A Dog, a Monk, and a Mystery

A number of years ago, perhaps as many as twenty-five or more, while reading one of my many books by Joseph Campbell, I stumbled across a line of thought that has stuck to me like Velcro from the moment it first crossed my eyes. Campbell was speaking about a poignant piece of eastern wisdom that he received from a close friend and Buddhist monk years earlier, and that wisdom changed the accent of the way he thought for the rest of his life.

Campbell wrote that he was lightly complaining to his friend about his wife’s lack of punctuality and her total disregard for time in general. He told his friend, for instance, that she would take him shopping with the promise of only being a few minutes, leaving Joseph in the car waiting, but would instead take an hour or more, which frustrated him to no end.

His friend was unfazed and told Campbell very simply that the problem wasn’t his wife but was him. Campbell said he was stunned at the suggestion and reiterated his indignance, but his friend calmly explained the real issue that Campbell was failing to see.

“Joseph, while you were waiting for your wife, just think of all the wonderful things you could be thinking about. Instead of letting your frustration rule your mind, you can easily spend that time thinking and meditating on anything your heart desires. The time spent waiting for your wife is a gift.”

For Campbell, who was one of the world’s foremost authorities on Mythology and comparative religions, contemplation was his operational mode. In other words, ‘thinking’ was his passion, so hearing this simple imperative from his friend completely reset his attitude, which effectively re-centered his focus from that point forward, just as it did my own.

Well last night I was given a pleasant reminder of that very line of thought when our new dog, Bear, was acting oddly. He seemed to be agitated about something, even unsettled. He was pacing the floor and just appeared to be anxious about something unseen. And to be perfectly honest, I found it irritating. It was a Friday night and I wanted to relax, but his pacing had me unsettled as well. The only course of action, apparently, was to stop writing and take him for a jog around the neighborhood in the hope it would alleviate some of that agitation.

As we began, I could feel a disagreeable mood beginning to settle over me, because his drama was interfering with my evening. I didn’t want to be jogging around the neighborhood late at night, I wanted to be ‘lost inside my mind’ (to quote a favorite song) while writing in my journal. Fortunately, it took only a few short minutes before the real moment broke through and wrestled my mind to attention. What I failed to notice, crouching conspicuously behind my agitation, was a glorious moon in the night sky, posing like a Diva that left no doubt she was full of herself. Then once my attention was secured, a soft but persistent voice rose up to remind me of a long-forgotten monk, and it was his wisdom, learned many years earlier, that I needed to bring back on-line to properly soak in the true moment I had at hand.

One consequence at being armed with such an engaging insight, was that each time Bear stopped along the road, to sniff or whiz on a bush, I fully surrendered myself to the vision on offer above, to sip on its radiance and to soak in the mystery that it has bestowed on mankind over countless millennia. And how could I not? Everything around me was a captive witness to its splendor. I was then standing at an elevated portion in the neighborhood which had no trees and only single-story homes, which meant the sky opened up, horizon to horizon, filling my full field of vision with starlight. The entire cosmos seemed to be requesting my attendance. 

An additional spice to the mixture was due to it being late at night, so the entire neighborhood was utterly at peace with itself, and in that silence a soothing calm draped itself around me. While drawing in a deep breath of the cool night air, with my eyes glistening with starlight, all I could do was marvel at the privilege of standing there at all and allowing it to pour into me.

Then a curious thing happened. As Bear and I began heading back, an odd visual phenomenon caught my attention. It occurred as I lightly jogged with Bear while looking up at the night sky. As I jogged, with my eyes bobbing up and down with each stride, I noticed the houses and trees along the street, with their dark shapes silhouetted against the moon filled sky, were all bobbing along with me. And as I continued, I also noticed those same houses and trees all moving past and out of sight, due to their proximity of course, but the moon and stars above held firm. In a surprising insight, the impermanence of everything around me revealed itself and in that instant, all the houses, trees and parked cars struck me as little more than artifices; props scattered across the stage of my neighborhood. Everything around me felt to be mere abstractions, while the cosmos above held the true context to my (our) existence.

That visual dichotomy, that feeling of belonging more to the sky than to this earth added an unexpected wrinkle to my perception of things, because it felt as if the grounding point of my field of vision was no longer where I stood, as it should have been, but was ‘out there’ somehow. In any direction that I cared to look, the stars held me firmly in their grasp while the surrounding neighborhood simply melted into irrelevance. Allow another millennia to pass, a Nano second is cosmic time, and this neighborhood will be long gone, bulldozed over many times over, but these stars, in their trillions, will still be doing what they do on a time scale so immense that we clearly felt the need to invent imaginary beginnings and endings to it all, simply to keep our brains from short-circuiting from the truth of the matter. And as I let that sink-in for a moment, it quickly dawned on me that several billion years of celestial history yawned at my epiphany.

Now here is the payoff. With this unexpected insight coming into sharper focus, I could feel a shift in my perspective taking place and suddenly it no longer felt that I was casually walking my dog around the neighborhood, but instead was standing, quite audaciously I must add, on this evolving, spinning, orbiting, and sublimely exquisite planet, staring up at the heavens, eye to eye as it were, making sure my attendance has been noted. It makes absolutely no difference to me how insignificant my presence is, I still count myself among its children……the multiverse be damned.

I would urge everyone to try it sometime, to look up on any star filled night and extend yourself into the mystery as far as you can reach and feel the shift. Let it ignite the perception that we so thoroughly ignore wrapped up in our day-to-day lives; that we are flying through space at this very second. That we are all alive and breathing, with family, friends and careers all in tow while walking around on this giant rock spinning like clockwork hurling itself around an average star at the edge of our galaxy.

Then understand, and this is a key point to seize upon, that the souls of your feet are the only part of you this earth can claim. Everything else is surrounded by the same space cradling the moon and stars. Think of it, we are standing ‘in’ space just as much as standing ‘on’ this earth. The touch is so light that we fail to notice it, but if you can do it, I’m convinced that a deeper, far more penetrating perspective will wrap itself around you, as it has me. To view life in this way is not a form of escapism, it’s a privilege. 

Now before anyone reading this assumes that I have fallen victim to some new age metaphysical mumbo jumbo, you can sleep easy tonight knowing that is not the case. I am perfectly aware that all of this is a product of thought, just a mindful exercise; a clever way to trick my mind into slipping into another realm of experience, a different perch, if you will, in which to view my life. But isn’t that also the point of spirituality? To transcend our normal state of experience in an attempt to grasp something else, something…. other.

That, in a nutshell, exposes a lifelong dilemma of mine. Nearly everyone in my life equates spirituality, or any form of existential curiosity, purely in religious terms, yet I don’t find that a viable option. My mind is wired for reason, not faith. That’s just the way it is, and because of that hard fact I found it necessary to develop other methods, alternative modes of transportation, you might say. It simply had to be done. My mind insatiably craves something that it is unable to fully define, yet all the available explanations are steeped in beliefs that I cannot follow in good faith. So, to borrow a Marine Core euphemism, I’ve had to ‘improvise, adapt, and overcome’.

How that plays out in my life is that I deploy the only tool in my possession that I trust explicitly; my intuition, which I use as a beacon of light while I devour bookshelves of literature and poetry, or at being enraptured by a melody or enthralled by the performing arts, or by the clarity of philosophy and science, or any place where clues can be found. Yet regardless of what I may discover from those clues, and no matter of how illuminating they may be, my search will continue, on and on, with no end in sight, nor will one be requested. I am utterly at peace living completely untethered to any faith, for I know that if I keep my heart pure and my mind open, this little pilgrimage of mine will continue to serve up moments of absolute splendor, as it did tonight. Just by listening to the prerogatives of my intuitions, I stumbled onto a launch pad of sorts, and from there I was in orbit.

Eventually Bear and I made it back to the house and I once again attempted to write, but it wasn’t long before he had more energy to burn off. Yet this time I knew what awaited…so he found no opposition. That way I saw it, if I may extend the lesson from our unnamed Monk, I was about to step out into my second gift of the night.