Meeting the Wall

The Wall of the Sierra, Steve Brown 2022

As the crow flies, Badwater Basin, which has an elevation of 282 feet below sea level, and Mt. Whitney, which has an elevation of 14,505 feet above sea level, are only 85 miles apart.  That's a 14, 787 gain in elevation in 85 miles, or an average of a 174 feet per mile.  But the gain in places is much greater because it isn't one even-slope.  As majestic as the Rockies are, roads crisscross them and go up and down all over the place.  The wall of the Sierra simply refuses to be crossed by anything more than hiking trails.  It is grand, and wild, and when you see it for the first time, it blows your mind.  Here's the kicker, on that same day, you can reach the sea if you want to.

There is no state geographically or climatically like California.  Not only is the highest point in the lower forty-eight and the lowest point in North America only eighty-five miles apart, but the biggest trees on earth and the hottest place on Earth and driest spot in North America are about that same distance apart.  In a one-day drive, you can see the cracked, white flats of Badwater Basin, the giant sequoias, and still have time to reach the Pacific Ocean.  

Cool facts, however, cannot convey the experience.  Pure knowledge is not tangible through the abstract.  It must be observed through the concrete.  That's what Zen is about.  Zen cannot be discussed.  It is the anti-idea truth.  Steinbeck understood zen.   What makes his best works profound is not the ideas behind them, although those too are powerful, but how effectively he puts the reader in that moment of experiential learning.  The Grapes of Wrath changes us not because of what it has to say, but rather because we become one with the Joads.  The critics don't always like Steinbeck because when you read his work, it feels as if there isn't as much to talk about philosophically.  However, The Grapes of Wrath was read in the halls of congress specifically because of that.  The book was too damn real to be relegated to lecture rooms.  We need that blatant realness again.  The world burns, the seas churn from statistically significant storms, and entire neighborhoods are leveled by the retaliation and hate of man, babies bathed in blood--all while entire species of plants and animals quietly slip away from life forever, never to share this planet with us again.  And we don't see it, we don't feel it, we don't react to the hurt the way we ought to because we simply aren't present.

I have no idea what it will take to turn things around, but I do know whatever the solutions will be, they will involve us entering a moment deeply enough to be moved to some sort of empathetic action.

Knowing is being there in front of the mighty wall of the southern Sierra, looking at a basalt ridge with the contours significant enough to be considered mountains back east, and to feel the contrast of that dark, ragged edge against a wall of stone behind that absolutely dwarfs it, the fan alone across the valley rising two or three times higher even with perspective skewing the reality.  Data can't get the brain there.  Only the eyes can.

In order to truly understand something, we must first truly see it.  I am absolutely convinced that if a man could always put himself in a moment as a sort of journalist and just take-in the situation correctly, he would always be moved to do the right thing.  What keeps us from that intimacy and care is our ego-mind always isolating us, trying to protect us by intellectually removing us from the other so that at best we can ignore, and at worst, we can hate what we fear most--that we are all connected.  

The ego is a destructive protective mechanism that keeps us from feeling what we need to feel.  It keeps us from being overloaded.  But it is ultimately harmful.  That sense of separateness and superiority keeps us in a state of inert isolation.  Even in war, nothing changes, because we simply do not feel what it is like to be our enemy.  We revel in our own pain, but because of the workings of the mind, we never glimpse the pain felt on the other side.  The terror in the eyes of children is removed from us in sterile phrases like "unavoidable casualties" and "for the greater good". 

But a man looking into the eye of a child without some cause frothing in the sinews of his brain cannot pull the trigger.  A man trained to know a moment, and know it deeply, cannot NOT care.   One cannot be jaded and enlightened simultaneously.  That is why WOKE has to be made into to an evil word.  Being WOKE, as Christ and Buddha and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly were, destroys any possibility of operating under the normal rules of the ego.  One truly must be born again.   

Relatively few do not want a world born again, anew, because they profit well from the status-quo.  Most people, however, simply fear reality.   They do not have evil intentions.  Rather, they fear being WOKE because they fear being alive.  They fear that WOKE intensity of feeling will require them to become something new, to drop their addictions, and step into some new light.  

The ego says it is better to just shoot the messenger than to change.  Therefore, someone usually steps up and does that for humanity, keeping Utopia from being anything more than a dream.   Because we fear change, this is exactly what society wants--to worship dead martyrs rather than step into a moment and be fully born again.

So, we end up with these absurd ironies.   The Christian who hates everything WOKE, and yet spends his life waving the banner of Christ, who is the most tangible example of WOKEness to have ever lived.  And on the other side, you have people claiming to be WOKE spending their lives ridiculing Christians--Christ being the perfect symbol of all they hold sacred.  It's absurd.  But it is because it serves a purpose.  The ego-wars, and the psychological distancing keeps us safely separate from each other so that we don't have to enter a very real moment, feel our own hypocrisy, and drop all our tribalism.  There is something in the natural man that fears connection, fluidity, openness, and equality.  The brotherhood of man is relegated to an abstract notion in church house because the ego is too damn terrified to experience brotherhood for real.

It seems to me that it is impossible for us to become who we need to be in order to make the very adult decisions that need to be made to save our planet and ourselves until we can intentionally enter a moment on our own free-will against the demands of the ego.  

That's what Gandhi was doing when urged his followers to bow down and submit to the blows of the British army.  By breaking with the instinctual response to either fight or flee, he was forcing everyone into a moment where everyone could feel each other's pain--where the British officer had to feel what it's like to be beaten and where the Indian protestor had to feel how it hurts to have to beat another person on command.  By removing the ego's natural response to retaliate, Gandhi was forcing emotional proximity between opposing warriors.  He was forcing a brotherhood of man through a moment of intense connection between the beater and beaten.  By dropping to his knees with his fellow protestors and not resisting, he smashed in one moment the normal separateness between occupier and the occupied, creating an undeniable common humanity.  It was intentional, and it was practiced, and it was completely counter to the ego-driven, natural man.  It was Godly.

That is the power of a moment.  I suck at being who I want to be when I get stuck in my ego-mind.  I spend hours, if not days, feeling either victimized, isolated and alone, or instead, justifying and feeling superior about things that don't matter.  And all that time spent in my head over insignificant things makes me miserable.

However, when I'm truly in a moment--just there observing light and shadow, taking in temperature and textures, enjoying people on their own terms (neither seeking their approval nor trying to force my will upon them), I feel a bliss that has absolutely nothing to do with circumstance.

The difficult task is getting there intentionally anywhere and anytime by training the eyes to see on command whatever is before them.  Every day should be as grand as that day you stand on high desert flat and gaze, stunned by the magnificent wall of the Sierra.   Escape always comes to an end.  Deep immersion can, with practice, become one's eternal existence.