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Article: TRAVELING (Excerpt from Tarot of the Future)

TRAVELING [An excerpt from Tarot of the Future, Raising Spiritual Consciousness,Chapter 2, Arthur Rosengarten, Ph.D., Paragon House Books, 2018]

All But The Brain Dead And Fully Enlightened

Some many years ago a graduate professor of mine with expertise in Social Psychology and Buddhist Mind Theory, remarked during class—“For Westerners, there is one question, above all others, that most quickly triggers instant anxiety, no matter who is being asked, or what their age. What is it?”  

One student blurted out the obvious “fire!”  No, that was not a question, nor was it the correct  answer, the professor curtly said.  Another tried, “Did you notice a strange rash on your genitals when you woke up the next morning?” Funny, but still not correct.  A few more stabs yielded predictable concerns with respect to tax audits, root canal, penis size, wet dreams, embarrassing moments, etc., “the full catastrophe,” as you’d expect of graduate students in the mid-1970s, for such purposes. All wrong. The Professor grew tired of our weak attempts and came right out with it. The question is: “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”  It came like a thud. I thought it was a pretty lame answer, frankly, for such an inviting build-up, but upon closer examination, I supposed it did show some merit for the stated intent. But at any age? It sort of eclipsed around the meaning of “being” I figured. Interesting… But after some decades to reflect upon this curiosity,  I now think the better questions are “So who are you really, and where are you really going?”  

 At first glance, it seems innocent enough. “So, Mary, who are you really and where are you really going?”  The identity part might be the easier of the two, at least in the beginning (to which we will come back later), but where one is going is a perhaps little more thought-provoking.  Not in the obvious, immediate, or concrete sense of going places, rather in terms of direction, purpose, and destination in the grander scheme.  Where, in fact, are you going? Try asking yourself this right now: “Where am I going?” Surely you must be going somewhere? Whether or not it is precisely known, muddled, or unknown (at the present moment), it hardly needs to be said that human beings are wired to go places all the time and on many levels.  Its complete absence, on another level, calls to mind the Zen slogan “No where to go, nothing to do.”

Most places we are consciously going to, it turns out, fall into the category of physical destinations in outer space, or “PDs” in shorthand.  PDs are three dimensional places like the office, home, the park, the restaurant, the moon, etc., and this movement typically occurs volitionally around daily routines of ordinary life, and in present time.  For instance, you might say:  I am going to “the job I dislike,” “run some errands,” “pay the electric bill,” “visit a friend (or lover),” “shopping for shoes,” “to brush my teeth,” “take a run,”  “walk the dog,” “play my guitar,” “make dinner for my family,” “play mindlessly on the computer,” “the doctor for my bladder infection,” “drink a cold beer,” “meditate on kindness,” “the bathroom at the end of the hall,” “my daughter’s basketball practice,” “catch a movie I really want to see,” or “get some much needed sleep,” etc.  So many places go I!  Remove the “coloring,” however, the specific qualifiers, descriptors,  and particulars– and examine structurally just the rudimentary things that remain,  we find our collective goings to be rather finite and predictable: we go to work, maintenance and upkeep, socializing, sex, consumption, hygiene, exercise, care-taking, creativity, eating, playing, health care, mood alteration, bodily functions, parenting, entertainment, and sleep.  By no means a complete list, but these are among the common destinations today that most people in modern culture will identify as the objects of their goings.

But is this not obvious, and do mundane destinations such as these really strike terror just at their mention? No, they categorically do not! About what, then, is all the fuss? Weren’t we talking about the Tarot of the future? We will get to that, but there is more here to ponder…for we are ultimately talking about our life purpose; “where are we really going?” also asks what is the true direction and purpose of our movements in view of a future destination.

Physical destinations, as such, are not typically the category of goings by which instant existential anxiety is generated as posed by the cardinal questions. To the contrary, PDs are generally familiar places, unremarkable, and often satisfying. If anything, they provide comfort and pleasure, not distress. Whatever anxiety PDs may provoke, they will more likely fall into second order effects such as one’s attitude, preference, memory, and interpretation about them. “Did I do it well enough?” “Was it appreciated sufficiently?” “I wasn’t happy the last time I tried it,” “Will it come back to haunt me later?” etc.  

But the places we reflexively associate as our “going objects,” i.e. physical destinations in outer space, actually comprise only a fraction of the content that we have come to know as “our lives,” and occupy perhaps no more than 50% tops of our goings, (unscientifically, I would wager), and here I’m being over-generous.  If someone asked you simply “Where are you going?” on the PD level you might simply answer “I’m going to the store,” add some explanatory note, and think nothing more of it. 

As I write this chapter, a meaningful synchronicity has just occurred with what we are discussing. Namely, sad news of the passing of the legendary heavyweight boxer, Mohammed Ali, on May 3, 2016, in my opinion, among the great ones of our time, and like for so many, a favorite hero for me throughout my life. I find such striking parallels to what I am engaged in writing often to be fertile ground for momentary reflection. Scanning through major media coverage of Ali’s passing, I find an old interview with Ali back at age 35, given before a live audience in England… A kid asks The Champ what he will do when he retires? Ali’s answer speaks directly to our point here:

When I retire from boxing I really don’t know, but I want to say something here…Life is real short. So if you add up all your traveling, all your sleeping, your school, your entertainment, you probably been half your life doing nothing.  So now I’m 35 years old. 30 more years I’ll be 65.   We don’t have any more influence, we can’t do nothing much at 65—your wife will tell you that…when your 65, ain’t too much more to do.  So, did you know in 30 years I’ll be 65?  In those thirty years I have to sleep 9 years, I don’t have 30 years of daylight. I have to travel back to America, takes 6/7 hours.  All my travelling, probably 4 years of traveling in the next 30 years, about 9 years of sleeping. Television, movies, and entertainment, probably about 3 years of entertainment.  I might have 16 years to be productive.   So this is how we can all break our individual lives down.  What am I going to do in the next 16 years? What’s the best thing I can do?  Get ready to meet God.

Especially when we consider what changes when the sexy modifier “really”  is added to our formulation, “So where are you really going?” a light punch in the gut may now be discernable. Take a look.  If the answer is that you are frankly uncertain, you haven’t given it much thought, or instead you default back to another PD in outer space, then it is likely that a second gnawing question will soon loom in the outer hallways of your mind: “Is this all there is? Is this where my life is really  heading?”  To a retirement community in Scottsdale, Arizona or its equivalent. To visit all the PDs in North America you can with your husband in your receation vehicle (providing he’s still around)?  To your last confused breath on Earth, and then, hopefully, to cash in on the free rent and good food in heaven?  Is that really where you are going?

Travel

In this book’s terminology,  I substitute for the phrase: the act of going places, a better, technically more accurate, single word, namely, “travel” or “traveling” as in “Where am I traveling to?” The most basic definition of ‘travel,’ is simply “moving from one place to another.“  It applies both to outer space and inner space. We are traveling constantly, and on many levels of travel; remaining perfectly still seems nearly impossible (assuming you are alive), for all but the brain dead or the fully enlightened, the alpha and omegas of complete stillness.  

We are travelers by nature, instinct, functionality, tradition, desire, enjoyment, habit, wisdom, both involuntarily, and by choice.  We are always going somewhere, it seems, and this is as clear as the cloudless hour.  Even without a physical destination, we are moving from one place to another.  Travel, of course, by no means is limited to its ordinary modern connotation—the thing  we do on business trips or vacations to Europe, or to our sister’s house in Des Moines. The depressed person who spends hours of her days ruminating over a recent break-up travels in anguish looking for relief. The college student may travel late into the night in his books (and simultaneously, as well, an inner space of myriad fantasies which shall remain nameless), looking for knowledge, ideas, stimulation, and understanding. The profoundly spiritual or mystical among us may even be traveling in awareness to find enlightenment, or so they believe.  

The computer age has certainly played a dominant role in not only where but how we travel today; it crosses the borders of inner and outer space, and within its portals has rendered travel times and distances virtually instaneous and theoretically unlimited in reach. Software today is rapidly transforming the outer world that once was. Vast possibilities for new applications continue to be imagined and created with no end in sight, fed and nourished by the massive amount of human index data now available.  Driven by rapidly expanding access to ever-strengthening software and hardware capabilities, the Information Superhighway discovered at its inception, however, a critical and essential necessity and reliance that all travel requires to function: navigation tools.  As computer software today is rapidly transforming the world that once was, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, and called “the most connected man in Silicon Valley,” recently  observed in an interview on CNN:

All of human life can be thought of as navigation—you are navigating your career, you are navigating your education, you are navigating your personal life, you are navigating your entertainment, and you are navigating your health. And all of that navigation can now be used as “human index data to build entirely new kinds of navigation (CNN, GPS with Fareed Zacharia, May 29, 2016).”

Thus it is that we are all traveling in the purest sense, moving from one place (physical, virtual, or mental) to another, constantly, and with little guidance beyond our navigation tools. This intrinsic condition of being human is what psychologists call the “process ” of how we find ourselves to exist: moving through impermanence, and the constant flux of “traveling.”  In the Buddha’s formulation 2500 years ago, it is the very source of the first of The Four Noble Truths, Suffering (dukkha): 

Life in this mundane world, with its impermanent states and things, is dukkha, suffering, and unsatisfactory. 

The fact that all the constituents of our being, bodily and mental, are in constant travel (motion or movement), arising and passing away in rapid succession from moment to moment, without any persistent underlying substance, further begs the questions: “To where?” and also, “Who is it that’s going?” (or perhaps, “what” is it that is going?). The Buddha’s fundamental insight suggests that the very things we identify with, and hold to, as the basis for happiness, rightly seen, are also the very basis for the suffering we dread. 

All beings in whom ignorance and craving remain present wander on in the cycle of repeated existence, samsara, in which each turn brings them the suffering of new birth, ageing, illness, and death. All states of existence within samsara, being necessarily transitory and subject to change, are incapable of providing lasting security. Life in any world is unstable, it is swept away, it has no shelter and protector, nothing of its own. [Trans. By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi]

Excerpted from Chapter 2: Traveling; Tarot of the Future: Raising Spiritual Consciousness by Arthur Rosengartren, Ph.D. (Paragon House Books, 2018). Available on Amazon.

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