how to save the world

this is a work of fiction

 So I went to a shaman, asking for guidance about liberation and enlightenment. And she told me that she couldn’t help me find enlightenment, but she could possibly help me to see what was not enlightenment. I thought that might be a start.

So she took me to a forest clearing and we sat together on a fallen log, and she gave me a foul-tasting concoction to eat, and asked me to describe what I was experiencing. For a while, nothing happened. And then suddenly I began to see colours and hear strange sounds and then I experienced being in the middle of a scene of utter madness. All around me there were atrocities being committed, and strange creatures told me they had always been happening but I just hadn’t noticed, or perhaps I was just being kept in the dark. These were ghastly, cruel, miserable acts of unspeakable horror and violence, and soon instead of just happening to others they began happening to me. I was forced to eat poison and felt my teeth rotting and falling out. I was yoked with strangers and whipped to dig a hole in the ground and then to fill it up again. When I shouted about the insane things I was witnessing I was told by the obviously deranged mob of people all around me that I was the insane one, and that all that I was seeing was perfectly normal.

I said this to the shaman and she told me to just sit with this, that this was not enlightenment, and that none of this was real, and I would awaken from the nightmare. And then there was an explosion and everything was screaming and blood, and I passed out.

When I awoke I was, somehow, unharmed, and the shaman continued to hold my hand and asked me again to describe what I was experiencing.

In the distance I could see someone walking toward me, dressed in a robe of astonishing colours, with a golden aura around them. Even when this person came close I could not tell if it was a male or female, or its age, or even if it was quite human. But when this person, or creature, smiled and touched me I immediately understood that all was love, and that nothing else in the world was real. I was filled with this enormous feeling of peace and energy and well-being, and knew my purpose was to love this creature, to become one with it. That nothing else mattered.

I smiled at the shaman and thanked her for staying with me through the nightmare, and told her now I understood about liberation — it was all about losing your self in another.

The shaman smiled back at me and asked me, once again, to just sit with this, and told me to my dismay that this was not enlightenment either, and that none of this was real, and I would awaken from this dream, too. I insisted I did not want to awaken from it, if it was in fact a dream. It was the only thing in my life that had ever made sense. And suddenly the creature I loved with every fibre of my being moved even closer and our bodies merged into one, and with a rush of ecstatic bliss I again lost consciousness.

And when I awoke the magnificent creature was gone and once again there was just me and the shaman, still holding my hand. And I sighed and wept for what I had — at last! — found and then just as suddenly lost, and the shaman just sat quietly and asked me to describe what I was now experiencing.

I replied that I seemed to be back in the real world, but I was now full of grief over what I had lost. I kept waiting for a third surreal experience, but nothing seemed to happen. I felt bereft, impatient, dissatisfied. We sat together for what seemed like hours, and I just kept describing my thoughts and feelings, and the mundane things I saw and heard, there at the edge of the forest.

The shaman said to me that none of this was real, either, and that I was still dreaming, not really seeing at all, and that at some point that dream would end and what would be left would be as close as she could imagine to enlightenment.

I listened and sighed and finally, exhausted from all these unreal experiences, I again lost consciousness.

I am not yet awake, not sure I want to be. My instincts tell me that I would not, will not, survive awakening. Every once in a while I remember, back when I was very young, even before there was an ‘I’, what it was like to be awake, to just be, to see everything as it really is, and always has been. When I said that to the shaman, she smiled at me and nodded, but said nothing.

So now I sit here, on this log, living in my sleep, and every once in a while there is a glimpse, a suggestion of something I remember, something beyond understanding. There seems to be a clue in the gaze of wild creatures, the shadows in the moonlight, the water gurgling in the stream, the whisper of the wind. Something waiting. Something beyond me.

top image above from Pixabay CC0, by Cor Gasbeek; bottom image is mine

(The following is fiction — just a fanciful story I made up that I wish were true. Since the email version doesn’t include the article category (“creative works” in this case) when it sends out feeds of my blog, I apologize to email subscribers for thinking it was real reportage.)

image CC0 from pexels.com

I guess it had to happen someday soon
Wasn’t nothing to hold them down
They would rise from among us like a big balloon
Take the sky, and forsake the ground…

Hold them up, hold them up
Never do let them fall
Pray to the dust and the rust and the ruin
That names us and claims us and shames us all
      – James Taylor

I‘ve always had a thing for exceptionally intelligent women. So when I agreed to act as seminar leader and graduate TA for the Philosophy of Science program at our university, I was delighted to discover that more than half of the class was women, and that in particular two of them brought with them reputations for brilliance and controversy. I had no idea what I was in for.

I met them both personally for the first time at a seminar entitled Dawkins vs Gould: The Philosophy of Biology, which I was ostensibly facilitating. When Karin and Marina squared off, I was expecting the fireworks to be around the two male philosophers’ differences over the role of religion and spirituality in science, or about the whole issue of “selfish” genes, but the debate immediately leap-frogged past that and into a far more (to me at least) interesting and existential discussion: It was about what we intuitively know (but cannot scientifically “prove”) versus what we intuitively “know”, or sense, that we cannot know.

It would be impossible for me to accurately summarize the different perspectives that Karin and Marina espoused, and after their animated discussions became something of a worldwide phenomenon in philosophy circles, I can only say that to some extent, as I listened to them, I felt I was witnessing The End of Philosophy — their thinking was so advanced that I felt they were, rapid-fire, rendering many of the most-discussed philosophical subjects of our time completely moot. They made what thousands of philosophers and scientists had spent their lives thinking and writing about seemingly completely irrelevant. The most important realization that came out of many hours listening to their dazzling intellects expound mind-blowing ideas that were way beyond anything I had conceived or read, was simply: Nothing matters. 

What was more remarkable is that they forced the listener to this astonishing and unexpected realization from almost diametrically opposite threads of reasoning and intuition: Karin from the Gould-ian scientific perspective of everything being random and unpredictable, and Marina from the metaphysical perspective that evolutionarily “consciousness” and everything that arises from it could not be real, and that therefore what is real cannot be known by the mind.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. These two women had already, as undergraduates, wowed their colleagues and professors to the point that whenever they volunteered to speak the rest of the class suddenly sat in hushed silence diligently taking notes — including the instructors. They were way over all of our heads, in an intellectual (and perhaps emotional and sensory and intuitive) world of their own, which we could never dream of being a part of. We were just delighted that they took the time to articulate what they were thinking so that we could just appreciate it. We were in the presence of genius — genii in fact, feeding off each other, and we could only bask in it, as full of awe as if we were watching two Grand Masters painting together.

That is to say that, while they didn’t “agree” with each other, they saw no purpose in debating. There is no absolute truth, after all, and they saw every point of discussion as being a way to move closer to an understanding, to explore, not to change the other’s position but to understand it and hence move forward towards a synthesis greater than either had thus far come up with individually. There had been an attempt, by the faculty leaders, to get them to have a formal debate, with structure and an audience voting for the winner, but neither woman would have anything to do with that, dismissing it as an “anachronistic male spectacle of no value”. Instead of responding to each other with “but…” they responded with “yes, and…”. Listening to them was like being in dizzying free-fall — they didn’t know where they were going, only that it was productive, creative, moving forward, and any formal structure would simply hamper that.

When our first session was winding up (we had run over our time and were being kicked out of the seminar room), I fatefully suggested that we retire to the campus lounge and continue the discussion (more accurately a two-woman dialogue — none of the rest of us had the audacity to interrupt their discussion with our own clearly-outclassed thinking).

I was a man in love, with two superhuman women, and as I ushered them and the entranced class to the lounge, I was trying to figure out how to capture this brilliance, before it was lost, before these two women just rose magically into the stratosphere together and disappeared, leaving us mere mortals behind, ashamed and dumbstruck. Fortunately there was a tripod on the stage of the lounge, left behind by the latest performing musicians I supposed, and I grabbed it, mounted my cellphone camera on it, pointed the camera at the two prodigies, said 50 words to (utterly inadequately) recapitulate what had already been exposed in their shattering discussion to date, and let them continue.

Four hours later we called it an evening. I put the recording up on YouTube, thinking it was the most important posting that impoverished medium had ever received, and for a couple of days it was almost completely ignored. Then to my surprise the number of viewers started to soar. At the next seminar date a week later, the room meant for a dozen discussants in the class was impossible to reach due to the crowd clamouring to attend and hear Karin and Marina expound further. I told them we would rendezvous at the lounge after the class, and that only registered students could attend until then. Two hours later the din outside the room was so loud we could no longer hear Karin and Marina speaking, so we retired to the 200-capacity lounge, surrounded by numbers so large that, once everyone had filed in, the lounge closed its doors to additional students to avoid violating fire regulations.

If you’ve been following this at all, you know how it snowballed after that. The second four-hour video racked up millions of views, the post-seminar meetings had to move from the overcrowded lounge to the university theatre, Karin and Marina were besieged by the media for interviews and by universities all over the world offering inducements for them to go there (none of which they accepted), and some of the world’s leading scientists, philosophers, intellectuals and “teachers” began sitting inconspicuously in the theatre during the talks (which were now broadcast live), furtively but energetically taking notes.

At the insistence of Karin and Marina, there was no Q&A during or following these discussions. They offered no explanation for this demand, perhaps wanting to spare the feelings of those who might be inclined to ask something.

After the fourth session — sixteen hours of staggering genius, enough for a lifetime’s exploration by lesser thinkers, in the can — I finally got up the courage to invite them to my place, just to take stock of what was happening. I think mostly because they found the sudden celebrity a bit overwhelming, and knew that my place was peaceful, private and unlisted, they accepted. Marina, who sat in the front passenger seat during the car trip there, spoke quietly and incessantly to Karin seated behind her, at a volume I couldn’t quite hear — I was so intellectually exhausted I was somewhat grateful for that.

At home I put on a playlist of instrumental music (enough words for me that day) and we sat together on my couch, wordlessly, drinking chai tea. Because they were both so quick in their thinking, at one stage my students had asked them to slow down and not talk over each other (which they did not as interruption, but as a kind of running counterpoint), Karin had the brilliant (and awesome!) idea of having me, as the facilitator, sit slightly behind and between them, lightly hold one of each of their hands, and gently squeeze only the hand of the woman who was talking, as a way of “moderating” the conversation and slowing down the flow of ideas unobtrusively. It worked. I was, of course, elated. To me, nothing afterwards could ever compare to this quiet alternating touch for sheer, raw eroticism.

So we sat on the couch together, holding hands just like that, as a nod to the roles we had found ourselves in. Finally Marina broke the silence:

“Josh — Karin and I have decided something, and we hope you won’t be disappointed with us. Today, if you were following, our discussion reached something of a dénouement. We’ve realized that we’re at an end. We’ve unraveled all we can together, and there doesn’t seem to be anything more that is essential to say. So as grateful as we are for the forum you have granted us, we think that the song is over. We can’t see the point in talking more. We’ve said all that we can think to say that’s of any value. So we’re going to take a vacation, and hope that what we’ve produced is good enough to meet the requirements of the seminar, and that you won’t be upset if we don’t return. This has been the most important experience of our lives, and we’ll always be in your debt.”

“The Masters’ painting is done,” I said, mostly to myself, with a sigh. Marina gave me a concerned look, but then, with a glance at Karin, immediately understood the reference, and smiled, and nodded.

“Yes, it seems so,” she replied.

We sat there quietly for a while and then Karin asked if there was “a spare bedroom” they could sleep in — they were dead tired and didn’t relish the trip back to the university to retrieve their cars and drive home. And I realized they were lovers.

I spent that entire night, sleeplessly sighing, fantasizing about what might be possible, what I wanted, what would be best for them. They obviously made love, and for what seemed a very long time, but they were discreet about it. My dream of course was that, in their blossoming personal lives together, I might play the same essential, connected role, holding them together, moderating and mediating their genius, that I’d come to play over the past month in their public lives. That would have been enough for me. I told you I had a thing for smart women, and I knew nothing like this would ever happen again.

It took until the early hours of dawn before I finally collapsed into sleep, and of course when I awoke, much later, my delightful charges had gone. They made the bed with fresh sheets, put the soiled ones in the washer, left me an absolutely wonderful, handwritten note that I will cherish forever, left some cute and provocative ‘selfies’ of the two of them in my email, and disappeared from my life forever.

I’ve watched the videos so often I can practically recite them from memory, and they were right — there was nothing more to say. Of course the deeply-threatened patriarchal establishment took their departure and unavailability as evidence of their arguments’ frailty, and in less than a year hundreds of articles in professional and popular journals had disingenuously criticized and finally dismissed their brilliant, fleeting work. I removed all the jealousy-tinged comments from the videos and closed off further comments. The videos spoke for themselves, and I’m sure their genius will eventually be vindicated.

So yes, nothing matters. But still, my heart will never be the same. I grieve I suppose for what never was, yet what happened was enough. I am honoured to have been there, and played a role. It is all just a story, and every story is meaningless, but it’s the only thing I have.

you have tethered the big rubber dinghy
to a tree on the sea shore
so it floats, just off the beach

and the three of us climb aboard
and, as you insist, put on silk blindfolds
and nestle down on soft blankets
on the supple floor of the boat

for awhile we just bask in the sun
while our friend regales us with descriptions
of amazing brilliantly-coloured
deep sea creatures —
how they move, effortlessly
through the water, pulsing,
their fins and flippers and tentacles
sliding, guiding them through the sea

we can almost sense them
floating under and around our boat
as the waves push us, gently,
almost to shore and out again

pulsing, like a whale’s song

the air is the perfect temperature of our skin
and we imagine it is like this, too
for the creatures in the sea —
no boundary between skin and air and flume,
just one being flowing
outside of time

the sun comes out and warms us, and then retreats
and comes out again, as if to reassure us
it is there still and always

and then a sun shower, the strange feeling
of the sun’s heat and the cool drops
at the same moment
making us laugh

and the breeze is just a whisper
caressing us, teasing us to open to it

pulsing,
like a jellyfish spurting toward the ocean’s surface

the boat ripples with the waves
and follows them toward the shore
and away again

and now your fingers softly brush across our bodies
infinitely gentle touches
smoothing on the oil
that protects and lubricates,
arouses and calms

pulsing,
like the ripples of moonlight on the night sea

so we return the caresses
feeling our way sightlessly
each fingernail sliding deliciously over curves,
each firm hand gliding along flanks and sinews
until our whole bodies are engaged
in the exchange, every nerve ending
teased to the surface

pulsing, like hearts beating, lips sucking
in the still moment of a first kiss

and then, still laughing and smiling
we splay back out under the sun,
barely touching each other
and lie silently, listening to the surf,
feeling the sun and subtle wind and gentle rain,
taking in the scent of lilikoi, spider lily,
limu and coconut

this moment is complete —
it has no intention to it;
it is not leading to a conclusion,
a catharsis, a resolution;
it is just what it is

the cycles of caresses and sunshine and breezes
and raindrops and waves and scents
and breaths flowing in and out
fold over each other and back into one

there is no end to this moment,
no need for it to end, no limit to it,
it is always and has always been

there is no purpose or meaning to this
no objective, no need for anything to be done
there is nothing to be lost, or found, or held on to
no tomorrow, nothing that should be otherwise,
no need for any work, any striving,
anything different

there is only
this

cartoon by Felicia Bond on wikimedia, CC-SA 3.0
The people were worried. The Evil Drumpf had seized power in the kingdom. He had installed his corrupt Minions in positions of power, and was plundering the Commons and threatening war with any neighbour who did not accept his absolute edicts. On the ramparts, the people looked hopefully toward the horizon. The children were crying.

“We need a miracle”, said one man.

“If only a hero would come and rescue us”, said another.

Suddenly there was a flash in the sky, and a luminous grey creature descended to Earth in front of the crowd.

“Get back, it’s a giant rodent!”, warned an observant woman.

“Eeew!”, cried the children.

But the giant rodent was undeterred, and turned to the crowd, speaking in a calm voice.

“Don’t be afraid”, the creature said, in a voice that seemed to reverberate around the ramparts. “I am here to help you in this time of need. I am — Equani-Mouse!” His name echoed through the crowd.

“Are you going to kill the Evil Drumpf and restore peace and democracy to the land?”, asked a young boy.

“Just tell us what to do to get rid of this demon, and we’ll follow you”, urged an anxious mother.

Equani-Mouse shook its head and smiled, beseeching the crowd to listen. “I am an expert in complex systems, and what you are dealing with is not a problem with one man, but a predicament. The Evil Drumpf is only one of a million connected variables, evidence of a system in late-stage collapse.”

“Drumpf isn’t a predicament, he’s a whack-job”, interrupted an adolescent. “He needs to be confronted and stopped, now.” The crowd buzzed and nodded in agreement.

Equani-Mouse sighed. “What you must realize about predicaments is that they cannot be ‘fixed’. The only approach to them is to understand and accept what they represent, and learn to cope with and adapt to them. Chop wood and carry water, before and after Drumpf, who is only a symptom of a much greater malaise.”

Many in the crowd frowned, and some outright scowled.

“Boo!”, one boy cried out. “The Evil Drumpf is destroying everything. He’s sick, and incompetent. Don’t tell us to accept him.”

“You’re a fraud!”, a man said, looking at Equani-Mouse menacingly. “You’re not here to help us at all. You’re trying to discourage us. You are probably one of the Evil Drumpf’s Minions!”

The crowd grew increasingly agitated and hostile. Finally, a woman called for order and said to Equani-Mouse: “Look, maybe you’re the wrong person, er… creature, for this job. All we want is justice, what our people have always sought: global human equality, a cosmopolitan world civilisation, fair and free trade, the spread of personal liberty and secular democracy to all corners of the globe. These goals are so obviously desirable that it is inconceivable that we should ever stop progressing towards them. Your telling us to just accept this aberration Drumpf is cowardly and unhelpful. Perhaps you could send us a super-hero better equipped for the task of liberating us and getting us back on track.”

The crowd cheered and applauded this comment. Equani-Mouse took a deep breath. and then replied: “You seem to think that civilization is destined to greater and greater levels of progress and humanity. Your textbooks and media and leaders lie, telling you only what you want to hear. You may be living a much better life now than your species did a couple of centuries or millennia ago, but compared to prehistoric humans, you’re less happy, less healthy, less resilient, less sustainable, more destructive, and most importantly less attuned and connected to the wisdom of all life on this planet. Your civilization is a hubristic affront to millions of years of astonishing evolution on this fragile and beautiful planet. Yet all you want from me is to enable you to try to continue what you have been doing, which is disastrous.”

There was silence. One boy said what others were apparently thinking: “What a loser. The giant rodent wants us to accept the Evil Drumpf as punishment for something we didn’t do, as if it were a plague or pestilence from God. Its advice is hopeless. I say we send it packing. We don’t need another hero. All we want is life beyond the Evil Drumpf. We have leaders, let’s follow them instead.”

Equani-Mouse smiled sadly, and replied:

“You may not realize it, but the Evil Drumpf won’t be able to do anything different from what your last leader, HopiumMan, did. He won’t do anything that is more than symbolically different from what your usurped leader MoreOfTheSameWoman would have done. Look around you. All the systems you’ve built are crumbling. Nothing is working the way it was designed to. You have inadvertently and foolishly desolated the planet and brought about the sixth great extinction of life on it. All your civilized systems are doing is speeding up that process, and causing universal suffering. There’s nothing you can do to change that but accept it, live joyfully in the time that’s left, and do your best to help all the creatures you share this part of this amazing planet with, in small ways that are within your control. A thousand small acts of loving kindness, compassion and understanding, taking joy in others’ joy, and equanimity — these are the ways you all have to do that. What the Evil Drumpf does is of no consequence, and all the news about his deeds is just a distraction causing you stress and grief for no reason.”

“Not buying that Buddhist crap”, said a woman standing near Equani-Mouse. “We can get rid of the Evil Drumpf and his Minions, but we need to be united and forceful, not stand meekly and idly by while he pillages our land and mistreats our people. Let’s join together and send up a prayer to show us the way. Who’s with me?”

The crowd moved toward the woman and slowly the group joined hands and once again turned their eyes to the horizon as the woman uttered her prayer. Suddenly the sky darkened with the shadows of two more flying figures. The wind picked up, and with a flourish a caped woman and a caped man landed in front of the crowd. Equani-Mouse was jostled aside. The woman spoke first:

“Equani-Mouse is wrong!” she shouted. “We can show you the way! I am BeTheChangeHumyn, and this is DeepGreenGuy. A better world is possible. Together we can help you defeat the Evil Drumpf and restore peace, democracy and progress to this great land!” Equani-Mouse winced at the word “progress” but said nothing, shaking its head sadly.

“We must organize, resist, refuse to give up”, BeTheChangeHumyn continued. DeepGreenGuy nodded and chimed in: “There is no honour in passivity. We are all by nature activists, and when we listen we know what needs to be done. We may fail, but we will if necessary die trying”.

Some people in the crowd looked nervous when they heard these last words. But almost everyone in the crowd agreed with either BeTheChangeHumyn or DeepGreenGuy, and as the pair walked away from the ramparts toward the Tower where the Evil Drumpf was, the crowd followed eagerly behind.

Equani-Mouse was left nearly alone, but it shrugged off the rejection. The only people left were a woman and her daughter, who walked over to Equani-Mouse to offer thanks. “They’re not ready for your message,” the woman said. “Their humynism, their activism, their hope, their outrage, it’s a religion to them, a salve, their way of coping.”

“I know,” Equani-Mouse replied, hugging the pair. The little girl smiled at the large grey creature and said, smiling “I thought you were going to try to convince them that there was no Drumpf, that everything that seems to be is an illusion”.

As they walked off toward the forest Equani-Mouse responded, laughing quietly, “Yeah, like that would have worked.”