Barnett Weekly

I recently went shopping with my friend, Mr. Peach. Peach is not his real name, of course, it was bestowed upon him by a confused foreign government which upon welcoming him to an international event left him an envelope addressed to “His Divine Excellency, Mr. Peach.” Such is the nature of diplomacy.

In any event, we found ourselves with several hours to kill, and began a sojourn in search of clip-on sunglasses (for me) and a headset with microphone (for Mr. Peach). Heading south of Ft. Collins, we found ourselves on a wide boulevard lined with megastores, and pulled into a parking lot in front of Target. There are those who think Target is pronounced, “Tarjay” and I will admit I like the sound of it, but nothing could have prepared me for Tarjay.

It was cavernous, but unlike a cavern’s dimness, Tarjay was awash in illumination. We were immediately accosted by a red-shirted young lady named Michelle, who with pigtails whipping back and forth in unbridled enthusiasm, asked if we needed help.

“I’m looking for some clip-on sunglasses, Michelle,” I responded. Her expression dropped, eyebrows knitted as she fell deeply into thought. “Hmm,” she perked up, “let me ask!” No sooner had she said this then we were approached by another young lady dressed in red, who conferred with Michelle. A third employee strode over, joined the conversation and began speaking into a small walkie-talkie.

I turned to Mr. Peach. “I think we are about to be arrested by security,” I offered, and we both began to laugh, perhaps too hard as evidenced by the long faces of Michelle and her two associates. “We stopped carrying that product some time ago,” she said, and I suddenly felt very, very old. “Thanks so much,” I replied and turning, we left the store. “Interesting!” said Mr. Peach. “Indeed,” I agreed, and we laughed too hard again. Next stop – Office Depot!

The selection of headsets was substantial, but Mr. Peach was justifiably concerned that his chosen product work properly with his Mac, which he had brought along. Michael, the helpful Office Depot employee did his best to help, but in the end suggested we purchase the product, go over to Starbucks and use their wireless connection to download the proper software. By this time it was 5 P.M. If it did not work, he said, we could bring it back by 6 P.M. for a refund. “And where is the Starbucks?” asked Mr. Peach, “Can we walk?” “Well,” said Michael, “It’s a schlep. I would drive,” he said.

We paid at the counter, where a young woman helped us. Her badge said “TINA – In Training.” “Are you training to be Tina?” asked Mr. Peach, and we both laughed too hard again. She looked confused. “Your badge…oh, nevermind,” I stammered. “Thanks!” we said and left. “Interesting!” said Mr. Peach. “Indeed,” I agreed. Gales of laughter followed.

The download at Starbucks, just a block from Office Depot, was a total failure. Despite the purchase of a $5 Starbucks Card we never connected to the internet. We did enjoy some coffee and several fits of laughing. “I was once diagnosed with a disorder,” Mr. Peach explained. “They said an over-abundance of dopamine and serotonin was making me excessively happy.” “Indeed,” I replied.

And you know what happened next.

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The wisest among us have always known of hate’s power to consume decency, and they have counseled us accordingly. “Love thine enemies,” Jesus is quoted in the Bible. The Buddha advises that one moment of hate destroys eons of accumulated merit. Mohammed teaches forgiveness above all else, the true heart of Islam.

Despite such teachings and the urgings of our better nature, our day-to-day lives are too often consumed by hate. We hate spinach, commercials, un-flushed toilets, lights on when the house is empty, the gas tank too low, poor grades, parking tickets, waiting on line, stepping on gum, trying to reach AT&T, washing dishes, raking leaves, people who ask us for money, cars that won’t start, telemarketers, taxes, freeloaders, politicians, sexual predators, airline security checks, the high cost of gasoline, music of many kinds, runny eggs, stubbed toes, dirty clothes on the floor, getting sick, and crying babies on airplanes – the list goes on and on and on.

For every person in the world there are many hundred ways to hate. In confronting our suffering, each of us constructs a personal hate list. One might argue that what we feel is not hate, just aversion, dislike, displeasure, unhappiness, disgust, dismay or discomfort – but these are simply subtleties of hate. The seed of hate is planted with the first “no” we learn as toddlers, and transforms itself in adulthood into “matters of taste.” We regard such discrimination a badge of honor, and use it to define ourselves and others. In time our investment in hate grows so large that giving it up feels like sacrificing life; it is at moments such as these that violence sometimes arises.

Beneath hate one always finds fear, for it is upon fear that hate first sets its sharp talons. Our fear is born in confusion and bewilderment, and borne by us through denial. We exist in a universe of only marginal predictability, where accidents can happen to any of us or ones we love at any time. Illness, injury, and death come suddenly and without warning; it’s no wonder we are afraid. In denial, we gather possessions, regularly exercise, drive carefully, eat the right foods, stop smoking, drink in moderation, pick our clothes up off the floor, floss and bathe daily, take out the garbage, do our homework, drink green tea, put on sunscreen, check our tires, buy organic bananas, say please and thank you, balance our checkbook, and pray. Despite our innumerable efforts, things happen, sometimes terrible.

Of all types of hate among the most corrosive is self-hatred – and we are brimming over with such loathing. We are imperfect: we’re fat, lazy, anxious, ill-tempered, impatient, too critical, out of shape, wrinkled, worried, dishonest, sleep deprived and weary. And worse, we believe our self-hatred is well deserved. In our tireless efforts to escape fear we have further confused ourselves and others.

We can’t escape hate’s grip by hating hate; to do so we first must lean into fear. Leaning into fear requires making friends with uncertainty, and to do this we must learn to relax. Each moment arises completely fresh – open, original and spontaneous. Through the practice of gently relaxing into the open space of here and now, fear loses its grasp and we can enjoy the effortless liberation that dissolves hate.

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I am walking downtown in a pleasant cosmopolitan city, perhaps Portland or some other northwestern community. I notice that a light-rail transportation system is in full operation, and crowds of people are hustling and bustling, as they tend to do in active metropolitan spaces. Moving into the swirl, I catch a street car headed downhill, not really sure where it is going; it just seems the right thing to do at the moment. We travel a wide, well-paved street as the afternoon sun ducks behind steep hills astride the city. I hop off the tram and stand within the median strip of the broad boulevard, cars rushing by in both directions.

As I move to the sidewalk beside the east side of the street; it suddenly becomes very dark and a massive downpour begins, the hardest rain I have ever known. It comes down with such force that all my clothes are torn off, falling in pieces around me, forming a multi-colored puddle of shredded fabric.

Naked, I walk along the sidewalk, trying my best to be discreet but finding it difficult not to feel embarrassed. Finally I duck through a walled entry which leads to an alley, and walking through an open door enter a bustling restaurant filled with elegant patrons. A man wearing a bowler hat sits alone at a table with his back to the wall, a white linen napkin tucked into his collar. His table is also covered in crisp white linen. Chewing, he looks in my direction, but takes no notice and keeps on eating.  Around me the sound of dishes and voices conjoin a whirl of activity as waiters and busboys quickly tend tables. Other diners look my way but say nothing – I adopt an air of dignity and decorum.

Still naked, I stride through the restaurant – self-conscious, but not fearful –  find an exit door and move back out into the street. By now night has fallen, but it’s no longer raining. I keep to the shadows and walk uphill, looking for a transit station but unsure of where to go.

I finally spot a station entrance, make my way down a long flight of stone stairs to the platform and hop on a yellow box car. I seem to have found a small towel or washcloth, which I hold over my nakedness, as if no one will notice. The noisy box car train bounces and jostles in a tunnel for a long while, and then emerges into early morning light above ground. Suddenly far from the city the whole atmosphere has changed; the breeze is fresh and smells good, clean but with a hint of salt in the air.

We trundle along and finally come to a gentle stop. I get off and walk out into the dawn. The eastern sun is just rising over an ocean horizon, golden light spreading across gentle ripples. I can faintly hear waves washing up on the not-to-distant shore. I turn to the right and feeling enormous relief, realize I have arrived at my destination. With its ten stories of dawn-kissed golden sandstone and verdigris bronze room balconies crazily tipped at funny angles in all directions, before me stands the world-famous Hotel Confusion, in a quiet village on a sloping hill by the sea.

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As if the recent tragedy of the Maloney family – father, mother and two children killed by a speeding motorist as they headed home from vacation were not enough – we’ve now been subjected to the horror of two people burglarizing the Maloney’s vacant home in Sonoma.

The natural reaction to such behavior is outrage and disgust, and now that the burglars have been apprehended, they will experience the outrage they have earned. No doubt, prosecutors, judges and jury (should matters come to trial) will express their anger, though this will give small solace to those who knew and loved the Maloney family. Certainly, both burglars deserve justice and punishment for their crimes, and they certainly will get it.

Yet this incident prompts consideration at a deeper level than the application of justice; people are shaken by the depravity of such callousness. Many find themselves recoiling from the thought that two people could be so cold and calculating, and their confidence in others is shaken. While it is easy to transmute such feelings into thoughts of revenge, the perpetrators already live in a hell-like realm of drug abuse, addiction and crime. For these two, prison may be easier than life “outside.” There is no excuse for their behavior, and they must be accountable for their terrible actions, but it’s worthwhile to consider what value might be found in understanding how it is that two people can behave in this way.

No person is born a criminal; no infant is guilty of any crime. Along the way, something terrible happened to these two people, and I would like to know what it was. It’s easy to simply relegate them to the trash heap and throw them in the slammer for twenty years, but the particular nature of this crime prompts me to want to know more. When such coldness emerges into public view, it should not be ignored; there has been something lost in these two souls, a slice of humanity has disappeared from view, and I am curious about what it is behind lost lives like these.

The media pounces on stories like this, savoring the sensational and gruesome aspects of it. The burglars will be demonized and used to build circulation. Those hungry for revenge will let their own hatred loose for a while, and a primitive form of social hysteria will ensue. If we lived in ancient Rome, the burglars would be thrown to the lions before a cheering crowd. All this teaches us nothing, however, about how humanity is lost and the root of suffering.

Our criminal justice system metes out punishment. Inclinations towards understanding, rehabilitation, restitution and reintegration have been set aside. The two burglars will join a locked-down society of sociopaths, victims of their own suffering and the suffering they have caused others.

I’m not looking for sympathy for the burglars, but I am hoping for greater understanding of what drives individuals towards social depravity. We can point to drug addiction, but something underlies that. We can point to poor parenting, but what are the hows and whys of that? Most of us would say, “Who cares?” But, without some deeper understanding of the lives of these two burglars, we have no hope of learning anything, and lacking that, we have no chance to cure such cold-heartedness in others.

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What exactly is a moment, what we commonly call nowness? Does it have duration, and if so, how long is it; if not, does nowness actually exist at all? (Warning to the easily confused: This might be a good place to stop reading).

Nowness has no physical dimensions or fixed aspects: no size, no shape, no color, no sound – no characteristics of any kind. If Einstein is correct, it is not even a consistent, simultaneous moment, but varies with speed and mass (stop rushing, you’ll live longer).

Despite its lack of characteristics or tangible qualities, each of us nonetheless recognize nowness, and know it experientially. In other words, we experience something that cannot absolutely be found, pinpointed, captured, confined, defined, replicated or reduced. Each moment of nowness is unique, completely new and original (unlike most Hollywood movies today).

Speculation about nowness is speculation about time. Physicist Julian Barbour in his book The End of Time, proposes that time does not exist at all. In his model, what we experience as the flow of time is simply our consciousness splicing together discrete, completed static arrangements of space and matter, much like individual frames within a movie. Each static arrangement, moreover, differs from one’s point of view, of which there are an infinite number. Therefore, in place of linear time we exist in a knitted-together conscious continuity of static arrangements in which nothing actually moves and nothing actually happens (unless it’s in the NY Times, of course). When asked by two Zen monks which is moving, a flapping flag or the wind, a third monk answered, “Neither. Mind is moving.”

Modern physics has rushed across the threshold of common sense and stepped into the realm of paradox. Current theories aver that quantum events are not absolute, but instead are a function of probability. Sub-atomic history is not fixed, but actually alters due to choices made by the experimenter in the present moment. Time is plastic, curved and contained within space (a metaphysical Tupperware universe?).

Devoid of any solid nature, and neither absolutely true nor absolutely false, our experience of nowness seems quite real nonetheless. When perceived fully, the open-ended unfolding of nowness actually dissolves the duality of past and future, which may be why its presence can be so palpable and powerful. To be “in the moment” is an experience we all share, as is the sense of time “stopping.” Even when our distracted minds are entirely elsewhere, there is no escaping nowness. Thoughts of the past or plans for the future take place only in nowness.

Herewith we find a great experiential paradox: we perceive a nowness that may not exist; it is perhaps (a) a transitional moment of no duration or (b) a completed arrangement which ceases to exist as soon as it comes into existence, (c) neither, or (d) something else again as yet to be determined. In any case, something or nothing is happening, and we are happening or not happening right along with it. There are those who say that nowness is simply the product of attention, and doesn’t exist without us to observe it. To verify that hypothesis, however, requires proving a negative, yet again another mind-bending paradox. Alas, we’ve come full circle with no answers.

Enjoying nowness, gratefully, is not a matter of intellect.

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