The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans

by David A. Ross

  “It must have been terrifying,” I offer.

  “I was a boy of fifteen. I understood many things, but not the type of violence that people often perpetrate on their neighbors. But I was lucky. I had several astute advisers.”

  “What happened then?” I ask.

  “What happened then was that I was assisted by the CIA in leaving the country and re-establishing a government-in-exile here in India. It was the American Central Intelligence Agency that funded our cause for several decades—one million, seven hundred fifty thousand dollars per year, every year!”

  “It must have been nearly impossible to re-establish the Tibetan culture in a new land,” I suggest.

  “Of course it was difficult,” His Holiness tells me, “but don’t forget that I was not alone. Nearly eighty thousand Tibetans had followed me to Dharamsala, and we created a Tibetan educational system in order to teach the Tibetan children the traditional language, history, religion and culture. We established the Tibetan Institute for the Performing Arts in 1959, and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies became the primary university for Tibetans in India. We also founded two hundred monasteries and nunneries. This was our primary way of preserving Tibetan Buddhist teachings and the Tibetan way of life.”

  “Do you think you will ever return to Tibet?” I ask His Holiness.

  A nostalgic smile crosses his lips. “Only if China agrees not to make any precondition for my return,” he answers. “Which they have so far refused to do.”

  For a moment we sit in silence, yet His Holiness seems at peace, content to wait, not needing to fill every empty space. I take a moment to assimilate the history lesson the Dalai Lama has given me. Outside, bluebirds sing and flutter in the trees; thunder rolls through a distant canyon. I right myself on my chair, take a sip of tea, and straighten the hem of my dress. Finally, I ask His Holiness to tell me a bit about his philosophy and his teachings.

  “I practice Dzogchen,” he tells me. “Dzogchen means ‘Great Perfection’, and it is the natural condition of the mind. Dzogchen is also a body of teachings and meditations that can be practiced as the most direct path to enlightenment.

  “Dzogchen teachings focus on three terms: View, Meditation, and Action. To see the absolute state of our mind is the View; the way of stabilizing that View and making it an unbroken experience is Meditation; and integrating that View into our daily life is accomplished by Action.

  “Dzogchen lies at the heart of all things and is nothing less than wisdom's recognition of itself as unbounded wholeness—the incorruptible mind-nature. Such awareness is inherent within all beings, but not to be attainable by thought. It refers to the true primordial state of every individual and not to any transcendent reality.

  “Dzogchen is an approach to non-dualism.”

  “Yet dualism seems to be the undisputable law of the universe,” I say.

  The Dalai Llama laughs loudly: “The Grand Illusion!” he proclaims.

  “Then the universe is really not dualistic in nature?” I waver.

  “What do you think, Fizzy Oceans?”

  “Everything I have been taught supports the concept of duality. Everything I see, hear, taste, smell and touch seems to reinforce duality. Other religions thrive on duality: good and evil, mostly. We define our space/time continuum in terms of duality: up and down, in and out, before and after. But you say that duality is not the fundamental state of the universe…”

  “Even our physicists are coming to understand what those who practice Dzogchen and have achieved enlightenment have understood for centuries. The state that we have called Nirvana, modern-day physicist describe as ‘tendencies’ or ‘relativity’. But it is nothing new. The difference, though, is that a Master of Dzogchen practice lives continually in this state of mind, while our scientists only describe it. Which approach seems better to you, assimilation or approximation?”

  “Assimilation means Enlightenment, right?”

  “Of course,” he counsels.

  “I could use a bit of enlightenment,” I lament.

  “And so it is already within you,” he reassures. And suddenly the room is engulfed by an unqualified peacefulness. The Dalai Llama closes his eyes, and for a moment he seems to have fallen asleep. What am I supposed to do now?

  I breathe in. I breathe out. I breathe in. Breathe out. In… Out… Okay, I can dig this. We are just sitting here…being. Just…being. It’s okay, I tell myself. I have nowhere else I have to go. And His Holiness surely won’t sleep forever. He’s bound to wake up sooner or later. So I begin to think about what it might be like to see the world in non-dualistic terms. Can I possibly do it? I don’t know. This seems like a riddle wrapped up inside an anomaly, encased within a conundrum.

  Whoosh…

  And suddenly, within this great silence, I think I get it! His Holiness has imparted to me the great secret of the Ages. Except it is no secret at all. On the contrary, it is obvious. It is the simplest thing in the world. I break into a broad smile. I chuckle to myself. I check my pulse. It occurs to me that I will never again be the same as I was before. And at the same time it occurs to me that nothing is different. I wish His Holiness would wake up so I can share my revelation with him, but of course he already knows all about it. He must know…

  Abruptly, Dalai Llama’s eyes spring wide open, and within his dilated pupils I can see the infinite expanse of space. Stars swirl into galaxies, quasars at the center of each massive galaxy that surround a central, super-massive black hole, each one ten thousand times the size of nothingness. No duality out here. Yet, I AM!

  “Well, this has certainly been a pleasant hour,” His Holiness tells me as if nothing has happened.

  And of course, nothing is exactly what has happened. I get it! Nothing—no thing. I get it!

  His Holiness takes a final sip of tea then stands to escort me to the door. I am grinning like a hippie on LSD. His arm crosses my shoulder, ever so gently. “You must visit me again sometime,” he says sincerely.

  “Yes, I would like that very much,” I tell him. My words are automatic, though, because I am a million miles away. No. Not miles. Not kilometers. Not anything.

  “Be well, Fizzy Oceans. Now go in peace and do useful work.”

  “I try, Your Holiness. I really, really try!”

  The Dalai Llama smiles beneficently.

  I get it!

  I GET IT!

  I first became aware of the poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī when I came across one of his poems during a project I was doing for Open Books. Here is the poem:

  I died as a mineral and became a plant,

  I died as plant and rose to animal,

  I died as animal and I was Man.

  Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

  Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar

  With angels bless’d; but even from angelhood

  I must pass on: all except God doth perish.

  When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,

  I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.

  Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence

  Proclaims in organ tones,

  To Him we shall return.

  And now I am on my way, courtesy of the ever-efficient Virtual Life transfer system (and here space and time are one and the same), to a personal meeting with the most famous Mawlawïhah Sufi poet of the millennium. Lucky girl I am!

  Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī—or simply Rūmī, as he is now known—meets me in the Anatolian city of Konya, in virtual Turkey. He is elderly but still vivacious. A white linen turban covers his head, but his beard is full and long and white. Over his shoulders he wears a green cape that descends to a hem that encircles his ornate slippers. His loose-fitting shirt is made of linen; his pants are gold satin. His black eyes are gentle; his mannerisms are smooth and subtle. As I approach, he places his right hand over his heart then extends his open palm to me.

  We are standing in the courtyard of the Mevlana Museum. In the backgro
und is a massive mosque, its minarets rising like needles to pierce the casing of Heaven. This is the world of Allah, and Rūmī is one of His primary messengers.

  Sitting upon a Persian carpet, Rūmī invites me to sit opposite him. He crosses his legs, one over the other, and I do likewise. Once we are both comfortable, he relates, “I was born in Persia, now called Iran, in the province of Balkhi. I lived the majority of my life under the Sultanate of Rum, and it was at the Sultan’s estate that I produced most of my poetic works. It was my son, Sultan Walad, who founded the Mawlawïyah Sufi Order, which is also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, famous for the Sufi dance known as the sama ceremony.”

  “I have always been fascinated by the Whirling Dervishes. I think many people are intrigued, but I also think that few understand the purpose of the dance.”

  “Samä represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One,” Rūmī explains. “In this journey, the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth, and arrives at Perfection. The seeker then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity, to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination in regard to belief, race, class, or nationality.”

  “In western culture, we have come to regard dance as an artistic expression rather than one of prayer or meditation,” I offer.

  “Samä is all of these,” he instructs. “After all, art is the one human expression that even attempts to speak the divine language. Poetry, dance, and music offer humans a vehicle by which we can approach God.”

  “So it is like Eastern meditation,” I propose.

  “Not exactly,” says Rūmī. “Eastern meditation is undertaken for the purpose of emptying one’s mind of all worldly thoughts, leaving only the divine to inhabit one’s consciousness. Samä is different; it is metaphor.”

  “You mean it’s a story?”

  “More than a story,” he relates. “It is an entire philosophy.”

  “A philosophy expressed by turning endlessly in circles…”

  “Not endlessly, but repeatedly.”

  “Can you explain the philosophy to me?” I ask.

  “I can write it in my poetry,” he answers. “And I can also express it in the dance… Can I explain it in words? Let me try.

  “The spirit, after devolution from the divine, undergoes an evolutionary process by which it comes nearer and nearer to Godhood. This is not only true for human beings, but for animals and plants, as well as all matter in the universe. Such unidirectional movement is due to the natural urge to evolve and to seek a union with that from which it has emerged—God. Do you understand?”

  “On an empirical level, yes,” I tell him. “But experientially…”

  “Which is why we must dance,” he says. He rises from his seat upon an ornate carpet and tells me to do the same. “Perhaps you also need to dance,” he says. “The steps are not difficult to master; it is the repetition that produces the desired effect.”

  “Do you think I can do it?”

  “You must try,” he implores.

  At the center of the vast courtyard outside the museum and mosque we are joined by other dancers as well as a troupe of musicians playing tambourines, cymbals and wooden drums with natural skins (I had always thought that music—and particularly dancing—was strictly forbidden in Islam, but Rūmī informs me that it is permitted in circumstances when the dancing and the music—always played on ‘natural’ instruments—is for the glorification of Allah; though to me, this seems like something different, more, as Rūmī told me earlier, like a metaphysical exercise, such as yoga or magick). I am given a flowing white dress to wear, and one of the dancers gives me a crash course in the proper way to whirl.

  “What if I get dizzy?” I ask, and they all look at me as if I am crazy. But I always get dizzy when I spin in circles; I thought that was normal.

  “Allow yourself to move beyond physical sensation,” Rūmī advises.

  The musicians begin playing a curious percussive rhythm, and the dancing begins. Round and round I go, ever so slowly at first, then gaining what can only be described as an inborn velocity. To my surprise, the dance becomes effortless; my body feels lighter than air. The more I whirl, the deeper into a trance I fall. I am unraveling everything I thought I knew. I am devolving, revolution-by-revolution, back to my source, my essence. Physical sensation dissipates into the thin Anatolian air; time becomes an asterisk. The cumulative history of the Ages unfolds before me—not only human history, but evolutionary history. I am human, yes, but I am animal too; I am bird and fish and mollusk, I am vegetable and mineral. I am the sun and the sea and the stones. Finally, I am without form altogether: I am pure energy. Is this how God feels, I wonder?

  How long I have been dancing, I cannot say. Time has no meaning whatsoever in this state. This is a different dimension altogether. Yet, slowly my momentum slows, and I know instinctively that this is the way of not only the universe we know, but the way of the multi-verse as well. Where am I? Am I still alive? I don’t know.

  Suddenly I regain physical sensation. I fall to the ground; I open my eyes. The planet is spinning (like a Whirling Dervish), but wasn’t that always true? Rūmī is gone. The dancers and the musicians are gone. The museum and the mosque are gone, too. I am back inside my body…at the fish market in downtown Seattle.

  4) War

  Why do people engage in war? Surely by now they understand the devastation, the suffering and the grief. Often, when it is finally over, hardly anyone can explain what all the fighting was about. Most wars are settled through diplomacy (which ultimately means compromise) rather than by some decisive military victory. The dead are mourned by their loved ones, lines on a map might change by a degree or two, old leaders succumb to new ones, new rules or laws are laid down, and then life goes on more or less as it had prior to the carnage. War has been going on since any human can remember—before Europe went crazy in the first half of the twentieth century, before Napoleon, before feudalism, before the Roman Legions, before Genghis Khan… Why?

  I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, and I think I know the answer. War is not waged over any single political or religious issue. It is not waged over injustice. Wars are certainly not fought for moral reasons, or even ethical ones. One might make the argument that wars are fought for material gain, and it is true that the winner usually profits handsomely while the loser is left impoverished, but that is not the reason either. The real reason that people fight wars has to do with our evolution: we are descendants of the reptilian species, and the lively and aggressive lizard lives still within our mentality, ever-present and waiting to strike, fearless, stupid, without the capacity to reason. Wars happen when reason (diplomacy) fails. Where does our higher consciousness go? Underground—deep, deep, deep underground. It takes a break, a breather, a masochistic holiday. We stop thinking, stop feeling, and stop listening. Our vision becomes as absolute as kill or be killed, fight or flight. We stop seeing the world in terms of metaphors and symbols; the color spectrum fades leaving only black and white as options. It’s the lizard—the infernal lizard—that has left us its legacy. We don’t know how to control it—at least not yet—so from time to time we thirst for blood, a taste we find bittersweet.

  I have contacted the emulation of Sid Messersmith, the founder of Poraxis Strategies and the creator of Sid Messersmith’s Battleground! It is a real-time tactics computer game that was released back in 1991 by Electronic Applications and won the 1991 Origins Award for Best Strategy Computer Game of 1991.

  The American Civil War application allows the player to control either the Confederate or Union troops during the Battle of Gettysburg. It can be played as a single scenario, or as a campaign of linked scenarios, either recounting the original history or exploring alternate possibilities. I have chosen to experience a historical enactment via Virtual Life, so what I will be watching, in effect, is a simulation within a
VL REP, one that mirrors the historical events of July 1, 2, and 3, 1863. Sid has enlisted several well-known expert players to execute the re-enactment of the famous battle.

  Rendezvousing in VL, Sid and I take flight and soar high above northern Virginia. It is the last week of June 1863, and it is hot. Very hot! The land beneath us is dry from drought as well as battle-scarred from years of warfare. Confederate troops march in the thousands toward their destiny in Pennsylvania, and as the column presses northward, many soldiers succumb to heat and hunger and dehydration and collapse by the side of the road. Yet the line moves onward to the sound of fife and drums, generals and their adjutants on horseback at the front, caissons following them, then the infantry, and finally the support personnel bringing up the rear.

  “In mid-summer of 1863,” Sid tells me, “General Lee had determined to move the war northward and establish a stronghold in southern Pennsylvania. His strategy was based on the assumption that if a presence could be established and maintained, then he could eventually attack Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or even Washington, D.C. And if he were able at some point to stage an assault on one or more of these important northern cities, then it might well bring an end to the war, the South, of course, prevailing in their bid for autonomy. So he concentrated his forces—seventy-three thousand strong—and marched them northward into the Shenandoah Valley. “Boots and saddles!” the command went up, and the troops moved out amidst thick clouds of choking dust, from their bivouac in Fredericksburg, Virginia en route to the Keystone State. Of course Lee’s vision was tenuous: establishing a stronghold was more easily conceived than achieved, as history now confirms. And what a bloody and heartbreaking bit of history it is!

  “Thank God it’s in the past,” I comment.

  “But never out of sight,” Sid laments. “Never forget, Fizzy Oceans, that history is alive. In a causative context, it is always in the present tense!”