by Rob Armstrong
Let’s begin by finding a comfortable seated position.
The world will tear itself apart within a hundred years. You know how it botched things with COVID-19. We bickered about wearing masks or not wearing masks. Shooting up vaccine or not shooting up vaccine. A Chinese lab made it, or it was bad luck from someone eating a diseased bat—a once-every-hundred-years sort of thing. And what happens if a whopper like climate change isn’t a hoax? For now, cast that notion aside.
Please close your eyes. Feel free to open them slightly if that’s more comfortable for you.
If you can’t overcome the easier problems—wear a mask or don’t—how can you hope to master the hard ones? You don’t have to be overeducated to predict that if climate change goes the way the talking heads say, we will be in a world of hurt, and then all bets are off. Rich countries will steal dwindling resources from poor countries. Poor countries will fight other poor countries for the scraps. Any anxiety-riddled ape can imagine the hellscape to come.
You have a hard time negating lingering thoughts. To attain modulation, reframe the topic: say the big brains confused the mountains of data and, thereby, the extent of climate change. Humankind can take a mulligan. We’ll be fine until we aren’t.
Now, take a deep breath in, slowly filling your lungs with air. Feel the air moving through your nostrils, filling your chest and abdomen.
It helps to think positively. Today, everybody’s veins are pumped up with specialness. It’s vital to share your ideas. Think of bees and the power of their hive mind. Post your opinions far and wide, wherever silicon roams. If you don’t have an opinion, borrow one; they’re everywhere, waiting to be echoed. Vive l’ère de l’information.
Exhale gently. As you breathe out, imagine releasing any tension or stress you’re holding on to. Let’s do this a couple more times together. Inhale slowly…and exhale. One more time, inhale…and exhale.
You are here to stop the negative thoughts, to tame the spurts of anger, and to focus your mind on productive things. You strive to be a happy warrior with a still mind. You seek to eat right, exercise often, stay informed, and make human connections while posting your progress, hoping to collect affirming emojis on your spiritual journey in search of nothingness.
But you fail. Too many snacks form jiggling flesh. Too many late nights cause aches that excuse you from exercise. Too much infotainment makes the world seem like a reality show. You connect with others as if you were driving a bumper car.
Return your breathing to its natural rhythm. Don’t force it; just let it flow naturally. Pay attention to the sensation of each breath. Notice how the air feels cooler as you breathe in and warmer as you breathe out.
Counter the negative thoughts that randomly enter your head through cognitive restructuring. The idea that “it’s all rigged” is true. Nothing is your fault, because you can blame it on kismet, divine power, or billionaires. Saying “My bad” absolves you of everything, like the priest does at the end of confession.
If your mind starts to wander, that’s okay. It’s natural. Gently guide your focus back to your breath. The rise and fall of your chest, the feeling of the air moving in and out of your nostrils. Each breath brings you into the present moment.
Blame your rage, self-loathing, faults, and addictions on your parents. On bullies. On neighbors who peeked at you through half-drawn curtains—as you walked by their houses—and said to themselves, “What is that kid wearing? What’s that they’re carrying?”
You’ve been programmed since birth to fail, fall short, and not cut the mustard. Nothing you did was right. You weren’t smart enough or attractive enough. Sometimes you were too skinny, sometimes too fat. You did not look like everybody should; your hair was wrong.
In middle school, you learned callousness and how it feels to be labeled as an “other.” You learned the pain of whispers, mocking laughs, and being left out of sleepovers. You could fill journals about how bad partners cheated on you and lied about it. In college, humiliation came naturally when you became recreational prey to the hounds of the fraternities.
As we continue breathing, I want you to visualize your breath as a gentle wave. Each inhale is the wave rising, and each exhale is the wave softly falling onto the shore. Feel the rhythm of your breath, steady and soothing.
You quit your job, which you worked hard to get, because you grew to care about how many emails were processed, how many complainers were satisfied, and how many PowerPoints tallied your productivity. Did you really debate whether to pick a green or yellow shade for the bar graph illustrating your customer satisfaction units?
Feeling wonderful was a warning sign that you had succumbed to whatever hypno-sauce the corporate machine was spoon-feeding you, and you promised your gangly middle school self that you would never become a sheep in the herd. So, you stopped the blue and white pills and tried other things to control the self-doubt, anxiety, and anger. You tried everything, including all the things you were warned about in those health class videos, to pull out of your spiraling decline. Nothing worked until you came here, to the Dharma Center.
Let’s sit with this image of your breath as a gentle wave for a few moments, breathing in peace and then breathing out your stress. Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to do this. Just being here and focusing on your breath is enough.
Here at the Dharma Center, they teach the embrace of nothingness, the recognition that everything is in a state of flux and that it is better to disengage from ego-driven attachments. They say everything is connected, and you must experience the world without judgment. When you become empty, you are full.
Much of this jabberwocky made sense for a while, until it didn’t.
Your mind is open to the idea of your spirit animal. This animal represents your deepest instincts, qualities, and strengths. It may be an animal you’ve always felt connected to, or it might be one that surprises you. Trust that whatever animal appears in your mind is the right one for you at this moment.
The only thing that resonates from these new teachings is the need for a spirit animal—an avatar. The idea brings to mind the poem Beowulf, from your college studies. You recall your tears while reading the lines, “From Cain sprang many so misbegotten spirits / Among them Grendel, the banished and accursed.” Now you realize that your pain was not for naught. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Your anger and humiliation birthed a Grendel inside you.
That Grendel grew until it ate away the soft parts that kept you a captive to your accusers. It’s clear to you that it will avenge you when called upon. Being the target, a victim, no longer appeals. The need to attain nothingness, connectedness, or anything else made to wipe away your desires or ego seems the flip side of the same cursed coin that makes you want to be a happy, productive person, the kind who pays their taxes on time and goes to church enough to be accepted as passably religious.
Imagine yourself in a natural environment, a place where you feel safe and at peace. It could be a forest, a mountain, a riverbank, or anywhere that resonates with you. Visualize the details of this place—the sights, the sounds, the scents. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Hear the sounds of nature around you.
In readings, you learned the tale of a Buddhist monk during the such-and-such dynasty who could transform into a bird, mouse, or dog. This ability to transmogrify is only ascribed to characters in legend; such a thing has never been published in a scientific journal. You know it can be done, not by magic or divine intervention but by the same laws of physics that birthed the universe from nothingness.
Picture a young Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge theoretical physicist and cosmologist, scribbling mathematical equations in front of you to show how something can come from nothing. “A trickery of minus, plus, and absolute bar signs,” it could be said, were one to see the equation written before them, in chalk on an aged green board. Still, you feel the equation is true. Deep down inside you, when you’re lost in the deepest of meditations, when your senses are turned off and the stillness at the center of your being is locked in a moment beyond time, you see it, the black velvet of nothingness that covers creation. And at the nanosecond when your inhalation turns to exhalation, only then does Grendel emerge.
Up ahead, you see your spirit animal waiting for you. Approach it slowly, observing its presence, its movements, its energy. What kind of animal is it? How do you feel as you get closer? Remember, this animal is a friend and guide.
Grendel is you, and you are Grendel. You are the conundrum of quantum physics, where something can be in two places at once, and matter and energy are interchangeable. You are flesh and muscle crafted from stars and hate. You are the judge of your accusers. No longer are you a sheep among the herd; now, you are the shearer. Look at yourself in the mirror, and see that all the past scars have mattered and that you are now something unrecognizable, even to yourself. You are here beyond everyday logic, science, reason, mythology, or pharmacology. Sometimes, hate is enough.
You turn off the voice that guides your meditative session and walk into the night, looking for someone to repent their sins against you. Your focus is unwavering. Your mind is still.
Category: Featured, Short Story