Phenomenal World

 I have been listening to a taped teaching of the late great Traleg Rinpoche on how to deal with what he calls "the phenomenal world." No superlative intended. In Dharma terms, phenomena is everything that appears: the moon, the mountain, the mall. In other words, the real world. 

Since we must deal with this real world all the time, Traleg Rinpoche explains that meditation is not a way to escape or avoid it, not a means of tuning it out but of tuning into it. Meditation means learning exactly what the phenomenal world is and how it works so we develop the skill to live properly in it.

His teaching seems simple yet is quite profound, so it will take time to digest and pass it on. But right away it yanked back old thoughts about the real world. That's all anyone ever talked about when I went to college: the real world. We all knew what that meant: the workaday paycheck reality waiting at the graduation door. But it turned out that wasn't all of it, wasn't the half of it as some people like to say. 

Turned out that real world was just another virtual reality-- like the unnatural world called college. And people's reality was virtually different everywhere: New York City wasn't real to Topeka or Montana. Texas was surreal to Boston. Layer upon layer of made-up civilization had been overlaid with various slants and angles. What we were calling "life" was filled to its brim with additives, preservatives and cmo's: corporate manufactured occasions. So life's biggest question became not what does it all mean? but what exactly is the real world?

I don't have a perfect answer so you don't have to read on. I can't even pretend to have a hint. But what I do know is that last week, a month later than usual, the light changed. A signal. There is always a morning around the second week of August, this year, the second week of September, when I wake up and can't help but see the light has definitely changed. It cants so differently, everything looks absolutely HD clear and amazingly sharp, as if Life finally got the camera in focus. That soft silken blur of summer is gone; the air has crisped the way food does from extended heat. Summer's lackadaisical "whatever" suddenly gave way to autumn's decisiveness.

And the light withdraws noticeably earlier, which speeds up the daytime pace. Tomorrow is the equinox: the length of sunlight and darkness will exactly match. Then they will begin their inexorable push-me pull-you, lengthening and shortening before they meet again and go in reverse. It's almost like life is imitating the tech companies that constantly change software because they can't seem to get it just right. These patterns used to be a very big deal; our holidays are actually based on them. The changes are that palpable. But you can't detect this constant shifting in the virtual world of city lights and air conditioning where everything stays the same. And we stick our manufactured holidays on Mondays for more of the same meaningless same.

Headlines are shouting horrible news of heavy migrations every which way out of the Arab world. In the real world, the Canada geese are migrating south in huge honking Vs and sometimes huge swirling swarms of smaller birds escaping the northern cold like Syrians escaping barrel bombs can fill the sky above me. Adult loons have migrated from fresh water to the sea.  Harbor seals have moved offshore. Restlessness is afoot. The original inhabitants of my land used to move from the sea to the mountains and back twice a year. We stay stuck in permanent houses and watch the world go by.

Europe does not know to process all the desperate refugees just like everyone around me right now does not know how to hold back the tsunami of ripe tomatoes weighing down the vines. People are begging for ways to process them. I've spent much of this past week passing out recipes, running a class and eating a lot of tomatoes.  Plus corn on the cob because its season is winding down and safe, non Round-up ready GMO corn on the cob won't be back in the real world for another 11 months. And maybe I won't be.

I can once again quickly tell you which trees are oak, or maple or a birch that is not white because thanks to Mother Nature's assisted suicide, their leaves have begun to lose their sameness green. The oak is turning orange, the maple deep red and the birch yellow, a final shout before they die. The tulips that were so elegant in June are only buried bulbs now, those cheerful July daisy plants decapitated stalks. Even the annuals are looking tired from all that summer smiling. And I'm too tired to revitalize them.

In the real world, we humans are garden plants who morph from bright sprouts to sagging stems and eventually disappear. If you just look at yourself for a second, you discover impermanence is very real. You were a newborn, a teenager, a twenty-something with rip roaring hopes, and now you have graying hair, face wrinkles, veins that make your thighs look like a miner's map, and vines of hope that sag under the fruits of experience. Every seven years you are made up of totally new cells; in the real world, you are not yourself.

Traleg Rinpoche says in this teaching, if there were no impermanence, if phenomena weren't insubstantial, there could be no change, no time, no progress, no us who have actually come quite late to the party. The inventor of the new always thinks the invention the be all and end all, the time stopper that will never fade away. In the virtual world, everyone works so hard to hold on, to make permanent and fast and binding what suits them in the moment.  But then the moment passes and they're afloat in an onrushing tide, looking over their shoulder as they cling to what's past. That is the source of all our troubles. 

 The real world is kinder, gentler and more compassionate. It has no fix, nothing fixed, the fix is not in. It is a work in progress. It kicks out and takes in, calibrates and shifts, moves and shakes, updates and abdicates and moves on, creating endless possibilities and endless room for all of us to go with the flow, flow with the go. That, I believe, is how we are supposed to understand the phenomenal world, superlative intended.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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