In a previous post (Isms), I mentioned in passing that I’ve evolved my own beliefs about the meaning/purpose of life in the meta sense, but did not elaborate upon what they were.

Om I/God

Here’s what I think is going on, to the best of my scrawny human brain’s capacity to understand such things. I believe that we are all part of the same ginormous all-that-is, experiencing itself in every possible scenario, from every possible perspective, all the time.

Not that I believe time exists independently of our experience of it. Rather, I believe it to be a perceptual filter, peculiar to human existence, which allows us to focus our limited processing capacity on a small segment of our experiences so we aren’t completely overwhelmed by them.

This both does and doesn’t correspond to Buddhist concepts. At the end of Siddhartha (a novelized biography of Buddha by Herman Hesse), after a lifetime of seeking he-knew-not-quite-what through a series of rather extreme experiences, the elderly Siddhartha is sitting on the bank of a river, hearing in it all the voices of everything, all at once. In other words, Om, the experiencing of which is a goal – if not THE goal – of Buddhist meditation. Here, Buddhism and I are on the same page. Or maybe it’s a plane. Or an orb. Or a multiverse…

For the Time-Being

But Buddhism and I diverge when it characterizes human lifetimes as a repetitive cycle of suffering and pain, chronological from lifetime to lifetime, so that subsequent lifetimes are a punishment or reward for previous ones.

Imposing linearity on things beyond human experience which may well be atemporal strikes me as bizarrely materialistic in the context of a spiritual tradition that is focused on transcendence. And then there’s the classification of human lifetimes as inherently superior to non-human lifetimes, despite all their aforementioned suffering and pain. Huh???

Be Here Meow

Be honest, who do you think is better at living in the now and and surrendering absolutely to the perfect bliss of being, you or your cat? And no matter how hard you practice mindfulness, she always will be. So if that fully present state is the most desirable one, why are multiple lifetimes as the only species on the planet that has to work to achieve it characterized as a reward, and an advancement in the spiritual hierarchy? Seems a little backwards. Shouldn’t we be aspiring to ascend to cat consciousness?

What’s “Up”?

Not to single out Buddhism for a tendency towards hierarchizing things. A predisposition to think in hierarchies is one of very few human tendencies I will grudgingly acknowledge as innate. From ancient religions to modern supernaturally-themed TV series, previously-unmentioned hierarchies get tacked on as an afterthought when writers run out of ideas, or priests fall prey to creeping worldliness.

I believe we are capable of thinking outside the ladder, but seldom do. And I also believe that may be the thing we most need to overcome in ourselves if we don’t want to become the next great extinction, by our own hands. Not that I am by any means certain humans are evolving, or are even capable of doing so. Using “journey” similes for spiritual development implies progressions that may not really apply beyond the physical realm.

Pooling My Self Together

Anyway, the reason I am bringing all of this up is that I was reading an old post (Take Me Away From All This Death) in which I explored why I fear death, or rather what it is I fear about it, which is more pertinent than ever as fear of the pandemic – and the resulting denial of both the pandemic and the fear – has spread more virulently than the pandemic itself.

After working so long and hard to discover my identity and develop a daily life into which it is fully integrated, the idea that it might end when my physical self ends is disturbing. But when I kick into the meta perspective described above, I realize nothing is lost. Nothing can be. It’s all a part of the great all-that-is, and so am I, whatever “I” may be.

It further occurs to me that this an excellent reason for loving kindness towards others, which is another major Buddhist ideal, albeit one for which an in-Buddhist-universe explanation of why it’s good is somewhat lacking. But if we are all just part of the same big thing, acceptance and compassion towards others is acceptance and compassion towards your (greater) self.

Getting there is a process, however. It’s hard to feel nurturing towards those who are willing to sacrifice me, all too literally, on the altar of their denial, to avoid facing the depth and breadth of their own incapacity to roll with life’s punches when events take an unforeseen turn.

Altared Consciousness

I have, at least, accomplished a reduction in my rage about that. I found a couple of others, far-flung in miles, but close in experience, who were also gobsmacked by the mass exodus to a Disnemagical land where “COVID is over,” 430 deaths a day do not add up to 156,000 deaths a year, and the emperor’s new clothes are sumptuous indeed.

Our shared perception that the emperor is, in fact, buck naked, soothed the threat to identity that seeing the world differently from those around us can feel to be, which in turn permitted me a clearer-eyed view. And because it is fall, even though a gradual, mellow one in a gentle climate, sorrows of the past arise like misty ghosts to remind me that I have known denial from the inside. Sometimes it’s protective, when acknowledging the magnitude of a problem for which one has no solution would be too much to bear.

Human brains evolved in small groups with little privacy where we were likely to be very well acquainted with every person we ever saw. We are ill-equipped to deal with our own burgeoning population and increasingly urban lifestyle. Our self-preservational instincts developed to protect us from imminent bodily harm. They do not serve well when a threat is invisible, prolonged, or otherwise indefinite.

And, like most herd animals, our drive to survive often trumps our empathy when the lion takes our neighbor. One wonders whether animal sacrifice religions evolved from a very old memory of a sense of safety which blossomed in the wake of another’s death.

Identity, Cries Us

So perhaps it would be more effective to shower those who fear fear itself – so much so that they can’t admit they have any – with reassurances, as counterintuitive as that feels, especially in the face of their hostility, derision and contempt. But sometimes you have to talk to the person who you sense is underneath, even when that person is unbeknownst to theirself. Especially then. They can hear you, even if the surface person cannot. I suspect HSPs will know what I mean.

A lot of humans have externally-based identities, which tremble when their external anchors shift. Fear of identity death runs deeper than fear of physical death, ergo spiritual traditions which postulate afterlives. The disruption of “normality” which COVID has brought, even though the changes are not all bad, threatens to topple those identity anchors, triggering a visceral anxiety over loss of self that is too acute for these humans to endure.

So, individualism becomes the highest law, the mega-rich price-gouge ever more deeply and blatantly, and angry men ramp up their suppression of female bodily self-determination while forcibly demanding their own. In other words, those with no strong internal center double down on external identity-affirming behaviors of the past. And the more those behaviors fail to make them feel safe, the more intensely they practice them, and the more readily they throw anyone who tells them what they don’t want to hear to the lions.

I can’t claim to have achieved the level of compassion I am advocating here. The wildfire rejection of reality is too alarming to my own sense of safety. At what point do I stop being perceived as a hypochondriac to be humored, and become instead the messenger to be shot? And will I see that point coming? We are none of us immune from fear, you see.

This, Too…

Psychologically speaking, this is fascinating and illuminating, for those who thrive upon unraveling behavioral puzzles, at least. Practically speaking, it appears to be disastrous. But sometimes disaster clears the way for rebuilding something better. As lengthy as the pandemic seems already to have been, it’s still too soon to tell how it’s going to turn out. The future remains uncertain.

But then, it always was.