Real

I arrived at Tom’s to find the lot empty, the windows dark, the door locked, and a scrawled note: “restaurant closed until further notice. sorry :-(“ 

In the unlighted interior I glimpsed one of the cooks who usually make my breakfast sitting at the counter: a heavy, immobile Mayan face. He glanced up at me without expression and looked away. 

So. I’m sitting here at the Bipartisan Cafe, contemplating my future.

Yah. My assignment for this week – which has flown past on the wings of gwythaints – was to watch for glimpses of my true self. Every bone in my philosophic body twangs in anxious alarm: true? What do you mean true? What do you mean self? Haven’t Hindus and the Buddhists been squabbling about this for two thousand years?

You can’t do therapy without making extravagant metaphysical claims. Really you can’t do much of anything without making extravagant metaphysical claims: but with therapy it’s particularly obvious.

The modern habit is to just go on recklessly ahead, deferring the ontological reckoning indefinitely. Because “real” of course isn’t “real” and only prissy neurotic philosophy professors worry their pretty little heads about it. The rest of us spend our days stealing each other’s wallets, making YouTube videos, and sending emails to that charming Mr Epstein who’s supposed to have such interesting parties.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune

But, as milady correctly observed, a sense of inauthenticity has to come from some conviction, suspicion or delusion of a missing authenticity. And what is that? When does it arise? 

It’s a fair question, but it turns out to be a difficult one to answer. But this actually is one of the answers: sitting in a cafe and writing. Then there’s that little patch of time at the end of meditation; my phone plays its “wake up!” tones, I tap it off, say the sealing prayer, usually with a little rueful twitch of the lips at the “by this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra” bit – by this virtue? Good luck, buddy – but still I come to the hozho prayer, and turning my palms out, I feel the neutrinos from the sun streaming through my body. You don’t feel the neutrinos, nobody feels the neutrinos, they go right through without touching a thing, yeah, but you feel the neutrinos coming from the east at sunrise: not that they mind the earth either, they go right through that too; sunrise is just for photons & coarse stuff like that. But. Even so, yeah, that actually feels pretty real, for a moment. For a moment. “It has become beauty again.”