So Much for That Reality Tunnel

Sometimes It's Good to Get Out of Our Heads

I first learned of the term ‘reality tunnel’ many decades ago from the maverick writer Robert Anton Wilson. I adopted it immediately. It seemed vastly preferable to the usual term, ‘worldview,’ because it seemed fundamentally more fair-minded. ‘Worldviews’ look out at everything, as if from atop a high mountain. ‘Reality tunnels’ speak to the, uh, reality of walls and limitations.

Reality tunnels are how we understand the world. This is an immensely important undertaking for our species because of our highly-developed — some might say over-developed — neo-cortex. Cats are fine with a lap and some food. Not us humans, who need to make meaning like we need to eat.

We do this via a divide-and-conquer process. We decide that “this is so” and “that is so,” that “this is good” and “that is bad.” We carve up the world to make sense of it, and in dividing it, we conquer: Our reality tunnels are basically moral maps that we devise, or have handed down to us, so we can carve a path through the jungle of life and walk it with confidence, assurance — and, all too often, an abiding sense of ‘my team and yours.’

But reality tunnels are also jails. They can blind us to different views as well as to different, well, realities.

(If you find this sentence a bit confusing, take a heroic dose of magic mushrooms — then you’ll know what I mean.)

My political reality tunnel had two basic prongs: Faith in the future of democracy, and faith in the shared values and basic goodness of the American electorate. Both prongs imploded on Election Night. It felt like my world had come to an end; no, it felt like the world came to an end. Yet if I take a step back, I must acknowledge that this emotional reality does not correspond with the actual reality. For one thing, many people do not share my political reality tunnel, including some smart, thoughtful people I’ve grown friendly with. In addition, and more broadly, life goes on. People are still taking their kids to school, still shopping online and in supermarkets, still doing the business of bureacracy, still getting on with the business — and pleasures — of life. The sun still rises and sets daily.

It turns out that it was ‘only’ my reality tunnel that imploded. A psychologist would probably tell me that my grief crashed me down into my primary narcissism. Like an infant, I became the world.

In the long run, that’s not a wise or healthy place to be.

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In the late 1990s, I participated in a symposium on corporations and climate change with Stewart Brand, the creator of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog. At the time, Stewart was working with C-suite executives at Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s leading petroleum companies. He said something that has stayed with me ever since: “You’d think that for these people, maximizing profits would be the most important thing for them. It’s not, though. More than anything else, they’re committed to hanging onto their reality tunnel.”

I understand that more than ever now. An imploded reality tunnel is a terrible thing.

So what happens now? Where do I go from here? How do I rebuild my world from out of the rubble? Here are answers that come to mind:

• One day at a time, one step at a time, in communion with myself and in community with others.

• Embrace the moment. Love in small and useful ways.

• Practice resilience — insist on faith. My reality tunnel may have taken a licking, but it’s still ticking. I still believe in justice; I still believe in democracy; I still believe that the arc of progress continues to move forward. The struggle continues.

• Understand that there are reality tunnels beyond the one that imploded. We humans aren’t one single reality tunnel, we are a congress of reality tunnels. They intersect and overlap, and joy is the beating heart of one of them. There’s no value in being trapped inside grieving; it doesn’t help you and it doesn’t serve others.

Reality tunnels are like file folders inside a gray-matter filing cabinet labeled ‘This Is Your Neocortex Doing Its Thing.’ It turns out that there are realities beyond that filing cabinet, and they feel so real and true that one cannot help but come away from the experience believing that this is actual reality we’re experiencing and not just another reality tunnel.

This is where master meditators go and where enlightened people make their home.

I’ve been to that mountaintop, or very close to it. In an essay about this experience, I wrote:

In my vision, I was situated high on a mountain promontory. The view could have been from outer space — that’s how far removed I was from the hurly-burly of the here-and-now. I could see the entire span of human history and, for all I knew, beyond. Somehow I’d slipped the traces of the historical moment and had ascended to what I can only describe, with apologies for the grand abstraction, as a much loftier perch in the space-time matrix.

I wasn’t at the very top of the mountain. The peak was reserved for people whose egos had been completely shattered and who identified with their entire  beings with the All. That wasn’t me. I was still in my body up there. And my ego. But I was much closer to the top than to the bottom and high enough up for the individual dramas of human history —and even all of them in their entirety — to shrink into insignificance. The heated and often horrific issues of the day — the rise of autocracy, the denial of basic human rights, the crass and mindless cruelties we habitually inflict on each other — it was all of a piece, and it had been going on forever.

Even the existential horror of global warming felt emotionally manageable. The remarkable Cambodian culture of Angkor Wat had collapsed because of an environmental crisis. History was a grand dance, black versus white, good versus evil, and the dance, while deeply tragic, was also profoundly beautiful.

I didn’t feel indifferent to our current struggles. I was still rooting for the good guys, still hoping as ever for the light to prevail against the dark, but I had a buffer now and I felt less invested in the outcome. Whatever the outcome, good or bad, it would be just a drop in the ocean of history.

When I shared my experience with a friend, he responded that we can deal with life’s horrors in three ways: Denial (“it didn’t happen”), detachment (“it happened, but I’ll pretend it didn’t”), or non-attachment (“accepting what happened with equanimity, and an open heart, and some inevitable sadness”).

In my vision, I’d experienced non-attachment. My mind had escaped from reality-tunnel jail, and it felt great.

As I get on with the business of emerging from the rubble, I’ll be holding this ‘upmountain’ place in my heart, on my mindscreen, and in my aspirations.

Actual worldview, here I come!

Up and out! Now there’s a winning answer.