Who’s Actually Living in the “Modern World?”

In this world are so many filled with spirit like Jesus.
How could it be filled with so many false prophets?
How could it be filled with heart-darkening brine,
when the water-skin of the universe
is brimming with such pure water?
-The Pocket Rumi, by Kabir Helminski

If you desire the self, get out of the self.
Leave the shallow stream behind
and flow into the river deep and wide.
Don’t be an ox pulling the wheel of the plow,
turn with the stars that wheel above you.
-The Pocket Rumi, by Kabir Helminski

It occurs to me that most of the people I know, that I work with, and that I encounter while visiting the cafes and shops around here are none of us living in the “modern world.”  In our face-to-face encounters, pleasantries much more frequently ensue than angry confrontation or cold detachment.  Yes, those things exist, because this is, after all, the material world and it is a world of physical partitions, and variegated philosophies and points of view.  Nevertheless, in most encounters I find that there seems to be a fundamental recognition that not only do we occupy, at this moment, a common temporal and physical location in the vast, incomprehensible distances of the cosmos, but that there is in heart and mind a sympathy of wants and needs that must be appreciated.  These communications occur through the eyes and the vibrations of voice and gesture.

I say we must not be living in the “modern world” because, by virtue of  that world’s constant intrusion through media and entertainment it would appear as if there is no possible reconciliation between peoples.  It’s pontifications are that we are irreparably damaged by our politics, flawed, condemned by original sin, doomed to self-created dungeons of psychological dysfunction; or that we are dominated by a desire to dominate and exploit; that we are impotent victims of the thousand modern ailments of body, mind or soul.  These are the images and ideas that continually bombard the eye and ear from the ubiquitous media.  So, if we were living in the “modern world,” as it is portrayed by that effluvial emanation of technology and gossip, then there would not be the simple commonality and understanding that I experience everywhere I go around here.  It would be a disparaging void of dehumanization and clinical remove. Yet it is most definitely not so.

It is true that some individuals are only reluctantly engaged.  Some remain internally thoughtful and aloof from encounter (I myself immensely enjoy my solitude).  And yet, you can still see the humanity thrumming musically within each soul, whether animated or reflective.  Even those who, like crabs, scowl or bluster or boldly spout irrationalizations during a contretemps still are possessed with a spirit and soul that must be respected and cherished. I know that I have rendered injury in such encounters, or have received injury.  But I marvel at how quickly reconciliation can occur when one person extends an offer to transcend the disagreement, and perhaps find a mutually agreeable way through it.

In those certain instances where no accord seems possible, in reflection, I find sorrow for the dispute, because in truth it’s only our handicaps, those which we call our “understandings,” which stand in the way of walking in “the field beyond right and wrong,” if I may borrow a metaphor from Rumi.

And still, even then, one’s humanness is a tangible presence irrefutably victorious over every temporal squabble! It ever remains.  It’s why we are inherently interested in what happens in other countries or in the lives of other people.  It’s why folks in Iowa are fascinated by events in Iceland (if they are blessed to hear about them). It’s why the idea, and perhaps the reality, of extraterrestrial visitors is so entrancing: to think of knowing of other conscious beings like ourselves growing up in another part of the galaxy under possibly very different circumstances is an alluring prospect indeed. We innately know that consciousness is one, though there are as many points of view on it as there are beings in the world.

It’s our gift of consciousness that binds us in essence. Even when you look into the eyes of a cat, for example, it’s the recognition of an awareness within the being in that tiny body that strums the heart-strings. And it causes you to dwell upon that being’s experiences, from its point of view, how it looks up at you (for compassion and fun), how it embarks on its various adventures in the hidden places of the house or the property! A whole world turns behind those eyes, unfolding before one’s appreciative gaze.

So, what is this thing we call and think of as “this modern world?”  What is this ideal that influences and bends our thinking to itself like a large gravitational mass capturing the light of a star? It appears to me to be a story, a mythology, and in fact a wounded catechism of perspectives on life that has become detached from the very reality we each are living every day. It does have its real effects upon the common world. But this doesn’t change the fact that their cause is illusion. We have been captivated, perhaps even imprisoned to some degree or other, by a doctrine of destiny and evolution that continually pulls us (like the proverbial carrot-and-stick) outside of ourselves and outside of the present moment. When we are caught up in its whispering delusion we are in effect pulled out of ourselves like a sunflower seed from its husk, and cast upon the hard rock under a searing miasma of fantasy, misperception, illusion, and half-baked propositions without roots in anything real.

Rightly one asks, “What is real?”

There’s no quick or sure answer that anyone can give another. Words aren’t capable of that. But in that moment of shared “presence” with another there is reality.  In that moment when two people smile over the blooming sunflower in the garden, there is the reality of life.  In the moment when the bread-dough willingly yields beneath one’s hands and all the world “else” is left to the “else,” there is reality. Deep insight in private contemplation, the fragrance of eternity at three A.M., the emergence of lilacs in spring, the immense, uncontainable splendor of the sun — these things sing of reality. But in writing of these things, the words are only reflections of their reality. The reality itself is a private, personal, inner being and knowing, existing beyond and within experience, activated by experiences, and sometimes emerging unbidden like the fragrance of a rose in the moonless night. The main thing is, we know reality and we are reality beneath all the stuff of this “modern world” which only floats on the surface of the sparkling river of being. Its one’s own soul that drinks from the depths of those waters and lives with the inebriated, who live beyond sanity and insanity. And it’s the soul that I’m talking about, who knows nothing of, nor cares at all for this “modern world.”