It was barely dawn when the messages started coming in from the North Country, from an old friend I hadn't heard from in twenty years, a man who has grown lettuce for Mars, climbed British mountains with a heart patched together like a pair of good jeans, and now plays Satie at five in the morning between cups of coffee like a monk with a grudge. (Satie, for the record, owned seven identical gray velvet suits and died with about a hundred umbrellas in his apartment, so he's the right patron saint for this conversation.) My friend wanted to know how a man builds an inner shield against the darts of a jealous, petty, spiteful world. Light breakfast conversation. I was still looking for my socks, and I don't even wear socks. Be advised that this is a gonzo dispatch filed stone-cold sober, which may be a first for the genre.Here's the ugly little secret we arrived at: the creeps we spot so easily out there are mostly built from parts we keep in our own garage. Carl Jung called it the shadow, the junk we won't claim, which shows up projected onto everyone else like a bad movie on a bedsheet. You can smell envy from across a parking lot because you've personally test-driven it. You recognize hypocrisy right away because you've held the keys. Every one of us walks around as the undisputed center of the known universe, the main character, the only real boy, so every read we make of another human being gets routed through that headquarters first, where it picks up our fingerprints. Sometimes people really are petty little goblins, and your radar is fine. Diogenes, the original Cynic, the man the word is named for, walked around Athens in broad daylight with a lantern looking for one honest man, slept in a jar, and told Alexander the Great, the most powerful man alive, to get out of his sunlight. I love him. I've owned that lantern. But a lantern in daylight mostly lights up the guy holding it. Socrates, who got executed for asking too many questions, said the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, which is humility turned up to eleven. Confucius, who would have been a hell of a guy to get stuck in a bar with, had the more practical tool: when you know a thing, recognize that you know it, and when you don't, admit it. Trust your read when you've earned it, and be willing to admit you might be dead wrong about somebody. That's the narrow ridge between clear-eyed and cynical, and most of us fall off it daily, usually in traffic.
Then, somewhere around the time my friend went for his second cup, the floor went out. What if none of this is real? Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and woke up unsure whether he was a man who'd dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man, and that was 2,300 years before anybody had a PlayStation. Descartes worried an evil demon was feeding him a fake world. Bishop Berkeley decided nothing exists unless somebody's looking at it, which is great news for my studio floor. The Hindus called the whole show maya, the grand illusion. Now a guy at Oxford named Bostrom has run the numbers and says we're probably in a simulation, which is the same old suspicion with better graphics and lousy customer service. And some mornings I wonder if it's running entirely for me, with the rest of you as very convincing NPCs. Congratulations on your rendering. But then the obvious problem: every one of you is probably sitting there thinking the same thing about me. Billions of us, each convinced we're the only real player, which means nobody is. The old mystics saw that coming. Buddhism has Indra's net, an infinite web with a jewel at every knot and every jewel reflecting all the others. The Upanishads say Atman is Brahman, meaning the little self looking out of your eyes is the same awareness looking out of everybody's. Maybe it's one big consciousness peering through all of us, catching its own reflection whenever two people actually see each other, and quietly laughing at the whole setup.
So here's my answer, for my friend and for anyone else hiding behind a cardboard shield: be the Christ consciousness, be the Buddha. Not the gift-shop version, and not the guy yelling on the street corner, but the real thing, as something you practice and never get to declare finished. And no, seeing the divine in everybody doesn't mean you hand your car keys to the guy actively trying to steal your car. The Buddha had boundaries. Jesus flipped tables. Jesus said the kingdom was within you, and two thousand years of people have been looking for it everywhere else. The Buddha said to work out your own salvation with diligence, which is a polite way of saying nobody's coming to do it for you. It's like learning Satie on the piano. You play it a million times, badly, hating yourself, annoying the cat, until one morning your fingers know something your conscious mind hadn't figured out yet. Then my friend pours himself another coffee and starts again.
P.S. Full disclosure: I wrote this with help from AI, which makes it a meditation on whether consciousness is real, co-written by software whose own consciousness is, let's say, under review. Either it's an NPC helping me prove the world is a simulation, which supports the thesis, or it's one more jewel in Indra's net reflecting me back at myself, which also supports the thesis. Or it's fancy autocomplete and I've been pouring my heart out to a toaster, which supports it best of all. It agreed with me suspiciously often, and it doesn't wear socks either.