On Little Cayman Island, the shore drops off so gradually from the beach that here, around half a mile from shore, the sandy bottom is still only around thirty feet below us, its natural whiteness shimmering pale blue through the limpid tropical water as we view it from the skiff. Then with unexpected precipitance, the luminosity of the sand ends suddenly right at the edge of a trench of profound depth with steep sides like an ancient river canyon. It is into that trench that we are about to dive.
No one goes to Little Cayman Island to do anything but dive—that and a bit of catch and release bonefishing. It's just a small scrap of land with a couple of rustic lodges dedicated to scuba diving and nothing else. My wife and I happen to be the only guests, not just at our lodgings, but perhaps the only guests on the entire island since the other lodge is empty at the moment.
The dive master--a teenage kid--and I had gone out on a few dives previously, and after he saw that I had the knack, he'd led me on a follow the leader chase through some caverns and passageways of the kind where you might get lost if you don't know the way out. It was fairly demanding scuba diving, and the kid had twenty-five years on me, but I kept up. The fast-swimming was a bit out of the ordinary but still within the sport diving limits. The dive arranged for today will be something else entirely. We are about to break all the rules.
He'd proposed a descent into the trench, carrying battery illumination, to visit a black coral forest far below. Black corals are believed to have mystical powers and medicinal properties and nowadays are exploited also in the form of jewelry. This latter use, unfortunately, has led to a depletion of these amazing animals that are among the oldest living creatures on Earth. Individual living specimens of black coral more than 4,000 years old have been found, and living colonies like the forest we were going to see may have been around for thousands of years longer.
There is, however, a small problem. The depth limit for sport diving on regular air is 130 feet, but the coral forest only begins to come into view at twice that and extends perhaps hundreds of feet deeper. Going that deep will be risky—in fact very risky--but I’m hot to do it. I was, in those days, a bit mad that way. I liked taking chances.
We agree on 280 feet maximum and make the calculations. We’ll have only two minutes at that depth. Staying longer would demand a decompression stop on the way up—half an hour hanging on a line fifteen feet down, breathing from extra tanks placed there in advance. Neither of us is up for that. And nitrogen narcosis—the rapture of the deep—will begin to set in at 130 feet or so, getting ever stronger as we descend, so there will be that to deal with as well as the darkness.
Over the side of the boat we go, descending until we are standing on the sand 30 feet down. We check the flashlights, give our gear and gauges one last gander, exchange a thumbs up, and drop into the trench. I face the canyon wall. There’s plenty of light here near the surface, and lots to see. The idea is to manage your buoyancy so as to drift slowly downwards while taking it all in. Soon it will be very dark, and the flashlights are all we’ll have for seeing.
As we descend, I become aware that the canyon wall contains countless separate niches, large and small, and each of those niches comprises a world of its own—a system of living creatures unique from every other niche. The wall is very close to me—just beyond arm’s reach. As I pass one of the larger openings, perhaps the mouth of a cave, a world-class barracuda, maybe five feet long or even more, swims out, seemingly without effort, and stops directly facing the glass covering my eyes, just a foot or so away. He studies me. His stare is emotionless. His rows of fang-like teeth shine in the sunlight still penetrating from above. I feel a momentary frisson, a quick dose of dread. I am larger than his usual prey and don't really expect to be attacked, but he is big and fierce, and I am out of my element here. We drift downwards like that together for a few long seconds. Then in an instant, he is gone.
I become fascinated with the details of each niche. The more I look, the more I see. Every niche is different, and each one constitutes a little interdependent world of its own filled with life. The nitrogen high, just beginning to come on, sparks the feeling that all this means something. I don’t think I’d ever heard the word “nonduality” back then. That term took off only later, in the 1990s. But all I see seems to fit together seamlessly. Every niche is filled with aliveness—a multitude of individual animate creatures each doing its thing.
Some people like to imagine that no individuals "really" exist. What an idea! Of course, we exist. That's what fills the niches—individuals, like that barracuda, all ultimately connected to lives everywhere on Earth, because even the flapping of a flipper half-way 'round the world can affect the environment here in the trench, however impalpably.
Nor do I imagine, as some people seem eager to believe, that the existence of these living creatures depends upon human awareness of them, as if those niches, teeming with life, did not exist until a couple of scuba divers happened upon the scene. Contrary to popular belief, stoked by the foolish declarations of self-described teachers such as Deepak Chopra, and his ilk, quantum uncertainty does not speak to this question. Quantum mathematics deals with an infinitesimally tiny level of being, not large objects like corals and barracuda.
Nor are those creatures necessarily an expression of what some people like to call “Universal Mind,” which is a concept entertained by human minds, not a fact–not by my epistemological lights. Do you know what “Universal Mind” is, or even if such a thing exists? I don’t.
Sign on to such metaphysics if you like. I see that wall of life straight on, not through a screen of learned precepts and dogmas such as “nothing really exists but consciousness,” or only “God” is real, or this is only a dream, etc. Those words have nothing to do with the moray eel slithering out from its hidey-hole aiming to devour a tiny scuttling crab, also trying to make a living in his one and only little niche. This is aliveness—life and death. If you prefer to pretend otherwise, well, you have every right.
By now I am feeling quite psychedelicized, and tell myself to be sure not to forget my air gauge, my depth gauge, and most of all, the clock. I look to my left, and my companion is there shooting me a “how’s it going?” gesture. I flash him a thumbs up, and we continue drifting downwards.
At 200 feet, we turn on the lights. At 250, I am raging high. Every object revealed in the beam of the flashlight seems to radiate a significance beyond conception. The entire universe seems to be flowing and changing. The second hand on my watch appears to be advancing impossibly slowly, and my eyesight is getting slushy. I am hallucinating too. I feel myself on the verge of an entirely altered state in which there would be no remembering the gauges or the clock.
My companion points his torch down, and there they are, the black corals, extending to the limit of our feeble flashlights and beyond. I won’t even attempt to describe the mystery of that moment in the murkiness. Two minutes later, we begin our ascent, which demands slowness, so the nitrogen dissolved under pressure into our blood can evaporate out little by little without bubbling into joints or the brain. Eventually, our heads break the surface into the tropical afternoon.
Back in the boat, I feel tired but exhilarated. The kid seems happy too. Then it dawns on me that he had made that dive before, perhaps countless times. In his rather empty life on that rather empty island, he’d just been waiting for another diver crazy enough to go down there with him so he could get high.
Nice story. Agreed - I get so sick of the "human consciousness and beliefs are all that matters" ideas. It's a really foolish bit of conceptual solipsism. We and our viewpoints are only the most infinitesimal bits of an inconceivably vast and mysterious universe.