The Path of Disorientation
Disorientation, engaged safely, can create an opening to an ever-fresh world.
The other day I fell asleep at the end of a Zoom video call. I don’t think anyone noticed. I woke up, disoriented, staring at a video of myself staring back at me, not sure what was going on.
It’s hard to artificially create this type of disorientation (at least, safely and cheaply), so I took advantage of it. I enjoyed wandering around the house in a confused stupor for about five minutes until the disorientation wore off. Every angle looked odd. I had no idea what I was doing.
If we are not disoriented, we do know what’s going on. To the extent that we know what is happening, we are operating largely out of our expectations of what is happening. These expectations are with the whole body, not merely conceptual. For example, our muscular system embodies an expectation about gravity, and gets disoriented in situations such as a roller coaster.
Knowing what is going on is obviously useful. But knowing too well what is going on closes us down to the moment-to-moment unexpected. I find regular relaxed engagement with disorientation helpful in maintaining a loosely oriented stance in everyday life, as opposed to a highly oriented stance. A loosely oriented stance is more available to change direction, to notice the unexpected, and to enjoy the freshness of each moment.
I’ve often optimized foreign travel to be at the intersection of my family’s capability to be relatively safe and to be disoriented. But an interesting thing about travel: you can become oriented to expected forms of disorientation — “I don’t know where to eat…I know what to do in this situation: walk around a few blocks looking for a restaurant.”
My favorite kind of self-induced disorientation is via meditative techniques in low-doses. This creates a container of safety in which to become disoriented. Some people use psychedelics or intense, prolonged meditation to achieve fruitful disorientation. Both of these approaches have well-known risks, so caveat emptor.
Disorientation can be brought safely into everyday life by conducting such inquiries as “What do I not understand about what is going on right now?”. This is not a prompt to engage a program for resolving the lack of understanding, but rather an answerless opportunity to relax into the enjoyment of incomprehension! New insight often rests on the other side of incomprehension, and will resolve in time, but that time may be seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Allowing the incomprehension to sit without resolution creates a fertile field for insight.
The path of disorientation, when safely engaged, can create an opening to experience the world ever-afresh.