Air travel brings up a lot of strong emotions, most of them negative: boredom, scorn, pride, paranoia, anger, loneliness, stupor, smugness, anxiety, sadness, humiliation, tenderness, aggression, fear, frustration, sluggishness, exhaustion. Thus air travel is the ideal fuel for anyone who wastes most of her or his life doing meditation.
The meditator does not regard negative emotions as a turn off or as a sign that things are going wrong. Rather, they are the meat of your mind, far tastier than anything that is served on either side of the flimsy transparent curtain that separates the smug from the humiliated.
In particular, the basic emotion of living humans is anxiety—meditators agree with Heidegger that this is the bedrock. You should thank heaven and earth every time it comes up, like a flight attendant offering you a choice of chicken or pasta.
That all starts with the uncanny realization that this is not my beautiful home town, this is not my beautiful car—this is a slightly crappy airporter at 4am driving through the neighborhood I never go to in my life, absurd vocoding singers machinating on the radio, confusing street lights and colors, the slight sickness of an unfamiliar person's driving.
This feeling of basic anxiety is the meditator's best friend. As soon as you hit it, you should rejoice—you rediscovered the one emotion that never lies! Greet it like an old friend. Put that iPhone down. Feel it: it kinda sucks to be sentient, doesn't it?
An added bonus is that one gets some time with somewhat large amounts of anybody at all. We are often too careful about who we associate with and modern society encourages this in various ways. Air travel is a wonderful way to experience your idea of his idea of her idea of you, what some call the social I. Most people in this culture are way too identified with their social I. Most of the emotions on the list above would be seriously assuaged if we just picked up the habit of dropping our social I once in a while. They might even vanish. An awful lot of what one experiences, the meditator knows, is not genuine: it's just your idea of her idea of his idea…
But perhaps the ultimate prize for the yogi is that plane flight allows most everyone to experience all kinds of fear and panic, mostly around death. People who travel a lot—I travel a reasonable amount I guess—can become quite blasé about this attunement to death. But it's such a precious opportunity to realize that at any moment your skull could pop open at ultra low pressure, or you could be crushed by millions of tons of water. Or the front of the plane could break open and you would be falling, exposed to thousands of feet of air, revolving, falling.
And you are in no sense in control—a great similarity with going on retreat is that you have to do what others say and sit still. Who ever does that, who isn't a yogini?
Under such conditions, strong emotions arise. You watch a movie and weep at the corniest moments you never dreamed you would shed a tear at. You find food delicious or disgusting, in excess of how you'd taste it on the ground. You see, after you die, after takeoff, you still have your mind. Only it's not quite you anymore. There are a lot of memories, sure. But everything is slightly displaced. I wish I could assure you that it's just a blank void or heavenly choirs. I'm afraid it's going to be much more like a plane ride—without a clear destination.
You see the ground is not just earth, terra firma, but it's your body and it's you world and it's your connection to enlightenment. It's a big mistake to think that enlightenment lies in heavenly space. In that direction, for most people, it becomes a bad trip very quickly. Thank goodness we have ears and greasy fingers and use toilets. The Buddhas are in your body.
So when you have your body strapped into a chair and shot into space, you have a marvelous opportunity to see how you'll do in the bardo, the after death state. Most people who are not meditators pass out after they die, because the brilliant clear intensity of the first bardo is just too much. Then they come to in the bardo of dharmata, which is full of grinding, rushing sounds and strong emotions, like being on a plane.
The whole thing, from the fluff in your navel to the furthest reaches of the horizon, is your mind projection. It's you, and it isn't you. That roaring sound of death? That's your basic energy, your basic ignorance. You can't turn it off. You have to just enjoy the ride.
On a plane, you can practice noticing that you are caught in your emotions, then you can bring yourself back to what is really happening. You may not be on Earth but you still have your body. You are sitting in a chair. You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
A few weeks ago I gave meditation instruction to the Occupy UC Davis people, in a geodesic dome. The blue tarp was filled with sunlight. It was perfect—like sitting on a plane.
Exiting a plane is always awesome for a yogi. It's the biggest anticlimax ever. Anticlimaxes are good. You smile at the way you saw check-in and security and going to the right gate as the Stations of the Cross—or wondered why you so defensively covered your basic fear of death with a blasé sheen. You were simply traveling from A to B. Just like after you die, where you go from one life to the next.
I sometimes think that the bardo of becoming, which is what happens to you if you don't make it in the bardo of dharmata, is like being in Denver International Airport.
“Mr. Quisckhammer, Mr. J. Quisckhammer—Ms. F.E. Ferstle, Ms. F.E. Ferstle—please go to a white courtesy telephone.”
It's just an airport. Just like a supermarket is just a building with products in it. Just like a coffin is a box with you in it. Just like being married is just you committed for life to another human. It's only an airport.
I sometimes think that people who travel a lot don't just do it for utilitarian reasons—what a good alibi, right? I believe that they do it because something in air travel seduces them. And behind whatever is seducing them, is their naked mind, as odd and as shocking as a newborn baby.
And as you exit the airport, these strange heightened feelings go away. You put it down to alcohol or high altitude. Everything is perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened, and you have no idea who you really aren't.
Tim Morton is the author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature, as well as seven other books and over seventy essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music.