The Freak Parade

I’m having trouble sleeping this evening, so I thought I’d try to pacify my mind with a little midnight rambling. I’m probably in pretty good company right about now – I recently saw on a Discovery channel program that a ridiculously high proportion of Americans have a sleeping disorder of some kind, primarily some form of chronic insomnia. That jives with my general experience. Most adults I know have trouble sleeping at least a few nights a week.

I don’t think the reason for this phenomenon is any great mystery – as our culture continues to accelerate and radiate increasing quantities of noise (in the form of information and technology driven social interactions), our minds become exponentially busier in order to keep up, yet our lifestyles don’t often permit sufficient time to “decompress”  so we have trouble sleeping. Our minds simply can’t stop twitching when we turn off the lights and close our eyes.

If you have any doubt that the pace of change is accelerating in our society, watch this. Actually, watch it anyway, it is a fascinating presentation. Our natural tendency, when we reflect on our rapidly changing culture, is to judge it as either robbing us of our souls or as the righteous march of human progress. In reality, however, whether or not this change is good or bad is a meaningless question. Nothing can hinder or contribute to the phenomenon by some application of our will, such change is outside the realm of human control.

Even so, just because we can’t alter the onslaught of cultural entropy doesn’t mean we have to be utterly swept away by it, simply accepting as inevitable fact that we’ll be sleeping less and less year after year.

The video I just referenced asks this question at its conclusion: “What does it all mean?” This question, of course, is not a question, but the Question. Christian mythology holds that Man fell from grace when Eve ate from the fruit of knowledge and thus launched all of human history. The fruit of knowledge needed only to transmit to mankind that single Question to have its effect. It isn’t an opposable thumb or the ability to make tools that defines and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, it is that Question, the relentless pursuit of which has given birth to the entirety of human culture. Furthermore, our inability to answer that Question accounts for our uniquely human suffering – the widening spiritual hole in our experience of life that our consumerist culture is scrambling harder and harder to fill, by way of technology and mass production. This is perfectly captured in this cartoon:

As a side note, I highly recommend subscribing to the Noise to Signal RSS feed – a desperately needed dose of perspective in the form of very funny cartoons. Anyway, my intention is not to be critical of our culture, but simply to consider it in order to aware of it so as to find a way to live in it without being utterly enslaved by it. I believe this is critical, because while the acceleration of our culture may be inevitable, it is accelerating towards increasingly unsatisfying ways of approaching our thirst for meaning.

My belief is that the answer to the question “What does it all mean?” is the question itself - “it” means to be aware of the utterly un-resolvable mystery that is human experience, and to explore and study this mystery as long as we live. Our culture is fundamentally unsatisfying (from a spiritual perspective) because it is oriented towards blindly trying to find a salve for some illusory spiritual wound, it does not approach the Question directly, and so it won’t ever have a chance at answering it, or of quenching our thirst. Of course as any Zen Buddhist will tell you the Question is a trick question to begin with – it is the metaphysical phrasing of the joke “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” – Grant of course. “What does it all mean?” – it means itself. The goal of a Zen student’s practice is to “get the joke” – not intellectually, which is trivial, but viscerally, experientially, which is not so trivial. Anyway, for those of us who are not Zen students, that doesn’t help much. Even so, I urge you to not forget about the mystery – if we lose the context of the Mystery, or the Question, then our accelerating culture will eventually eat us alive or at least wear us down, but as long as we remain aware of the Mystery and the Question, and attend to them both on a regular basis, then any pace of change or mutation of our culture will be both endurable and enjoyable. Of course, this is easier said than done, which is why I’m up at three in the morning philosophizing instead of sleeping peacefully next to my wife