Last week I misplaced my iPhone. I thought I would be clever and use the Find-My-iPhone app to find it, but because the phone was turned off (which is how I usually keep it, since I have the luxury of loathing intrusive ringing or vibrating telephones), Find-My-iPhone couldn’t. If it’s not in my pocket, then the phone is usually attached to the charging cord on the kitchen counter. After looking in every pants and jacket pocket I’d worn during the last week, rummaging through the trash, tearing my truck apart, traipsing around the perimeter of the house, I finally gave in and asked my wife to bring new eyes to the situation. She found the phone in six minutes.
Separated From Sanity
While on the surface a lost phone might seem a pretty mundane incident, a bigger issue underlying the experience turns out to be me separated from something I’ve spent the greater part of my life trying to cultivate: Brilliant Sanity. Brilliant Sanity is a term rooted in Tibetan Buddhism described and practiced most elegantly by Karen Wegela, a contemplative psychologist who was kind enough to contribute a chapter to my Deep Listening anthology. The elements of Brilliant Sanity turn out to loosely mirror the cycles of the seasons. In her crystal clear account, How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance, Karen identifies five aspects of Brilliant Sanity. The first is The Cultivation of Openness.
Radical Openness
Openness is associated with the color white and invites us to walk through the world with a sense of sacredness and an unfixated, flexible mind. Losing my iPhone and then not being able to find it no matter where or how hard I looked, resulted in me increasingly losing the luster of Brilliant Sanity. Anything that might have initially unfolded as sacred and flexible in the search soon narrowed into frustration and fear as I began considering what important personal information was stored on the device. Whoever had the phone was surely draining my bank accounts and ordering every single brain science book on Amazon, while I frantically wracked my brain. But then I caught myself and moved in to …
The Richness of Experience
The second quality of Brilliant Sanity: Appreciating the Richness of Experience. This quality is associated with the color of pure gold. The moment I became aware of the crazy-fear thoughts arising in response to the missing iPhone, I was able to pause, lighten up and even laugh: woolly-bully left brain had caught me yet again with its penchant for spinning out endless stories of disastrous futures. All that I knew for sure was that my phone was somewhere and I knew not where. And that’s ALL I knew for certain. Paring back to that simple fact then quickly led me to …
I Can See Clearly Now
The third aspect of Brilliant Sanity: the Wisdom of Seeing Clearly. This aspect is associated with the deep blue of a clear sky. It arises out of left brain, right brain, mind, body and spirit all operating in concert to drive enthusiastic curiosity and inquisitiveness. As we well know, I am deeply curious about how my mind and brain work. I play an ongoing awareness game: doing what I can to catch left brain trying to drive me Brilliantly Insane. Left brain is a master at this game; I like to think I am a worthy opponent. Catching it clearly at work during the Great iPhone Search was encouraging. It also then allowed me to move on to …
Expressing Compassion
The fourth element of Brilliant Sanity: Expressing Compassion through Genuine Relationship. This element is associated with a warm, vibrant red color. One bit of compassion I am able to get in touch with and express is towards myself and the deeply disorganizing response my brain has to loss. Not only the loss of my iPhone, of course, but the loss of friendships, parents, idealized visions, the sweetness of my daughter’s infancy and early years, of my own youth and untold, unrealized personal promise. Loss undergirds virtually every element of human enterprise and if I don’t turn away from it, but instead do my best to turn gently toward loss with softness and compassion, it becomes workable. It also then allows me to move toward …
Applied Effectiveness
The fifth aspect of Brilliant Sanity – Taking Effective Action. This aspect is associated with the growthful color green. Recognizing how being emotionally disturbed distorts not only my capacity to think clearly, but also my senses of vision and hearing, I am able to tell my wife of my plight and ask her for help. The first thing she does is go online and look at the ATT call log. No calls have been made on my iPhone that I didn’t recognize. Next she asks me to think harder about where and when I had it last. Together we determine that the probability is high that the phone made it home with me the last time I was out. Next she starts looking room by room, leaving no covered surface unturned. In my office she lifts up a picture of Bodhi the dog that the cats have apparently knocked into an open carton of Neuro-bliss. And there, under the dog picture next to the bottles of bliss, sits my iPhone.

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