My Own Lying Eyes

My teacher often draws the comparison between ignorant sentient beings (all of us, sorry) to drunks (some of us). Having been both, I see the truth of this in frequent episodes that would be hilarious if they happened to, you know, someone other than me.

As Buddhists, we’re trained to notice that the habitual ways in which we see and think about the world almost never accord with what might be termed “reality.” Like drunks, we usually blame every single other person and thing for our problems except for our drinking. But once we’re cornered and forced to admit that maybe, just maybe, our own habits are to blame, then come the dramatic declarations that we’re going to change. Unfortunately, at least at the beginning, we’re mostly just concerned with being seen by others as “someone who’s going to change” instead of actually changing. “I’m quittin’!” we shout. “And this time I mean it!” Eye rolls all around. Often it takes events of bone-deep mortification –hitting bottom, as they say – to kick in the arduous, painful, and supremely rewarding process of true change.

Now, I hit my bottom some years ago – thus this peculiar get-up I wear every day – but I’m still surprised by the dry-drunk behavior of my sentient being-ness. What happens is I forget to remain skeptical about what my conceptual mind is telling me. Sometimes I catch myself in time, but often trouble ensues.

One fairly benign example of the former concerned activity in my courtyard. Two days ago, a bunch of workers tromped in and began to mark off a large square encompassing most of the last patch of open space there is. “Oh no,” I thought, “it’s just as I feared! They’re marking the foundation of a new building. This means infernal construction noise 18 hours a day, every day, right outside my window! I can’t bear it! I have to move! But I just paid six months’ rent on this place...I know! I'll sucker someone else into living here so I can move and get the peace and quiet I need more than others. And besides that, the sky is falling!” Imagine all that with me pacing in tight circles, arms flapping.

Then, this morning, I noticed they were pouring concrete slabs around the perimeter of the square. "What the…?" thought I. "That’s a strange way to start a building." A Mongolian friend was over and when we went out I asked her to ask them what they were up to. “Oh,” one of them replied, “we’ve been hired to renovate and improve the playground for the children.” They…what? You mean I have to unpack my boxes and throw out the red-circled apartment classifieds and quit with the arm-flapping and night sweats? But I saw what I saw and was sure I was right! That’s two days of inner torment completely wasted! Yeesh.

Now, that’s a comic example, but the other day I bumped into a friend in a café. After a bit, the combination of what I deemed some odd behavior on his part and something funky I thought I saw on his laptop led me to formulate some pretty elaborate, nefarious conclusions based on pretty thin evidence. Worse still, once my grand theories about my friend ripened almost to the point of spoilage, I felt compelled to share them with him in an email. My 17 years of Buddhist training barely made an appearance as a feeble caveat at the end: “Of course, I could be mistaken. If so, oops, sorry.”

Twenty-four hours later comes the predictable reply: You’re mistaken. And allow me a moment, Mr. so-called Buddhist monk, to tell you what I think of your mistakenness.

Now again, my Buddhist training has not been for naught. It wasn’t hard to see the egregiousness of my error and I immediately and profusely apologized, while swearing to myself that I’m quittin’ conceptual proliferation for good! And this time I really mean it!

Fortunately, I pick quality friends and this one is good-natured as well as good-humored. He suggested that if I’m still on a Dostoevsky kick, the next tome I might enjoy is The Idiot, but he did so in a way that managed to be funny and not insulting. That’s a lesson I filed away.

Speaking of ol' Fyodor, I nearly bounced the cats off the bed shaking with laughter at a passage from The Brothers K so Buddhist in its outlook, and yet spoken by none other than Satan himself (there’s a small bone for you evangelist missionaries to chew on; but careful, might be a chicken bone!). It appears in an extraordinary chapter called “Ivan’s Nightmare and the Devil” that could serve as a centerpiece for a helpful volume called How To Write Good. Ivan, at the end of his tether and in a feverish delirium, encounters the Prince of Darkness seated in his quarters in the guise of an unwelcome, once-rich-but-now-slightly-shabby sponging houseguest who engages Ivan in maddening conversation about faith, belief, perception, reality, God, morality – you know, what everyone hallucinates about. He’s also hilarious about describing himself and mocking Ivan:

“ ‘…stop expecting great and sublime things of me, and you’ll see how nicely we get along…In reality, you resent my not having come to you surrounded by a red glow, in thunder and lightning and with scorched wings, but appearing, instead, in such modest attire. First, your esthetic feelings are offended and, secondly, your pride is hurt. You feel that such a great and brilliant fellow like you was entitled to something better than such a trite, vulgar devil.’”

So anyway, Satan relates an anecdote to Ivan from long ago in the nether world where he usually dwells. I’ll let Mr. S take it from here:

“ ‘This legend now, it’s about heaven. Once there was on your earth a thinker and philosopher who rejected everything – laws, conscience, religion, and, above all, a future life. So when he died, he expected to plunge right into blackness and nothingness, but what did he find instead but future life. He was very surprised and quite outraged. “This,” he said, “is in complete disagreement with my convictions.” So they condemned him for that…they sentenced him to walk a quadrillion kilometers on foot through the darkness (because we have the metric system now [lmao – ed.]), and when he had finished walking that quadrillion kilometers, the gates of heaven would be open to him and everything would be forgiven him…’

“ ‘…the man who had been condemned to that long walk stood about for a while and then lay down in the road and said: “No, I won’t walk that far; it’s against my principles.” Now, if you take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sat pouting in the whale’s belly for three days and nights, you’ll understand the character of the thinker who lay down in the road.’”

Ivan then expresses his admiration for this “thinker” and his principles and asks if he’s lying there still. No, says Satan, he lay there for a thousand years or so, but then got up and started hoofing it. Ivan derisively laughs about this and then gets his own big brain working, and here’s where we find Satan’s Buddhist punchline at the end:

“ ‘But what’s the difference – walk a quadrillion kilometers or lie there eternally? Why, it would take him a billion years to cover that distance anyway.’

“ ‘Much longer than that even – I could calculate it for you if you gave me a pencil and a piece of paper. But, anyway, he finished his walk long ago, and that’s really where the amusing story starts.’

“ ‘How could he have finished? Where did he get the billion years to do it in?’

“ ‘You say that because you’re thinking of our present earth. But you must understand that our present earth has repeated itself perhaps as many as a billion times: it died out, got covered with ice, cracked, broke into pieces, decomposed into its original component elements; and again there was just water above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun – the process can repeat itself infinitely and always in the same way, over and over again, to the minutest detail. It’s all a huge, intolerable bore…’”

Comments

[Christian]

Thank you for writing the story of my life. You just saved me the narcissistic torment of writing an autobiography.

[By the way, "metric system" is erroneous. The correct name is Système International, abbreviated S.I. The official name is only in French (so unusual nowadays).]

[kmkat]

Another name for what you call conceptual proliferation is being highly intuitive. My husband is quite good at that. When he makes a judgement based on very little evidence and is right, it is amazing. When he does same and is wrong, it can lead to some embarrassing moments. As you know. But the wild satisfaction of the not-infrequent correct jumping to a conclusion provides so much positive reinforcement that it is a hard habit to give up.

[Steve Ford]

Venerable Dude, I don't now what you accused your pal of but as for the building thing, this may be the first time that this has happened in the new Mongolia. Mark your calendar.

[Dara]

I have a funny story about that very thing too (just one, you ask! No, countless!) that involved me having a conversation with someone under a tree filled with chirping birds, mentioning that I hoped one of them would not take that moment to make an offering. Suddenly I felt a plop on my head and began to rant and rave and look for a kleenex when I heard laughter behind me. It was Jetsunma, who had heard the tail end of the conversation and poured a drop of Diet Pepsi on my head. Lesson learned? Yes. Remembered? Ummmmm....

[Jenn]

I read Crime and Punishment when I was twelve (for fun!) and never touched a Russian novel again, not unexpectedly. But you've got me so intrigued with the Brothers K that I picked up a copy at an estate sale last weekend. Today I dive in.