The dance of avoidance... may I have this dance? Yes I may have this dance.
Tis a mystery, it truly is, the way I can so easily find ways off of the path. It's such a layered onion, so I have a notion to dig in some ways and peel back a few skins.
For starters, is there even a path? I assume that there is, but who's to say that it's the societally approved path of 'means to an end', nose to the grindstone, hard work yields the fruits of one's labors. We're certainly indoctrinated to think that way in this culture, and I've bought into it enough to frequently feel inadequate and unworthy due to my lack of consistent digging in.
But what if that whole notion is just a crock? What if it's like the Catholics being told that masturbation is a sin, which has led to a vast amount of guilt and self recrimination based on a bullshit premise? What's another example of that process? Maybe the fact that homosexuality is so stigmatized as wrong and a 'choice', which has led untold numbers of innocent people to hate themselves on a bullshit premise. Not to mention the bullying, beating and murder that far too many have been exposed to.
Once upon a time, slavery was viewed as OK, part of the natural order of things, and with this justification, millions of people were mistreated for thousands of years, all based on a bullshit premise. So yeah, it wouldn't be hard to conjure up plenty of examples of suffering based on the 'bullshit premise' premise. But is that just a rhetorical device for me to justify my way in the world? My way in the world being very present-tense oriented, rather than 'goals and objectives' linear. Perhaps....
Rather than try and decide the validity of the 'nose to the grindstone' approach, is there a different barometer by which I can measure my behavior? But hang on, who says that we are to measure ourselves anyway? Isn't that still a remnant of the philosophy that this life is some kind of pass/fail test and what is our GPA? That's probably true. Is there a way to approach this inquiry without resorting to good/bad, pass/fail dualities? That's a tough one, because I seem to be really oriented into that way of thinking. Something is either yes or no in my mind. It will take some breath and some fuzzing of the boundaries in order to blur those strongly etched lines.
I think of M at the moment, and her strong belief that 'nobody perfect, Richard'. I believe that in her Buddhist way, she was telling me something that I needed to hear, and it's coming up right now. Something about my tendency to judge and judge and look and look for the problems, as if by going down the list with a red pen, I would ever find what I was looking for. There is futility in that approach, and it took my connecting with a hardscrabble Chinese/Thai woman to finally start seeing that particular light. Nobody is perfect, Richard, particularly yourself, so why would you hold up that kind of mirror on the world. You might need to search for another looking glass.
And now I just had a moment of bliss, in which I had a strong sense that she is someone that I need to be connected with, that there is a piece that she provides me which I truly need. And the phone rings at that very moment, and there she is, calling in from Thailand, at the exact moment that my heart opened up, she was on the line. We had a brief and beautiful conversation, and now a minute later, I'm kind of buzzed with something that I can't really explain, kinda love drunk or something and opened up in an unusual way, gooey inside and emotionally happy, as if God had helped me to time my inquiry right to the second of the phone call. The timing was fantastically on cue, literally to the very second of my opening up, and there she was. Wow!
And the bigger picture of this very inquiry is that it's somewhat of a reprise of one of the most formative experiences I've ever had. I was fifteen years old, and I got into some kind of trance in which I tried to imagine what it would be like if all this didn't exist. If this world as we know it didn't exist. My thought was that it all seemed so unlikely that we would be here in life, so I tried to imagine an alternative. Would it be blackness? No, because that is 'something'. What would be behind the blackness? And I couldn't conceive of anything, because how would I? And the fact is, that we do exist. This world is here, full of life and light and extraordinary things at every turn. It took an process of trying to negate it in order to experience it in all of its radiance. Because that was the result of the inquiry.... a sense of awe and radiance and miracle that was so strong, I actually wrote myself a letter to remind me that this knowledge would be the key to my happiness throughout life. Yes I did, I wrote my 'older self' a letter, because I had the correct understanding to know that it would be so easy to forget about the 'miracle of life' and I had a sense that I needed to remember it in order to be happy.
This little writing assignment on 3/26/11 took on the same shape as the original inquiry. It started out as a process of negation. What if my negative thoughts are based on a bullshit premise? And in trying to decipher that riddle, the onion gets peeled and maybe what emerges is something that is beyond good and bad, something that has more to do with love and breath and the heart more than the head. And it's funny how it starts with the head looking at itself, turning itself inside out and ending up in the heart space. Hmmmmmm..... Ommmmmmm
