Blessed Are the Sleepy Ones, For They Shall Soon Drop Off
A young woman in a coma emerges into a half way state — a twilight zone somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness.
The other night, I was watching a documentary on brain-injured people on TV. One young woman in a coma emerged into a halfway state — a twilight zone somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. I watched her as several nurses tried to get her to wake up. It was so sad and so poignant. All she wanted to do was sleep, but they wouldn’t let her. The nurses kept calling her by name as they gently pushed and prodded trying desperately to get her wandering eyes to focus. But instead, she thrashed around like someone being rudely awakened from a deep sleep, swinging her arms — sometimes violently — trying to fend off her nurses so she could lapse back into her peaceful state. But they stuck to it, got her to a sitting position, and later forced her to stand for short periods, all the while talking to her and calling her name. Finally and most poignantly they put a toothbrush in her hand and she tried to get it to her mouth — mostly missing her mouth altogether and brushing her nose. But the fact that she seemed to vaguely understand what a tooth brush was for was taken by her helpers as a tiny but hopeful sign.
Then the scene changed and I was watching a beautiful young woman watching this same scene on a television monitor. Suddenly it was obvious that this vibrant person was the comatose girl in the video! A voice off camera said, “Do you find it painful to watch yourself like this?”
She broke into a radiant smile and said, “Oh no, I love it! It makes me realize how lucky I am. It makes me so grateful for who I am now.” With the help of her wonderfully patient nurses this girl fought her way back from her twilight world into life one small step at a time.
Of course this made me think of spirituality. The motif of “waking up” is one of the most oft used ways of describing the end result of a spiritual search. The Jehovah’s Witnesses actually call their newsletter Awake! Plato described what most people take for reality as little more than the trance-state dream of people chained in a cave watching shadows dance on a wall. The movie The Matrix of course preaches that we are actually living in a virtual world. Richard Rose, my Zen master, reiterated constantly that we are all “sleep walkers” and “robots” mindlessly wandering through life bumping into the furniture and continually cracking our heads on one stupid decision after another. And like the girl in the video, we are only dimly aware of our fate if we are aware of it at all.
Like the nurses in the video, all great teachers have one object in mind — to get us to FOCUS and PAY ATTENTION, and like the poor girl in the video all we want is to be left alone so our minds can wander endlessly in our twilight world of mindless distraction and waking sleep.
As I watched this video and thought of these analogies I realized that what I want to be is one of those angelic nurses from the video. As a nurse to brain-injured people, I cannot go along with what passes for spiritual teaching in most quarters. Most spirituality is not about waking up. It is about lulling people even deeper to sleep. Most teaching is nothing more than lullabies of reassurance nurtured by belief.
In order to help this girl, these nurses had to be — at least initially — her adversaries. No matter how gentle and well meaning her nurses were it was clear that she was EXPERIENCING their help as UNCOMFORTABLE — maybe even terrifying. Her therapy was the quintessential example of someone being forced out of her comfort zone.
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