Galaxy Song

Here's another burst of insight from that cagey lot down at Monty Python.

This time they put humanity in context with a song drawn, fittingly enough, from The Meaning of Life. One fated from the outset to become a seminal text in my spiritual training, because I too have long asserted that this whole Great Mind thing is just a largish vaudeville show. And here Eric Idle (aka the Pythons' resident Zen master) confirms my suspicions.

For the rest, kindly note that the figures cited in the work are scientifically demonstrable. (Making this is a rare example of a novelty song that contains, like, verifiable data, and is therefore acceptable to Wikipedia, among others.)

And that Eric's knack for a penetrating conclusion is the most electric since Lennon and McCartney.

Follows the tablature:

GALAXY SONG
by Eric Idle

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth

Primo Makyo, Dude!

As I've said before, it's dangerous to listen to others' meditation experiences. You end up feeling like your own practice doesn't measure up, or imagining you're experiencing stuff you're not. Which introduces further delusions, when you were trying to eliminate some.

This is why such talk is discouraged in Zen.

But keeping makyo moments mum can create other obstacles, notably a sense that you've received special dispensations when you experience them yourself, when in fact all you've done is dream awake. And getting attached to such phenomena can be as damaging to your Zen practice as tales of others' accounts; possibly more so.

Therefore, today I'm going to buck the trend and relate a few groovy trips I've had when I was supposed to be sitting.

Surely the most entertaining was the time I entered satori and had an argument with a bird. The bird – an actual one, who was real and everything – was perched on a tree at some distance and calling boldly, as songbirds are wont to do. And I was rebutting his assertions. (Silently; in my mind.)

I'm fairly certain my opponent was unaware he was engaging in dharma combat. Any road, most birdsong is one-sided communication, meant to warn others of the arse-kicking that awaits if they overstep some invisible territorial limit.

But the experience was very real to me. And amusing; I almost laughed out loud.

A few minutes later I felt my hand open a door to a deep, infinite black cellar, whereupon I shouted into the emptiness, and found great meaning in the lack of echo.

That was just one occasion, though enhanced and intensified by satori. In less cinematic instances I've entered the classic state of oneness; the bliss high; the disappearance of ego and attendant evaporation of the tribulations it catalogues; and the expansive awareness of Creation in all its numberless galaxies. If some of these images crop up on the old blog here, doubtless they're inspired, at least in part, by these lapses in monastic discipline.

But sadly, human beings have long taken such falderal for "visions" or "the voice of God" or "gifts of the Great Mind" or any number of other self-aggrandising misapprehensions. Whole religions have sprung from this crap.

And crap it is. You may in fact find insight in such hallucinations, but only if they jar something else loose in your skull, and only then if you pay close attention to your reaction. It's like a koan; the tale itself contains no teaching. It's the things your head does in response that lead to opening.

There's a famous story of a Zen monk – one of the more prominent Ancestors; I forget which one – who became enlightened after years of intensive practice by a pebble bouncing off his rake. The same principle is in play when you trip out on the cushion. Pebbles hit stuff.

Because sitting, like sleep, ploughs up the silt. And as in your night dreams, clods of it can acquire significance, generally by apophenia. The result may lead to useful insight, but all the action is inside your head, and no more substantial than anything else that happens in there, however spacey and novel it may feel in the moment.

I think most serious meditators experience such flights from time to time. I had them more often in the beginning. In recent years they've become fewer and less dramatic. If such things don't happen to you, maybe you're just better at this zazen thing than the rest of us.

Either way, don't get attached. Smile at the pleasant visions, raise an eyebrow – figuratively speaking – at the distressing ones, and watch both of them pass.

Then return to the breath.

We're not here to be Awesome Zen Masters. The job description is: sit still and do nothing.

And all that 60s-era far-outtedness sounds like something, to me.


(Photo courtesy of Jan Meeus and Unsplash.)

Scale

Humanity: "If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Rest of the Universe: "Mm. So, anyway…"


(Photo of Messier 63, just one galaxy in the M51 Group, all of whose lifeforms are noteworthy for the total lack of prestige any of them impute to humanity, courtesy of ESA/Hubble, NASA, and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Three Infinitudes

The length of time.
The depth of space.
The ignorance of people.


(Photo of one tiny chunk of space, containing over 200 galaxies [that's galaxies, brothers and sisters: each an aggregation of billions of stars, most of those presumably anchoring entire solar systems] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, NASA, and the Hubble Telescope.)

WW: October night