Dinosaurs on the Roof

 by Robert Reese

“By conceiving what you put before you to be projection only,
You do not rest in this.” 
-- Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only, Yasubandhu

Close your eyes. Imagine you are running past the same house daily for the past three years. The sun is coming up, but the air remains artic. It is a sun-shot, fall morning.  The days have turned golden and blue and cold. At this time of day, no one is about but you and your dog. Each day you have run past the same house with the same trucks and cars in front,  each of which have bumper stickers and small signs proclaiming the merits of Donald Trump and Mike Pence—now, three weeks after the election.  (In fact, the political signage was taken down the day after the election, then re-positioned after Trump refused to concede). As well, there are signs proclaiming allegiance to the N.R.A and, most recently, a bumper sticker announcing an alliance with the QAnon, the sprawling far-right internet conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against the U.S. from pizza parlors. Fundamentally, QAnon is a home for Americans who aren’t willing to stand down from their beliefs simply because those beliefs have been refuted countless times. QAnon is home for those who believe that certain pizza parlors throughout the United States operate underground child trafficking rings. There is almost no way to dress this up. It simply is what it is.

At the same time, I’ve not met (or even seen) the owners of said vehicles, signage and bumper stickers---but my mind imagines them huddled amongst interior signage, festooned in tattoos and leather, conjuring conspiracies that proves that liberals started the California wildfires as a massive Wiccan ritual that’ll hypnotize Republican congress members into making abortion mandatory for anyone who’s pregnant.

Despite the fact I’ve run past the house and the signs a dozen of times, my mind always feels like a condemned church with an attic full of bats each time we are in the neighborhood. At this point, a kind of fatalism sometimes kicks-in; and, typically for ten minutes, my own mind is captive to a vast torrent of noxious thoughts and beliefs associated with the signage and the people who mounted them.

This is a rudimentary Mind Only School story, which demonstrates the basic principle that what we believe is going on is not accurate, and what seems to be happening is only our own mind’s fabrication. The real circumstances are different, even though we are completely swayed that it is the way we believe it to be. We are so convinced that we don’t even bother to question it—we just assume it is so. And yet our normal, unquestioned sense of reality is infrequently what we think it is. So this simple story is about how believing what we think leads to suffering.

Portions of the Mind Only school is at the core of David Rabe’s novel, Dinosaurs on the Roof.  Set in Iowa, the novel opens with a striking scene. A lady, Bernice Doorley, knocks on the door of her neighbor, a younger woman, and asks her a favor: she anticipates being whirled-up in the Biblical Rapture that very evening, and hopes the woman will agree to take care of her pets after she vanishes. Bernice, is a fine comic creation whose train of thought during the course of the 24 hours covered by the book’s narrative highlight all the ethical and physical inconsistencies of Rapture belief — as well as the vagaries of consciousness characterized by the Mind Only school.

And then, last week, as I’m running past the same house with its signage, I hear someone closing the front door and look over a see a rational-looking guy with normal mustache in jeans carrying two pink Pippa Pig backpacks to a SUV. Though it’s cold, he’s wearing khakis with multiple pockets, the adventure photographer kind with large compartments with zippers and Velcro on each leg. He sees me, looks over smiling broadly and greets me with a jubilant “good morning!.” I’m a little shocked by my misperceptions but manage to return the greeting and pad down the road. We are just two neighbors, two ordinary morning guys, two parents greeting one another in the fall chill.

With the appearance of a human face behind the signs, all my ideas about the occupants drop away—as if I’ve been turned upside down and gently shaken until all the thoughts fall out like coins. Mind-Only School is suspect about the stories we live by, including the most nuanced accounts; stories so subtle we don’t even notice we are telling ourselves.  Completely unbidden, the afflictive emotions of greed, hate and delusion can arise from the misconception applied to my neighbor’s house and signs. When we hear about not believing in very subtle stories like this, we might have difficulty in challenging them. We might error on the side of our stories. Because of our predilections and latent tendencies we might see people, places and things as have “own-being” and because of that, suffer in our misperception. We misperceive based upon what the mind creates and divide the world into “grasper and grasped,” and hear dinosaurs on the roof.