I was in an aeroplane, more than seven miles up, when I
started thinking about the complexity of things.
For people who do meditation, one of the major goals is to
achieve simplicity, that sensation when all is one, when the constant ephemera
of daily experience disappear into ragged wisps of illusion, where there is
only the reality of breathing in and breathing out, holding on and letting go
until you transcend the duality, moving beyond thought and feeling into monad
unity … Ommmm.
I have never been very good at this.
There’s a hamster in my head; a driven, energetic little
bastard who gallops away on his exercise wheel all the time. I’ve spent much of
my life (futilely) trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. Most of the
times I try meditation – and it doesn’t make much difference what technique I
use – I generally manage to get through the initial phases quite easily, into
that area of inner stillness and relaxation and then, in the growing silence, I
start to hear that bloody hamster more clearly.
Most of those who teach meditation counsel not to worry
about this. “Don’t fight it,” they say. “Let the thoughts come … and go. They
will arise and then fade away, leaving growing peace, emptiness and goalless
fulfilment in their path.” Om mani padme hum.
They don’t know my fucking hamster.
He’s a persistent little bugger, and he enjoys the space
provided by the initial phases of the meditation process. One his nastiest
little tricks is to take the role of the observer of my progress, analysing it,
commenting on it, making the process of voluntary not-thinking into an
interesting, obsessive, conscious subject of thought – and thus neatly
derailing the whole process.
He’s given me quite a bit of grief in my life. For many
years I found I could slow him down, or even put him to sleep altogether, by
using (ever increasing) amounts of alcohol.
Not a good idea.
Dealing with the consequences of that took a lot of time and effort. Generally, I believe that using
psychoactive substances to try to modify aspects of your personality isn’t good
for you in the long term, because you’re only putting temporary “No Entry”
signs on major areas of yourself, which only function as long as you’re
actively taking the substance. (Disclaimer:
This observation should be no way seen as applicable for prescribed and
monitored medication for mental health issues such as serious mood disorders or
potentially psychotic personality problems.) And, as my experience with alcohol
painfully taught me, such strategies often have serious – and lasting – downsides.
So, I have learned to accept, I have to live with my hamster
and develop other strategies for dealing with him.
Choose your battles,
they say. Don’t get into a fight unless
you’re pretty sure you can win it. Sometimes, instead of trying to wrestle
my manic hamster into silence, or to ignore the constant rattling of him
whirling away on his wheel in the corner of my mind’s living room, I take a
different tack. I consciously open the door of his cage, inviting him to come
into the room and really stretch himself. Reach
for the ceiling, I tell him. Be
welcome. Show me what you can do. (And, very quietly, whispering to myself
so that he can’t hear the furtively hoped intention; Knock yourself out.)
And so, in a kind of anti-meditation, instead of relaxing
and emptying my mind, I relax and consciously allow it to fill up.
Which brings me back to the aeroplane.
I’m in an Aer Lingus Airbus A320-200, more than seven miles up in the
air, travelling at about 500 mph. Along with around 150 other people, I’m
securely enclosed in a warm and comfortable environment, which is just as well;
a few feet away, outside the aircraft, the lack of oxygen in the thin air would
be competing with the very low pressure and a temperature of -60° C to kill me
within a matter of minutes, long before I’d hit the ground at the end of my
fall.
I start to think about the number of people involved in the
process which has me here. There were the thousands of people involved in
building this plane, which was manufactured either in Hamburg or Toulouse (or
even quite possibly both – since Airbus has a very complex assembly process,
the result of intricate political horse-trading). The CFM engines were almost
certainly built in France, though many of the components were made by GE in the
USA; thousands more people involved in building, selling and transporting the
hundreds of thousands of individual components incorporated in the actual
aircraft in which I am now flying.
But, my expanding thoughts about complex human connectivity
realise, this is only part of the picture. What about all the people involved
in making the ancillary fittings; the companies which did the final fitting for
the airline, for example? It’s quite possible that some of the stitching on the
faux-leather/plastic seat cover on which I am sitting was done by some Chinese
woman, working a sewing-machine on a twelve hour shift in a sweatshop factory
for three euros a day. The list of those involved in making my journey possible
expands again to include all these people, and all those who were part of the
myriad operations of packing, transporting, unpacking and installing stuff from
many corners of the globe.
And then there’s the crew, and all the people working in the
two airports getting this plane into the air and back down again safely. The
ground-staff and the baggage handlers, those who did the security checks and
signed off on the passenger, cargo and fuel manifests. The air-traffic
controllers who are guiding our flight safely through the night. The people
working on pumping the crude oil out of the deposits where it has lain under
the ground or the sea for millions of years before those complex hydrocarbon
molecules began their final journey to be refined into kerosene now being
burned to provide energy for the jet engines pushing us through the skies above
Germany, Holland, the North Sea, Britain, and the Irish Sea, all the way from
Düsseldorf to Dublin. Was the man who oversaw the pumping of that original
crude a well-paid shift worker on a North Sea oil-rig, or a much more
poorly-paid Filipino migrant worker, sending remittances home to his family
from Saudi or Kuwait? All the people involved in refining that kerosene and
finally transporting it to be pumped into the plane’s fuel tanks.
Still more human connectivity; As I order a chicken and
lettuce wrap to eat, my thoughts turn to all of those involved in producing
this, from those working in a food-processing plant somewhere to put it all
together to the farmers who raised the chicken (probably somewhere in a
battery) to the ones who grew the lettuce and the other ones who grew the wheat
baked into the wrap. And who were the people who mined the salt which was used
to season it, and where did they live and work? And how many people were
involved in buying and selling and transporting and assembling all the
ingredients of the snack I’m eating?
Ephemeral, momentary, fragmentary connections with literally
hundreds of thousands of people who have all been involved in some way in
making this journey I am on possible, but connections which are none the less
real for all that. Our modern lives are perfused with incredibly complex
interconnectivity; in thousands of everyday situations, which overlap and fuse
into each other, we live lives of wonderfully complicated interdependence.
Without noticing, my racing thoughts become weaker, quieter,
fall away. I find myself becoming quieter, more peaceful, more relaxed.
The hamster has lain down in the corner and fallen asleep.
Om mani padme hum.
Fee fi fo fum.
Dum di dum.
Ho hum.
…..
Om …
Images retrieved from:
http://tristathorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hamsterwheel_original.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aer.lingus.a320-200.ei-den.arp.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Om-mani-padme-hum_02.svg
http://tristathorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hamsterwheel_original.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aer.lingus.a320-200.ei-den.arp.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Om-mani-padme-hum_02.svg