Relative Wind

Last night I drifted off pleasantly to sleep with the lovely Buddhist thought that I am nobody. I felt the old twinge of depersonalization, and I rode with it.

I used to think I was somebody. But the older I get and the more folks I meet, the more I see I am no different from anyone else, that we are all mostly the same. And as I age, my memories seem less and less definite: did I really do that? Was I really there? Was that me?

I like to believe I am fading into the universe. Now I’m a raindrop falling in the gutter, now a spinning galaxy, now a crab on an ocean floor. Now a pattern of light on a sheer curtain moving with the wind. Now nobody at all. Nothing at all.

According to psychiatry, this is depersonalization, and it is a symptom of depression. Here’s where psychology does so much harm. It mistakes a cure for a disease, and seeks to prevent it. Usually successfully. Any Buddhist knows depersonalization is a psychic breakthrough. Psychiatry fearfully tries to drag you back into the wheel of birth and death.

Depersonalization is the cure. The disease is everyday life.

Both Christianity and Buddhism are mystery religions. Both see that the apparent world is upside down, that things are seldom as they seem. God suffers and dies. One consciously refuses Buddhahood once it is possible. Messiah comes, and nobody knows him. The greatest in this world are least in the kingdom of heaven. Life is death, and death is salvation. The stone that is rejected becomes the cornerstone of the temple. The least and most unlettered monk is chosen patriarch.

Taoism also has mystery; Hinduism and Islam have their mystical branches. But in Christianity, you can’t escape it.

In the next booth, two teachers are debating loudly and lengthily the meaning of the phrase “relative wind," an aeronautical term. They seem to be saying the same things over and over, without reaching any conclusion.

Is that mad, or am I?

Relative wind. The workaday world is not worth getting excited about.

Now the noise subsides. All I hear is the clicking of computer keys.