A Zen Horror for the 21st Century
An empty mind is not a blissful mind. An empty mind is ... just empty.
It is like a glass of water from which both glass and water have been removed. A foundational vibrational hum overlaid with its acoustical opposite, rendering what the Great Ringmaster would characterize as "Silenzio!"
An Illusion of Intimacy
In this brief time of COVID made personal, I am banished to the second bedroom.
The bed is Asian and supremely comfortable if a bit difficult to get up from, given its modest elevation. In addition to pillows, it has two big bolsters that are covered with a soft and resilient fabric. The fabric is decorated with Japanese kanji. What do they mean?
If I place the bolsters between the bed and the wall, and in the night my palm or my forearm falls on one of them, I can convince myself that I am in touch with the living hip of a heretofore unknown slender and sleeping woman, one who radiates a certain warmth in her sleep. Hips, unlike rib cages for example, don't breathe, but I can even convince myself that the shallow breathing of her lungs reverberates at a remove in the hips, as does her qi, her spirit body.
And thus I am permitted a long and uninterrupted touch -- one that otherwise, at this time, no living creature but my dog might allow me.
What's for Lunch?
The string theorist Michio Kaku was asked recently to speculate about what alien civilizations might look like, how they might behave. He answered that very likely at some point in their evolution they killed, and ate what they killed. How so? According to Kaku, predatory behavior correlates with intelligence. The fox is smarter than the bunny. The bunny need only learn to run away, as fast as it can. But the fox must learn to strategize the hunt. Since we know that the aliens must be very smart to get here, they must also have a history of predation.
(Is this true as a general proposition? Is the alligator smarter than the faun that it pulls beneath the water and drowns?)
The subtext of the remark is clear.
An Inference of Immortality
The prevailing view for more than 100 years has been that we are solely material beings, that consciousness is nothing more than the software that runs the computers between our ears.
An opposing view is beginning to make a comeback, as has been noted before in this space. See, for example, the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, who argues from economy of explanation that consciousness is primary.
At the same time, as has also been noted in this space, the Nimitz Encounter compels us to take seriously the idea that we are not alone in the universe. And, once we have stepped onto the moving walkway of UFO/UAP exploration, we know not where to get off, and we are led inexorably into high strangeness. Something like the Hollywood Wolfman popularized by Lon Chaney in the 1940s may be lying in wait for your chihuahua.
Jacques Vallee and others argue convincingly that the "embodied" high strange phenomena are actually one, shape-shifting phenomenon -- the "greys," the "reptilians," the skinwalkers, the little people of Ireland, the ayahuasca elves, the Ladies of Fatima and Lourdes, the pilots of airships who knocked on doors in the Midwest circa 1900, when there were no airships at all of the natural sort in North America.
Most, but not all, of the various creatures have been clothed. The clothing may be austere, more wetsuit than Brooks Brothers, as in the case of the greys, or it may be elaborate, like the robes of Our Lady.
In a material world, even one in which we are not alone, someone must make the clothes worn by all sentient beings. Lacking proof of any kind to back me up, I insist that there are no factories where the high-strange clothes are made; the idea is far more preposterous than the existence of the beings themselves. Thus, the higher intelligence must be able to substantiate the clothing as it were, just as it substantiates the creature itself. The leprechauns dancing around the fire did not buy their cute little suits off the rack.
And if the uniforms are substantiated at will, it is a good bet that everything else regarded as material is likewise a projection from consciousness. And if everything material is a projection from consciousness, then it is also a good bet that our consciousness survives the disintegration of our bodies. "In what form?" you may ask.
Who knows? We may, in good time, have to rub elbows with some pretty nasty manifestations of the spirit, just as predicted by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
We live in a time, the more one thinks about it, of the Magnification of the Mystery.
