How Howard Hughes
Died for Our Sins


Imagine the wizened Howard Hughes mulling to himself:

Here all the while you thought you were an individual, but to your surprise you find that you are the eyes of God.

You though you were just an individual, but all the while your conscious mind, your individual mind, was completely unaware of all the glories and sins of the world that you were dragging along in your slipstream.

You thought you were alone, and then you discovered, when you looked into the mirror of the cosmos, that standing behind you, attached to you, forming the back of your head, as it were, were all the pain and suffering, all the brilliance, all the laws of nature, all the trivialities and contingencies that fill in the cracks of the world.

You thought you were alone, and once you stared into the mirror of the entire cosmos you saw that there behind you, there attached to you, there as part of you were all the souls that ever drew a breath and lived and died, all the living creatures large and small.

You thought you were just an individual, and once you stared into your image in the mirror of the cosmos you discovered that there is no individuality, that individuality is an illusion, a dream induced by the sleep of ordinary wakefulness.

You thought you were an individual, but then you discovered that all your thoughts were spun on a web that extends into infinity through all the words in all the languages that were ever spoken or written or sung.

You thought you were set apart, and then you discovered that every movement you make obeys all of the physical laws that every other action, every other event, obeys the same way, and you felt the harmony that all beings share.

You thought you were an individual, but then you discovered that the boundaries of your individuality were membranes so thin, so ephemeral, that your new vision of oneness blasted them away like flying pieces of sheet metal off those planes you crashed.

You know what happens when those Mormons let the film projector stop but the lamp stays on: the image on the screen stops, then the heat of the projector lamp starts to burn the film. It starts at the center, and then the hole gets bigger as the celluloid incinerates under the heat of the lamp. Finally the screen goes all white.

That's what it's like when the boundaries of the self are burned away. A white light floods your mind and you are left gawking at the sky. But the differences return. The damn Mormons wake up, splice the film, and rethread the projector. Things come into focus again. After seeing the unity of all things, all of the same old things are there: trash and suffering, airplanes and operas, spoons and elephants. Nothing disappears, and nothing changes. But your experience of the whole, and your place in it, is different. You are connected. You are not just "you" in the way you used to understand yourself. Instead you know that your ordinary waking mind is just the growing tip of a history that includes far more than you will ever consciously remember. You know that when you touch another human being it is like one part of the whole touching another, cosmic narcissism!

When you finally wake up and see the extent of your connectedness, you will feel an immense peace. After all, how could you ever fall through this immense net when you are part of that very net. But this peace will not last, for soon you will realize that part of what this net of relationships contains is pain as well as pleasure, suffering as well as delight, and that the narrow part of the whole body that resides in the body with your name can as well find itself in the pits as well as the heights. Enlightenment will not keep you from crashing if you don't fly right.

So in one sense nothing changes. The laws of nature remain the same. The rules of grammar remain the same. All the history that has ever happened remains the same. But at the same time, everything is different.

You are no longer alone, despite the fact that your body will age and die independently from all other bodies. You are no longer alone, despite the fact that no one else will pay your income taxes for you. You are no longer alone, despite the fact that some of your secrets are yours alone. The day-to-day trappings of individuality will continue untouched, and your powers of vision will not burn through walls. You biceps will not be any bigger and your memory for names will not necessarily be any better.

But once you have experienced your relatedness to all things you may become just a little more graceful. You may breathe just a little more deeply, and you may get fewer colds. Yes, there are psychosomatic effects associated with the peace that passeth all understanding, but they do not extend to leaping tall buildings at a single bound.

Narcissus never discovered these things because he looked only at his physical image. He had not yet seen his sublime image. But imagine that Howard Hughes, in his hermetic meditations, came to see these things.

- James Ogilvy, Chapter Five, "How Howard Hughes Died for Our Sins", in Living Without a Goal, A Currency Book, 1995.


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