“We are animals. Animals whose wisdom has extended so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For thousands of years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoiding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains the same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The question then becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?”
Well—indeed. Frank leaned forward, piqued, wondering what Drepung would tell them the old man had said next. That gravelly low voice, growling through its incomprehensible sounds—it was strange to think it was expressing such meanings. Frank suddenly wanted to know what he was saying.
“One of the scientific terms for compassion,” Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, “… you say, altruism. This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of … admonishment. To practice compassion to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion.”
This got a laugh, and Frank also chuckled. He started to think about it in terms of prisoner’s dilemma strategies; it was an invocation for everyone to make the “always generous” move, for maximum group return, maximum individual return … Thus he missed what Drepung said next, absorbed in something more like a feeling than a thought: If only I could believe in something, no doubt it would be a relief. All his rationality, all his acid skepticism; suddenly it was hard not to feel that it was really just some kind of disorder.
And at that moment Rudra Cakrin looked right at him, him alone in all the audience, and Drepung said, “An excess of reason is itself a form of madness.”
Frank sat back in his seat. What had the question been? Rerunning his short-term memory, he could not find it.
Now he was lost to the conversation again. His flesh was tingling, as if he were a bell that had been struck.
“The experience of enlightenment can be sudden.”
He didn’t hear that, not consciously.
“The scattered parts of consciousness occasionally assemble at once into a whole pattern.”
He didn’t hear that either, as he was lost in thought. All his certainties were trembling.
He thought: an excess of reason is itself a form of madness—it’s the story of my life. And the old man knew!
He found himself standing. Everyone else was too. The thing must be over. People were filing out. They were massed in a group at the elevators. Someone said to Frank, “Well, what did you think?” clearly expecting some sharp put-down, something characteristically Frankish, and indeed his mouth was forming the words “Not much for twenty-five hundred years of concentrated study.” But he said “Not” and stopped, shuddering at his own habits. He could be such an asshole.
The elevator doors opened and rescued him. He flowed in, rubbed his forearms as if to warm them from the conference room’s awesome AC. He said to the inquiring eyes watching him, “Interesting.”
There were nods, little smiles. Even that one word, often the highest expression of praise in the scientific tongue, was against type for him. He was making a fool of himself. His group expected him to conform to his persona. That was how group dynamics worked. Surprising people was an unusual thing, faintly unwelcome. Except was it? People certainly paid to be surprised; that was comedy; that was art. It could be proved by analysis. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything.
“… paying attention to the real world,” someone was saying.
“A weak empiricism,” said someone else.
“How do you mean?” the first person said.
The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or packing. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.
He sat there thinking.
Anna came in. “Hi Frank. How did you like the talk?”
“It was interesting.”
She regarded him. “I thought so too. Listen, Charlie and I are having a party for the Khembalis tonight at our place, a little celebration. You should come if you want.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I will.”
“Good. That would be nice. I’ve gotta go get ready for it.”
“Okay. See you there maybe.”
“Okay.” With a last curious look, she left.
Sometimes certain images or phrases, ideas or sentences, tunes or snatches of tunes, stick in the head and repeat over and over. For some people this can be a problem, as they get stuck in such loops too often and too long. Most people skip into new ideas or new loops fairly frequently—others at an almost frightening rate of speed, the reverse of the stuck-in-a-loop problem.
Frank had always considered himself to be unstable in this regard, veering strongly either one way or the other. The shift from something like obsessive-compulsive to something like attention-deficit sometimes occurred so quickly that it seemed he might be exhibiting an entirely new kind of bipolarity.
No excess of reason there!
Or maybe that was the base cause of it all. An attempt to gain control. The old monk had looked him right in the eye. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness. Maybe in trying to be reasonable, he had been trying to stay on an even keel. Who could say?
He could see how this might be what Buddhists called a koan, a riddle without an answer, which if pondered long enough might cause the thinking mind to balk, and give up thinking. Give up thinking! That was crazy. And yet in that moment, perhaps the sensory world would come pouring in. Experience of the present, unmediated by language. Unspeakable by definition. Just felt or experienced in mentation of a different sort, languageless, or language-transcendent. Something other.
Frank hated that sort of mysticism. Or maybe he loved it; the experience of it, that is. Like anyone who has ever entered a moment of nonlinguistic absorption, he recalled it as a kind of blessing. Like in the old days, hanging there cleaning windows, singing, “What’s my line, I’m happy cleaning windows.” Climbing, surfing … you could think far faster than you could verbalize in your mind. No doubt one knew the world by way of a flurry of impressions and thoughts that were far faster than consciousness could track. Consciousness was just a small part of it.
He left the building, went out into the humid afternoon. The sight of the street somehow repelled him. He couldn’t drive right now. Instead he walked through the car-dominated, slightly junky commercial district surrounding Ballston, spinning with thoughts and with something more. It seemed to him that he was learning things as he walked that he couldn’t have said out loud at that moment, and yet they were real, they were felt; they were quite real.
An excess of reason. Well, but he had always tried to be reasonable. He had tried very hard. That attempt was his mode of being. It had seemed to help him. Dispassionate; sensible; calm; reasonable. A thinking machine. He had loved those stories when he was a boy. That was what a scientist was, and that was why he was a good scientist.