Last night I decided reality television is the clarion call of the apocalypse. This worried me because I hadn't packed a getaway bag. Or rather, I had, but there was so much stuff in it I couldn't possibly schlep it all without an entourage. So I called my cousin Hannah Leah and asked her if she would take it: the break ups, the make ups, the crying jags and the make outs. Only she was going through a turbulent split herself and didn't really have the space or the time. My parents wanted to shoulder my burden--well, they'd caused it, hadn't they?--but I felt that at 40 (40!) I should have the moxy either to deal with it or split it between us, which ultimately left me with just a third. Still more than would fit in an overhead luggage rack but this, this I could manage. Thusly, I bequeathed my childhood, teens and twenties to my progenitors and took my thirties to the mat. Oy, vata day!
What we deem to be reality is actually a figment, muzzy and overwrought, like a fax of a fax of a fax. When Descartes declared, "cogito ergo sum," he was iterating the catch phrase for the age of enlightenment in which reason/intellect ruled the day and the day was long. The body became separate from the mind and the mind disenfranchised from the spirit. I think therefore I spam. Or, more aptly, you Kant always get what you want.
Only here's where things get sticky: when the mind is free to form its big ol' ideas, it begins to create stories about the relative quality of its own being-ness. It reads. It remembers. It compares and despairs. It separates itself from the unmanifested reality. Okay, it's a fantastic if bumpy ride with some hot sex and a lot of great books, but it's a far cry from the Pancha Mahabhutas--the Five Elements--which are the only things on Brahma's beautiful earth that humans have NOT made up. They predate and postdate it all. Feel that fact.
I know, I know, you're saying, what about my cat? My cat's real. Only your cat's comprised of the Five Elements too: fire, water, earth, space, air. In manifested form the five elements become not only your cat, but also the tridosha--three qualities--whose interplay determines the nature of the individual. That's YOU. The awl of the mind is a powerful tool, so powerful it can spend six days pondering a sixty second exchange with one's boss or six years pondering a six week relationship, but space came first. Now matter how sorry grateful, regretful happy you may think you are, you simply are. It's mental but it's elemental. And that's the reality. As Popeye would say, I am what I-AM.
