Not Even Not Zen 360: Biomythography - Note 99: Religious Experiences, Pt. 3

Religious Experiences, Part II

Night 3: 

On the next night, I crashed late, exhausted. I'd worked past dinnertime. I'd read comics and paperbacks for less than an hour after my late meal. At last, my limbs got so heavy they were hard to move. I had to put myself on pause. 

When I lay back, I started dreaming within seconds. I fell into a busy adventure. Here, I was an agent on an alien world, a golden insectoid person among many others. We were different, somehow, and structured as a society in ways other than I had expected in my job as secret agent. Yet we were clearly people inside. We had the usual set of mortal problems, solutions, and needless intrigues. Among the problems I needed to deal with was a frustrated individual who was considering murder. My job was to steer him away from making that choice. 

 

I dashed from one complicated plot to another. Although I solved the potential murder, I found other things wrong, other crises to avert or at least, in the cases of natural disasters, to mitigate. My time on the dark, golden planet seemed awfully long. 

Eventually, I finished the last mission and found myself back in my home base, which was located in the heart of a giant, yellow star. Part of me realized this was an odd place to keep the base. Yet it made perfect sense. The insectoid people wouldn't think of looking here for a very long time. 

Besides, from the impossible size of the star, I understood that epochs had passed. The universe was old. Now that I was back in my base with a few others of my kind, I recovered my memories. They had been off-loaded, somehow. In the star, I understood more. I immediately agreed with this as a location for launching operations on the planet, which was good, because a few seconds later I remembered I had played a key role in designing the place. 

The three of us designers met. 

You're being called back, said my partner-boss, currently in the form of one of the natives but glowing silver, perhaps with the heat.

Someone is being called, I replied, resisting my orders. 

We all know the logical choice is you, said the glowing creature. I am strongly tied here. And I was never as good in the other places. 

But I've achieved a lot, I countered.

Yes, and that's why we don't need you. The creature shrugged. You know you're the one. 

How long will I be gone?

Forever, I think. 

I nodded. My partners indulged me as I took a last look around the interior of the star. Then I let myself be called back. I returned to headquarters, although I'd been gone so long I had forgotten the place. 

My existence blinked. Headquarters, it seemed, was the afterlife. 

I held motionless for a moment, suspended in whitespace as I let my awareness expand. The milky atmosphere because transparent to my senses. I saw what I needed to see. There were countless electric-blue angel souls around, most of them in the distance. There were yellowish formerly-alive souls, too, some of them close to me. Not much had changed since I had gone on my mission to one of the last planets in the universe that still teemed with life. 

And yet everything had changed. 

A nearby soul touched me, then another. As we gathered, I knew what they knew. I had been called back because the other architects in the afterlife were building superstructures. The tasks were massive. The structures were too big for mere souls to see and understand. Yet we worked with them. 

And the non-architects had called for me. And the other architects, too, had wanted me, they revealed. They directed my attention to several large conglomerations in front of me. I recognized them. They were the soul-structures I had started in ages past. There were soul-roads and conduits I'd made, too, even farther off. 

They wanted me to join everything. They wanted it to make sense. 

Dimly, I felt the presence. The ever-holiness in the afterlife no longer irritated me. I felt for the vibration of it as a way to reassure myself I was in the right place, doing the right things. Well, the other souls wanted me to put this all together, to join everything with everything else. It was a big job. 

It was so big, I could barely perceive the nearest other architect in the distance. Even so, I knew the architect and the others like us were farther away than I really understood. It didn't matter. Distance was irrelevant. Time was immaterial. I would do the work. I would join superstructures with others. I would thread the darkly yellow conduits. 

This was the end game. Or it was nearly so. Or maybe my perceptions were incomplete and the building of the superstructures would go on forever. But I didn't think it was the case, this time. I had come and gone a lot, over the ages. I had born witness to the changes. And I had just lived (once more) in the universe. It had looked old. There had been only four ancient galaxies visible. The main galaxy itself was drifting apart into components. Only a few hundred stars had been visible from the home base. 

And here, the afterlife was bigger, more finished, and more complex. It was functioning, to my view, in nearly understandable ways. 

Maybe I would understand more. And maybe I wouldn't. When I had first arrived, I had railed against my lack of comprehension, spurred on by my perceptions of wrongness. But now I didn't feel any need to exert myself against the presence that was God. My burning push for justice had been so long ago, I barely remembered. Now I simply did the good deeds I could, however small they were in this grand scheme. 

I moved the stars. I moved the structures.

The presence was always there. Even the angels, I noticed, seemed more mature now. They found their places better. They understood something about how to lend aid. And I had my place among them, fixing and building, working all the way, laboring in peace toward the unknowable end, toward the heat death of the universe.

Not Even Not Zen 359: Biomythography - Note 98: Religious Experiences, Pt. 2

Religious Experiences, Part II

Night 2:

Many nights as a teen, I stayed up late, usually reading paperbacks. The short ones, I flipped through at a rate of one every two hours. I hated to stop in the middle, so I read to the end of each book and slept a bit less each night. And maybe that's why I had no recollection of my unconscious world, normally. 

On the night after my odd afterlife dream, I managed to put down an Agatha Christie paperback. I drifted off before midnight. I was surprised to find that, almost immediately, I fell into a continuation of my previous night's dream. For a while, I even retained an awareness of being asleep. Once more, I beheld my vision of the afterlife. And although I moved through the milkiness of my cloudy existence filled with mostly-white, bright stars, I noticed that color had crept into my perceptions. 

There were hues in the brightness. 

I had the sense that the difference came from how I had become accustomed to my work. I was immersed in it, a full citizen of the afterlife. It was not a matter of the blank world gaining colors so much as it was my comprehension growing more mature. I was able to interpret small differences in the shades of reality. Some of the 'angel' stars burned blue-white. Some of the 'soul' stars burned yellow-white. 

My ability to tell the difference aided me. It gave me direction. The souls were the ones usually not in the right place.  

The souls of the dead were somehow warmer than souls that had never lived. They were bigger, usually, and more complicated inside. I liked working with them. Sometimes the angels questioned me as I worked, though. They didn't understand what I was doing. To be fair, I seemed to be a self-appointed fixer of things that seemed wrong to me. I didn't mind the questions. I had them, too. But I kept working. 

I fixed and fixed, built and built. The structures I created grew more complex and yet, sometimes I corrected them so that they could self-assemble into entities that were more simple. I leaned back, surveyed the results, felt satisfied, and looked for more disorganization to organize.

What are you doing? asked a yellowish star. I grazed my intent over another group of lost souls. Sometimes, the individuals were meant to be on their own, I knew, but not most of these. I could tell at a glance. And the yellowish star, too, had been observing the lonely souls.

When I turned to the yellowish one that had spoken, I saw it was the biggest and most complicated soul I'd yet encountered. Merely to touch it gave me an sense of its deepness and greatness. Inside its fire, I detected a hint of orange. Truly, this one was different. 

I knew what to do. Earlier, I had built a structure with a sort of hole in it, a gap I had perceived as necessary to exist even though I hadn't known the reason. Now I understood. This soul belonged there. 

Please come with me, I said. I was dragging the soul even as I talked. Amused but suspicious, the soul allowed me to move it.

When I added it into the structure, where it leapt into place voluntarily, the newly-created conglomerate shivered from the inside to its outermost reaches. The belly lit from within, sourced by the great soul. The fire of it, everywhere, grew warm. This had been another good deed.

And I kept working. 

"Oh." In the middle of the night, in the mundane world, I awoke. My bedroom lights hummed over my head. I had fallen asleep so fast I hadn't risen to turn them off. For a moment, I felt exhausted by the work I had been doing in my afterlife vision. But I felt satisfied, too. In the afterlife, I had been getting better. 

I was improving. 

Not Even Not Zen 359: Biomythography - Note 97: Religious Experiences, Pt. 1

Religious Experiences, Part I

When I was nineteen, I experienced something rare for me - three nights of the same dream. In fact, it was the same dream overlapping and continuing. The intertwining threads of the connected themes and images  wove themselves into a single long, deeply religious story.

I've had most of my mystical, spiritual experiences while an atheist. On the younger end of those experiences, I would have called myself agnostic. My father had explained something about Betrand Russell and agnosticism as a designation. I'd read a few Bertrand Russell essays (probably of the simplest type since these were pre-teen years) and I felt in sympathy with the long-dead philosopher.

By the time I was twelve and calling myself agnostic, I had read a few Daoist, Buddhist, and Stoic pieces, including the Herman Hesse re-telling of the story of Siddhartha. I practiced sitting in meditation, albeit inconsistently. One time, as I sat on a couch in a teachers lounge in Northwood High School, I got a strange sensation of rising out of my body.

It was a little like a time in third grade when, during a kickball game, I rounded third to home and realized I was about to make a home run. From third to home, my view of the world rose out of its usual vantage point as I watched myself from the outside, speeding to home plate, even as I was also in my body, demanding that my limbs pump fast. It was a weird, doubled view of the world and my outside view, looking down on my body from a position thirty feet to my right and in the air, was by far the dominant one. As I remember it, I had to force myself back into my body after it was over.

Five years later, as I sat in Northwood, I felt my "self" rise out of my back and look down. I could see the back of my head. Already, my physical form had become partly transparent. My self rose and expanded. The world seemed to shrink a little. I could see through the structure of the entire building, which appeared to me in a see-through version, real but also comprehensible as a set of outlines. The forms revealed kept telescoping out and away or, more precisely, my view grew larger. I could see the surrounding town, then cities and rivers, only dimly glimpsed, and in a few seconds, the world. The world did not appear as in a photograph from space. It was a darkish shadow into which I could peer and see the outlines of human-made shapes, an ocean, and a bit more. Soon it diminished. I saw the solar system from a distance, mostly empty space.

Even the solar system grew distant quickly. For a long moment, all of reality seemed dark. I sensed that my view was still moving. Other star systems became part of my picture, then many of them. My sense of self, of connectedness, kept expanding.

Toward the end, the star clusters and galaxies and galaxy clusters became dim. They revealed shapes I couldn't really comprehend. I understood, in a vague way, that I was seeing things I couldn't understand - that I always had but now I had passed some sort of limit.

The not-really-understandable stars dimmed. The universal structures receded. All of existence faded.

I became aware of my thumb touching my forefinger. My skin and ribcage hummed a little. I listened to my body. It felt quiet. I opened my eyes. Around me, the warm shades of the furniture in the teacher's lounge seemed mundane but oddly, reassuring. I was back.

There was an unpleasant smell in my nose but it was the same, hard to define odor the high school teacher's lounge usually had. A bird trilled. It had been making its birdcalls earlier, I remembered. Behind me, light streamed in from a window. Branches and leaves of a tree cast flickering shadows as a breeze blew outside.

#

Although I had other sensations of heightened awareness and connectedness, I didn't have many experiences out of my body. I don't remember any after puberty. For a long time as a teen, I didn't have the ability to recall my dreams, either, except when I had nightmares or I woke abruptly. If someone dropped a heavy chair in the house or we heard a nearby lightning strike, I would rouse. For a moment, I would remember. Otherwise, there was nothing.

On the occasions I experienced a dream I could remember, it was always a surprise.

Religious Experiences, Part II

Night I:

As I transitioned from one dreamworld to the next, I was calm. My existence went grayish and quiet. Everything grew distant. My vision darkened for a moment, long enough to notice. Then the world brightened to reveal an expanse of blankness.

I moved around in the whitish expanse. After a while, I realized I was dead.

In my dream, I wasn't mad about it. I wasn't sad. In a matter-of-fact way, I decided I might as well explore my continued existence in this realm of bright light. I looked in every direction. There was no ground below me, only the vastness of milky space. There was no sky above, only a continued blank. Sometimes there were hints of shapes far in the distance, but those shapes appeared in different shades of alabaster and snow.

Eventually, as I concentrated more, I could see better. Far away, I could make out faint stars. They were slightly brighter than the foggy world. I approached. And as I grew more acclimated to this realm, I became aware of a presence. It was everywhere in the non-air around me and also beyond. Far, far beyond.

The presence was huge. And it was not quite comprehensible, which was annoying.

In a determined manner, I approached the nearest set of stars in the misty-milk air. Now that I had noticed them, I was clear about their barely-detectable existence. Even the holy, pressing-down-on-me potentiality that was everywhere was easier to feel than the stars. I started to grow angry with the afterlife. Things about it weren't right. I didn't know quite how to describe the sense of rightness and wrongness I had, but I knew things could be better. And I knew the potentiality I felt was God. Or it was what living people called God in their ignorant way. But although its presence was everywhere, I couldn't find it. That became my main source of my irritation.

When I was close, I extended my senses to the stars. They had refused to notice me or talk with me. Now I insisted. I understood they were angels. Or at least, they were souls.

I kept insisting they notice. I demanded a response. It was a struggle of wills. I exerted my desire to its utmost. Then I grew my will larger and exerted it again. And again. Finally, I succeeded in turning their attention.

For the longest time, they simply looked at me.

This is where there is a blank spot in my memory. Or perhaps it is just a normal hallucination spot, an accurate memory of an inaccurate thing. This was a dream, after all, and I remember we had a long conversation as the angel tried to figure me out. The creature was quite non-human, mentally, It felt almost emotionless, and its understanding of anything and everything seemed limited. It had a powerful but narrow mind. And there was so much wrongness happening around me that I grew impatient.

Near the end of our conversation, I said, Can't you tell that everything is out of place? What aren't you doing anything about it? Don't you know how to fix what's wrong?

There was a pause from all three diamond-shaped souls.  They spun in the milkiness.

 

Oh, you're one of those, the nearest angel thought at me. It seemed rather knowing but not in a smug way. It wasn't being polite or sympathetic, but it felt as if these creatures were incapable of the emotion of smugness. It managed to gesture at a cluster of stars in the distance. They were impossibly far away but, just as impossibly, when I focused on them, they seemed reachable. Do you want to know where to go to start changing things?

I want to talk with God.

The presence is everywhere. You can't get closer or farther away. But do you want to change how things are? Is that what you are saying?

Yes.

Over there.

I knew what the soul meant. Even from a distance, I could tell these souls weren't doing the right things. They were meant to be arranged better and to communicate with one another like in a serial circuit. They acted, though, as if they didn't know how to start. And I right away knew I could make them work. 

Although there was travel time to the cluster of stars, I hardly noticed. Soon I was there, doubting myself, but also working. The job was a matter of exerting my will. Now that I had spoken to three big angels and gotten them to react, getting these lighter and smarter souls to do what they wanted to do anyway was easy, even for a beginner like me. Doubts crept in as I worked, though. I had to try things and fail. It made me think about how I was a soul like these. Wasn't I? But no, I was but I wasn't. These stars had a purpose, I could tell, and it was a different purpose from mine. I could feel it in the ever-present, urgent holiness around me. But for some reason, these souls hadn't been able to get organized. 

I spent a long time making things better. And then I moved back, experienced a flash of insight about how to make it perfect, and went back to arranging and coaxing the souls. Soon, I decided time didn't matter. I had known this before, somehow, that time was irrelevant to my work, but now it felt revealed to me again. I finished the job and the result was beautiful. That was what counted. 

After I admired my first success, I noticed more stars in the distance. This was a much larger conglomeration and better organized, too, but still something was wrong with it. The middle of the organization had fallen apart or had never arranged itself right.

My journey to this farther, larger cluster of souls felt irrelevant. The work was bigger and more tedious but after a while, I was happy because the progress was faster with less coaxing of the individuals. Instead, I basked in their sense of relief as I arranged them so they could function together. Each realization from them came as a flash of joy as the previously-confused souls connected with others and recognized the rightness of their new position. 

And so the dream continued. I worked. Sometimes I took breaks. Sometimes I tried to communicate with the presence. I exerted my will on it, although to no noticeable effect. I yelled at it. I impelled it to fix things but it was as if the presence was too big to see to this tiny level of detail, as if we were as big as real stars in the universe but the presence itself was just so big in comparison, even to us, that it couldn't do essential things at this level, jobs I felt needed to be done.

And so I worked until I woke up. 

Not Even Not Zen 358: Biomythography - Note 96: Swim Lessons

Swim Lessons 

On a warm day in June of 1969, I got into the passenger seat of my father's car. My father drove a Morris Oxford, a British car, green on the outside, grey on the inside. I remember it didn't smell of cigars as much as usual. My father had cleaned out his ashtray. Or maybe it was just a beautiful, spring day and he opened the vent windows. 

Up front for once, I clutched my towel. 

"You're not going to get sick, are you?" he asked. 

There was no good answer. I rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned my head as close as I could to the gap above me. Sometimes a fresh wind helped.

"Why are you driving?" I asked after we had ridden for a few miles. 

"Your camp is on the way to my school." 

I didn't nod. Sometimes moving my head during the drive made me sick. Anyway, I had to contain myself. I was starting to tremble as I thought about summer camp. It was my first day. I was going to learn how to swim. 

I had been begging for swim lessons for years, it seemed. Every day in every summer, I yearned to launch myself into the community pool on my own power. I ached to live my life like one of the big kids and to go wherever I pleased. To be respected like a big kid, not a baby. To walk to the pool without my mother. To cool off when my body wanted it, not when grown ups decided they could spare the time. Want, want, want. I had not wanted something so much since I'd kissed the girl across the street. I wanted to break free and swim like a fish, like a shark, like an otter, like a dolphin. Like I was free.

At the camp, the swim instructor came late. Or actually, she was there on time but she wasn't in a hurry. She wasn't already waiting for us in the pool. She wasn't rushing like I wanted, so we seemed behind schedule. She said she had to talk. 

"Today, the water is pretty cold," she explained as she got in. She held her arms up so they didn't get wet. 

A little girl dabbed her foot in the water and winced. I followed. The chill sank into my toe like it was a piranha biting me. At one end, the camp was still piping the water in. Everything was fresh and new. That also meant it hurt. 

"See?" the instructor laughed. "You won't have to get in today, if ..."

As I looked at her hesitant, overly polite smile, I jumped. 

A moment later, she was pulling me out. I was gasping but it was because of the change in temperature. I was fine. 

"I want to swim," I demanded. 

"Well, sit on the side first." She plunked me down on my bottom. "You're not the only student."

"It's cold!" I complained. I held myself and shivered. But I kept my icy legs in the water.

"I didn't tell you to get in."

"I'll be warmer if I move around," I suggested. My father told me that all the time. My swim instructor, though, took a deep breath. She considered it. 

"I might let advanced students hold onto the wall and kick," she said. "If they behave."

"Great!" I started to position myself.

"But only if they behave!" She raised her voice and one of her eyebrows at me. "We have ten students today, not one. Ten."

I grunted and shuffled where I was, on my bottom. I felt the rough concrete grab my swimsuit and start to rip at it. If I wiggled, I could feel the serrated surface scratching the fabric. I tried to hold still. But when I got bored, I wiggled. The instructor talked. She talked and talked. I wiggled and wiggled.

Some of the other students told her they didn't want to swim. What were they even doing here, then? I folded my arms and sulked at them.

After a while, I found myself dry and wrapped in a towel. I was standing at the edge of the Town and Country Day School building lot where they were holding the camp. Some of the other day campers were leaving. My father had been waiting for me. He'd done whatever mysterious chores there were for him at Northwood High School and, afterward, he had parked in the line of cars with the other parents.

"How was he?" my father asked a camp counselor.

"Very good," she said. "Very advanced, I'd say. He was the best student."

"Oh," he gave me a nod. "That's nice to hear."

But in the car, I sat and sulked some more. I was a champion at brooding, moping, glowering, and all the other non-verbal ways of expressing despair in a manner that was not quite deserving of a parental ding on the ear - although sometimes the adults seemed tempted by the idea. My father regarded me for a moment. He asked how the lesson had been. Then he turned the ignition. The car roared. As I tried to respond to his question, I burst into tears.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"I didn't learn how to swim!" I shouted. 

"But ..." He thought for a moment, letting the car idle, trying to square this outburst with the assessment he'd heard from the counselor. "Weren't you good? Why didn't you learn?"

"I don't know."

"Huh." He rubbed his bearded chin. "It was your first lesson. Did anyone else learn how to swim in the first lesson?"

"No," I complained. I folded my arms. "She wouldn’t let us."

"You’ll learn," my father said.

"She has to let me!" I wailed.

"She will, she will." He sighed and put the car into first gear. "Geez, you have all week."

#

The swim lessons went on, an hour a day, every day until Friday. Our last lesson got cut short by a ceremony, certificates, and juice. By day three, though, I was allowed to swim. 

With some hints from the instructor, I could manage to stay afloat and move forward. On day four, I swam doggy paddle for the width of the pool. On day five, I swam the length of the pool, starting from the deep, cold end. I didn't just doggy paddle, either. I got my arms above the water to pull. Plus the swim instructor indulged me by teaching me to take breaths on my side. Like a big kid. 

"Now I can go to the pool by myself," I announced.

"Well." The instructor put one hand on her hip. "I don't know about that. Just remember to tell your lifeguard that you want to take your test."

"Today," I said. 

"If your mother lets you go to the pool today," advised the instructor.

Not Even Not Zen 357: Biomythography - Note 95: Strange Bedfellows, Part VII

Strange Bedfellows, Part VII

We started dating. She was cute and witty. That was the good side of the relationship. When she relaxed, I enjoyed my time with her. A lot. A whole lot. After all, she was my crush. Thin, beautiful face, entrancing wit, enticing, wry smile. Whenever she breathed close to me, I inhaled and shivered. She made me giddy.

I had dated women who identified as lesbians before. But I had never dealt with one who was in the closet. I'd grown accustomed to the activist-minded sexual politics in western Massachusetts. It was an open, expressive environment even when it was disapproving of who I was dating. I'd never given thought to how the politics in a small town below the Mason-Dixon line, a handful of miles from Appalachia, might be different. 

We were sitting in The Old Town Tavern, a bar a few blocks from work. That evening, we held hands across one of the low tables. She smiled at me as we touched. Every now and then, people walked by. Suddenly, she removed her hand from mine. She turned away from me. 

A pair of women strolled by us along on their way to the dance club part of the bar. 

"We need to leave, now." My date glanced at the backs of two women. She rose from her chair. 

"What's wrong?" Like her, I rose. I wasn't alarmed, though, only bewildered. 

"We can't be seen," she hissed. "This was the wrong choice. Some of my friends drink here."

The encounter seemed to ruin the evening. She spent the next hour shuffling her feet, looking around, trying to make sure she wasn't being seen with me. 

Our next date, we met at a more remote bar, one with pool tables where we could play and talk. She felt good enough about it that only a night later she invited me to another bar, where she didn't quite relax but she did feel able to talk.

"No, you'll never meet my parents," she told me. She sipped her beer. "I don't want to give them hope."

"What does that mean?" I protested. "You said they don't know you're gay. So what's the difference?"

"They would ask about you forever." She rolled her eyes. 

"So I can't meet your friends," I finally realised, "but I also can't meet your family."

"I know it's difficult." She pulled away from me for a moment but she leaned forward again to touch my arm. "But you only have to do it sometimes. I have to live this way all the time."

She arranged our next date at a restaurant she despised because it suited her privacy needs. I was starting to understand I wouldn't be allowed to suggest places. Any location in which we were to meet, she had to ensure the public part of our encounter would be secluded or else so open and busy, none of her friends would suspect she was dating a man. 

Finally, she put us on hold. She let a few days go by and hardly talked with me, even at work. We sat side by side at our cubicles, isolated from most of the other writers except for our third roommate, the younger woman, who was furious with both of us.

Eventually, my crush set up another date. Even to talk about it, we had to walk out of the building on smoke breaks at roughly the same time. She brought a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. I strolled over to bum a cigarette. 

"Let's meet at the mall," she suggested as she watched me light up.

"Where will we go from there?" I asked.

"We'll figure it out. I want the meeting to look like an accident." She flicked the ash off her cigarette. "Just in case."

The rendezvous at the mall involved shopping near the fountain for twenty minutes and keeping an eye out for her in the meanwhile. She did the same. In time, she noticed that I'd seen her. She took her place on a bench near the fountain. I waited about a minute, as per her instructions, and took my place on a different bench. By apparent accident, we sat close. I glanced at her but apparently it made her uncomfortable. I let my gaze drift back to the fountain and listened. 

"This isn't working out," she said. 

"Um, yeah." Probably, I shouldn't have nodded in agreement. But I did. 

"I thought I could make it work." She picked up a pebble, small enough that someone had bought it into the mall in their shoe. She tossed it into the water in front of us. "But I think I'm just taking advantage of you."

I wished she were taking advantage of me more and also more often, but I understood the point. She had re-thought the date, tonight. This was goodbye. 

"No way to make it work?" I asked. My crush on her made no sense. I guess it never had. Making sense is not the way crushes work.

"No."

"Okay." My heart slowed. My muscles collapsed a bit but I was sitting and I tried not to let it show. A moment later, I felt a wave of shame and hopelessness sweep over me. It warmed my skin.

"You should walk away first," she said. 

I nodded, as if to myself. After a half minute, I got up and walked to the fountain. I paused to have an almost-thought, more of an instinct, and turned toward one of the bookstores. Books were my friends. I could read a little, maybe laugh at someone's humor, maybe speed-read through a few chapters of science fiction. Maybe I could buy something if I found a way to justify the money to myself. And so I began my stroll. 

Behind me, I heard her rise. She picked up her plastic shopping bag. Even over the sounds of the other people in the mall, my ears were tuned to her. She picked her direction opposite mine. She started walking. 

Not Even Not Zen 356: Biomythography - Note 94: Strange Bedfellows, Part VI

Strange Bedfellows, Part VI

"You split up with your girlfriend?" said my office mate. She stopped typing and turned away from her Macintosh screen to study me. We were sitting in our cubicles, side by side in a narrow, yellow-walled office.

"Yeah." It had been my idea. But I wasn't happy about it. I stopped typing in the middle of a sentence and spent a moment pitying myself, feeling the loneliness of breaking up.

I had put my experience as a human trial participant into an article for a local newspaper. My co-workers knew what I’d done with my vacation time. But they didn't know, until I mentioned it, that I had decided to end my relationship of nearly three years. 

“So now you could go out for drinks.” The woman by my shoulder gave me a teasing smile. “Your girl couldn’t get jealous anymore.”

“Huh.” I had turned down friendly offers to socialize because I had wanted to include my woman but, each time I had asked her, she didn't want to go. My desire to have friends was not hers. And she didn’t want me to go out drinking without her. She wanted me to stay home. Now I was free, sort of. I could hang out with friends.

Realistically, I was only sort of free. I still lived with my old girlfriend. We had signed an apartment lease together. We were both nearly broke. We had to ride out our situation until the end of the lease. That meant we saw each other every day. We shared our food. Her opinion still meant a lot to me and I would be encountering it every day. 

After thinking for a moment, I agreed to go out on Thursday night. That gave me a chance to warn my former-girlfriend current-roommate. 

"Do you like playing pool?" I asked my office roomie. She kept her blonde hair cut short. She always wore a leather jacket, too, so I thought the chance of her liking pool halls seemed decent. 

"Yeah, I kind of love it. I play near my place in Hagerstown." She failed to look up as our third office partner strolled in. A brown-haired girl, just out of college, she arrived later than we did, usually. Today was no exception.

"I've got a place here, in Frederick." Once a week, sometimes alone, I reserved a table and ran through it a few times playing eight ball or nine ball. 

"Sounds great!"

"What are you guys talking about?" asked the third member of our little office. 

There are times in life when you don't know how you got into a situation. When you look back, the clues were there. You simply didn't notice. In the future, in a similar situation, you might not notice, either. Because you've got a steady pattern of catching on late. In retrospect, you should have picked up on the clues. It's hard to see how you couldn't. 

"We're heading out to a pool hall on Thursday," I said. 

"Just for a beer after work," the blonde woman added.

"Oh, you guys have been talking about heading out after work for months." The brunette hung up her purse on a hook next to her cubicle. "I'm glad it's finally a yes."

"His girlfriend broke up with him," said the older office mate. She saw the frown that crossed my face. "Or he broke up with her but he's not happy about it. Either way."

"Oh, great!" She burst into a smile. "I mean, that's too bad but you know what I mean. You can go out. Am I invited?"

My older office mate looked at me. I glanced back. My shoulders rolled as I shrugged. The women were both fun, both cute. I had a bit of a crush on the older one but I didn't have any intentions of following through. Or I hadn't. Until this very moment. But now, I realized, maybe I did. Or at least I could.

"Sure," the older woman said. 

"Sure," I agreed. I shared a nod with her although, quietly, internally, I finally acknowledged the crush I had. The thought of an evening with her made me giddy. Maybe a third person in the pool game would keep things innocent and save me from embarrassment.

I had a couple days to think about it. In retrospect, not a lot of thinking got done. My reverence for my co-worker blossomed. She sat closer to me. She smiled and laughed more. Increasingly, I looked forward to hanging out her. Maybe I could get an idea about the chances of her returning my feelings.

"Wow, you look good," said the older, blonde woman as we met at the pool hall. 

"Yeah," her brunette friend agreed.

I looked down at my jeans and my plain, white t-shirt. All I had done was swap out my office shirt for one without buttons. I wasn't as socially awkward as I had been before college, though. I knew not to deflect complements with too much force.

"Thanks," I said. Showing a little gratitude always worked. 

 

We played for an hour and I heard more comments about how I looked but not much about my pool game. When I got hot with the cue and started running tables, the women shrugged. Mostly, they teased me, usually in fairly witty ways. We exchanged banter like twenty-somethings, which after all is what we were. I wondered if the older woman was letting me win. At times, she seemed like a good, steady-handed player. 

We'd worked side by side for months. We shared similar senses of humor and, often, the same politics. She had started asking me about my girlfriend after our first month together. I wasn't sure about the status of her love life because, she declared, "it's private," but she seemed to enjoy keeping track of mine. 

The brunette touched my biceps a couple of times as she passed by to take her shot. The older one commented on it.

"You should try it," the younger woman teased. 

My crush beckoned me to her, one hand on her pool cue. When I got close enough, she leaned in to give my arm a gentle squeeze. 

Strange Bedfellows, Part VII

Not Even Not Zen 355: People Have Theories

People Have Theories

A theory is a model of how reality works, like the theory of gravity. People get attached to their favorite theories, even ones they don't formalize in writing. In fact, people might get most attached to informal, unspoken views. They mistake their assumptions about how things work for their reality. Some people die unhappily and, to them, unexpectedly because their theories missed something critical. 

Maybe they viewed the world through their ethnicity, as in "I didn’t expect that guy to shoot me because he looked like someone from my tribe." Maybe they viewed the world like a game, as in "I thought I'd get another chance."

Nowadays, these assumptions get called cognitive bias. We all, as humans, are likely to recognize how aspects of an event confirm our theories. We do this more than we notice elements of the same incident that contradict our expectations. The mental habit has been called other things, too, and so has the act of unlearning biases. Unlearning has gone by labels like 'letting go of preconceptions' and 'embracing the paradigm shift.' 

For long periods of time in many cultures, spiritual leaders played down the concepts of cognitive biases and unlearning. Those leaders asked people to 'endure' or to 'hold fast' to wrong worldviews. Still, the idea of unlearning has a respectable history. 

Seeing Things As They Are

As soon as people lived long enough to need to unlearn things, discussions about the need must have arisen. 'Unlearning' came to be held in high regard by some people, at least. 

Daoism is a tradition with a prominent focus on 'seeing things as they are.' Living in perfect harmony with the universe is the stated goal. In order to live in harmony, one needs to understand the world and accept it for what it is, not as what one wants it to be. Sometimes this view on living has made for good scientific observations. Long ago in China, Daoists became prominent scientists. Daoism always had a more mystical side to its philosophy, too, as expressed by the term 'ziran,' which means freeing oneself from obstructing biases and acting in a spontaneous, natural fashion, without effort. 

Stoic philosophies were lost to western traditions for centuries after Stoicism was banned. When the religion was popular, though, it used multiple terms to address 'unlearning' concepts. The Stoics valued ataraxia, the trait of not being disturbed by the external world, and apatheia, the peace one achieves by giving up the passions of life. Stoicism also recognizes pathos, which refers to emotions resulting from mistaken judgments. Giving up mistaken judgments is a vital step in the Stoic concept of becoming an ideal person.

Buddhism promotes the practice of vipassana. The term refers to seeing things as they really are and it has its own, dedicated style of meditation. The meditation may have drifted from its term a bit and from its implied unlearning of bad assumptions (although I don't have first-hand experience with it). Nevertheless, the term vipassana reflects the importance of the 'unlearning' skill and a long tradition of honing it.

Zen Buddhism, in a slightly separate tradition, expands the 'unlearning' concept as far as 'unasking' a question. By unasking, a Zen practitioner indicates that the question, regardless of its answer, is not a productive one - the answer cannot give any useful insight. 

Strategies 

Some ways of letting go of cognitive biases are simple.

One way is to envision a different bias. It goes like this: if you are convinced people are stingy then, for a while, convince yourself that people are generous. Observe, inside yourself and in your worldly circumstances, how the change in your approach changes the world. If you normally think of yourself as short, regard yourself as tall. If you often think your neighbors are fussy, think of them as careful, hence their beautiful yard, fence, or mailbox. Put your different view into your actions. 

The important thing is to be at least a little bit in control of your biases. Of course, envisioning a different bias in order to loosen the hold of a deeper, more ingrained one is just the mental or spiritual equivalent of warming up. 

Another powerful method of re-learning is increasing your ability to focus. With practice, some people get very good at this underrated skill. Likewise, you can train yourself to observe without judgement. To start, it's as simple as questioning the part of you making those judgments and asking, perhaps, "what did I really witness?" In many professions, possessing sharp observation skills is essential. (Think of an air traffic controller or a detective without them.) In others professions, the skill goes unrecognized even though it conveys a significant benefit. (Imagine the results when nurses or doctors increase their powers of observation.)

There are essays and books on these strategies but personally I find that another good way is to relax and deliberately lose focus. Let observations occur naturally. Maybe, as you regard those observations, you'll let those slip away, too. 

Any approach to improve un-learning or re-learning skills is valid to try. Because we all need to improve. The reason why 'seeing things as they are' is an esteemed practice in Daoism, Stoicism, and Buddhism is that clear outward sight and clear insight are related. And they are both a bit too rare. One of the reasons people have a hard time noticing things and understanding them, of course, is that people are attached to their theories.

Not Even Not Zen 354: Poem - True Love, the Scam

While I was sitting at a wedding, listening to the vows, I started writing new vows in my head. A few whispered words from my wife made me decide on a particular poet. I tried to write for myself in that style. So for me, the ceremony was entertaining but I ended up with this confusing set of vows in my head.

I hope someday, someone will get married to this. 

True Love, the Scam

Would you take this spouse to bed?

Will you take this ring to wed? 

It might seem selfish, could be dumb

But I've liked my lonely freedom.

Would you be the lock and key? 

Stay together and still be free? 

If somehow I could be free

I would keep the lock with me.

Would you love their long pea coat? 

Would you love them in a boat? 

Boats may cause me to be sick.

Coats are itchy and too thick. 

Would you together make a house?

Can you, can you, be a spouse?

Will you shout a love primeval?

Would you dare a love illegal?

Well, if you give, to me, the ring

I think I'll dare most anything.

For damn, I am.

Damn, I Am.

In love.

Yes, I love you here and there. 

I will love you everywhere.

I will love you in a box.

I will love you. You’re a fox.

I swear my love upon a star.

I will love you near and far.

Say, I have fallen for the scam.

I am in love, damn me, I am. 

And I will love your long pea coat.

And I will love you in a boat.

And I will kiss you in the rain.

And in the dark. And on a plane.

And in the car. And in a tree.

Your kisses are so good, you see!

Yes! The box unlocks

And we'll be free

And I will love you more, you'll see.

Holding hands till we go gray

We'll increase our love each day.

I can love this stupid house.

I can be, with you, a spouse.

Yes, I love you here and there.

I will love you everywhere.

I do so like

this true love scam.

Damn it,

Damn it,

Damn, I am.

In love.

-- Eric Gallagher, 2024 (at Megan's wedding to Nate)

Not Even Not Zen 353: Biomythography - Note 93: Strange Bedfellows, Part V

Strange Bedfellows, Part V

On a spring day in downtown Northampton, I wandered the sidewalks from shop to shop. I don't remember why. I may have stopped in at my work, which was a bar and restaurant combination on Bridge Street, the main drag. Even though I didn't have a shift there that day, I sometimes dropped by to say hello. There were at least three package stores, including Serio's Drugs in the downtown, but I don't remember bothering with them. I lingered at the book shops, as always. 

The weather was cool but, as I marched between the shops with my backpack on, I worked up a sweat. (It's likely that I bought a book and was carrying it, maybe several.) One of the women from work had recommended a local novelty shop two blocks up a hill on King Street. I'm pretty sure it was during my hike there from one of the bookstores that my thoughts about ny social life kicked in. 

I was seeing another lesbian. And the affair was probably going to be brief. It made me think. 

Two years before, back in college, I knew rationally that not everyone was bisexual. However, a lot of women (and probably the men) seemed to be fairly try-sexual, for sure. That's not what college is about, of course. It's mostly the classes. But college is where my last two years of girlfriends declared themselves to be bisexual. My relationships with them seemed like accidents, bits of random friendliness and luck, and they were some of the best lovers in my life.

Now I was starting to wonder if I had a pattern and if the root of it was something in me. Was I doing things, however unconsciously, to get into these somewhat-transitory relationships? Were the nature of my affections due to this area of Massachusetts? I had seen goth women, hippies, and jocks here, but all of them were interested in other women. Being lesbian or bisexual, either one, seemed awfully popular.

I spotted the novelty shop up the hill, fresh blue paint on the outer walls and sky-blue trim around the windows, probably puzzles and toys inside. Along one of the storefronts along my way as I passed, I spotted posters for upcoming concerts.

Being mostly single and mostly bored, I stopped for a moment to read about the bands and clubs. Next to one of the posters was a gay pride flyer. It was advertising a gay-themed bookstore coming soon. Books! And a store I hadn't visited! Admittedly, from the date on it, the place wouldn't open for more than a month. Maybe it wouldn't carry the trashy science fiction I liked best, either, but it would still be worth a look. I had been collecting "Dykes to Watch Out For" volumes and I was still missing one. What better place to continue the search than a gay-themed store?

That got me to thinking about lesbians again and why they were such a presence in my life. I glanced above the bookstore flyer. There was another photocopied sheet taped up with the others and it read, "There is no hell."

As an atheist, it made me smile. 

And then I realized I had gotten here because of religion and politics. Those weren't the only reasons but I had discovered in college how nice it was to be accepted. And the most likely people to accept me as an atheist, without disdain or even comment, were lesbians and gay men. 

No one here shouted 'commie' at me for not going to church. No one thought my taste in prose or poetry seemed odd. I could hang out with whomever I wanted, at least when I could persuade people to ask me over. Admittedly, my presence had been confusing for some of the gay men in the Northampton and Amherst social circles. A few women, too, had said they didn't consider me eligible because they thought I was gay. Others had an opposite reaction and 'tried to turn me straight,' for which I was thankful. 

There was a wonderful sense of relaxation for me when hanging out with all these people who didn't want anything from me and, of course, sometimes didn't want me around at all, which is also a fine thing at times. And sometimes they did want something. And sometimes it was me, which could get touchy in the social scene but usually fine. 

The pattern in my life was due to my atheism, for sure, but not only that. My life couldn't have brought me here to this town without the acceptance of people who were also on the outside of conventional society, even more on the outside than me, really. We all benefited, in a way, from the various forms of ostracization that pushed us together. The pressures from the larger world brought us to this place and our acceptance of one another completed the pattern.

Strange Bedfellows, Part VI

Not Even Not Zen 352: Poem - Dirt Beds

In the Dirt Beds

"Here's my row of pythons," she says.

Hand like a blade, she gestures to the open-air terrariums.

"The smaller row is the rat snakes."

They are raised mounds of dirt, really,

eight long rows, dry brown, littered with rocks.

One of her guests grunts as he picks his way between the raised beds.

His eyes scan the ground.

He notices a single reptile showing itself,

a colorful red, black, and yellow model

that his host swears is not venomous.

Wait, he thinks, and points a finger toward

a brown snake with a flat head, further down a different row.

 

He sees a green, reptilian figure rising, too,

from one of the holes at the tops of the mounds.

He notices a patterned snake, brown and tan, all the way at the end.

It appears to be sunning itself.

There are a lot of them out, he thinks. He just hadn't noticed.

"In these rows," his sister-in-law continues as she turns a corner.  

"I have kingsnakes and hognoses. There, with the ditch between them

are the homes for greensnakes and boas."

Her smallest guest is a boy of seven,

a book-smart child in a white shirt.

He sweeps his hand to the end of the far row.

"What are those mounds over there?" he asks.

Next to him, his older sister,

blue shirt, dark hair, dark jeans,

turns to study the earth.

"I keep a few indigos next to the greensnakes," she says.

"For the color?" asks the girl.

"Yes!" The answer comes with a laugh.

"They look nice. They're harmless."

Finally, the girl's mother, the host's sister,

raises her blonde ponytail

and puts a hand on her hip.

A moment ago, she was running her hand through the ditch

and now she pops a lump of dirt,

a puff of gritty smoke, dust on her pants.

Another hand goes to her other hip.

“Have you ever thought of growing something else

on this property?" she remarks. She lifts her head

to indicate the land beyond the fence.

"I mean, maybe corn, or a few fruit trees."

"No apples in this garden," the host replies.

Her eyes narrow suspiciously on her sister.

Her arms fold across her chest.

"Just snakes."

-- Eric Gallagher