Barnett Weekly

The answer is…more stuff! The continuity of existence is existence itself – an unbroken timeless non-event in which nothing is actually ever the same, and thus never changes. In essence, nothing happens continuously.

This conundrum notwithstanding, from time to time most of us would like to stop the world and get off. This is impossible, so we retreat instead to the confines of our own familiar mind-cave, creating the powerful illusion that the stuff that happens needn’t concern us. As if in a dream we watch TV, go to the movies, read books, listen to music, nibble on chips, jiggle our legs, chew gum and accumulate possessions; in short distracting ourselves in every way possible from the groundless, ungraspable experience of continuity

Moreover, our ordinary perspective is limited not only by mental and emotional distractions but also by our actual inability to fully understand what is going on around us. Although we know that cause and effect are real and comprise the essential fabric of continuity, we are incapable of fully observing cause and effect in all their subtle manifestations so it is only the grossest and most obvious forms which generally attract our attention. Much of the time, we are bewildered.

Occasionally, we find ourselves open to a wider experience of the stuff that happens. We’re caught short by a sudden flash of color, or rendered speechless by the unexpected screech of tires braking to a hurried stop. At such moments the vividness of continuity hits us and we are suddenly and fully awakened. Our preoccupations, habits and mental constructs are instantaneously dropped, and the full power and spectacle of existence rushes through us. Labeled “peak experiences,” we quickly retreat to our “normal” view of reality and get back to the business of crawling around the safe little cave inside our minds.

There are opportunities, however, to fully and intentionally engage with the energy of continuity, and practices that can be employed to encourage and sustain that engagement. Recognizing that our natural awareness, unmitigated and unmediated by thought, is always available and is essentially of the same nature as continuity, the cultivation of such engagement is the great work of wisdom traditions stretching back many thousands of years. Culture and technology have changed, but the nature of mind has not. Thus the lessons and experiences of those who have developed methods and practices devoted to the awakening of mind remain relevant and are of great value in this materialistic age.

It is taught that true awakening arises simultaneously with the awareness of suffering. If we exit our safe little cave, we experience the unhappiness of all cave dwellers, and the profound experience of that suffering is acutely painful and heartbreaking.

Thus the engaged experience of continuity is not comfortable or without great challenge. Infinite open-endedness can feel peculiarly claustrophobic, relentlessly present and completely inescapable. There is no retirement from continuity, no turning back, no stopping the world, no time off. And despite this, having tasted the truth, retreating instead into our mental cave feels insufficient, unsubstantial and false.

Making the choice and effort to be awake and engaged is at one and the same time very outrageous and yet completely ordinary. According to the great teachers, this is the only way we can be of real help to others at all.

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Dogs howl.
A pink twilight speaks of rain.
The ground, dear one,
Is always shaking.

My wife’s sister and our niece were the first to join us a decade ago, moving to town four blocks northwest of us. It turns out she and her daughter were an advanced guard; over the last six months our family clan has continued gathering. First my daughter, her husband and our granddaughter moved into a house six blocks southeast. That happened in December. Last week, my father took up residence in a cute apartment five blocks northwest, around the corner from my sister-in-law.

Like social animals of any kind, sensitive to the environment and wired for survival, people can sense uncertainty and threat, even when the perceived nature of such threat is clouded or indistinct. Like penguins sensing bad weather, drawn together against frigid wind, families are gathering, families like mine.

Change is in the air in America, and along with it uncertainty in great measure. I’m not talking apocalypse, though there are those who lean in that direction. There are some who say apocalypse has already happened, and has happened many times before. And there are others yet again who think apocalypse is happening right now. Ask the whales, they say.

I am talking about various signs of trouble, most of them the direct result of human activity or the effect of natural impacts acting upon it. Take note: a Gulf of Mexico deep oil well blowout, volcanoes in Iceland stranding air travelers across Europe, stock trading glitches that drop the Dow Jones 1,000 points in one hour, leaking nuclear reactor water contaminating the below-ground aquifer in upstate New York, endocrine disrupting chemicals like BPA lining commercial canned goods – something is happening. We can feel it, but as Jesse Colin Young sang years ago, “What it is, is not exactly clear.”

What is clear is that a family that was spread apart, anywhere from 250 to 2,500 miles, has gathered in one little town rather suddenly. We cross paths constantly, wander in and out of each others’ homes and lives in ways that simply weren’t possible before. My granddaughter is surrounded by love spanning four generations; in my father’s childhood such a situation was not unusual, but today it is a rarity. An explicit interdependence has arisen.

There are challenges in such interdependence, of course. Boundaries are moving and changing; privacy is not what it was. But a particular kind of security is also arising. We are no longer separated ones or twos or threes, but have each other to lean on. Think penguins.

When life is easy – jobs plentiful, health fine, money in the bank – being alone in ones or twos can work out alright. But life is not so easy right now. Something is brewing, and it’s not all good. The world is in serious trouble and just as my immediate family has drawn together, so must we as the larger family of society accept the reality of our interdependence, draw together, be kind and supportive.

Like the fiercest gales or blizzards, all the terrible storms of human folly eventually blow themselves out, and together we pick up the pieces, care for each other and clean up the mess. This is the only way a good human society has ever succeeded.

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And so it was in 2009 that a brief hiatus, or rather a stalemate, befell the opposing sides. Despite the cascading billions of spam mail flooding the internet and swallowing vast terabytes of bandwidth – armies of drone zombie computers silently doing the bidding of distant masters scattered across the globe – Gmail and Thunderbird kept most of it at bay.

On any given morning, as email inboxes began receiving their daily flood of solicitations for Viagra, Cialis and various love potions, phony UPS delivery notices, inexpensive designer watches, pirated software, sly attempts to redirect traffic to malicious software, “phishing” expeditions, pretend newsletters and fraudulent notices from banks, communication supposedly from the FDIC, greeting cards from “family,” contest winner announcements, airline specials, communication credited to the IRS about refunds or unpaid taxes, regulated pharmaceuticals, and so on, just as quickly the spam filters shunted the flood into segregated “junk” and “spam” folders where their contents lay dormant and inactive.

As in any war, there were casualties, of course. In some cases, it was those sorry few who too old or vulnerable or inexperienced to fully understand the battle being waged would click on links within these spam mails and set loose the monster to feed on their own computer and join the ranks of zombies. And the web backbone itself, open to any and all emails legitimate or not, suffered as did the companies enlisted to support it. Routers and servers, jammed and pushed beyond their limits of delivery timed out, clogged and had to be re-booted. New equipment designed to handle greater capacity was mobilized, at great expense.

But the heart of the battle is not fought online, but in the mind of spam programmers. Even as the stalemate served to inoculate the population from the worst savagery of battle, plans were being drawn to escalate the conflict and break through the spam defenses. At one time, spam used phony company names, but now what seemed like individuals were the sender. As the filters became smarter, even this “personal” looking spam mail was detected and removed. For a short time image files fooled the filters, but this tactic did not succeed for long. A thrust here, and parry there, the duel continued.

And then, all of a sudden, the unthinkable occurred. The filters, having gained what could be called primitive intelligence, began to flood the spammers with their own spam mail. A pitched battle ensued in which the zombies and their masters found themselves on the receiving end of their own spam. A great circle of karmic retribution ensued, which though partly paralyzing the internet for months, finally revealed the identities of compromised machines and shut them down. A great silence cast a blanket of peace over the web.

Reports of email loneliness were reported on CNN. Despite the seeming inconvenience, spam had been of comfort to many, and nothing had yet arisen to replace it. So it was that “spamusic” arrived, a gentle symphony of pure sound selling nothing. This was followed quickly by “spart,” “spoetry” and “spamovels;” a huge burst of free creativity filled the vacuum on what had been the battlefield of spam war.

And so it remained until 2012, when dramatic global events changed web and world history forever.

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