Cosmic Horror or Divine Ecstasy?
I offended myself in the course of writing this
A note before we begin: I had the distinct honor of having a post featured in Inner Life. I’m a huge fan of Inner Life and it’s an honor to be part of that community.
One of the most spiritual/terrifying experiences I ever had was while canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. For those who don’t know, there is a chain of lakes along the border between the province of Ontario, Canada, and the state of Minnesota in the United States.
I’ve read a theory that religious experience may be a matter of neurons. That some of us are pre-disposed to spiritual experiences or feelings based on some extra ganglia or doodads in our noggins that orient us in that direction. If that’s the case, I got an extra batch, because I frequently feel things that seem sublime, for better and worse. I felt both terror and ecstasy at once on one sunny afternoon on a lake up there in the woods.
This was back before GPS was common and I was navigating us by map and compass. It was the end of a long day of paddling, and we were all hungry and tired. I held a map in my hands and tried to figure out which island hosted the campsite we wanted to retire to that day. My stomach growled angrily. My eyes squinted. The diamonds of sun that dappled the waves were turning into blinding pinpoints into my brain. My thoughts, instead of forming in my mind, seemed to be jumping over hurdles and crawling under barbed wire before they arrived at any conclusions. As such, we were lost.
After checking the compass that seemed to be playing tricks on me, and turning the map around like the useless propellor on a beanie, I stabbed a spot and set off. We paddled to the island and pulled up on the rocky shore.
“Wait here,” I said, and stepped out of the boat and made my way up a slope to check for our campsite. After some nosing around in the brush I had to concede that this place was not the campsite marked on the map. It must be a nearby island.
I got back into the canoe and pushed off. As I called out to our friends in the other canoe, “That’s not it!” I looked down to see a small frog sitting on a sunbaked stone, blinking into the empty sky with his legs rubbed off. When I had pulled up, the bow of my canoe had scraped into him, and now his reality was much, much different.
That poor, poor little frog. It was a shock to my God-nerves that resonated through my entire body. He was probably waiting for lunch, (a catastrophe in itself for any fly wandering by), and suddenly forces far beyond his comprehension changed everything. And the only explanation he got was his first time hearing English, from a beast he’d never encountered before, “That’s not it!”
Of all the horrors: malicious psychopaths, fearsome predators, creeping disease — I think the arbitrary indifference of random destruction scares me the most. A purposeless re-arrangement of events that wreaks havoc through indifferent means is the very definition of the abyss. It is the challenge of living in that universe that I find the most difficult.
I must not allow the horror of it all to be the defining attribute of life in this arbitrary universe. It is an intense feeling, yes, but I must not let the intensity of terror be the benchmark against which truth is measured.
Like everyone, I’m a narrative machine. I tell stories all day long: to myself and to others. The idea that there is no big story tying it all together is too horrible to contemplate. How do I contend with it? By accepting the fact that I simply do not know the whole story. The poor frog, if he did know the whole story, would not be consoled. Unless, unless, there is more to the story. For I only know his story through the lens of my own. And I’ve learned a million times that I don’t even know my own story, not really. Just bits and pieces that I force into a narrative to get me through the day.
But I’m merely a mote, dancing in a sunbeam, just like everyone and everything else. My hopes and fears are not the point. The dancing is the point, if there is a point. My dance will end, either by a capricious canoe or something else. To reach another person, to spot another mote in the beam and wave in passing, to blink into the sky no matter where I am, that’s what is, and therefore what matters. To find a way to feel OK in a world where frogs are maimed for no good reason, that’s the challenge. I must not allow the horror of it all to be the defining attribute of life in this arbitrary universe. It is an intense feeling, yes, but I must not let the intensity of terror be the benchmark against which truth is measured.
FREE LIFE COACH PRESCRIPTION
Don’t let the quantity of your feelings dictate the quality of your life. Horror is a cold shock, but it means nothing in the end. Search less for meaning and more for love. You will always find it, and it will become a meaning of its own.
Living by a better benchmark, hoping that you can too,
I am,
Your Free Life coach,
Sean Sakamoto
When I read today’s piece, I kept hearing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly,” in my head, and then De Niro in Taxi Driver doing the famous, “You talkin to me?” 🎬 scene. This was a doozy, Sean. Thanks 🙏🏻
thank you! wondeful