I was watching “Donny Darko” a few weeks back when I had an interesting and subtle experience, so subtle in fact that if I had not written it down immediately afterward, I doubt even the faintest trace of it would have remained by morning. Here’s essentially what happened…
While watching the movie, my mind wandered and I found myself mulling over a brief, rather mundane period of time from earlier in the day.
I recalled how I arrived at an appointment only to realize that I had forgotten to bring something which initially seemed terribly important (though this turned out not to be the case.) I then saw myself searching my truck frantically for the forgotten item before settling into 5 or so minutes of punitive self talk over having forgotten it. Lastly, I recalled how I snapped out of the funk by realizing that I hadn’t intended to forget. I was able to give myself a break and head into the appointment without it.
Basically, what happened was that I noticed that my attention shifted from the movie to the remembrance of this rather mundane 10 minute slice of my life. There was nothing particularly interesting about this sliver of time actually as similar episodes had been played out many, many times before. Appointments, forgetting things and absorption in mental chatter are some of the fundamental things that make up our day to day existence, are they not? Everyone can recall similar episodes in their own lives I’m sure. Seemingly routine moments such as these, when strung together over hours, days, months and years, form the fabric of our worldly existence. “Life”, someone once said, “is a just a series of unfinished projects.”
What many of us fail to notice, I believe, is how the vast majority of these moments rapidly vanish from our memory banks the moment we move on to the next appointment, task, hobby, distraction, etc. Unless of course the item forgotten was something like a wedding ring and you realized you had forgotten it while you were standing at the altar. Moments such as these, because they are accompanied by such strong emotions, tend to become permanently etched into our brains. But you get the point. The overwhelming majority of our life is apparently not very memorable.
What made this simple reflection interesting, however, was that I was somehow able to witness the events from a slightly different perspective. This wasn’t simply my run-of-the-mill, ego based remembering. For just a fleeting moment, out of the corner of my mind, I was able to reflect (or perhaps intuit) upon how every aspect of what transpired- the actions I took, the thoughts I had, my efforts to “fix” the situation and finally the acceptance that arose- was simply a conditioned thought form arising spontaneously within my mental existence. None of it was “personal”. It all seemed instead more like the programmed actions of a robot.
I know this sounds odd so maybe this will help…
Though I was reflecting upon events that had actually happened, I recalled them with the same detached familiarity associated with déjà vu. The sense was that these events had already happened (which they had) only that they happened to somebody else (and that somebody else was me, my ego structure.)
I was able to witness myself looking for the forgotten item, deciding to go into the appointment without it and then forgiving myself for forgetting it from an objective vantage point that I have rarely experienced before. And I intuited that this perspective was actually more real than my normal, everyday cognitively-based subjective point of view.
The insight was that while there was forgetting there was no personal “I” to do the forgetting. There was searching but no “searcher”, doing but no “doer.” There was feeling bad followed by acceptance though no solid “I” to do either. Just “feelings without a feeler” to paraphrase Mark Epstein.
As the mystics have said time and time again, over thousands of years- the “I” sense is an illusion.
Despite how real “I” seems, how second nature and self-evident “I” feels, despite the fact that my ego identity repeats to itself over and over, on a mental level so fundamental that it escapes analysis “I know who I am. I’m Christian”, despite all of this- all appearances, all beliefs and all “evidence to the contrary”, this “I” sense- my “I” sense- is ironically just another thought form, one that is definitely occurring, though not to anyone in particular. The “I” sense is merely a sophisticated thought form that, like all thought forms, simply arises within awareness. And the kicker is that this isn’t even “my” awareness but rather is THE Awareness, the only awareness that is.
The nobel winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger describes this Awareness as such:
“Knowledge, feeling and choice [which you call your own] are essentially eternal, unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings...There is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing… Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.”
I am left with the sense that if this objective vantage point I am describing lies even vaguely in the direction of That to which the mystics point, then I am quite certain that awakening is going to be so astonishing, so shocking and of such a severity that should it arrive in the particular aspect of consciousness which I consider “me”, it is sure to find the resident thinking apparatus completely and utterly unprepared.
Gassho
