We watched “2012” the other night, the latest in what seems to be a growing industry of apocalyptic films and books foretelling the end of civilization as we know it. Coming as it does on the heels of so many recent high-profile earthquakes, it’s got more than a few folks feeling jittery.
Watching the film version of California slide into the sea, I was reminded of something that really stood out to me during the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers: the confetti of corporate paperwork spilling out of the doomed buildings.
Specifically, I remember thinking that only moments earlier many if not most of those documents were considered incredibly urgent to someone’s life. Perhaps they were slides for someone’s big presentation – the one upon which that big salary increase was based. Or maybe they were insurance applications for a child’s asthma medications. Millions upon millions of documents representing key aspects of peoples’ lives suddenly ripped from desks and filing cabinets and inboxes and sent lazily snowing all over what was to become Ground Zero. One moment you are obsessed about the wording of a staff memo; the next you are contemplating a 1,000-foot leap from the flames being fed by that same memo.
So let us imagine, just for a moment, that disaster strikes. The economy collapses taking with it your life savings. A massive earthquake devastates your area, suddenly making food, water, electricity and personal safety quaint relics of the past. The avian flu finally lives up to its billing and starts killing everyone you know. Or those crazy Mayans turn out to be right about this whole 2012 end-of-the-world thing.
In an instant, all that you have built your life upon is gone. Now what? Most of us laugh off these concerns pretty much the way we do thoughts of our eventual demise – it is always something that will happen in some remote future at which time we tell ourselves, “I’ll deal with it then.” Which helps to explain the deer-in-headlights look so many suffer when the doctor says, “It’s cancer” or the earth starts to move beneath our feet or an airliner roars toward the skyscraper in which we are standing. We don’t know how or when our personal apocalypse will arrive, only that it will and odds are better than even we’ll be taken by surprise.
Jesus and his ilk took great pains to remind us that all are called to awaken to their true nature, but few choose to listen. We’re too busy building toward a future about which we know nothing and upon which we may never lay our eyes. For millennia prophets and mystics of all stripes have urged us to focus our energies inward, to eschew the material for the spiritual, to “be in the world but not of it,” and yet still we pin our hopes and dreams on the material. The earth rattles Southern California and thoughts and efforts immediately turn to “damage assessments” or its impact on the economy. The happy homeowner returning from already-forgotten Easter Sunday observances surveys for cracks in his wall, drainage from the swimming pool, the counsel of the prophets lost amid his search for the insurance company’s number.
Ironically, it is the material that is, in fact, immaterial, and even our science is now proving this. Each of us and the world we inhabit is nothing but energy, our very essence nothing more than subatomic probabilities in a space-time continuum that our brains invented. Quantum physics shows us that even the tenderest of moments – holding hands with a child, for example – is nothing more than an elaborate dance between opposing sets of electrons interpreted by our brains as “touch.” Cosmology teaches us that our sun one day will absorb our planet before burning itself out; that the universe itself either will stretch out endlessly into a cold dark emptiness or fall back on itself. None of it is real, all of it is for naught.
Your brain reads these words and says, “Wow, serious downer.” But of course that’s the mind/ego interpretation since it is the material upon which it exists. Jesus counseled that his kingdom was not of this world, the Buddha reminded us that we are dreamers in our own dream, and in response we say it’s too hard “getting our minds around” such concepts. Of course it is: our minds are the makers of the dream and their kingdom is right here, thank you very much.
But what if we instead took the words of these enlightened few and paid them real heed? What if we focused most of our energies on the inward journey instead of squabbling over this world? What if we let the world simply be – what would become of our minds? What would we do with them? Better still, what if we followed the advice of the mystics and released our minds as balloons to the sky. Would not all of our cares cease? Would not our real nature emerge: peace, bliss, serenity, eternity?
So perhaps we should add a few minutes to each day’s To Do list and ask ourselves that most profound of questions: “Who am I?” Maybe we can start that journey toward unraveling the greatest of mysteries, ourselves. Or as the Mayans might have said, “Why put off until 2012 what you can do today?”
