WHAT IF EVERYBODY CHANTED AT THE SAME TIME?

I heard on the radio that a group of scientists from Harvard or somewhere really important discovered a group of Tibetian monks chanting and sitting in a cross-leg circle around a pile of big rocks. To the Westerners' amazement, the rocks hovered in the air. The scientists ran some tests and came to the conclusion the monks were chanting the rocks to levitate.

Aside from remembering not to believe in everything I hear on the radio--imagine a radio chanting at me until I levitate--this incident suggests a number of questions:

1) WHAT ARE A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS DOING JUST WANDERING AROUND THE HIMALAYAS? Surely they weren't out looking for this. I heard the report and thought: Right; some of the finest minds in the world just "happen to be in the neighborhood." But as usual I'm most likely the idiot here. Most certainly, these eminient personages were on "some other assignment," whereupon one heard about the amazing Tibetian monks and they all went scrambling up K2, 63-year-old profs with osteoporosis and the one with the penile implant,and all to merely "look-see." That would explain all the computerized equipment they'd need to run the tests they supposedly ran, computerized equipment they surely rented from all those advanced scientific research institutions in Bangaladesh. What kind of tests were these? Did the Harvard scientists "run their hands under the rocks" the way magicians do after they've halved somebody from the audience with a chainsaw? Or did they conduct "serious experiments" like radio frequency analyses or sonic vibration studies? If so, how did they get all this equipment into Tibet's forbidding mountain ranges? Some of those monestaries cling to mountainsides as high as 20,000 feet. Winds rush high and frigidly. Helicopters don't go there. Photon detectors, satellite dishes, all sorts of indescribable instruments of high technology, would somehow survive the cold, the ice, the wind, the altitude and human frailty for the sake of figuring how the monks managed to lift the rocks without hands. Maybe the monks levitated the equipment up the mountainside themselves, but it was probably more like this: Dude. Yeah, you. Sherpa. Put that gasoline-powered generator on your back...and see that slope over there?

2) WHAT ARE A BUNCH OF MONKS DOING SITTING AND CHANTING AROUND A PILE OF ROCKS? I've always respected Tibetian monks, even though some of the more magical legends surrounding Himalayan holy men read like not-so-subtle con-jobs. Don't those men, many of whom have spent entire lifetimes in search of nebulous truths, have better things to do than raise rocks? Was this some kind of contest between this monk and that one? Maybe it's a macho deal: You know, Quien monk es mas macho? Devadip? Or Goomba? Maybe Tibetian monks, because they're human beings, get together and show off. Kind of like a bunch of old coots sitting on the front step to a country drug store and spitting sunflower seeds at a puddle. Perhaps the monks thought they could raise a little money with the trick. All I know is that I picture a group of old men in strange robes sitting in a dark, torch-lit cave, all humming and warbling that obnoxious way those kinds of monks always do on National Geographic Specials. The announcer always talks in a hushed voice about ambrosial wine that's made out of goat's milk, which is supposed to taste just great, though if you've ever smelled a goat you'd KNOW that can't be true. And maybe that's why the monks hum: They're either trying to get the curdles from between their teeth, or showing the guy with the leather wine bag that they're occupied at the moment and can't part their lips to drink any more of that goat wine as long as they're humming. Whatever the case, so many more important things than a bunch of rocks need to be lifted in this world: We could have lifted cars off wounded children in Iraq; we could have moved broken buildings after earthquakes in Turkey; we could have made the Pentagon move a little. Because of the sheer impracticality of lifting rocks by kinetic energy in a mountain cave, or so it seems to me, it's evident the Tibetian monks in the cave have completely punked out: They don't believe in anything anymore: Hey! Let's just sit around and hum until the rocks start floating around the room. Wanna do that?

Westerners think the spurious linkage between practicing meditation and miraculous occurance is is "mystical." Westerners also believe that wearing weird clothing and practicing a non-indigenous religion is "mystical" as well. The monks are aware of both cases. Worse, the monks seem to have punked out so badly already that they've allowed themselves to go commercial: Dudes! We've gotten our act together and are taking it on the road! Kind of like the Kundalini Hillbillies.

This humming of Tibetian monks is supposedly a healthy thing that puts people into a mutually-transcendent state of mind, but the mutually-transcendent state is really a dead end. It has no practical value. Sure. It feels good. But isn't it funny that relaxation in the Western World has become so far removed from our daily lives that it's now a mystical experience people like Harvard scientists will travel halfway around the world to study?

The Tibetian monks sit and make rocks rise up in the air. It seems miraculous. But isn't just walking over and picking up a rock equally miraculous? Isn't walking over and telling a monk that he doesn't have to drink the goat's milk if he doesn't like it a miracle? Isn't any and all action a miracle? Why don't those guys go out and plant fields or herd horses? They'd get a lot more done.
Instead, all they do is emphasize the futility of changing suffering through the vehicle of direct action. There they sit, together possessing the most powerful direct activity known to man (and even then, it's only rumored...), and they're using it for purposes that border on the absurd. It's like using the power of the atom to make bombs. It's like utilizing the miracle of microwaves to get sex-addicted to a 976 number. It's like travelling all the way around the world to see if a bunch of old farts can make rocks fly. Enough said.

3) WHAT ARE THE ROCKS DOING VIOLATING THE LAWS OF NATURE? I don't know about you, but if everything--even our average DART transit stop--doesn't have a soul, my entire spiritual program, personally speaking, is going to go limp the second I get into Heaven. I don't know why I've always felt such an urge, but I sincerely want everything to have a soul. I really do. That hope of mine has come close to ruin because a bunch of moralists have completely screwed the majority of the objective world right out of God's Kingdom by requiring souls to have moral or ethical codes. By most philsophic prognostications, which really mean a whole lot, in order to have a soul, an object must first have self-awareness. That disqualifies most philosophers, but that's not the point here. What's so self-aware about a rock violating the laws of nature by levitating? The laws of nature tell us that rocks aren't supposed to fly and that's one of the moral codes for rocks. Perhaps the rocks are simply criminal rocks that have been "hanging out on the block" for eons until some rube came along as an accomplice to a crime. If the rocks were so self-aware, they would probably have taken a clue from the monks...WHO ARE DEMONSTRATING THE FUTILITY OF VIOLATING ANYTHING AT ALL, mainly because acceptance and transcendence of suffering is perhaps the most macho thing anyone, East or West, can do. Instead, the rocks, having skipped the school for rocks, have decided to conduct themselves in ways radically different and criminal from the acceptable ways of the other rocks: By levitating, the rocks are craving, they are expressing contempt and, most profanely, they are deluded if they actually believe that rocks, levitating, can ever amount to a hill of beans in this world.

What have flying rocks accomplished? Look at Gaza, man.

4) WHY AM I WRITING THIS? I responded to a stimulus (the radio), welcomed a thought into my intellect, chewed it over really good, and then spat it out for others to digest. This is the way goats teach their babies to eat grass. Still, it's pretty futile, all this figuring and analyzing. What good does it do? At very bottom (as if I didn't already know this), I am writing this because it gives me comfort.

The world is an uncomfortable place. It should go without saying that discomfort is no neighbor, cousin or ken to danger; yet nothing really fits in this godforsaken place.

One hundred thousand years ago, some ancestor of mine stood in a field, perhaps on a hilltop, gazing down on mile after mile of high, green grass. Suddenly, something that doesn't fit--a cave lion--nudged his perepheral vision. This seeing-stuff-that-doesn't-fit syndrome has been part of our human survival mechanism since we first climbed out of African trees millions of years ago, and probably since long before that. It's a syndrome that runs deep within us. We won't be getting away from it for a long, long time. Things that didn't fit one hundred thousand years ago could probably kill you. They can do the same thing today, but as we all can see, we've invented so much crap designed to protect us from the unforseen that we're relatively out of danger most of the time.

Sure. Very few things that don't fit kill you these days, but just because they can't kill doesn't mean they don't fit. Those things make us restless. The world is so vast, we have so much information coming in, and there's a small part of us that demands we fit it back together into an organic whole that actually makes sense. Since that goal is unrealistic and altogether impossible, we look for shortcuts--conspiracies, ideologies, religions, political ends and means--ways, in other words, that will make the world seem more reasonable, and therefore, more comfortable. We think churches and temples, and all the rules and moralities and sensibilities they represent, will give us comfort, mainly because we can't understand what happens when we die. We can't understand why we have to suffer, either, and no matter how hard we try to put that puzzle together, it's futility. We might as well forget about it.

Instead of trying to survive in a world where some things just don't fit into the proverbial scheme of things, we're now trying to make ourselves more comfortable with the world of nature, not to mention with the world we've designed to protect us all from nature. We are uncomfortable. Discomfort is usually at the very bottom of all our civilized and domesticated ills.

Now, I'm trying to make myself comfortable with things that don't fit--IN THE WORLD OF NATURE. I am suspicious of floating rocks. I'd bet you are too. Of course, with all the video games on hand, we're conditioning ourselves to believe just about anything. That's something we'll all have to get comfortable with.