“Keep telling yourself ‘it’s only a movie‘” was the famous tagline for Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left in 1972. It may be appropriate to look at the harrowing moments of our mind with the same encouraging detachment. No matter how serious life may feel in the moment, like a movie, it’s seeming realism is the result of a perceptive trick of the tale. (Pun intended). Neurological fake news is an ongoing misinterpretation of reality bent to the purpose of making ourselves more important to ourselves.
Sometimes we are suck into the movie, gripping our nails in harrowing belief; and other times we’re able to step outside the frame seeing ourselves telling ourselves a story. With meditation practice we can slow the process in order to peak beyond the folds of the curtain to the working basis within.
I love moments of hypnagogic consciousness upon awakening, surfing between sleeping, dreaming and waking as if skipping over gadget impressions as we rise into awareness.
But, just before we wake there is a most precious moment. A moment of “ahhhhh” that precedes all thought. This moment of pure waking precedes every moment. This is the sacred space, or gap, where we have a limitless opportunity to hack our preset turning our mind from rote adherence to habit toward discovery and change. This may be the very space of creation. The moment before, before.
And within this gap we might get a glimpse into the projector. The apparatus that constructs the fantasy of life.
For many humans, with the outsized pressures of modern life, this subtle moment goes by unreguarded. We push past it, bursting awake to the screeching beep of the alarm, sing some innocuous tune in the shower, dress and rush straight to the coffee. In short order we’re following our travel mug down the street to the train. It’s like waking up after a drunken night next to someone you don’t know, trying to sneak out the door before they wake up. That used to happen to me every morning. And I lived alone. I could be three stops on the train before I start to recognize myself.
When we slow down in order to meet life, we might see life happening in the gaps we blast past. If we train the mind to pause and pay attention to these precious moments, every following moment becomes an opportunity for discovery. When we turn our mind toward discovery our lives become alive. This is what we refer to as waking up. It’s not leaving a dream state for a somnambulist state, but actually awakening. Looking past the curtain and seeing the mechanics of our seeing.
The Buddha experienced pain and suffering – even after his enlightenment, up until his death – or he wouldn’t have had the skillful means necessary to convey a remedy to suffering. He was there with us. He was not a supernatural being who might free us if we were to play along and do as he said. The path of awakening requires our participation. And yet, that participation can’t be under our control. Aye, there’s the rub. We can’t just close our eyes and wait to wake up and yet we can’t turn our journey into the next story we are scripting.
Buddha took the personal and translated it to the universal. He owned his personal experience, yet his personal experience wasn’t about him. It was human experience. In the same way, our life is personal, but it is not ours alone. Whether we know this or not, we are inextricably part of everything in nature.
But all too often, we fall away from waking, into fantasies projected by inner narratives. We carry the dream of sleep with us into our day. And in our dreams we are too important to regard the life around us unless we can twist it to fit the narrative. The mind does this instantly with little concern for reality. It creates stories with ourselves at the center that give us the impression that we are in control. But all we control is our narrative. Like a movie “moving” at 24 frames a second our internal movie creates a momentum that renders a false reality that looks and smells like a duck.
Trungpa, Rinpoche said to a group of students in a shrine room that the before we notice the walls, or the columns, or the floor we have a micro instant gap, which he illustrated with a gasp. Gasp, floor. Gasp, ceiling. Before we label anything, or categorize any moment, we have a moment to pause, breaking the momentum that perpetuates the movie, we might see a past the curtain to a brighter, clearer moment.
We may absorbed in be a gripping movie. But the world is nonetheless waiting outside for us.
I think I read once that life is too important to freak out. The idea I have is that when I really care about things, I slow down to pay attention. My freak-out gets in the way of paying proper attention, and I miss things; it leads to embarrassment and unhappiness. But when I am able to slow down and get out of my own way, I am often so happy regardless of what is happening because there is always something to appreciate.
On a more serious note, recent events in the political sphere seem quite frightening to me. The world I thought I lived in seems suddenly to be quite different and imperiled. In light of the confusion I feel a need to wake up a little more and pay attention to the world as it is. I am doing my best to avoid judgement, tho I will frequently fail at that. But I feel old superstitions dropping away, and old attachments as well. It’s like I suddenly realized that this life thing is serious and I need to give it proper respect and attention.
It reminds me of when my cat’s health started failing. She wasn’t eating well, and seemed quite finicky about the water bowl, so I started paying closer attention to her. I wound up developing a closer relationship with her, and I feel that I learned a lot from that exchange.
Since this attitude change occurred, I am starting to find that I care less about what is going to happen to myself, or in the future at all. This moment is all there is. (I’m still making plans as I go, but) I am less concerned with imagining a grand plan for myself or the world.