The Trauma of Everyday Life

let go of my usual preoccupations. But I had the uneasy sense that this was probably wrong. There was a famous story of a very learned and accomplished Tibetan master who, when he was finally enlightened, said, emphatically, that it was exactly the opposite of what he had imagined. I knew I was not enlightened. Therefore, by the logic of the Tibetan master, whatever I imagined no-self to be was probably one hundred and eighty degrees off. If no-self wasn’t inner peace then what was it? I tried to feel like a bubble in a stream or a flickering light or a dream but I’ve never been much good at visualizing and I gave up before too long. I felt more like Snow White than a phantom or a bubble and my recurrent efforts to remember the names of her seven dwarfs kept interrupting my philosophical ruminations.
    I couldn’t do much with the concept of no-self that morning. “Can’t figure it out right now,” I thought to myself with a sigh. I realized I was trying to avoid the feelings hanging around from earlier in the morning. At that moment, I was suddenly aware of how much information my senses were sensing, my ears and eyes especially. The landscape surrounding me, filled with color and early morning light, and the rustling of the birds in the trees and undergrowth, were filling my consciousness. I had a brief flash of a diagram I had studied in medical school. Dotted lines connecting two inverted triangles—the eyes taking the world into the brain. I remembered how I used to think the eye was like a camera, faithfully reflecting the outside world in the theater of the mind. But then I had learned otherwise. It was vastly more mysterious than that. The brain actually creates our reality, I was taught, it does not just mirror it. Sensory data enter the brain as raw material, not as finished images. The eye perceives angles and edges, not objects or backgrounds. It’s up to the brain to make reality coherent, building it up out of the raw information our organs of sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing and memory feed it.
    Immersed in the sights and sounds surrounding me, this bit of basic science took on a more profound meaning as I meandered on my way. It wasn’t as much “me” walking through “it” as it usually was. The dotted lines of the diagram began to seem as important as the triangles. “In here” and “out there,” the two triangles I could see in my mind’s eye, were not two different things: they were connected. This world I was walking through, stirring slightly in the faint morning air, was my mind. And my mind, its thoughts notwithstanding, was this world. Another phrase crossed my mind: one I had read somewhere recently in a Buddhist text but not really understood, “There is no self apart from the world.” Now that phrase was resonating. Or resounding. No self apart from the world. I thought I understood what it meant. In here and out there. Not two. One.
    It was a joyous experience to walk with that phrase percolating through me. It turned something around in my understanding. It reminded me of a quote from Albert Hoffman, the “father of LSD,” who died at the age of 102 in 2008. Dr. Hoffman, a chemist who first synthesized the chemical, gave an interview to the
New York Times
at the age of 99. He said a lot of amazing things in that interview (“Nearly 100, LSD’s Father Ponders His ‘Problem Child,’” January 7, 2006) but one in particular sprang to mind. “Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.” Dr. Hoffman’s description aligned itself with my experience. I was inextricably bound up with the world, not separate from it. I had always thought the point of Buddhist meditation was to change something in my mind, to effect some kind of inner transformation, to peel away layers until I unearthed my real (no-) self. I was secretly operating with a belief that there was something wrong with me that needed fixing, that my ‘self’ was evidence of this, that if I meditated enough I would be cleansed. But now I had a glimmer of another way of looking at it all. No-self was not a state to be achieved, it was a testament to my embedded nature. No self apart from the world. The whole idea of going deep within to change myself seemed suddenly ludicrous. I felt like I