May 15, 2003

"From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come."

I...have been indulging myself in rest, and fetishized solipsism. This is an extension of my thoughts of nearly a month ago. It is much more comfortable and--all around--more pleasant within the confines of my own skull. This flies in the networked face of what passes for human interaction in the Information Age, which is all about linking, increasing the complexity of the 'sphere, achieving some sort of tipping-point where all the pages and sites and 'blogs collapse into fabulous higher order and we've all evolved somehow. All very Aquarian Conspiracy, really, and right now the notion seems to me to be worth about the same as a used copy of that book. Fifty cents!

Which is not to say that I've settled upon the Big Knowing, or finalized my own personal take on How It Is, or told the outside world to sod off while I set about acquiring a good couch, some tapestries, a hookah and some poppy by-product to smoke.

But Lord, I've come to see that there is no substitute for a good and sensible Head, and in a massive fit of misanthropy I have concluded that there are far too many bad and insensible Heads out there, each one seeking out others to share in its nasty insensibility. Oh, I've got them spotted! Nasty, bad, wicked Heads, so attached to Knowing, all wrapped up in their Big Big Truth, but unaware that their furious clinging is akin to a drowning man's slipping grasp on a fragile rope, and that once loose of it they will plunge down into fathomless, lightless depths.

A little knowledge is a terrible thing. A lot of Knowledge is a neurotic redoubt erected against eternity.

It's taken me...oh, 31 years to realize this, and it puts me in the precarious position of claiming knowledge, or at the very least of having a belief worthy of acting upon, and this is exactly the same sort of thing that all of the other bad insensible wicked Heads are doing. That's a problem, and--contrary to what seems to be popular practice--the obsessive production of clever words strung together in some semblance of logical order will not resolve it. I would rather cut to the chase and leap about the room shouting I'm right! I'm right! I'm right! and baring my teeth at passers-by.

People tend to believe in the things that most reinforce a positive self-image. Thus, if the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis of Oil is the tripartite embodiment of all that is petroleum-based and evil, then the constant decrying of that Axis and all of its nefarious schemes makes one, by corollary, righteous. Similarly, if the Clinton/Clinton/Gore triumvirate of Lewdness, Feminism and Earthy-Crunchy-College-Boy Amoralism is the fount of all devilry, then by standing in opposition to it one becomes pure. It's a simple equation that becomes algorithmically more complex as one leaves the realm of politics and enters the houses of theology, ethics, and sexuality. The fundamental principle, however, remains the same. Rare indeed is the creature that chooses to deliberately cause itself pure injury or pain, and this is as true of the human creature and its thinking activities as it is of a rat in an electrified cage.

Of course, what we believe is good for us and what is actually good for us are not necessarily the same things. This is where we, as a species, part company with Mr. Rat. Our language abilities are uniquely suited to the task of psychologically resolving conflicts between "believe" and "actually." You may, for example, believe that opposing the continued attempts of Jews and Negroes to rule America and pollute the white race is a character-building enterprise, but whether that effort is actually good for you is, I think, open to question. There are similar issues surrounding modern sybaritic excess and flaccid "spiritual" indulgence, neither of which is thought to be harmful by the people who engage in it. It is via internal dialogue--that is, through language--that we convince ourselves of the rightness of our thinking and our actions.

People who only hang about with other like-minded people rarely have occasion to fully develop the sort of pithy justifications often required by those who would disagree with them. This is called orthodoxy, and it is on raging display in any group of humans you care to point out. Nevertheless, even in the absence of external heretical challenge, people still must create their own justifications for their behaviors and beliefs, if only to provide sufficient motivation for behaving and believing. This explains why a rat will eventually stop going into the corner of the cage with the electrified floor to get the tasty food pellet, while a human will--say--continue to visit bath houses every weekend and the STD clinic once a month. The rat can't convince itself that the tasty food pellet is worth the pain. The human can.

Similarly, there are idea-sets that are painful to maintain, because the ideas conflict with each other, the external environment, or with subconscious perception. This is what is meant by the term "cognitive dissonance." This dissonance is psychologically unpleasant, like an electrified cage floor. The assumption here is that the bundle of ideation which makes up a given person's thinking is capable of achieving a certain harmony, and tends towards order. Ideas that are in conflict induce various neuroses and complexes, which can be resolved by eliminating the dissonance.

There are many ways to reduce dissonance. One way is to seek out, as best you can, the "actuality" of a belief about yourself or the external environment, and to change your thinking if you discover that it's in conflict with that actuality. This works very well for some things, and not so well for others. Empirical beliefs about your environment, for example, are easily checked. Fluffier beliefs about your personality, or your metaphysical nature, are not so easily checked.

Another way to reduce unpleasant dissonance is via the mechanism of social padding, whereby the process of individually approaching "actuality" is replaced by a process of seeking consensus. This has the advantage of working well for nearly everything. Whether you're a Jew-hating cross-burning Aryan knight, a leather-wearing big-mustached fister of men, a sincere Christian, or a committed atheist, you can find a group of like-minded folks who will surround you with comfortable affirmation and lessen the impact of whatever disharmony your particular ideation-package might be causing. In our Information Age, this is becoming easier and easier. If you believe in cold fusion and UFOs, there are people who will assure you that you're right, in return for a little reassurance from you. If you believe that Bill Clinton personally shot Vince Foster in the eyeball, there's a newsgroup for you. Countless websites await those who believe that Dick Cheney will pocket eighty million dollars in cash from our recent Iraqi adventures. And so forth.

The Big Funny is that no matter which method you use to achieve cognitive consonance, there remains a fundamental epistemological uncertainty that can never be harmonized. Far beneath the petty assertions of human politics and religious constructs yawns the ceaseless chasm of death, the great unknowable into which the most well-constructed, impregnable fortresses of faith and logic will inevitably crumble.

Now: this is the part where I sail off into the flaky frontiers of personal, inexplicable experience. Once, in the midst of focused contemplation of what death might be like, while trying to imagine my own non-existence, I encountered an uncanny, thunderous absence. It was like a billion Gyuto monks in full-throated chant, and it was utterly silent. No drugs were involved, oddly enough. But while drifting in that strange state I "glimpsed" the overwhelming noise. Over the next few years I occasionally "sensed" it again, but never with any clarity...it was as though I was separated from all those monks by a thin, double-glazed window of soundproof glass. Sometimes it felt like an explosion, just about to occur.

Years later I encountered the passage from the Bardo Thodol quoted above. The Bardo Thodol dates from the 8th century, and purports to be a guide to the visions encountered during and just after death. It is intended to be read aloud to the dying. This supposedly calms the fears of the recently deceased, so that they will not be drawn into further bodily incarnation and can thus achieve enlightenment. The description of "the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding" is found in the second part of the book, the Chonyid Bardo, which is supposed to describe the states that a newly-disembodied awareness will encounter immediately after death. When I read those words, I remembered the silent thunder I had encountered. It seemed a peculiarly apt description.

Think of it this way: our five senses are attuned to the small space of this particular planet, this precise atmospheric mix, these certain wavelengths of light. But we don't see the ultraviolet petals that the honeybee sees, or hear songs as the blue whale hears them. Imagine, for a moment, that you could perceive all that there is to perceive. You would experience the cacophony of the entire electromagnetic spectrum far beyond the tiny sliver of infrared through ultraviolet light, encompassing radio emissions, X-rays and gamma radiation. You would hear the roar of molecular collisions, the shout of sunlight impacting the earth, the whisper of neutrinos passing through matter. If you could perceive all that there is to perceive, without the organic, limiting filters of flesh, what would it be like?

A thousand thunders, perhaps...the ceaseless, terrifying, overwhelming crush of all that is.

My experience is my own, and there are plenty of people I could seek out for a little social padding. But this doesn't seem like the sort of thing that needs to be fixed in place with the illusion of certainty. The Tibetan interpretation of my experience requires many things...the existence of souls, the wheel of reincarnation, and so on. But the experience itself...ah, now that is evocative. I attach these eighth-century words to it because they resonate, both with the experience itself and with my sense of it.

In my younger, psychedelic days I hung out with people who believed all sorts of things--that a guy named Harold could teach them how to approach God, that they were personally in real-time mental communication with alien beings from the Pleiades, that hyperventilating could send you back in time to resolve your birth traumas. All of these people were very focused on community. They had to be: how else to quiet the raging dissonance in their heads?

For my own part, I have come to realize a third way: eliminating dissonance by loosely holding onto personal experience, and not attributing to it a certainty that it does not possess. Did I really hear the thousand thunders of true Reality? Maybe, maybe not. But when I read the foamings of those who are Certain, of those who Know...I smile.

Not because I know more than they do...but because I'm beginning to realize that I know nothing of importance.