N O I S E

"Have you ever considered, any real freedoms Willard?

Freedoms from the opinions of others.

Even the opinions of yourself?"

 -Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Some days it seems that the human world consists primarily of noise. On one level, of course that's not true, the world is full of people cooking dinner or building houses or plowing ground, sensible purposeful activities. But the mental, emotional and spiritual atmosphere if you will that they exist in while they do these things may have little or nothing to do with actual life. 

I am in the position of not intentionally watching television at all, but my mother who has senile dementia has cable news on around the clock. It helps orient her to her position in space, I guess, since she is almost blind, and gives her the reassurance of human voices. So quite against my will, I am periodically confronted with the reality of what is transmitted on such channels. And what I am confronted with is nauseating in its unreality. I go out into the yard and commune with the real world of trees and grasses and dead insects. My cat eating foxtail grass (for a carnivore he sure likes grass a lot). I have a nibble too, suck the green juice from the leaves and spit out the cellulose. 

And then right inside the door I am accosted with the unreal world that comes through that insidious black cable. Full of insane ideas about what life is that are totally disconnected to reality as I understand it. Personalities, controversy, sensationalism, consumerism, voyeurism. All sorts of isms flowing through that black cable. Like shiny demons that are trying to grab you and pull you in so that you will become a part of their black cable world. 

And it is easy to say, well nobody takes any of this seriously. Nobody takes seriously what they see on television, any more than they take seriously what is on the internet. I don't think that's true, I think it worms its way into your mind and is intended to. Even if you don't have television, radio or internet, as long as you are involved with people in some way you will bump up against the noise. The noise is full of judgements that aren't based on anything except whether that judgement will make the one judging feel good about himself and his life. Hardly ever does anyone really say shut up and don't judge. We are all human idiots, where do we get off judging anything?

Of course this noise existed long before cable television, long before radio. It's just on steroids now.

"I've seen horrors.  Horrors that you've seen.

But you have no right to call me a murderer.
You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that.

But you have no right to judge me.

...without feeling, without passion, without judgement... without judgement... because it is judgement that defeats us."

-Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola in the movie Apocalypse Now had these words placed in the mouth of a madman, Col. Kurtz. A man perhaps driven mad by being too honest. They sent him to war, but a war bounded by hypocritical rules designed to build the illusion that they were humane people who were in Vietnam to help people. Col. Kurtz took war seriously, too seriously to believe any of that. If he was sent into battle, he went. But he didn't play games with it. He went all out, total war. For this, his keepers in the Pentagon declared him insane and sent people to kill him. 

And yet his keepers in the Pentagon, and the talking heads on cable news, were motivated by a peculiar sort of moralism. Not a moralism that Jesus would recognize, but behind it all there is a kind of "ought" involved, and if not involved because it is unknown, then there is a search for what the "ought" should be.  Because unquestioned in all of this is the idea that there is an "ought" involved, someone has to come out the winner, someone has to be labeled the loser, whether you "ought" to buy a Subaru or "ought" to support medical marijuana or not or whether Egypt "ought" to do such and such about their supposed "freedom". You can't mold human behavior without an "ought" of some kind. And that is very much what it is about. In our society, the idea that you "ought" to be a good person has to some extent been replaced with the idea that you "ought" not to be a "loser," a state defined by the absence of certain properties or the possession of other properties. Lots of people who don't take moral imperatives very seriously still take self esteem and status pretty seriously.

The stench of human conceit is all over such things as these. All lies, all hypocrisy. None of this has even remotely to do with the real world. There are no actual "oughts" in the real world, and the real world is not language or ideology or ideas, and far exceeds what human beings think about it. Such freedom as exists, consists first in freedom from the ideas and opinions of others. Not that you won't be exposed to such ideas and opinions, but that you understand them in the light of human conceitedness. It consists second in freedom from your own ideas and opinions. To understand that you are most true to yourself when you are in a state of nonverbal nonconceptual feeling-in-the-moment, something that inherently can't be universalized to anything else, or even to yourself at other times. Something that is not expressible. It's not a position, it is not a dogma, it is not an ought. Simply being-with-the-world, now.

I had to stop being-with-the-world in order to make this post, and I can already see that, and already feel disgusted with this post because of it. Was it an error? Am I "oughting" you? Am I also just contributing to the noise now?

"This Dharma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment ...and if I were to teach the Dharma and if others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me.

Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached.

This Dharma is not easily realized by those overcome with aversion & passion. What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see. 

 

As the Blessed One reflected thus, his mind inclined to dwelling at ease, not to teaching the Dharma."

~ Gautama Siddhartha, Ayacana Sutra, deciding not to teach anyone Buddhism.