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Today’s Karmic Workout – Confront An Unknowable Universe

Karmic Muscle Group:
Today’s Exercise: Confront An Unknowable Universe

[Preparatory Note: we live in a world that increases in complexity exponentially every decade. Our technology, economy and natural sciences are redefining the universe as we know it, and we didn't know it all that well to begin with. For the average person this can be overwhelming. We hear news reports about "god particles", artificial consciousness, cloning and other discoveries that are radically changing they way that human beings have understood the world to be. Human culture has not had enough time to digest this rapid change and integrate it into a social understanding that accommodates human needs and scientific advances simultaneously. We have recently undergone a global recession that none of the experts saw coming and still do not fully understand. There are terrorists coming into high tech weapons that could wipe out entire cities. We are being watched nearly everywhere we go, computers monitor our cellphone calls and emails and intenet companies assemble detailed data profiles on us so as to make it nearly impossible for us to search for the widget that we want because we are being bombarded by "search results" presenting the widgets that someone else wants us to buy.

Nearly everyone in our massive global society is nervous. We are confronted with a world that is so complex and moving so fast that we feel like a squirrel trying to cross a freeway. As our anxiety builds, we engage with certain behaviors that are not necessary good for us or the human race. For example, one trend in our society is to live alone and not create families. In 1950, only about 7% of American adults lived alone. Now it is 28%. We spend less time with community groups. We spend enormous amounts of time in the cocoons of our own reality trying to find a "happy place" amidst the chaos. As we disengage from society and each other, we are growing intolerant of others and are beginning to live in a consciousness that is characterized by threatening sense of "them" and very little "we".

As human beings, we have always been afraid of what we do not understand. This fear practically defines human consciousness. One common response to the anxiety that we feel when we confront complexity or the unknown is to create simplistic explanations or mythologies and then relate to these speculative narratives as fact. If you sailed westward from Europe in 1400, everyone knew that you would sail off the edge of the earth. The proof of this was that sailors did not come back. This was not a matter of faith, this was a logical assumption based on the known facts at the time. 600 years later, as archaeologists have found evidence of Roman ship wrecks off the coast of Brazil and Nordic relics along the coast of Eastern Canada and even further south, we now know that some of those missing sailors found an new world before anyone knew that there was a new world to be found. At the time, however, there was belief that the world was a plane with an edge and an end. There were speculations of great sea monsters and ethereal beings that haunted the sea that were yet to be charted. The truth was that no one knew what was at the end of the water, but it did not stop them from make up stories about it.

We would rather live in a myth than live with the unknown. Myths make us feel like we can at least create a relationship with a complex world. The fact of the matter is that myths contain wisdom and are useful, but they are also dangerous. Some myths can lead to more fear and even hysteria. It is amazing the number of people who have given away all of their belongings thinking that the end of the word was scheduled for last Tuesday.

The purpose of this exercise is not to challenge belief. It is to challenge fear. In this exercise we are going to confront the unknown as the unknown and let it be as scary as it wants to be, or not, but we are going to take a moment to suspend our frantic rational obsessions and embrace not knowing.]

Find a quiet place to contemplate and turn of your cellphone.
Establish meditative breathing with long slow inhales and equally long exhales.
Begin to think about your body. Think about the fact that each cell has DNA and that those molecules, unfolded, are six fee long. They give off low frequency radio waves. Scientists only know what about 20% of this molecule does. Your DNA is very similar to all other animals and even similar to plants suggesting that you have a common genetic ancestry with all living things. But nobody on this planet can tell you what that is.
Think about the universe. Physicists have discovered that atoms are made up of particles that actually may have not substance to them. As the search for the Higgs Boson has scientists all over the world smashing atoms, we are starting to understand that all there really is in existence is energy and that it is not made up of anything. This can be mostly proven by mathematics that you are not likely to understand.
Think about the guts of your cellphone. Odds are you have no idea how it really works.
Think about the global economy. The best minds from hundreds of universities have no idea exactly how it works and it can launch us into global depression and, ultimately, war if a small group of computers make a mistake. It is complex, poorly understood and can wipe out whole sections of the human population.
We know that large astral bodies have struck our planet in the past and even caused massive extinction events. With all of our technology, there are objects in space that are so big that we could do nothing about it should one of them strike our planet.
You are creatures that are more monkey than enlightened being and if you stop and think about it, you really have no idea what the heck is going on in the universe. This, of course, has not stopped you from having an opinion about it.
Sit and meditate on the fact that you have no idea who you are, what you are or even if you are. You have no idea what your experiences mean. You have no idea whether you will even survive through tomorrow. You are vulnerable and impermanent.
In your mind, embrace the enormity of what you do not know. Allow yourself to sit exposed to an indifferent universe knowing that you could be, nearly at any time, crushed like an ant. Do not try to console yourself. Sit quietly, ant-like and vulnerable.

Training Note:
This exercise takes enormous concentration because our rational minds, when stoked with a threat, start calculating and speculating to the exclusion of all thought. Many of us cling to our existence to the point that we might not be able to even take this exercise seriously. Some of us will rationally conclude that this excercise is absurd.

The fact is that you are a very interruptable event. This is no big deal. Everything is an interruptable event. What we are trying to do here is to observe our mind as it tries to justify and console itself rather than accept chaos, the complexity and the unknown. For centuries, human beings have bent over backwards to confront the discomfort that they feel because the don’t know what is really going on around them and they don’t really know who or what they are. We have invented elaborate mythologies to explain the world and our place in it only to watch those mythologies be disproved and dispelled centuries later. We will accept almost any thought that validates ourselves and alleviates the anxiety that we experience when we recognize that we live each day an inch away from being wiped out.

But what is the karmic consequence of all this rational denial, self-delusion and anxiety? We fight wars over ideology. We hate our neighbors because they do not share our religion. We distract ourselves so as to not think about death and impermanence. We stay busy to avoid the possibility that our lives are meaninglessness. The unknown and our fear of it is the source of an enormous amount of consciousness that is highly delusional and yet acts as a type of anesthesia. This makes it very hard to simply be in the moment. By taking a look at the mental processes that we use to avoid complexity and the unknown we can begin to develop the skill of simply being.

Notice that when you do not know, you create opinions and use them as fact. Notice that when you do not know, mythology takes on the dimension of possibility and reality. Why do you need to know in the first place?

Karmic Benefits:

Get To Know Your Inner Nervous Monkey: nervous flight response is not just for rabbits and squirrels. While we may be the top of the food chain, in the cosmic sense, we would not even make a splat on the surface of comet. Our will to survive has us watching and conceptualizing our world, but what is all that interpretive thinking doing to our being? If our self-concerned thinking leads us to create dark fantasies as a proxy for an unknowable reality, isn’t it like following a mirage to an oasis that does not exist? How often does this thinking take us on a wild goose chase?
Consider That Knowing Has Nothing To Do With Being: knowing is a way to inform being, but being does not really need knowing. Being is a creative state that is caused by choice and is not inherently dependent on circumstances. Being may arise as a reaction to a thought or belief, but it is not required. Being can actually alter karma and the chain of cause and effect that dominates the mundane world. We can cause compassion in our being without any reason whatsoever. We can sit and be one with a sun rise without being able to name the gases or the chemical processes that make it warm. Whether we see the sun as a thermonuclear reaction or a god, the explanation of it only matters if it alters our being. At the end of the day, these interpretive thoughts become simply a narrative that we invent to justify our being. Perhaps simply feeling the warmth of the sun is the most useful experience and we do not need to know why it warms us. It suffices to know that it does. Despite complexity and the stories and myths that arise from it, live is really a far more simple matter. We can simply choose to be and choose to cause the experience that we intend. If we have an intention to cause kindness, we do not need to wait for a sunny day. We can cause kindness in our being without a reason.
Consider That You Do Not Learn About Life, You Create It In Real Time: we think that we “discover” life or “figure ourselves out”. Is this really true? Or is it that our being is simply at the whim of the interpretive narrative that we create. Believing that our opinions and speculations are real forms a kind of a trap. We become stuck in a world of our own making, but we did not always choose to make it the way it turned out. This is because we did not know we had the power to do that. Sometimes our narratives can be useful, but often it turns us into a dog holding his own leash and not realizing that he is free to move about the world. Does the thought of DNA in the cells of your body grant you being? Does it matter whether to your experience of life that it even exists? Quite possibly, science, a century or two from now will say that DNA is simply a pattern of energy or something equally ethereal. The point is that we live in a world of experience and we have much greater control over that experience once we break free of our fear of the unknown and our obsession to know. Rationality, while extremely useful as a practical matter, is actually a kind of limitation. Rationality simply provides us with an explanation and a way to manipulate the physical world. But it has very little implication in the world of being. Being needs no explanation. It just is.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.