200. The Five Invitations

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No reason

There could be reams of good accounts of "unconsciousness" and I wouldn't know about it, but the final House episode of season two, "no reason," is the only thing I've run into that mirrors my experience. The entire show, except for the first and last scenes, are what House imagines in what we have to assume are a few moments of seeming to be unconscious after getting shot. Sure, it makes me curious to watch the first episode of the next season, but more than that I like that it depicts a timeless dream world. 

I'm going to have to watch it again with the commentary to see what else they have to say about the ideas presented here. 


Not a thing, as it turns out. The writer/director was doing the commentary and talked about everything but this. And here's something interesting, there are several things here suggestive of Inception -- layers of hallucination/dream; a talisman (in this case a bullet instead of a top) that lets you know you are in a dream and not in reality -- yet I can't say that the House episode is derivative since it aired in 2006 and Inception in 2010. Could the TV show have inspired the film? Don't really care.

I was hoping that David Shore would at least have commented that the entire story, including what House's antagonist in the episode (the man who shot him) says is all contrived by House. House could have remembered the case, where he saved the wife, but he has to be imagining the rest of the story. He could be still working out where the case they are working on could lead, but the details are imaginary. 

But, again, it isn't the details of the dream that interest me, though they are interesting and revealing about House's character (something else Shore doesn't go into). It's the manipulation of time. The dream is supposed to continue for days, though his "awake" time in the dream is probably only something over a half hour. But the time House is unconscious dreaming this, is only a couple minutes. And even more to my experience, his "unconsciousness" is experienced as anything but.

Debunking the Madeline

I think the cookie gets too much credit for Proust's adventure in memory. Yesterday into the night we had thunderstorms and the same weather pattern is around today. No lightning as yet, but the air is unusually humid. In past years I've responded to that distinctive rain on hot pavement smell, which has taken me back to the suburban street I grew up on in Louisville. But just now, leaving my gym, the pavement was dry but some quality of the air took me straight to the country club swimming pool I spent so much time at during those same years... and I'm pretty sure it wasn't chlorine.

It makes sense that it would be a quality of air, or the steam off a tea, that would penetrate your olfactory apparatus and trigger smell related memories. Maybe the scent of the madeline, mixed with the tea, played a role, but I suspect it was mostly the tea.

The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski

A book, by one of the people who established Zen Hospice here during the AIDS epidemic, about death, dying, and living. I've just finished reading the introductory sections, the chapter about the first "invitation" comes next. But he's already done something I'm not that happy about. 

As he is clearing the decks of religious dogma and terminology, he writes the following,

I will use the simple term Being to point at that which is deeper and more expansive than our personalities. At the heart of all spiritual teachings is the understanding that this Being is our most fundamental and benevolent nature. Our normal sense of self, our usual way of experiencing life, is learned. The conditioning that occurs as we grow and develop can obscure our innate goodness.

Being has certain attributes or essential qualities that live as potentials within each of us. These qualities help us to mature, to become more functional and productive. They fill out our humanity and add a richness, beauty, and capacity to our lives. These pure qualities include love, compassion, strength, peace, clarity, contentment, humility, and equanimity, to name a few. Through practices such as contemplation and meditation, we can quiet our minds, hearts, and bodies, and as a result, our ability to sense our experience becomes subtler and more penetrating. In the discovered stillness, we are able to perceive the presence of these innate qualities. They are more than emotional states, though we may feel them at first as emotions. It might be more helpful to think of them as our inner guidance system, which can lead us to a greater sense of well-being.

Perhaps this connection of Being with well-being is behind his choice of the term Being, but surely he must know it is a loaded term in philosophy, dragging ontology and the very nature of "thing-ness" behind it on a rusty choke-chain, like an abused dog with firmly planted feet.

And does Being only consist of Gauri qualities without a single Kali quality in sight? I ask for my friend Michel. If I was running a hospice with a high percentage of dementia patients, I would encourage Gauri qualities too, but how honest is that?

Of course this is also a sort of explanation for the approaching death character changes Dostoevsky describes in The Brothers K. He would have preferred a more Christian expression of this phenomena, I suspect, but he would get the idea.

These aspects of our essential nature are as inseparable from Being as wetness is from water. Said another way, we already have everything we need for this journey. It all exists within us. We don't need to be someone special to access our innate qualities and utilize them in the service of greater freedom and transformation.

So we are uncovering the ontological core of ourselves here. The goal of this book (just as it was with The Brothers K) is to encourage us to, like Zosima, discover and live our true nature even before we face death ourselves. I have to admit this suits me, my character or Being finds all this pleasing, and giving it a Zen context makes it even more attractive. But, again, my friend Michel is chucking bricks this way and Kali -- who you don't want to mess with -- seems to be supporting him much the way Athena supported Odysseus.

In summary, this looks like it will be a much juicier book than the last one.