Daily Blog - No No No! On suffering and acceptance.

Happening

Late afternoon, Lily just back from doing a yoga class looking blissfully happy, me typing on the veranda. As the sun drops below the hill, the change in the air is almost instant. It runs in like a cool stream.

A "mindfulness weekend" just over. Three classes: two on Saturday and one on Sunday, plus some work on a rock wall where a new prayer room is being built.

And what has remained after the two days?

Firstly, I have a black fingernail.

I bashed the end of my finger between two rocks so hard that the flesh, with nowhere else to go but out, burst through the skin at the tip of my index finger. It was a precise hit. When I first looked down and saw that, only a second after the bump, my nail was already dark red and surrounded with a trickle of blood, I thought I had snapped the nail off at its base.

But it's not that bad. The tear on the tip has been mostly pulled back into place with "wound closure strips." (I much prefer the old name: "butterfly clips", but these are better.) And the whole thing hasn't swollen too badly. The nail is black and the bleeding stopped relatively quickly, so I'm sure all will be well.

I just have to remember not to bump it, swat or grab mosquitoes, use a shovel, try to open jars, make a fist or use it to type.

What else?

I guess for me the most interesting thing Chim said was that as far as he can tell there's nowhere in any teachings that it says that becoming enlightened or attaining enlightenment means that suffering stops.

(For me this was nice to hear, because another guy who was up in Fremantle and seemed very interested in setting himself up as a guru and getting lots of paying followers - and, in my opinion, doing lots of harm to people along the way - let's call him Patrick - was very keen to tell people that once you thought what he thought you would live in a state of constant ecstatic selfishness forever more... No. Wait. Hang on. The selfishness part was me. Anyway... bollocks.)

"How could it?"asked Chim. How could a caring person not look around at the state of the world and not occasionally be affected with despair? How could anyone fall in love - love someone with their whole heart and being - and not suffer grief or sadness when something happens to that person?

No. As far as he can tell enlightenment means recognising the path to enlightenment. It's a funny Escher-like experience, a coiled spiral where the destination is the same as the journey. But in this context he's being more pragmatic. To illustrate, he talks about environmental sustainability, which suits me just fine. With sustainability there's really no point at which you can say you've arrived. No "Okay everyone, we're here now you can all stop working." Gardens still grow and need to be weeded, watered, harvested, composted... Bikes break and need repairing... Sustainability is an ongoing process.

If you "reach" sustainability, you simply reach the acceptance of and continued practice of the process.

Same same.

The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism - so: very basic stuff for Buddhists - is that life is suffering.. From there they go on to say that this suffering has a cause and the cause is attachment. A problem with a cause has a cure and the cure is letting go of attachment. And letting go of attachment takes practice. Now all this is sounding a bit dubious - as if it might head straight into the waiting arms of a Patrick-type who just wants to be free from all any real awareness of his or her interconnectedness with other people. Ah! If I have no attachment to anything I live in perfect bliss all the time.

No. (Again with the negative!) No. Suffering happens. You bang your finger so hard it pops open and turns black, or someone you know gets hurt or dies and you feel that hurt or loss.

Careful now - say the seekers of ecstasy - don't put your feelings on top of someone else's. How can you help if you take over and you start feeling hurt just because someone else is hurt? Doesn't that just multiply the problem or add your (fake) need for comfort to their real need for comfort?

Well, no. Conscious caring compassionate aware humans still feel. Being aware that someone else is hurting - feeling it - is not the same as selfishly pretending that it's your hurt.

So what's Chim proposing?

My basic explanation of it (and a quick analysis of the dumb questions I have asked) is that there are, in a sense, two kinds of suffering. One just happens. It's the bang on the finger or the loss of a friend. These things arise and keep arising, forever. Life throws stuff at you. Not always: some days are magic and it seems like life is flowing along superbly, but at some point something comes. Life is just like that. Change is guaranteed. And when it does come it may hurt a bit, but whether you just feel that hurt or you multiply it depends on the second kind of suffering.

The second kind of suffering comes from wishing that things were different. Wishing for a life of bliss is as sure a path to suffering as any I can think of. My brother has described this as a particularly American affliction: the cultural belief that America is the lucky country and everything there has the right to expect everything to go right all the time means they have boundless confidence and faith, but also that whenever anything goes wrong (which they invariably have not planned for) it is a massive disaster. A crisis of epic proportions ensues. Their whole belief system ruptures and they suffer horribly. Oh my God, they cry, McDonalds has run out of french fries for the day.

Being attached to the idea that things should be different is an entirely avoidable form of suffering. The thing I have struggled with for a while is whether or not this leads to acceptance and complacency. If I'm not attached to things being different, then why would I work towards making things different?

How could the Dalai Lama be Buddhist?

Having read Half the Sky recently, and thought about the plight of child soldiers, sex slaves, rape victims, child brides, women denied education or rights or who are burned because of inhuman attitudes, how could anyone be Buddhist? How could the Dalai Lama be Buddhist? Isn't it somehow a way of getting people to believe that everything's okay - "I can cope with anything because I'm not attached, I don't need things to be different"? Isn't the ultimately unattached person just sitting around saying things like, "Hey man. It's cool. Chill out. Take it easy. Relax. Just sit with me for a bit."

No. Again with the no. (I think I'd better start asking better questions!)

Suffering from wanting something to be different is different from feeling that things should be and working towards making things different. Not being disabled by your suffering - that is, feeling just the suffering itself and not the agony of crisis and despair that attachment can bring with it - actually enables clearer and calmer action.

I bash my finger. Once I've bashed my finger I can spend a while thinking about how much I wish I hadn't bashed my finger, and that I wish I had been more careful or that someone had seen what I was doing and saved me (utterly impossible, but with a sore finger sometimes you think irrational things), and maybe I could have gone on about how crap it is that  now I won't be able to open jars or lift heavy things.

Or I could just accept that I've bashed my finger. That's the situation. It hurts, which really just tells me that it needs attention. It needs a bandaid - or, on second thoughts, something bigger than a bandaid.

So what I take from Chim's comment is that being enlightened doesn't mean that hitting yourself with a rock doesn't hurt; it doesn't mean injustices don't hurt, or that the planet doesn't need attention. But it means that you are able to see things as they are and go from there.

Sometimes the words are tricky. Sometimes that previous idea is written "accept things as they are" and that can be taken two ways. I think the aim is to emphasise that "accepting" things as they are means not rejecting the reality of the situation: accepting it into your head without trying to whitewash it. If you accept it as it is then you neither deny it or make it much bigger than it is. To accept it in this sense is just to face it without any real fear.

The words that get used often are "neutral" and "non-judgemental." Again we can be on slippery linguistic territory. The other version of "accepting" can be read to mean "agree with" or "say it's okay". If I am accepting and non-judgemental, does that mean I'm supposed to be able to find a way to think that everything is okay?

No. Not at all. Obviously. (I've done it again. Still with the bad questions.)

If I see things with neutral, non-judgemental acceptance, then all that's saying is that I see them. I don't push them away or deny them. I just see them and then, because I'm not reacting, I can choose how I respond. I don't feel panic or the need to leap over myself because of the judgements I've made about how fantastic or horrible something is, so I can make a choice and decide to do something about it.

If I've whacked my finger, get a bandaid; if there's an injustice, sort it out; if the hill is covered in blackberry, eat one and then pull it out and come back tomorrow and go again. But don't suffer doing it. Just walk the path.

Observing

When Lily left to go and teach yoga this afternoon I jumped on my laptop as if with her not there I could do something different or be naughty. There was nothing different i really wanted to do, but it took me a while to realise that. Sometimes I am such a kid.

I walked into town and back. On the track was a little purple weed. Well, it looked like a weed to me anyway. In fact, what it really looked like to me was rocket. It had more prickly serrations along the edge of the leaves than normal wild rocket, and had no real scent, but the overall shape of the plant and the leaves was very close. I tasted some. It tasted a little like rocket but I wonder if that was a little bit of wishful thinking - me imagining that anything with a slightly bitter, peppery bite to it tasted like rocket - and the serrations put me off eating more than a tiny amount.

There was a beautiful burnt out tree along the path. The base was a huge hollow, completely burnt out on one side but the remaining part was like the base of a teepee. (Only this teepee had a natural opening, a window, in it.) The dry, old, grey wood had deep lines running down. I guess all natural things reflect each other in some ways, patterns that are elemental, but the tree had a watery quality, as if hundreds of channels lined its trunk. This perception was enhanced by the way the tree slumped and sagged at the bottom, widening out and folding like a sack. But above this sagging, hollow, one sided teepee the dead tree reached up and out like an arm wearing one of those old fashioned long-sleeved gloves which accentuated the fingers as they stretched so serenely (as was the style) for a cloud passing slowly overhead.

This was one of the best natural shrines I've seen, if that's what you're looking for. (This relates to a previous Daily Blog post.)

Things I'm grateful for

The night sky and how easily I can see it here.

The late afternoon sun, just before it drops below the trees.

Birds landing on the deck, specifically, but just being around generally. Little wrens or tits with matchstick legs, grey bodies the size of golf balls, upright blue tails and that energetic twitchy way of moving that wrens have. Common but hard to photograph.

The Bibbulmun Track is less than 100m from our veranda.

Molly the deaf dog from next door wandering around aimlessly but with complete freedom. Inside? Outside? Frank's place? The Origin Centre? Do I care? Does it matter? Really? She could be an aging ambassador for Dogs Without Borders.