The strike of unexpected lightning

When satori comes a-callin, there's no such thing as prepared

"The world now appears as if dressed in a new garment..." -- d.t. suzuki

I keep asking myself: Who the hell am I? I'm nobody. I'm not special. I didn't ask for this (well, not per se). So why did it happen to me? I still can't explain it.

(quote unquote) God is my witness, I still reel sometimes to remember it.

A flash of lightning. The bottom falling out of a water barrel, spilling the contents of the oceans all over you.

And you sitting there with a goofy look on your face.

So it was for me. I'm kinda prone to goofy looks on my face. Beatific, heroic, that's not me. I'm the goofy, cartoon bubble over my head which reads "arf?!" kind of person.

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There was nothing special about that day. The sky was grey and blue, misty with wannabe rain and a late autumn breeze. The house was a passably comfortable rental that needed a paint job, slightly better insulation and a patently better landlord. The lounge was the same old lounge it always was, cozy in that mangy old sweater you never throw out sort of way. The furnishings were -- by and large -- way past their expiry dates. The television (32 inches with dead pixels in the upper left corner) was blorching out some flavourless fare. It was a Sunday as plain as biscuit batter.

I can still remember everything about my partner. That's the one thing about what happened which is tattooed on my memory indelibly. (This is saying a lot because I forget everything. I once forgot my own birthday)

She was on her phone, tippety-tapping with those dinky, nimble elf fingers of hers on whichever of the half-dozen games she has on the go each month. Index fingers and thumbs moved like blurry after-images as she gamed away, her reflexes quick and her hyper-sensitive fingerpads tatting the phone screen like a seasoned acupressurist activating stagnant chi.

I can see her there on the love seat, intent and squinting, blanket up around her knees, her eyes deep in concentration on whatever photoelectric geometry puzzle she was mastering this dull afternoon. I could see the little shapes reflected on the lenses of her glasses.

As for me, I was on the couch, lugubriously gawking at some re-run of a re-run of a re-run on the tube. I'd seen whatever it was so many times I can't even recall what it was now. It was that kind of TV show.

I was in that kind of mood.

I was awash in bored little thinkings. Wondering about this, fretting over that. My mind was trying to tetris its way out of so much running through the ol' noodle, aligning things, boxing them together, pushing them out of the way. There was the autumn veggies I wanted to plant, there were those quarterly work meetings coming up next week (and I was trying to work out how I could lie to get out of them). The car needed a service. I needed to get back to work on my next book. Round and round these went, penned in with hundreds of thoughts more, all of them galumphing about in the ol' brain pan to the calliope tune of The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.

I wasn't anxious, you understand. Not exactly. I was just trying to sort out the clutter and cruft, tidy up loose ends, make plans to keep forging ahead. I was particularly obsessed with my new book. How would that latest chapter wrap up? What would be the right vibe for the cover art? Had I missed some opportunity for exploring man's inhumanity to man during that scene with the pie fight?

Would anyone read it?

Would I ever make it as a writer?

??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

In Sufism, it's Fana, the process of the ego being dissolved in the divine presence. In the Christian treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous author calls this the Spark of the Soul, the innermost part of each of us which is capable of direct, experiential knowledge of God. Hindus refer to it as Moksha, the liberation of the soul from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. In Zen, it's known as Satori a Japanese term which refers to a sudden, intuitive enlightenment or awakening, a profound, direct realization of the nature of reality.

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So, there I was, letting my brain run hither and thither with my ambling little scribbles of thoughts while I glazed at the re-run, when this little gem slammed me full in the face.

Would I ever make it as a writer?

Questions like that are big ones dressed up like little ones. For such a simple question, deep down I knew I was rubbing up against the nagging fear of mortality, the whole ashes to ashes thing. Mr. Death reaching out with those emaciated fingers (which look surprisingly like mine), and what would I leave behind? Will anyone recall my name, my work, my life? Will any of it matter?

This nasty thought had slapped full force into me like a juicy bug spattering on the ol' mental windshield. Asking about my career as a writer was a psychological dodge, and I knew it. When Death came and went, would anything I'd done be remembered, or would I fade away like the countless countlessness of souls before me?

(What could I remember of those who came a long time before me? What the hell was my great, great aunt's name again? Who was the president of Paraguay in 1939? What did the inhabitants of the Kambuja Empire eat for breakfast?)

I'd had my share of such questions across the course of my life, nagging little anxieties that lurk in the recesses of the mind for just the right moment to leap out. My general rule of thumb had always been to brush them off and keep chugging ahead. No time to ponder that mortality "What's it all mean?" nonsense. Best to get back to the question of those autumn veggie choices.

But this time, rather than put the idea back in its corner, I decided I'd take a different tack. I went at the idea like a ravenous dachshund gormandizing that pack of hot dogs left unattended.

It's not like I intended to do this. I wasn't facing my fears or some such nonsense. It was more of a whim, a "Huh, let's see where this leads" kind of deal. Just a wander down musing lane as it were.

Let's see, indeed.

When I die, I thought, within a few years, no one will know I existed. Some photos, some stories, maybe a stray copy of one of my books found in some musty used book shop. That would be about it.

Sure, my friends and family would know, but beyond them, it's really unlikely my notoriety would make a blip on anyone else's radar. It wasn't just possible; it was downright probable. I would go out like a crappy birthday cake candle and that'd be all she wrote. Another forgotten nobody in the unending annals of forgotten nobodies. My loved ones would miss me, mourn me, but lasting renown? Not likely.

I was, for all intents and purposes, nothing but a series of vignettes, dirty little jokes and silly experiences which later on down the line no one would quite remember. More time, and they'd be relegated to quips and blurbs, then forgotten altogether.

That's most our fates, btw. Our society having turned into a high school popularity contest, we've had it drilled into us that we MUST be remembered by as many anonymous strangers as possible. But the fact is, most of us just aren't going to earn the kind of super-fame we all imagine we deserve. There's nothing more or less special about those who achieve it. It's really a percentages game. You may hit the stride to super stardom, but you might also win the lottery tonight. Odds are odds, and the house usually wins. Most of us just won't outlive our mortality through fame.

Nothing like a sulfuric bath of pure honesty to put some vim in an imagination's step.

My brain wasn't done playing parlour games quite yet, no siree. That was just the warm-up act. My personal doom and post mortem anonymity was just step one.

What about my family? When we've all passed away, my partner, our kids, my brothers and in-laws and so forth, will anyone recall us? Will anyone know the happiness and sadness we endured? Will anyone recall our family trips, our urgent emergencies, the spoiled birthday cake that self-same aforementioned dachshund decided enough was enough and went face-first into the lemon-frosted goodness.

No. No one would remember, not for long. A couple dozen years, but then life just...goes on.

And then what about the place and time of my life? My nation, my society, the geopolitics of these inauspicious times? In a thousand years would it be anything more than footnotes in a crummy history textbook that some poor teenager is forced to memorise for a pointless exam?

Magic 8 Ball: All signs point to NO

I wasn't done. Not by a long shot.

I kept pulling back, pulling back, questioning the staying power of anything in the face of Grumpy Great Grandfather Entropy.

The species? Would the human race leave some indelible mark on the universe? Not the whole universe, but maybe some teensy corner of it. Maybe, if we somehow managed to get lucky and not kill ourselves through our own greed and stupidity (and that is a whopper of an If), maybe the human species could survive a few hundred thousand years, a million on the outside. We might spread to a few dozen worlds, build a space empire or whatever, grow out into the galaxy.

But in that long a span of time, it wouldn't be my humanity. It would be a totally different species evolved from where we know it today. And even still, after a point, even with all the best efforts, the likelihood that we'd be the next dodo is very high. Extinction is the norm, after all.

"If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us." -- michio kaku

Which returns us to a human-less planet (or string of planets if we manage to do the bidding of the plants and recolonise them to other worlds). Life will go on as it does, but with enough time, every trace of us as a species will have gapped it long since. Gone daddy gone. Humanity vanishing like the apatosaurus and the sabre tooth cat. We'd be -- if we're lucky -- some mouldering mound of bones and plastic toys in an alien museum. We were, like all the living things before us, doomed to extinction, to being forgotten in the long eons of time.

And what of the Earth, of our solar system, when our star eventually goes red giant? Venus, Mercury, even the Earth and Mars could be consumed as the red giant expands and expands to hundreds of times its current size (which is freaking whopping as it is, I need not point out). Stellar objects will be ejected from their orbital pull; our gas giants will be rattled in their rotation; ice moons will thaw. What we know as the solar system will be gone forever, and unless we plan on ice sculpting 'kilroy was here' across the Oort cloud, it'll be as if none of it ever existed.

Everything flew away. I was no longer in charge. My mind had found an express train to eternity and we were zooming faster and faster into the unimaginable reaches of the future where nothing I knew remained, where "Whatever" came before was far too far forgotten to even be called a memory. A memory of a memory of a memory.

The only constants, the only measures of Time, were Great Grandfather Entropy and Great Grandmother Change.

I could see it all, see the passage of millennia piled upon millennia, watch as everything I had known or ever would vanished. Change upon change upon change, and what had come before faded away until it was no longer there.

Millions, billions of years swept in front of me. I watched the stars flying apart, growing colder with the growing distance. I saw a universe which carried on, continued to evolve, transmute, become something which I could no longer recognise. All that I'd been, all that we had been, every bit of it disassembled and blown away in the solar winds. My atoms -- the very subatomic particles which had comprised my body, my family, my world, my insignificant corner of a dust mote of a galaxy -- every bit of it was change, reconstituted and dissolved.

Hundreds of billions of years were past. There was not even a figment of a memory of where we once existed.

There was only the silent expanse of the cosmos, empty, without memory. Nothing lasting, but the universe in an ever-changing tranquility, as it's always been. Going on, and on, and on, and...

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I was staring at the TV again. A moment -- maybe a second or two - had passed, but in that everlasting span, I'd been rattled to my timbers.

Majorly goofy expression on my kisser, my hands actually shuddering in my lap. I could still feel the current charging up my spine, odd twitches up and down my body, like I'd been thunderstruck.

Like I'd been thunderstruck?! I HAD been thunderstruck. Full stop. There was no like about it. What had been a passing fluff of anxiety and self-doubt had expanded inside me until a veritable quake had blasted through my entire being. I'd been swept away on a tsunami the size of Laniakea. I could feel the whole of creation, see it reflected on the skein of my soul. Me, this grime-stained little mirror of consciousness, had accidentally stumbled down a rabbit hole that even Alice would never have imagined. I'd been nudged by the little toe of a god.

A great anxious self-pitying hunk of me fell away, and I'll be damned if I've managed to find it since.

All my squandered chimpanzee moments trying to press for the attention and concern of other chimpanzees, all that got crapped out the backside of my Epiphany with a capital E.

Spacetime had walloped me a good one with a cartoon frying pan, leaving me speechless and stupid with transcendental tweetie birds circling my noggin. I was agog. My mouth hung open like a codfish at the fish monger's.

There were tears in my eyes, though I couldn't say what kind. Happy, sad, terrified, overwhelmed, grateful. Take your pick. It was a bouillabaisse of feelings which came rushing up to me to get my autograph.

Some paltry comedic zinger on the TV re-run had me laughing suddenly like a donkey with a head full of nitrous oxide.

"What is with you?" my partner asked, glancing up from her game. She gave me her patented "he's having one of his moments again" look, which only made me laugh all the harder.

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Like I said when I started this yarn: Who the hell am I? I'm nobody. I'm not special. I didn't dedicate my life to sitting cross-legged in a saffron robe chanting the sutras day in and day out. The closest I came to playing the earnest religious mendicant with a begging bowl was being down and out at age 23 and mooching smokes and tabs of acid at a Grateful Dead show.

Sure, I knew about satori. I've read Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, Rumi, Krishnamurti and most of the rest (I read the Dharma Bums as well, but I don't think that counts). I've made a lifelong dilettante's study of the mystical experience, that inimitable so-called "strike of lightning" which separates the seeker from the Divine. I just never figured it would show up on my doorstep, cartoon frying pan in hand.

You see, that was my mistake. I was under the false pretense that such visions were meant for the truly spiritual, the dedicated and single-minded seekers, not some slob watching TV. Saffron robes and meditating on the scriptures, self-flagellation and sensual denial were like some kind of admission fee I was never really willing to pay.

That's my mistake. Believing that those things were prerequisites to divine experiences, to evolutionary leaps forward as conscious beings. I'm sure they couldn't hurt, but I'd been under the flawed premise that there was a VIP lounge which that admission paid for, and I was stuck outside trying to peer inside. For an instant, I was the VIP lounge.

Oddly, these days, ever since that fateful Sunday afternoon, I've been living my life more and more in line with the admission fee.

Like I said, it couldn't hurt. Besides, whatever it takes to go back. There's no feeling like self-annihilation.