Once every six or seven blue moons, I'll arrive at some appointment with a coke in one hand, purse in the other, and NO recollection of the drive there, where I parked, or how in God's name I managed to leave the house in such an awful outfit! I call this "going on auto," and it's a dangerous way to fly. Like a pilot who sets the plane on auto for a quick snooze (or a quick swig of booze), I space out while numbly moving through my mental, albeit high-speed, daily list of to-dos. I am Just. Not. There. Life is passing right before my eyes and I am on Pluto!
I've noticed that this never happens with babies or kids; everything to them is constantly new, carbonated, and surprising. They say miracles live in life's little details. Beauty lives in the details. Colors and smiles and sweet scents live in the details. After continuous bombardment of stimulus and sheer repetition, our senses numb to these finer points. A ninja combats this by treating every experience, every moment, with a blank slate - a newborn brain. She then commits to this state of conciousness, saturating the way she experiences her daily life by constantly heightening and expanding each of her five senses.
I read an article written by a Zen Buddhist about a meditation experiment performed on Transcendental Meditators, Zen Buddhists, and regular people. ( In transcendental meditation, one can really sink away deep into meditation, whereas the point of Zen is to stay eternally awake, incredibly present and alive to every moment. Stay with me here!!) In the experiment, the Transcendental Meditators and the Zen Buddhists were told to meditate, and the control group was told to sit comfortably and breathe deeply. In each group a loud, alarming noise sounded. The Transcendental Meditators didn't even register the noise. The Zen Buddhists registered it, then went immediately back to an intense calm, meditative state. The control group registered it sharply and then stayed alert for some time. Next, the experimenters applied the noise at regular, frequent intervals. The Transcendental Meditators still registered nothing. The Zen Buddhists kept registering it every time as if it were the first - with a sharp drop, and then back to a calm, meditative state. The control group reacted the same way they did to the first noise; however, they became less relaxed and more agitated each time the noise was sounded.
An interesting experiment - yet I'm using it as an analogy. Like the Zen Buddhists in the experiment, the goal of every ninja is to maintain this "newborn baby" ideal, to keep her senses completely alive to the world, never once going TOO far off the deep end (whether it's due to meditation or "going on auto"), to not be totally aware of her surroundings at all times. She is forever refreshing her ideal, wiping her sense-slate clean for the next stimuli.
Thomas Edison would test new research assistants by having them over for soup. If the candidate seasoned the soup before tasting it, he wouldn't hire them. He didn't want someone who made assumptions based on the past, habit or repetition. The lesson I gleamed from that? To treat every soup, every sound, every experience with all five senses. Expand my knowledge of the world. By keeping the five alive, living is like one incredible acid trip without the whole bad psychedelic tie-dye imperative.
Until next time,
