Showing posts with label Buddhism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buddhism. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Don't Panic! It's That Fake Synchronicity Again

I cannot explain everything that happens around me, but I can vouch for an uptick in strange occurences and odd synchronicities going back several years now. As a Jungian, I shouldn't be bothered by this, since synchronicity is the stock-in-trade of Jung's philosophy -- except that I don't believe most of it is genuine.

I wrote recently about the car accident I was in back in April. The next week, my cousin sent an email saying that my brother, who lives in another state, had been hit by an SUV driven by someone who was upset with him (my brother isn't saying anything, and neither is anyone else in the family). We haven't been able to verify what happened, which in itself is odd. Did it happen, or didn't it? You wouldn't think establishing the simple truth would be so difficult, but it is.

I've long been accustomed to noticing people hanging about who seem out of place. The first time it happened, I was in an upscale sandwich shop having lunch and reading the life of Buddha for a class. I was so engrossed in the book that I didn't look up for a long time, and when I did, there was a rather thuggish young man sitting directly across from  me, engaged in . . . not much of anything, except sitting there looking thuggish. The thought instantly came into my head that there was something unwholesome in his manner and that he just looked wrong. I left a few minutes later, and he didn't bother me, but the incident stuck in my mind. Many odd things were happening at my workplace then, and this item seemed bracketed with them somehow.

He was only the first of many others . . . the man who stared so persistently as I had lunch at yet another sandwich shop and then followed me outside, talking animatedly on his cell phone and staring; the weird guy with the ferret face who tried to engage me in a conversation about pie as I was leaving Gumbo Ya Ya; the slickly handsome but vaguely demonic stranger who arrived at the elevator in the parking garage of my hotel at the same time I did; the oddly abrasive chick who crashed the Jane Austen Book Club and then skulked around the entrance as I was leaving the store; the low-rent Michael Fassbender look-alike who showed up at Starbucks the day after I watched Jane Eyre on video.

That's just life in the city, you say -- you're bound to meet with all kinds of characters. Well, maybe. If it happened once in a while, I'd agree with you, but all the time?

Speaking of look-alikes, I've also noticed, more than once, people who looked remarkably like other people I know. One of the most striking incidents occurred a couple of years ago as I was waiting for a train with two friends in San Francisco. I had been to a performance by Dave Alvin at Slim's a night or two before. When the next train pulled up, a man who looked incredibly similar to Dave, down to his height and facial hair and cowboy hat, got off right in front of us. It was not Dave, but it's hard to believe anyone could look (and dress) that much like him without doing it on purpose (unless it was Dave Alvin night in San Francisco and no one told me). Why would someone do such a thing, you inquire? Don't ask me. It was freaking weird, though.

And then there's the classmate of mine (or her twin), who has popped up in the oddest of places. I might think I was imagining that, since the hair was always different, except for that time in New Mexico at the all-night gas station when the fellow with her looked like the boyfriend she'd introduced me to one time. Well, if it was her, why didn't she acknowledge you, you ask? Why did she speak to you like you were a stranger? I don't know. You might as well ask why her hair was that strange shade of pink.

Then there's my "haunted" apartment. I know it's not really haunted, but there are enough unexplained cracking and pinging noises, sometimes emanating from innocent objects, to make you wonder about poltergeists. The lights blink mysteriously, although they never used to. And strangest of all are the popping and trilling noises in my ears. I've had ringing in my ears for a long time, and I always put it down to congestion or something mechanical like that, but the chirps and trills I hear nowadays are different, like electronic pulses. It's like something out of James Bond, only less fun.

I've lost count of the number of times perfect strangers spoke to me almost as if they knew me. I used to wonder if some of them were trying to tell me something, but I no longer bother. If someone has something to tell me, they'd better just straight up say it.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the tradition of the bardo, a liminal state reached by a person who is in between two earthly lives. In this state, the person encounters all kinds of gods and demons, some of them benign in appearance and some of them hideous, but they are in fact all deceptive. Before death (and while dying), the person is given instructions on how to handle them and is reminded above all of their illusory nature. Some of the people I've encountered remind me of these bardo beings. I'm thinking also of Dante's Inferno, where things get progressively freakier the further Dante and Virgil descend. Before they know it, they've even reversed directions, so that instead of climbing down they're climbing up, emerging into the cave in Purgatory head first. It's all very matrixy, as life in general seems to be these days.

If anything like this has happened to you and you want my advice, the only thing I can say, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, is "Don't Panic!" It's just the bardo, and we assume it will pass. Rest assured there is a logical explanation, and accept no substitutes. I have no idea what's up with all the derring-do, just as I have no idea why the young women in the downtown grocer's seemed to think it was uproarious when the Hall and Oates song "Private Eyes" was playing (at an earsplitting volume) while I was in the store this morning. But store clerks are not the boss of me, just so you know.

I don't remember signing up for a spy caper, although that's what I feel like I'm in. A family member told me the other day that she's scared and doesn't feel safe either at home or in public. I say this so you know I'm not treating this as a joke, even though it sometimes feels like one. Bardo-spy caper-matrix-inferno-whatever -- all things must pass. I may not know the answers, but I know when someone's acting the fool.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Dessert and Metaphysics

Yesterday was lazy. I got very little reading done, even though I took a book with me when I went out to lunch. I was what you might call "out of sorts"; either that, or that Peanut Butter Honey Amaretto gelato did me in for the day. I came home and thought I'd lie down for a while and read about postmodernism. What happened was that I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was after 1 a.m., and I'd been dreaming.

Today, I buckled down and finished the chapter that's been holding me hostage for several days. In all honesty, not only is the material dense, but I also have a problem with the loss of the self since I'm kind of attached to my "self." The author of my book says that the way to deal with the "death of God" is to keep marching on until you arrive at a type of nihilism that is ultimately affirmative but causes you to lose the death grip you had on your sense of self. You lose the polar opposites of not only self and other, but also of life and death, and this leads to a strange sort of happiness (at least for philosophers). 

That's great, but on a hot July afternoon with an "everybody's out of town feeling," it's a little tough to hear that you're probably not even who you think you are. 

To think that the core of your being is in some sense quite insubstantial is not only disorienting, but it also goes against the way I experience myself. But as I've started thinking about the connection between Buddhism and this idea of the loss of the self, the whole collapse of inner/outer takes on a certain beauty.

In Old Path White Clouds, the life of Buddha by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha explains the principle of interpenetration (and the loss of the self) to his follower, Ananda, using the example of an empty bowl. Although the bowl contains nothing (except air!), the Buddha points out the presence in it of all the elements -- earth, fire, water, and air, as well as the hands and the skill of the potter -- that came together to make it. So, appearances to the contrary, the bowl is not an independent thing in itself, but the nexus of all these things. In the same way, I'm not just myself, separately and alone, but a dynamic matrix of many different forces that have come together in a specific place and time. 

Actually, this is comforting in certain ways. In some sense, we're never as alone as we think we are. I'm not just alone in my living room, typing this in tranquillity; I'm composed of long-dead stars that once breathed fire and now live in me: "The world in a grain of sand," as William Blake said. It's beautiful and profound, but I still like the idea of my uniqueness and the solidity of certain things. Call me stubborn, but I don't want to dissolve into nirvana. I'd rather stay here and try another gelato.