Inner Space

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com May, 2011 Emotion and fantasy are suspect. We are supposed to be hard-headed realists, always facing 'facts.' Yet everything we've learned about brains and minds in the last 40 years or so (and we have learned a tremendous amount) suggests that the leap from sensation to perception is precisely a matter of imagination, and that without emotion (which directs and colors attention) there can be no reasoned thought. Sensation is news about what's happening to your body. Perception is news about what's happening in the outside world. Without guess-work based on memory and imagination as loaded (e.g.) by desire and fear, our eyes could only tell the brain about the light waves hitting them. The world of familiar objects and people that we think we see is more correctly understood as imagined: a brain/mind's attempt to make cognitive sense of what its eyes are taking in. Similarly with all the other senses, separately and together. What they report is basically a fantasy to which reality is attributed justifiably attributed most of the time. But we have dreams, and sometimes hallucinations and optical illusions, sometimes in full awareness that what we are seeing is not real at all. In this month's column, you are invited to follow the path of psychotherapists and 'mystics,' to consider the possibility that the inner world of dream, fantasy and meditation is, in one sense, more real not less so than the world of daily life. The world we actually live in is a cognitive construction, spun from the feelings and intentions of ourselves and others. The dream-world shows us something of how this supposed 'reality' is wrought. In his Song of Meditation, Hakuin Zenji makes this claim in so many words: "As regards [meditation]," he says, "we have no words to praise it fully . . . [Those practicing it] reflecting within themselves, testify to the truth . . . that Self-nature is no-nature; they have really gone beyond the ken of sophistry. "The truth that Self-nature is no nature" an artifact of one's own making, as I would put it in modern language might be called the key idea of Buddhism. From it follow as corollary the so-called 'Four Noble Truths' and 'Eight-fold Path' which all boil down to the simple point that

each of us is his own worst enemy, and the cause of his own sufferings. Freud, for one, would surely have agreed. I do myself, but as a modern man with a temperament and world-view less bleak than the Buddha's, I would like to stand his great insight on its head: It is true that in formal meditation or in my La-Z-Boy, what I find in the dream-world is an absence of essential Self, but rather a self-construed (small-'s') self, but I would see this self not as delusion but as a lifetime's work of something approaching art. I go to that La-Z-Boy to write, or think or indulge in fantasy, not usually to "free myself from suffering," but because I enjoy such mental activities, and the reclining armchair itself. The astronaut blasting off into outer space reclines on an acceleration couch. In my recliner, I 'blast off' for inner space or so I like to imagine. I gain the occasional insight in that armchair; sometimes I just relax and fall asleep. Or I read, and try to follow the ideas someone else. What I mostly do is cruise and sightsee, watching the thoughts as they stream by. 'Meditation' is the fancy word for this non-activity, but there is nothing at all fancy about it. There's hardly anything simpler. Does the pastime have any value? The only products of my time in that La-Z-Boy are my writings in these columns and on the Web, and you must judge by them. I am happy if anyone gets something from these pieces, but have to say frankly that production and social good works are not the name of my game. There are lots of people improving the world in their various ways, and a right hash they are making. I'm not a WASP, but a Taoist in this respect. I think the shit that is going to happen will happen, whether I work harder or not. The time spent in that chair has value for me, whether or not it has any for others though I want to say that in an increasingly crazy world of busy realists, just sitting still with one's own thoughts is probably not a waste of time. Rather than acting out one's fantasies, there may be some value just in getting to know them intimately where they come from, and what they are. Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist, has famously described the emergence of order out of chaos (self-organization) as "a dance on the edge of the possible." Fantasy is just that dance in the mind. But new possibilities don't need to be imagined in advance. They exist and often get realized before anyone notices them. Fantasy, sometimes, is just a recognition of possibilities not previously noticed. As a book dealer I was, in large part, a purveyor of fantasies. At least half the books I sold were fantasies of one sort or another; and I was amused when people used to apologize for their 'junk' reading, because at least half of my own reading came from the fantasy sections as well. People who read do so not just for information and ideas but also for relaxation and sheer pleasure and why shouldn't we? What did and does bother me sometimes is when people confuse their

private, pleasurable fantasies religious, political, sociological or sexual with universal facts. The wish to stamp out or overwhelm other people's imaginary worlds does a great deal of harm; and the cure for this must be to admit frankly and show by example to our children that private fantasy and play are perfectly respectable adult activities, although reality is sometimes important too. Anyway, my column this month has a clear recommendation for once: When you feel like it, just find a comfortable place and sit there. Let your mind wander. And never apologize to anyone for doing so.