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How Tenuous Our Grasp
A Diver's Philosophy
Copyright 1990 TrixiePixGraphicsNon-Fiction
Many years ago I heard a man speak at a formal assembly about UFOs. The discussion included the exploration of the theory that humans on Earth had been planted here, or "seeded", tens of thousands of years ago by intergalactic travelers, for whatever purpose, good or evil. I don't strongly subscribe to it, but it's a not uncommon notion. The speaker made the comment that he'd always had a feeling we weren't really from this planet at all. Earth was a hazardous place, he thought, and we did not naturally belong here.I pondered that comment for twenty years afterwards, knowing, somehow, that it had been a philosophical arrow shot downrange with skill and with conviction and insight, and that it had reached the bull's eye, too-- But I was finally to understand that it had, instead, pierced the bull's eye of the wrong target. It wasn't until years later that I figured it out.I'd been working as a commercial diver, and had been quite active in the field, attaining, even, a degree of fame and esteem. I'd raised 131 vessels off the ocean bottom, had saved some lives, and had endured some adventures and close calls. I guess all those close calls over the years had a cumulative effect on me-- for I began to waver in my interest in the profession, and I began to lose my nerve.Frankly, I was scared. I had buried a handful of divers, and had almost been one of them on too many occasions. When I was at work underwater I began to feel claustrophobic, to take in every breath cautiously and gingerly, lest even then some part of my complex dive system had failed, and that breath would be my last. I began to fancy that my regulator was malfunctioning, that it didn't "feel" right, that the air was coming more thickly from my supply, that I did not belong there, and that it was foolish to have committed my life to the deep, dependent on gear that seemed bound to break or wear out and leave me wanting. I began to wonder how it was that a man could strap a conglomeration of mechanical contrivances on his back and trust them to support his very life, all that he had, several hundred feet under the ocean in a totally alien environment. I couldn't imagine why a man would subject himself to such a thing. I longed to live again on the surface, where I belonged. And I quit diving.Some time later, finances forced me to think about going back into the field. I made a recreational dive in picturesque Lake Tahoe on the California/Nevada border to re-acquaint myself with the underwater world, just to see how it felt, and to see if I could somehow again find the nerve to work on the ocean floor. I was out of shape and out of tune with the profession when I made that dive. A critical piece of gear malfunctioned. And as a result I nearly drowned.I vowed then and there to find some other way to make a living. I would never, I promised myself, dive again.The night of my "near death experience" I lay in bed unable to sleep. Finally I settled into a fitful tossing, and at around 3 a.m. awakened gasping for breath. I suppose it was some subliminal, dream-induced, psychosomatic reaction to the choking and gagging I'd done earlier in the day when my air supply failed-- and as suddenly as I thought that thought I sat bolt upright in bed. It was one of those mini-revelations everyone has but often can't remember the next day or even twenty seconds later. But I knew it was the solution to the equation I had sought all those years with regard to our tenuous hold on this physical life, and the possibility that we hadn't come from here, and didn't really belong on earth. Of course we didn't! I could finally see it clearly! Our physical life on this planet is but a SCUBA dive.Onto our souls we strap, clip, affix and attach all manner of strange and wonderful, ingenious and miraculous devices-- and we energize the lot of it; we turn it on, if you will-- or perhaps that initial spark comes from some higher source. And we step forth from the precipice of another world, encased and entrapped in our susceptible paraphernalia and we fall headlong into physical life, for better or for worse.If all our gear and odd apparatus continues to function as designed-- if the heart beats and the kidneys purify and the muscles propel us through the relatively aqueous solution of reality on this plane; if our various systems are capable of continuously locating and ingesting, digesting and gaining energy from food, if our brains accurately coordinate our internal mechanisms and if our "wiring harness" is not accidentally shorted and the circuits are not inadvertently opened-- and if our lungs continue to bring in the oxygen that will sustain us here, just as the SCUBA bottle allows us to breath underwater, then our bodies will continue to live in this unnatural place.But if all or any of that marvelous engineering fails we must support it quickly with replacements or repairs-- or else return to the dimension from where we might have originally come as alien explorers. We are but a breath and a heartbeat from death even as we sit in our comfortable chairs and read this article-- just as I am, at the bottom of the sea. There is no difference whatever.We live our lives seeing our individual conclusions as a far off destination, somewhere over the horizon, at the ends of long tracks. But in reality we run parallel to it all the time, only an inch away, every second of every day. As I sat upright in bed that night I knew I would no longer fear the delicate and temperamental gear that supported my life in the depths. Why, I had been relying on such equipment for thirty seven years, every moment of my life on earth, and had thought nothing of it...Some system of mechanical equipment would continue to support my physical body underwater, which would allow me to fulfill my financial contracts there. --Just as my body, here, in this place we call "life", would continue to support the physical manifestation of my soul so that I could fulfill the mysterious contract I have with existence in this ocean of humanity. It is so unspeakably simple.And when some small part of the overall device fails, as it sooner or later must for all divers and for all humans and all beings whose exploration of time and space and dimension depends on some mechanism extraneous to their spiritual essence, I will simply return to my natural state, to the place from whence I came.
