Traveling by car is like watching life on a screen, writes Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his now classic account of a motorcycle journey with his 11-year-old son that is really an inquiry into values.“You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone.”

The secret of motorcycle maintenance—and of living a life that has value—has to do with drawing our attention to the quality of what confronts us here and now. No matter what we are thinking about or doing, according to Pirsig, we can cultivate a double awareness—attentive to our thoughts and the work we are doing, yet sensitive to the quality of what is happening, to what is unknown, open to the whole scene.

This was the exactly the kind of attention I wished I’d had that day on the Metro North train, six months after September 11, when my 11-year-old daughter talked about how she should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth– when she had hinted that she was capable of courage and sacrifice, of a life that was full of value and consequence unlike our contemporary life which seemed (go figure) more like a movie.

Alexandra had needed my presence just then, minus the words of wisdom. These days, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and thinkers in many disciplines are supplying evidence of an innate moral sense, and I knew on some level that day that my daughter had it and that she was reaching beyond instinct towards one of the Large Ideas that people have guided their lives by in every tradition and time, that human beings are born to set out on a quest and that (in the words of the founder of this magazine) “whatever purpose life holds it demands from him the discovery of his own meaning, his own totality and identity.”

Rilke once urged an aspiring poet to look at the world the way children do, from “the depth of their own solitude.” He believed that children can look at the urgent business of the adult world and see it for what it is, hollow and detached from real life. Even when kids are fantasizing up a storm, they have a way of staying close to themselves and connected to what is possible and what really matters. What I missed because I couldn’t muster the energy it took to be fully present was that Alexandra wasn’t talking about escaping but about transformation.

Right after the attacks, there seemed to be a new quality of presence all over Manhattan. One local journalist noted a general “suspension of distraction.” New Yorkers on the subways and streets were making eye contact, acknowledging that we lived in a shared world, surrounded by mystery. It was as if the shock of what happened had jarred most of us loose from our self-enclosed thoughts and certainties. There was widespread acknowledgment that we didn’t know anything about the way the world worked.

“The only thing we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom,” writes Tolstoy. Briefly, New Yorkers were wise. But this soon passed.

On Christmas Eve in Grand Central Station, I’d seen heavily armed National Guard troops and police officers surround a deranged old homeless woman who had pushed her shopping cart into the terminal to take shelter from a freezing winter rain. She’d stood clutching a broken doll, looking bewildered as the officers poked through the possessions that were spread out on the ground around her. I noticed one young officer in particular. His stance was stern but he had a pitying, questioning look in his eyes, as if he were watching himself and was incredulous that all that training and readiness to face danger had come down to this. Life can be like this, I thought as I watched him. It can carry us along passively, even when we have the best intentions.

In the days after the attacks, , a stencil appeared on the sidewalks all over downtown Manhattan. It featured a cartoon fist brandishing a rock and it read “Drop the rock,” It was startling to come upon this admonition to evolve beyond retaliation at such a time. Years later, I can see the fist of my own mind was gripping my own views so tightly I couldn’t see the truth when it appeared. The real truth of who we are and what matters is situational, I learned. It is embedded in the unique particulars of the moment. Hope speaks of Middle Earth while riding Metro North.

I have a perfectly good excuse, of course. Fear had rolled over the city like fog, and fear contracts the mind. Everything has a different quality up close, as Pirsig writes. Things stop being things. We see that even painful events have hidden reserves, surprises, truths, even joys that come to us like grace. Fear of a thing–Cancer, College, the Next Terrorist Strike—is another kind of suffering entirely, a sometimes subtle mental disease, a call to arms. I thought I was being open to Alexandra but it was more like I had the safety off my gun and I was ready to shoot.

We want to be aware and present and we don’t want it. We long to be liberated from our separation from others, from our children, from life as it is, yet another force in us pulls against it, insisting on our views and opinions, our selves. Thomas Merton compared the way our ego-centric consciousness splits off from the selfless awareness of Being with original sin. If this is the case, even single-cell organisms–even our own cells–are sinners, because they can discern the difference between self and other, reflexively defending itself against invaders.

Yet it is always also possible to go beyond the mechanical, beyond what has come before. These days, scientific studies are revealing that even genetically identical E.coli bacteria express individuality, behaving in different ways in identical conditions. Even in microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.

What does it mean to be open? What does it mean to seek a greater reality, to realize a greater identity? In the first “Focus” essay of the first issue of this magazine, D.M.Dooling writes: “Conviction and quest are not only not incompatible, they are essential to each other. Parsifal could never have asked the right question had he not been convinced about the existence and the primordial importance of the Grail.”

What are your convictions? How do you carry them so that it helps you on your quest? How do you open to the truth when it appears?

“I should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth,” said my 11-year-old daughter Alexandra as we rode the train down to Manhattan one February day in 2002. “I don’t belong in this time.”

Alexandra had been lamenting like this for weeks, ever since she had seen The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three screen adaptations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by director Peter Jackson.

Life in the Age of Middle Earth was no picnic, I told her. Most of people the people in the movie looked cold and dirty and terrified.

"But I could have been a gentile,” Alex said.

"Good news, honey," I said. "You are a gentile, and in a time and place where you can have medicine and hot baths whenever you need them."

"You know what I mean!"

I told Alexandra I knew she probably meant gentry, the nobles led by King Aragorn who transcended fear and rode out to do battle with the forces of darkness because they loved humanity and the good, represented by Gandalf, whom some people thought was really an angel. She nodded but stopped when I asked her why she didn’t think she could live with nobility in her own life in the here and now.

“Because it’s boring?”

Alexandra had mastered that drawling uplift at the end of a sentence that is meant to convey how lame a question is. She was clearly pushing away from the parental shoreline and heading into the deep water of adolescence. This may have been what spurred me to make my teaching more direct. I reminded her that in the real world, war is hell and violence never the answer.

“Don’t you think I know that?” she asked.

Six months before had been September 11, 2001. She knew. Making the remark had been like watching a glass fall and not being quick enough to catch it. I had always wanted to be the kind of mother who gave a kid the space they needed to discover what was good and true on their own. I wanted to be a “good enough mother,” a benevolent presence who lived by the adage “show, don’t tell.”

Real awareness and real presence are not separate from wisdom and compassion, I knew from experience. I had practiced being present and aware on and off ever since college (which was “way back in hippie days” according to Alexandra), where a professor had called me “a seeker of truth” (as compared to a seeker of a graduate school and profession). Awareness and presence would lead Alexandra to know what is good and true. I was sure of it.

After the catastrophe, fear and sadness rolled over New York like fog. Nobody seemed to trust their own instincts or senses or their own ability to reason or investigate anymore. I became fixated on helping Alexandra sink below all the voices and images from the media, to know that she could always take refuge in the present moment, in the sensation of being here and now.

My intentions were good. I wanted to teach my daughter how to return to the knowledge that life was good no matter what was going on, and that was the problem. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. My mind contracted around the idea of awareness and what I wanted for my daughter so that actually being aware and trusting Alex to express her innate wisdom and goodness were out the proverbial window. It would take a long while before I could actually practice what I preached, about being present for an unfolding mystery.

In the years to come, I would read about extraordinary advances in neuroscience. Extraordinary new brain imaging technology and pioneering experiments would reveal the “neuroplasticity” of the brain–its capacity to change its structure and function in response to experience.

Neuroscientists would explain that the brain is not fixed but a work in progress, fashioned and refashioned from its own idiosyncratic neural connections and capable (at least according to some scientists) of transcendence and the sacred. Researchers in other fields would explore how and why it is that people in all cultures have common moral intuitions, the same instincts for fairness, empathy, and loyalty.

Scientists in many realms are beginning to sound like Buddha (this equation has become so mainstream that even Bob Herbert, op ed columnist in The New York Times, made the point in his column yesterday), insisting that who we are and who we will become is not fixed but open, an unfolding process of relationship with our experience. We come from mystery. We are mysteries. Mysterious and miraculous truths come through us. Mothers know this but we constantly forget.

“This is might sound horrible to you because you’re my mother but I don’t want to have an easy life,” Alexandra said. “I don’t mind being in danger. I don’t mind pain, even.”

On some level, a mother knows that every child finds his or her own way to transcendence and God and what it means to be good or live a good life. For a few years after the terrorist attacks (which for my daughter also included a move from Brooklyn to the suburbs), The Lord of the Rings was Alexandra’s borrowed world, her shell, her sword and shield. It gave form to what was still formless, and expressed what she didn’t yet have her own words to express, which I thought was her belief that she might be capable of greatness, of being great-hearted in the face of the darkness of the unknown.

Alex had watched the final scenes of Fellowship of the Rings with tears running down her cheeks. I had been very touched to see her so moved by an epic spectacle. Where had this capacity come from?

Years later, I would read a newspaper article about an exhibit of Greek and Roman art that quoted a passage from Virgil, and it would strike me that Alexandra was like the Trojan hero Aeneas (even as I read it I marveled at many connections are made through serendipity). In the passage, Aeneas, fleeing the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and finds a temple for Juno under construction. Inside he finds a painting of the war that so astounds him with its nobility and precision that he starts to cry and, according to Virgil, “for the first time he dared hope for life.”

“It was only a picture, but, sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears,” Virgil writes. Some people might find it silly to compare an 11-year-old girl to a mythic hero, but Jackson’s film held the same power over Alexandra that ancient art is said to possess. It elevated her heart and mind. It gave her hope that her own life might hold greater, maybe even cosmic possibilities, and in a dark time.

One day years later, I faced a bitter loss that shook my faith in life. The strangest and most unexpected thing happened. In the depths of my grief and fear, I pictured King Aaragorn with sword held high riding out to meet the darkness and my heart lifted. Who could have predicted? My experience Alexandra and The Lord of the Rings forged a neural connection in my brain that saw me through.

Has anyone else had wisdom or goodness show up in an unexpected way? Let me know what you think.

The editors of Parabola thought it could be fruitful to use this space to chronicle and explore how the themes of this magazine resonate in contemporary life. For many months, we wondered how should we start the proverbial ball rolling, the wheel turning.  And it came to pass that we decided to begin at the beginningless beginning, with God.

The Germanic root of the word "God" and the word "good" are the same, and this root connection exists in other languages as well.  Human beings have worshipped gods as long as they have used language.  I wonder if God and goodness are inextricably connected?    

Plato didn’t think so.  If God had no moral reason for his commands, Plato reasoned, they were just divine whims.  If his moral laws did conform to reason, why not skip God entirely?   But where do those higher reasons come from?  These days, neuroscientists using brain-imaging techniques, psychologists using Web-based surveys to explore the moral intuitions of hundreds of thousands of people from different countries and cultures, and other scientists around the world are uncovering a rich evidence of, if not a gene for goodness, a moral intuition. 

Some suggest that living a good life has to do with connecting this rudimentary sense of  what it means to be good with higher ideas like the Golden Rule, which was discovered again and again through human history.   According to many, including Jacob Needleman in his book Why Can’t We Be Good?, such ideas come from a higher level of thought and represent a finer perception of reality and our possible human role in it than any of us could find on our own.  To truly be understood, however, such ideas must be taken on, body, heart, and mind, not just mused about.

"To care for one’s neighbor is to care for God and to care for God is to care for one’s neighbor," writes Needleman, by way of explaining a Hebraic vision of reality.  There are many neuroscientists who would make quick work of this ancient equation, assuring us that everything we think and feel and do is excreted by our physical brain and nervous system–no God, no free will, no being open or closed to anything higher or finer than ourselves.

When I was young, I was drawn to Parabola because it deepened my questions rather than handing me easy answers.   Now I’m not so young and my faith in the goodness of questioning has grown.  Holding a question rather than grasping at rigid certainties, invariably opens me.  It leads me towards a oneness with the truth of what is and sometimes towards the Oneness that is God. 

What do you think?  Please respond to this and future posts by clicking on the "Reply" link, below.