Flying the Zenly Skies

Apparently, despite his highly touted and sought after omniscience, the Buddha, when he warned about the hell realms we could wander into, forgot to mention American airports. They must have been in the side mirror blind spot on his vehicle to enlightenment. Or maybe the reason was American airports don't fall neatly into the hot hells or the cold ones he conscientiously described; they are a freak show that transgresses the firewall between hotly humiliated passengers and icily fiendish airlines. I bet if he decided to manifest now, the Buddha would recognize hell when he saw it and say: "If you want to be smack in the center of Samsara where all six hell realms intersect, get thee to an airport." 

Having flown public for over 50 years, I can tell you flying--read that: coach-- used to be fun, actually user friendly. You didn't have to die wondering why that plane never showed up, or sit squeezed and belted wondering why the airline suddenly had to repair the plane while it was on the runway ready to take off. You didn't have to starve or subsist for six hours on melting ice cubes and a mini pack of low-grade nuts or spend eight hours with the seat in front of you pressing into your sternum while being stabbed in the side by overreaching elbows, trying to distract from suffering with the proffered dumbed down, dumpster entertainment that cost more than Netflix. What I mean is, you weren't packed into sardine can squalor deliberately created to encourage an hourly exercise routine for your credit card to keep your sanity in shape.

In the good old days, when air travel was shiny new, polite and pretty-- when there were lots of start-ups,  stewardesses served meals and snacks (note the plural), passed out newspapers and magazines, put out fruit and cookies, even gave away decks of cards. I remember passengers being treated decently and respected as customers, probably because passengers dressed respectfully and behaved decently to airline personnel. Nobody mistook the plane for their private jalopy and tried to stuff it with the kids, the strollers, the guitars, the canoe, the dogs, shopping bags and clothing trunks. Probably also because airlines cared more about customers than capital back then, they wanted us to like flying enough to make their start-up stay-up. The mantra wasn't, to paraphrase, "We hate to fly and it shows" or "We d double dare you to fly theunfriendliest skies in the cosmos."

Since the pushers hooked us on flying, they don't have to care about shoving a fix at our addiction. The basic minimum of two wings and a motor, as low as they can go, is an offer we have yet to refuse. So airlines only treat people with decency in first class, or maybe international business--of course, in exchange for what amounts to some people's yearly salary. Classy is now a 1% class war spoil. 

But to show these increasingly inhumane corporations the compassion the Supreme Court would probably decide is due to persons, I admit I also don't want anything to do with not so hot 250lb men in tank tops and spandex, hot to trot 23-year-olds in halters and cut-offs, overheated shrieking babies, arrogant businessmen heatedly driving deals on cell phones, bleary-eyed coughers, longhairs whose elephant sized backpacks butt everyone, bicycle parts or golf clubs and blasé packrats stuffing their Hummers into the overhead bin. Every time I step into the funhouse dystopia these characters from the six realms of Samsara degrade the claustrophobic airplane cabin into, I understand the airlines' cold shoulder, the frequent flyers fierce fight for upgrades, the huge surge in private or charter flying. I'd like to get away from it all too, thank you.

Well, fa la la, I think I have found a way. No, I still can't afford the expensive private plane escape or the price gouging for first class. No, I'm not imprisoning myself at home; sometimes I really must be somewhere I can only get to by plane in my one lifetime because I can't sprint at 1000 miles per hour. I can't even run a marathon. Sometimes I gotta do what I gotta do. As it happens, tomorrow for my childhood friend, I have to meet up with about the meanest screw-the-customers airline to fly cross-country. But, ho ho ho, I've got an app for that!  Based on 26 years of driver ed learning to navigate Samsara, I've come up with my very own all new eightfold path to liberation from suffering. I call it Airplane Mode: ON.

The first step has to be right stillness. This means stay put and fly less, which means only when its absolutely necessary. This tactic provides realization of interdependent origination or how suffering unnecessarily arises from wanting to do something without thinking it totally through. It also decreases the sin of gluttony-- for punishment, to not go to all these newfangled destination weddings far from where anybody normal lives, gratuitously change scenery on weekends to combat boredom, and/or race friends to the extremes of exotica. Staying home is actually the new exotic; there's tons to discover and explore especially inside your own mind.  Inward instead of Outward Bound. Besides, Skype lets anyone at home go almost anywhere in the world without security searches, frustrating fees and lost baggage.

Step two is right outfit.  I took this from the Vajrayana instructions to imagine yourself as the deity and eventually you will be. Perhaps it's habit or maybe experience that compels me to dress with old-fashioned respect for a plane ride--even a long overnight haul. I mean no jeans with a tee, no sweats, no flipflops that belong to the beach, no dirty or torn anything, no athletic/yoga gear, nothing transparent or gaudy or minxish. My mantra is: Look like a lady and you will get treated like one. And hot sauce, you really do. This mantra make dreams come true.  Standing in that humiliating security line (guilty until proved innocent) before my last two flights, I won the bonanza of being deemed benign enough to go through screening without taking off my shoes or anything out of my bag. Before I even got to the gate, I thought I'd flown through heaven.

Step three is right sacrifice.  I think of this detachment practice as finally shedding pounds.  Lighten my load, lighten my life. Packing is not winner take all. It's about what's left behind. En-lightenment is detachment. It's realizing the fashion police are essential emptiness, and letting go of attachment to every last item in the dresser and closet. It's about focus. With the algorithm of one outfit three times, four outfits plus the one on the body at flying time makes you good to go anywhere for two weeks with just a carry-on. This liberates from the suffering of changed gates, cancelled flights, plane switcheroos, dislocated shoulders, baggage fees, lost luggage and the need to use public transportation to or from the airport.

Step four: right vision. This is the step for a multitasking self-starter who can run with scissors. Dharma is all about living right now and not worrying about the future, but when going on a plane, I say you've just got to anticipate all the calamities the immediate future is about to introduce you to. Or to plagarize the Boy Scouts: be prepared. A small bag of munchies for endless delays without food, a shawl that doubles as a blanket or scrunches up into a pillow since the airlines don't provide these free anymore, a supply of water in event of delays or chintzy policy, an enthralling book that keeps you turning pages while all hell breaks loose around you. Most importantly, take the most direct route possible: never change planes. Use ground transport on either end to make up the difference: it will be faster and easier, sparing you the suffering of missing luggage and spending a decade wandering around O'Hare looking for a customer service rep.
.
Step five: right timing. Buddhists believe in spaciousness and here's the chance to understand it. Leaving at least an extra hour or two to get to airport check-in liberates from the suffering of missing the plane, losing luggage, getting stuck in unmovable lines, needing a toilet, finding parking, changing terminals, not getting coffee and generally stressing yourself out in panic because you can't stop to ask where the hell the gate is or they'll close the plane door. With spaciousness, you can sit down at a terminal restaurant and enjoy a leisurely meal to sustain you through a foodless flight, instead of grabbing ridiculously overpriced and potentially hazardous prepackaged stuff you'd never eat if you knew how it was prepared. Giving yourself spaciousness  is generosity practice on two fronts. First it allows room for anything and everything unforeseen to occur and some snafu inevitably will. More importantly, you need to be as generous to yourself as you would be to the other kind of terminal patient also about to leave Earth's gravity.

Step six: right emptiness. Being at the forgetful stage of life when I actually flew with my iPhone on, I've been turning my mobile phone and iPad off before I leave the house. This definitely beats being escorted off the plane as a terrorist and gives the NSA time to go to the toilet. It also liberates from the suffering of teenage anxiety at separation from the tribe. Frankly, I'm old enough to know nobody's calling to offer me a billion dollars; nobody's emailing anything so urgent the world is going to come to an end before I get back down to Earth. Maybe by then they'll even be over it. And if they're not, I don't want their crisis as carry-on baggage. Only four outfits.

Step seven: right concentration. Puzzle books: crosswords and Sudoku. I'm like the mother pacifying her kid's restlessness with engrossing books.  Puzzle books totally hog my concentration, making me oblivious to the three ring circus I'm in. They let me look purposeful and intellectual, which is to say classy. They're Pilates for the mind, stretching it to accommodate what boggles. They don't have to be shut when the plane engine turns on and can be put away on a whim. Best of all, there's nothing that satisfies the soul more than methodically solving problems while surrounded by them.

Step eight: right of way. This is the big kahuna. Going early, turning off the phone, opening the puzzle book, eating in the restaurant...they're all about giving up,  and just giving in. Resistance devours all energy, and anyway resistance is just showing we don't like something. Airports aren't the place to pick and choose, to have it your way.  Give up all hope, the Dharma teaches, and fear automatically dissolves, because fear elbows in when the object of hope doesn't get delivered like Domino's pizza. It's about expectation, getting what we want the universe to bring. So if we just plain let go of any expectation of, say, being the pilot steering the flying experience to our idiosyncratic liking, we won't feel any fear whatsoever when this doesn't happen. We can just go along for the ride.

 Don't resist, don't insist. The airport is a hell of humiliation and depredation--our own public Guantanamo, yet shoulder shrugging "whatever" turns out to be a miracle cure--and to boot, a generic one without patent protection! You don't even need to sign up for Obamacare. Being the stillpoint of a churning world, as Trungpa Rinpoche once pointed out when looking down on Manhattan from a tower, is profoundly powerful and energizing. Giving meditation equipoise the right of way through the nuthouse airport really is liberation from suffering. 

In fact flying the zenly skies has become such a blissful escape from my ordinarily erratic and struggling days, I'm thinking since life is a trip, and I seem to be flying through it,  maybe I should just stay all the time in Airplane Mode: ON.




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved