Taming the Real

To say that the world and our experience within it is gnarly is a vast understatement.

Just yesterday, before I had a chance to pour myself a bowl of cereal, my iPhone lit up with an emergency alert announcing our impending doom here in Hawaii by way of an intercontinental ballistic missile. My partner, cradling our new born daughter, turned to me and asked “what should we do?” There ensued the longest split second existential pause of my life. It’s hard to say what was happening inside me, but in retrospect something like the mind/body caught in the paradox of its annihilation.

After our collective intentions willed this alert to be proven false and I started to regain my ability to think, I became indignant and angry, like many others, I’m sure. I thought, “the person responsible for this should be fired and then given a few months of prison.” Now calmly scrutinizing my reaction then, I can see that I was just getting in phase with my fear and anger was the byproduct. Coming so close to experiencing the real in the wild — that was the lingering conceptual after shock for me.

I was fortunate to have another opportunity to regain my calm later that day at my weekly meditation at the Buddhist temple. Here the question wasn’t about how wild the real is, but about our attempts to tame it through an illusory self that needs protection. I thought about how the self doesn’t quite come clean until it’s threatened. I thought, ironically, about the contours of my self dissolving. I tried to hold the thought of my absolute self, of who I am fundamentally in the plethora of dimensions yet to be discovered beneath the quantum level of reality.

Later back home, holding my daughter, I thought about her absolute self. I was again afraid to follow the thought with the now coalescing image of a much more porous world, an image of infinite terror and dimensions and bliss. Again I find myself yearning for a way to get in phase with this vaster, absolute fear borne of the mind’s recoil from the lustful, if pixelated, colossal moment of its imminent annihilation.