Rejecting Reptilian Reactionism

It’s easy to get in a funk about our day and age. Sometimes it seems people are stupider, meaner and more self-destructive than ever. We don't have to look to the Middle East to find irrational, vicious behavior. We just have to look at members of the political party across the aisle. Or listen to shock jocks across the dial. No wonder we are so desparate and paranoid at times, constantly reacting from the most reptilian parts of our brains. Our movies are vicious. Our video games are vicious. Our sports are vicious. Our news is vicious. No wonder the world seems like such a malevolent place. It's exhausting.

The key word here is "seems". We have to remember that the operative phrase of consumer culture is "Ha. Ha. Made you look." Drama, not subtlety, draws the most immediate attention and so, regardless of the medium, if the purveyors of that medium are jonesing for eyeballs because they have some sort of sales quota to make, then blood, explosions and pathos will always be the most readily exploited attention-getting devices. It doesn't mean that the world is predominantly made up of such elements. It just means that the filter of consumer culture is. When we forget this fact, we are most vulnerable to a meltdown of morale.

The other day my wife was caught in a long grocery line feeling a bit of this morale meltdown and also a bit of what she calls “hurry-scurry mind”— that sense of oppression you get when you're caught in a traffic jam of one sort or another with the lurching Godzilla of time hot on your heels. Then she found herself face to face with a baby being held by the woman in line in front of her.

Now you know how babies are. Whatever they are feeling comprises the entire universe for them . When they’re cranky the whole world is a hell realm. but when they are just being quietly interested in whatever is before them, they are so much more than just little beings. They are the essence of being. This is the way this child was. This infant was clearly free of the brand of temporary insanity that my wife was experiencing as it stared wide-eyed straight into her soul.

My wife decided to treat this moment as a gift and opened her mind to be touched by the baby’s unpolluted attentiveness. Very soon her heart was also quiet and, she said, she began to feel as if she were shining.

Opening to the child’s innocent purity reconnected her to her own. With a little skill, The Natural Great Perfection, as the Dzogchen Buddhists call it, is always available to us. So relax. As Suzuki Roshi once said to his students, "You're perfect. And you could use some improvement."