A Buddha’s Bodhi
The Eternal Fishnu is not just that blue, rubbery, fish-like figure with a yellow cap and a red backpack. The blue rubber figure is just an Earthly manifestation, an icon, of The Eternal Fishnu for my Earthly, visually-oriented and symbolically-thinking brain.
The actual Eternal Fishnu is a phenomenon of the Universe like gravity and time, an ethereal phenomenon gracefully nudging us from the friction-filled bumpy ride of dukkha to the smooth sailing of Buddhahood. He is a phenomenon similar to the gentle agitation over time on a chaotic bucket of mud, settling it into orderly layers of gold at the bottom and progressively lighter things moving towards the top. The teachings of Fishnu gently agitate our brains to re-wire, smoothing out our arduous transition from animal to intelligent designers.
A Human’s Bodhi
On the other hand, as Ringo put it, I’m a buddha trapped in a man’s Bodhi. I’m not an ethereal phenomenon as is Fishnu. Meaning, although I’m awake, seeing through the illusions computed by my mind by cultivating a perpetual beginner’s mind and 100% acceptance of what Is, my sentience at least for now is intimately intertwined in a human animal. My Bodhi still lives the life of a man of today with joys and the challenges that are just part of being a member of society and to a wider extent, a creature of Earth.
What is a “man’s Bodhi”? Or rather, a “human’s Bodhi”? It is waking up to the reality of what is out there, as opposed to living the life of the compelling delusions of our brain – that pitifully inadequate model of the Universe we rely on to figure out what’s out there. Our brain allows us to outsmart physics by enabling us to imagine outcomes, all in the safety of our heads, before committing to real, physically-irreversible actions.
Imagination is playing with the model of the Universe we’ve built in our heads, those symbols, things, and how they relate to each other in a big web of cause and effect. But there is much disconnect between the model of the Universe we’ve built in our brains and the actual Universe. That model in our heads is outdated because:
- Everything is always changing. Impermanence means our database of information in our brains must constantly be updated. Is it? Can it?
- We don’t know everything – we haven’t experienced much and the Universe, well, it’s a big place. The reasoning behind the reincarnation thing is that it would take thousands of lifetimes, from thousands of roles, to fully experience everything.
- Our brains do not require actual energy to imagine something like tipping over a car. We don’t know exactly how much energy it takes to move a boulder until we actually do it. But we can imagine some approximation that’s probably not exactly right. It’s what I call “cartoon physics”.
We’ve heard it said that there are many paths to enlightenment. In fact, we can almost say that it’s a given that everyone’s path will be different because everyone’s brain is wired differently. In addition, though, there are also many paths to sentience. Human sentience is just one kind of sentience. So different kinds of sentience requires a different Dharma – the teachings of a Buddha.
However, whatever our kind of sentience, human, Klingon, or plant, the destination is the same. That destination is a fully in-sync connection to the Universe. For humans, we suffer because we chose to believe the illusion of our brains that we are independent of the One Universe.
The circumstances from which all of life on Earth evolved over these last three billion years, involving interactions between countless creatures and physical conditions, lead to our brand of sentience for which Siddhartha Gautama’s Four Noble Truths make sense. Siddhartha Gautama is the Teacher of humanity during our “era”.
If we were to create an artificial intelligence and it clunked along with a kind of dukkha of its own, repairing that dukkha probably wouldn’t be carried out by teaching it the Four Noble Truths. It will require the “dharma” of the programming prowess of the developers of the A.I. (Coincidentally, as I took a little break during this writing, I see a friend on Facebook posted a meme; a baby’s face with the caption, “I refuse to take a nap … Is that resisting a rest?”)
The Era of Fishnu Buddha
Actually, The Eternal Fishnu is crashing Siddhartha Gautama’s party. The Eternal Fishnu’s “party” was roughly what we call the Devonian period, about 400-300 million years ago, when to put it simply, “fish” moved onto land. Why? There really wasn’t any “reason”, there aren’t “reasons” where evolution is concerned. But that vertebrate architecture of those fishes, that pliable exterior over a sturdy frame, lead to whole classes of new creatures, the tetrapods, which includes us.
Those new classes of creatures were only possible outside the friction and buoyancy of water to the lighter friction of air and the stability of ground. The new set of problems the tetrapods faced would force new innovations in creature design.
Were the fish sentient? Probably not as we humans experience sentience – nothing like the anthropomorphized version of fishes where Ariel, Sebastian, and Flounder lived, under the sea. But fish are life, where every molecule is intricately placed. All life has an intelligence of its own. It must. It filled this planet with wonders for three billion years! That intelligence probably wouldn’t get much out of the Four Noble Truths.
What was the dukkha of those fishes for which Fishnu appeared? Well … being a fish out of water for one. Why did those first fish that popped their heads out of the water continue to venture more and more out of its protection? Maybe they found a concentration of food at the shores, like scum accumulates at the sides of a bathtub. Maybe then the tide would go out leaving a bunch stranded there. Maybe most dried up, but some were sweatier or had thicker skin and were able to survive the low tide exposing them.
From our human perspective, it’s hard to understand why there would need to be a Buddha for fish. Again, Evolution never has a “plan”; there was never a plan for vertebrate fish to venture onto land. But once the process got under way, a Buddha helped them through that ugly stage of the process to the other shore. Looking towards the future, Maitreya, the Buddha of the future will only appear when the Four Noble Truths no longer makes any sense.
The Life of a Buddha Trapped in a Human’s Bodhi
So far, the writing on this blog site mostly speaks to the first two of the three Zen Stories that comprise the foundation of The Eternal Fishnu’s teaching: the beginner’s mind (The Empty Cup) and 100% acceptance of what is (Is that so?). However, I haven’t written as much about the third story, Picking Up the Bag.
The first two stories are about awakening to your Buddhahood and the third is on staying awake. One can’t fully appreciate the third story without fully digesting the first two. In a nutshell, the story of picking up the bag is that of an enlightened person demonstrating that enlightenment comes by simply dropping your burdens … just like that … and what comes after is picking it back up and continuing along your way.
So what’s the point? What changed? He’s still some schmuck carrying around a heavy bag. Well, nothing changed, but everything changed. When you realize your brain is a lousy model of what is really out there and you stop relying on it, you are now free to merrily, merrily, merrily go about your business as a member of society and creature of Earth – like in the nursery rhyme. Except it’s not life that is “but the dream”. Life is very real. It’s those beliefs of your brain where dreams lie – whether the dreams we have when asleep or the dreams we have wide awake.
Let’s look at a more pragmatic example from “normal” life where you drop your burdens, then pick them back up. Say that at work you know vast improvements must be made to a critical process; say this is an overhaul of an ETL system so severely scarred with years of hacky patches (a very common scenario) that it breaks every day. And it’s getting worse, to the point where some day you may not be able to fix it quickly.
But your plate is already overflowing with work for which you are directly accountable. Even if you did somehow muster the energy to tackle those improvements along with your “real” work, you’re afraid of stepping on the toes of others. You may be rocking the boat for folks not wanting the boat rocked with a few years to retirement.
Many will be under the delusion that nothing is wrong, that you’re a paranoid Chicken Little. Very often, if something hasn’t yet happened, people often think it couldn’t happen. From their perspective, nothing is wrong because, because they don’t see your heroics, your 60 hour weeks patching the dam all over the place. From their perspective, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
(Before continuing, I do want to note that worrying about some awful future seems to contradict being in the now – we’re not supposed to worry about things that haven’t happened and may not even happen. The advice is more so to not let that future which may not happen complicate our efforts and drain our energy now.)
In any case it has to be done and you’ve decided you’re going to pursue it, taking all the hits, tripping over yourself and others with hesitations. As it is with treating cancer, the company really has no choice but to put everything on hold and take its metaphorical chemo or radiation therapy.
What if, however, the CEO fully comprehends the gravity of the situation and is brave enough to act on it? The CEO is willing to put her neck on the line against the whiny shareholders and gives you carte blanche to do whatever you need to do, providing funding, protecting you from retaliation. With or without the CEO’s permission, you’re going to do it, but you’re now 100% free with the CEO’s permission. At that moment, not next week or tomorrow, you become that mission.
So what changed? The CEO gave you permission to do what you must. But that’s the human, corporate life. Real life is much better. The Universe doesn’t need to give you permission to live like a Buddha in this life because it never said you had to live with dukkha in the first place. It’s our choice to cling to or be defined by the past, be terrified by imagined futures, and wait for good luck to save us.
For life in general, you’re Free! You need not fear anyone, any embarrassment, and pain. Drop your burden … just do it. No leashes, no buttons to push. Empty your mind of all that crap you’ve been hoarding, and accept what Is around you, right here, right now.
That bag we drop then pick back up holds the three billion year history of Life on Earth, every single event. It’s inseparable from our bodies, the vehicle in which we travel this world, more inseparable than any other organ. But it’s not a burden, no more than your car is a burden to you on the freeway. The burden our insistence on relying solely on our imperfect brain.
Feel the freedom. Then pick it up and embrace life like a person with nothing to lose and nothing to gain! This is what is meant by, “When you become nothing, you become Everything.” When you have no constraints, you are all things. Like a sub-atomic particle no longer observed, it goes from a single point to a field.
You are still a human animal, but you can now continue along your way with the genuine fearlessness you were born with.
A Full Life
Do you remember this scene from Groundhog Day?
Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
One of the guys at the bar: That sums it up for me.
We watch the movie, “Groundhog Day”, and think it novel to relive the same day over and over. But with the mindless way most of us lives our lives, is it different from “Groundhog Day”? Our days go by like a blur because we’re hardly fully present. It’s like driving down a boulevard past countless strip malls. Unless we get out and spend time at each, they all look exactly the same from a inside a car at 40 mph. We see our days from a high level of I went to work, did stuff, came home, had dinner, went to bed.
Either your mind can give in to the Universe and let it take it on its wonderful ride in this amusement park called Earth, or you can be codependent on the Universe, being happy only when and if it decides to appease you.
My Teacher’s Enlightenment
Lastly, this blog is dedicated to the one-year anniversary of the Enlightenment of His Holiness, the Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet, on this date last year, November 3, 2017.
From The Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet today (my translation from His native “Mack mack mack …”):
“Humans are designers. That’s the human shtick. You only get to use that shtick to design your way out of problems. It’s those problematic times when humans can be humans, as I can be a duck when in water.”
Fishnu 