Half-Baked Buddhist

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Being a half-baked Buddhist doesn’t mean I am on the way to being done; it means that I am not very good at being a Buddhist. As a half-baked idea isn’t really half of an idea; it’s just an idea that hasn’t been thought through and still has rough spots. But for a Buddhist, I think that is where I should be and will remain, however much I learn or practice. That is fine, they say. It is what it is.  

I have been studying and trying to practice Buddhism for thirty years. I haven’t been as diligent as I would have wanted; I had a family, and a job I felt was important. But Buddhism is a species of very small worm that gets inside and changes you without your realizing it. It multiplies inside, but not so as you would notice, nor in ways you would expect. People start to tell you about yourself with nice words that seem to describe a different person. They say you seem calm, or kind, or wise, while to you this is not true at all. You are, as far as you know, asymptomatic.

By now, the worm has gotten deeper in me, and has been rewiring things for a long time. It has done this particularly when I wasn’t paying attention. It has gone so far that my old goals of finally becoming enlightened and understanding everything and then being a high-flown teacher no longer interest me. Now I am happy with being half-baked and a stranger to myself. Eventually you can’t worry about getting done in the middle when you stick in a knife. Any time I decide to put a knife in, I will fall. 

We are all in the same movie. The movie is huge and includes not only my nanodot of a living room but the nanodots in Moscow and those on the moon and outer space and the end of the universe. The movie is playing, playing, but I can only see it in my nanohead. This is a much, much bigger picture of existence than my eroding idea that each of us lives and dies “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth had to conclude. Not that we don’t fret and strut, but there is no stage, and the “heard no more” part is only partly true.

Little, tiny things I learn or experience, just by being quiet and looking carefully, sometimes show the world I imagine I live in growing out of its britches. 

The different world in which I occasionally catch myself floating like dust motes in sunlight doesn’t supplant everyday life. I still go to the grocery store. It’s just that everything is more coherent—from the sofa to my neighbor to my dreams, and I feel less like I am in a one-person show on a darkened stage and more like I am in that movie, just light like everything else. In the movie, one isn’t real and nothing else is, not even the story. The characters—as in me or you—only exist on the screen: maybe we think we are real, but that’s only the character speaking; we are only light. What if we are real only when the light bounces off someone’s retina? How could it be otherwise? Where is the movie when you aren’t watching it? I mean really, really; where is it? How can we fall into a mental state in which little bundles of light bouncing around on a thirteen-inch screen as people four inches high feel strangely real?  Because we do it all the time: little bundles of electricity hit old patterns in our brains, and vanished light bouncing around in the dark of our minds are what we call our world. Fact and fiction are the same. What is real is that the couple spilling a giant bucket of popcorn in the theater are products of the Big Bang.

Whether I am a good Buddhist or not, and whether I know much or not, I have a feeling that I’m not alone. We are not a Buddhist culture, and to study Buddhism in a very practical and concrete-built world is a little like driving the wrong way on an interstate. But because you are sitting down and not saying anything and actually not moving at all, you aren’t going to hit anyone. After a while, people leave you alone.  

So at a minimum, I’m not hurting anyone, and at best, I think I am experiencing the world in a way that seems to make me less prone to be unhappy with my decisions, my ways of treating others, and my overall understanding of what “I” am and where we are. It seems you can say “it doesn’t matter,”and try to “let it go,” but so long as you are doing it, it’s not going to be very successful. When I see myself suddenly as the character in the movie, everything as real and unreal as I am, somehow the focus changes.

I see how I behave and think and how it is so painful to myself and others, and I have a strange desire just to hug people who look sad or haunted and say…well, nothing. Just let them know someone sees them and doesn’t need anything from them. That I know it is hard. That everyone is as scared as they are. What a strange way to feel for a non-hugger who says no one had better try to hug her. Here is this wonderful, sweet, achy hearted feeling growing in me, in such odd ways It’s the worm again.