choose to suffer. it may be that at some level Consciousness chooses to manifest and accepts suffering as an unavoidable consequence of that. again, that’s one of those things of which i do not have first-hand knowledge, so while i may like the sound of it, i can’t put my weight on it.
at the other extreme, however, nihilism just isn’t an option for me. i can’t do it. there’s no intellectual scaffolding behind that choice; it’s just how it is.
so i shy away from discussing it in flowery terms, but yes, i do ask the universe for what i want. it winds up sounding silly and vague, something like “i want, um, whatever it is that will, like, y’know, take me where i need to go.” apparently in my heart of hearts i think there is universal telos, and personal telos, and i’m not privvy to the specifics of either.
(but also, in some way, i think there isn’t any such thing. and that paradox is okay because i do steadfastly believe that the universe contains logic and not the other way around.)
whatever. i’ve never been big on specific personal ambitions anyway, so i think my role is to feel the subtle tugs, the tiny gravity of pervading benevolence — whatever it is, however much role “I” play in its creation — whatever “I” am — and follow its lead.
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ’round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
- Monty Python, The Galaxy Song
December 9th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Thank you for the wonderful journey. Two things really struck me.
“religious folk would ask God why He lets this happen.” It was not His doing, although on both sides the so-called leaders claim to be doing His bidding. So the power that allows this to happen is really us. We let it happen. All of us. The bystander who witnesses the murder and does nothing is innocent? I know you cover this, but it appears so obvious when you pose the question, and God might ask us why we let it and all the other ridiculous tragedies happen.
“in the moment there is pain and idiocy and drudgery that are dual to beauty, fulfillment, and meaning.” I do not relish pain and work hard (without success) to avoid performing idiocy, but I am utterly convinced that drudgery is a subjective action. We may not create our reality, but we do create the meanings of our reality. I often hear someone say that he/she is bored. I can remember being bored in my distantly past youth, but for some decades, I have realized that I have so little time remaining in this immersion in the flesh that not ever for a moment am I bored. Even drudgery is so full of immense sensation that I experience it as delighting my soul level self. I complain about this and that and even in the complaining I am dancing in joy. Perhaps when consciousness moves into the creative zone, it partakes of the wholeness of Reality and observes the duality without prejudice. From that perspective, duality is fun.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:00 am
whoa, i need to compose a response to this. sort of lacking the eloquence (and euros for internet access) right now. something about how it’s not so much that one create one’s own reality as one chooses the filters through which to see it - which leads to taking particular actions, which feed back into the cause-effect matrix, et cetera. also something about how certain strains of self-deception and ignorance (e.g. faith) can be useful.
in the meantime, many thanks for this post.
the conversation with the universe made me laugh out loud.
December 10th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Wow. I also need to work on a response to this. Thanks.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have read this while hungover….