Miss Buddha

by Ulf Wolf

  Then a small bell—also a temporary arrangement—rang, and that (so they had been told) meant one minute to go. They would come and get her when it was time.

  And then the door opened into a room that had stayed quiet for the last sixty seconds. “Follow me, please, Miss Marten.”

  She did so.

  :

  They told me there would be seven hundred people in the room, and well over a hundred thousand through the university video network. Also, for the first time, there would be a live international feed courtesy of the Sorbonne. Apparently, USC had agreed to that.

  The room itself was filled to the bursting point, some even shared seats, by the looks of it, those standing were crammed shoulder to shoulder, not very comfortably. Probably close to a thousand, all told.

  There, where I had expected to find them, were Ananda, Melissa, Clare, and our industrious Agent Roth. I smiled at them, and all but Roth smiled back—still busy matching patterns and sensing whether all indeed was well. Still looking out for me. He is a good man.

  The rustle of the crowd died down, and I set out to wake some sleepers and steer some seekers.

  “There are some nine million different species of life here on earth, most of them beetles, as it happens—some 350,000 species of them. Don’t ask me why they are so popular. And don’t ask me who counted them all.

  “Life, in a word, is everywhere, from the seventy or eighty trillion cells that make up our human bodies and the one hundred trillion or so microbes that make our stomachs (yes, for each and every one of us) their home—and without which we would not be able to digest food—to the 12,000 different species of round worms, to the 4,000 or so different species of mammals: life is everywhere. In water, on land, in air.

  “This home planet of ours is literally teeming with life.

  “Much can be, and has been, said about all this life, about its many similarities and its many differences.

  “The one thing, however, that is rarely pointed out, is the one thing that all life has in common, apart from being life, of course: life eats. All life here on earth, to survive, has to eat. And the sad thing is that for all but the most basic life forms—including most plants—life eats itself.

  “We call this hunger—a whip so much stronger than sex ever was or ever will be. For while the sexual urge is all focused on tomorrow, a new colony of cells and microbes to declare a homestead when the one we’re occupying gives out, hunger cares little about tomorrow, it cares only about now.

  “Hunger. Sufficiently severe, it will drive even the most tranquil relationship into a feeding frenzy. It will kill anything that opposes it, for death is never, not for any living thing, a viable option (and I guess that pun is intended).

  “The truth is that this Earth of ours—and any other world where this tragic equation is in play—would be a peaceful place if we did not have to eat each other.

  “This absolute necessity to eat—for there really is no other option, you either eat or die—is the root of defense, protection, hatred, wars, killing.

  “Seeing as our physical shells are not what we in truth are, eating is an obscene need that embroils every living thing on the planet, at least every alive thing beyond plant life, which survives just fine on sunlight, water, carbon dioxide and minerals, thank you—mainly nitrogen,” she added as a clarification, “for carbon dioxide and water combine to sugar, which plants love.

  “Happy, indeed, is the algae who simply needs carbon dioxide and sunlight. Why was life not satisfied with that? What was life’s need to evolve?

  “I don’t really know, but evolve it did, and as life forms grew more complex, as larger and larger cell colonies networked into larger and larger bodies—all the way from the tiniest insect to the blue whale—we could no longer make due with sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and minerals. We needed, and looked for, a shortcut, and the best shortcut available was either the plants, which in their eagerness to grow, built a pretty hearty diet for us mammals—ask the cow, or the deer, or the gorilla for that matter, they all do very well on plant food—either plants or other living creatures.

  “Perhaps we should have settled with plants as food. That makes for a nice progression, logical—beautiful, even. No one gets hurt, no one has to fear for his or her life. But, alas, this was not to be.

  “I don’t know that anyone has discovered precisely how and where, but at some point some life form or another discovered that an even shorter shortcut to getting at food, was to eat another of your own (or similar) kind. Why eat plants, which you then have to laboriously digest and reconstitute or reassemble to those proteins and other building blocks that go to make up your body? Why not eat the already constituted proteins in some living thing smaller (albeit most often quicker) than you? Why not chase it down and consume already prepared—why not call it pre-digested plant food in the form of these smaller animals. So much better, so much easier to digest and absorb, so much easier to assimilate.

  “I don’t know where and when this happened, but I do know that today this has become the norm: only the more tranquil of our species (or any species for that matter) eat plants: the rest eat each other.

  “And here, at this uncomfortable truth, at this very junction of not having a choice but to kill you because it’s either you or me, spring all immediate ills of this world. For it is either your body or mine that will survive, and from my view I so much prefer it if the surviving body was mine. Therefore, sit still now and let me eat you.

  “And if it won’t sit still, you’ll chase it, you’ll chase it even with your last breath, because you have to, have to, have to catch it and eat it, or you are the one who will die.

  “There is no more horrible an equation in the world, at least none that I know of.

  “Perhaps an answer would be for everyone to go vegan. Yes, that would solve some of the problem, but it’s much too late for such a simple solution: too many species other than man resort to the same shortcut, eating their smaller—or dumber—cousins.

  “Kill or get killed. Dog eat dog. Survival of the fittest. Kill to eat. Kill or starve. Kill or starve.

  “Pick your motto, it will serve for this, yes, this terrible circumstance.

  “Compared to hunger, sex is as nothing. You can defy sex as an urge—and many do—it will not kill you. Defy hunger as an urge, and it will.

  “Kill you.”

  I pause here to measure the impact of my words. To perceive whether the outrageous truth of what I am saying is actually reaching these people, reaching them all the way. Touching their hearts.

  And in the silence that now seems to thicken I perceive that it does, that the paradoxical ugliness of nutrition, of life having to eat itself, is finding fertile soil in these people.

  Then I break the silenced to convey to them one of the most disturbing photographs I have ever seen. It was of a Russian peasant couple during the Stalin era, so close to death by starvation that they ate their children, remaining parts of whom could be seen in the black and white picture. But that was not the most terrifying thing about it. The most terrifying thing about the image was their eyes, four dark windows to the deepest guilt humans can feel. So deep that they must not, could not allow themselves to feel it, rendering their eyes as dead as stones. Two bodies, still alive, side by side, facing the old camera as statues of the deepest desperation.

  I hear several gasps as I manage to express the image, even a short shriek. Yes, I get it across well. The silence now not only thickens further but darkens.

  Then I say, “Yet this physical hunger is as nothing compared to the mental hunger of our minds.”

  I pause again to let these words sink in. Then I repeat, “This physical hunger is as nothing compared to the mental hunger of our minds.”

  Then I quote myself, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. Sp
eak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.

  “Mistaking the false for the true, and the true for the false, you overlook the heart and fill yourself with desire.

  “A very wise man said this about twenty-five hundred years ago, give or take. You can find them in Dhammapada.

  “The truth is that our hunger for world is deeper than our hunger for food. Our hunger for sensation is deeper by far than our hunger for sustenance.

  “But while we cannot still our hunger for food by anything short of food—physical hunger is not stillable by any other means, such is its nature—we can still our hunger for world by meditation, seeing in that deeper stillness that we intend our hunger, that we indeed choose that craving, that we make this world, and all sensations it offers, as food for our minds.

  “You never give yourself anywhere close to enough credit. You are in fact as powerful as any god, but you do an admirable job of hiding this not only from others but also, and mainly, from yourself.

  “Only the stillness of meditation offers you a view deep enough to see and experience this.”

  I look over at Ananda who nods in agreement, eyes closed. A faint smile, not quite as self-deprecating as I recall from the old days, but still quite humble. He knows the hungers, and knows their quenching.

  “Our physical hunger cannot be un-hungered, lest the body dies. The body will hunger, increasingly severely all the way to death. No matter how much we will it not to hunger, it will hunger, for we hunger the world to foster this physical hunger—it is part of our blueprint.

  “To un-hunger the body, we must un-hunger the world, for that is one hunger that we can master, the one intention we can retract, that we can un-intend or, more correctly, simply cease intending.

  “Ceasing the hunger for world is the essence of letting go. As long as we continue to crave and love our forms and feelings the world will maintain, for that is how we maintain the world.

  “Am I recommending the destruction of the world? Perhaps so. Why not? For when all is said and done, what has the world—and your hunger for it—given you in return but suffering (perhaps interrupted now and then by the pleasantly fleeting).”

  Then I decide to point at this craving from another angle.

  “They say that the heroin addict spends all of his remaining days chasing the tsunami of his first heroin high. He apparently never finds it, for all subsequent sensations are just degrees of the shadow cast by that one, first thrill.

  “Still, though experience constantly tells him he never will, he hopes to find its match and never ends this quest, he never lets go this thirst, this craving for that initial geyser of euphoria.

  “Our hunger for world, for existence, seems not unlike this. Our first taste of this created world of sensation must have been so inconceivably—and unmatchably—pleasant that we must find it again. So alluring that we to this day refuse to stop chasing.

  “And to this day we constantly fool ourselves into believing that we have no hand in this. We accept that we are born into it, that we for better or for worse survive through it, to then depart from it. End of story.”

  Here I pause again, if only to stress my next four words.

  “We are not victims.”

  I pause again, then repeat the words. Then elaborate.

  “We are not victims of this world, of our genes, of circumstance. We are the authors of our lives. Each of us is a physical fiction lived.

  “Someone said that dreams seem real as long as they last, and then pointed out that no more could be said of life.

  “This world is dreamed by us, this hunger is dreamed by us, this suffering is dreamed by us, and we have willed ourselves to forget how to stop dreaming.

  “It takes the deepest silence to see the source of this dream, but once seen, and fully owned, we again become knowing authors of our lives, and will then, finally, be able to cease our compulsive dreaming.

  “Not knowing that we are the authors of our lives is the true meaning of ignorance. Seeing that we are is the true meaning of enlightenment.

  “It takes the stillness of meditation to see this. Seeing this is the purpose of meditation. There is no other purpose.”

  The only sound in the hall is that of a distant air circulation system, the humming of some subterranean fan. There is also the almost un-hearable disturbance of the high up fluorescent lights. But that is all. The rest is a deep human silence.

  For a moment I consider whether to go on talking, or whether I have said enough. The silence tells me I have said enough. So I bow to the audience, turn, and leave the stage.

  :

  On their flight back from Paris to Los Angeles, Melissa demanded Ruth’s solemn promise that she would no longer lecture. Or appear in public.

  Ruth agreed in part: she would stop lecturing overseas, or at other US campuses or venues for that matter. She would not cease lecturing at USC, she made that quite clear. This, after all, was her job. And they would step up security. Agent Roth promised to see to that.

  Melissa was none too happy with this, but in the end saw that this was the only promise she would be able to extract from her daughter.

  At this time.

  :

  About an hour out from Los Angeles Ruth looked up from her in-flight magazine and leaned across a dozing Melissa to her left and said to Ananda who had the aisle seat, “Did you know that they named the body’s own THC after you?”

  Ananda, half awake, surfaced, “What?”

  “The body apparently can manufacture its own THC, and they named that after you.”

  “What is THC?” said Ananda.

  “It’s the active ingredient in cannabis. It is what causes the marijuana euphoria.”

  “And it’s called THC?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “The body can produce its own THC—well, the compounds are not identical, but near enough to serve the same function—and they named the body compound Anandamide.”

  “Anandamide?”

  Ruth held up the magazine to show Ananda the article. “Right here. Says right here.”

  “Anandamide.” Ananda sounded insulted.

  “Anandamide.”

  When Ananda didn’t reply, Clare, who sat behind Ruth, and who had overheard the conversion, leaned forward and said, for Ananda’s benefit, “It’s true. My sister did all this research into cannabis—she was quite the user, too, for a while—and that was one of the things she discovered.”

  “Anandamide,” said Ananda again. Still unhappy about being so plagiarized.

  “AEA for short,” said Ruth.

  “I prefer that,” said Ananda.

  “I have a question for you,” said Clare, addressing Ruth.

  Melissa, who was still trying to sleep, and who was not all that interested in the conversation, suggested that Clare and she trade seats, which they then did.

  Once she slipped past Roth (who was trying to sleep as well) Melissa pulled down the window shade and returned to her dozing.

  “What did you want to ask?” said Ruth.

  “My sister,” said Clare, “as I mentioned, was a great proponent of marijuana. She swore that it helped her see, and especially hear, things she would otherwise never have noticed.

  “Me, I only tried it once or twice in college—and who didn’t?—but I have to agree with her, it seemed to me as if time slowed down allowing you to perceive detail that otherwise would simply slip by in a blur.”

  Both Clare and Ananda looked over at Ruth. Clare clearly curious, Ananda a little amused, as if wondering how Ruth was best going to put this.

  This is how Ruth put it: “Life, at least here on Earth, needs some vehicle or agent to perceive. This agent or vehicle is the body. Even the tiniest of creatures, say the microbe, perceives not directly, but via the body.”

  Then she pauses for thought. Looks over at Ananda who says nothing, meaning he likes what he hears and is
now also, same as Clare, curious for more.

  “The body, whether that of a microbe, or insect, or animal, or human, is like a lens, or better yet, a prism. The eyes and ears or tentacles or other sense organs receive input from the objective world, waves of sight and sound, pressure of touch, and particles of taste and smell. Our prism, a chemical wonder if I ever saw one, then processes this input and presents it in digestible form to us, the consciousness that perceives.

  “I guess that what I’m trying to say is that we all view the world through a chemical prism. We could perceive the world without it—and that might be a wholly different world—but life chooses not to.

  “The neurochemical processes that allows us to see and hear with some sense of stability, in turn depend on the nutrients we consume. Day to day this is a fairly stable process. The body knows what to do with the molecules it consumes, and all is well.

  “Something like THC, a very short-lived cousin of which, as I just read, the body can produce—although never in quantities anywhere near what you inhaled,” nodding at Clare, “alters the chemical makeup of the prism, skews from normal, the paths of perception.”

  “Things slowed down, to a crawl,” said Clare.

  “Actually,” said Ruth. “One effect of the chemically altered prism is that your sampling of the present—for you do sample the present constantly, though never in real time—speeds up quite tremendously. Meaning that under normal circumstances you may sample a passing second, say, five times. Under the influence of THC, you might sample the same second fifty times, giving you the appearance that each second is actually ten seconds long.”

  “Where did you learn this?” said Ananda, impressed.

  “I’ve given it some thought,” said Ruth.

  “Wow,” said Clare, still digesting.

  “You’ll probably remember that things in your body, after you inhaled, began to speed up,” said Ruth.

  “They did,” said Clare, remembering.

  “Giving the appearance of slowing down,” said Ruth.