Truth

A cartoonist by the name of Ashleigh Brilliant, who was popular a decade or so ago (and still active, I find when I discovered his website just now), once wrote a comic I cut out and saved, the tag line of which was, "I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy." I think he may have been on to something.

I had a conversation with a man the other day who was adamant that there are not only rules that should be followed by everyone but that it is his moral obligation to point out to others when they violate those rules. He seemed rather miserable to me. Things weren't going his way. No wonder.

I think it's quite possible that the very definition of freedom is moving beyond the "ought" and "should" to an understanding of the sheer inscrutability and complexity of the human experience. I have had an inner conviction for most of my life that there is something called Truth which is incontrovertible, immutable, and knowable. I still think the first two may well be true. I am not yet prepared to concede that Truth is relative to each person's experience; rather, I think of it as more akin to the blind wise men and the elephant. You know the story: each wise man grabbed a different part of the elephant and then began pontificating on what an elephant Is—the one who got the tail saying it's like a rope, the one with the trunk like a snake, the one holding the leg like a tree and so forth. No matter what the wise men say, there is still an elephant standing there. But the last part, that Truth is knowable, of that I am no longer so sure.

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, we feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We deserve something better than resolution: we deserve our birthright, which is prajna [wisdom], an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity."—Pema Chodron.

"Sometimes spiritual matters are discussed in a cut-and-dried manner, as thought there were clear principles and one need only follow these principles, whose application is always precise, and all will be well. But life isn't theoretical, theological, or precise, and things are not usually as simple and clear as we would like them to be."—Norman Fischer

No matter what the truth of Truth may be, we must abandon our search for lasting meaning and plump instead for the joyful luxuriance of curiosity and Not-Knowing. But there is one thing I know to be true, and which was also pointed out to me in the writings of Pema Chodron: we must pick a spiritual path and let it take us where it leads. A woman I know is studying the dharma and Christian mystics and nondenominational enlightened beings and other spiritual masters, all at the same time. While I find this admirable in one way, I also recognize the impulse to seek answers everywhere and thus to find them nowhere. Since the only journey worth taking is inward, one must pick a guide and just go there. It's no use choosing a path and then looking for a different one as soon as the first becomes uncomfortable. Of course it's uncomfortable. That's the nature of the inward path. If it were cozy, we would never have left its comforts to begin with.   

Deep Water

I absorbed a disappointment at work the other day. A situation I thought would probably go a certain way took a twist that left me with a painful choice. What I decided, though I am sad about it, seems like the right way to go for the peace and well-being of the clinic. But what I really want to explore is this feeling of disappointment. It served to coalesce several lines of thought I have been focusing on recently. The first is a question I have been pondering for about as long as I can remember pondering anything:

Why does it seem to be impossible for us to be born happy, live happily and die the same way?

Let me first say that I have always had a certain mistrust for the idea that unhappiness is a necessary precursor to happiness. This seems to be a concept which many people take as a given, that in order to appreciate joy we must have sorrow and that the capacity for one is roughly proportional to the other. I find this, at best, reductive and facile. To my mind, it is akin to saying that one must live in the Third World to appreciate living in the developed world, or one must be divorced to appreciate marriage. And once we think about it seriously, are we really suggesting that the more we suffer, the more capacity we have for happiness? I find this ridiculous on the face of it. If I had a burn over 90% of my body would I therefore inevitably have an absolutely enormous capacity for joy (redcutio ad absurdum)? Of course, it's perfectly possible that this idea of the need for suffering in order to comprehend happiness might nonetheless be true, but I have never seen any convincing evidence to support it. (Though it is essential to the development of compassion, there is no denying that).

To my mind, the more important question is this: is it theoretically possible to live a life without emotional pain? I know it's not likely, but is it possible? We have all known people who seem to have a greater than average capacity for finding what is pleasant in life. Is there a place on the far end of that continuum where a person goes through an entire life without suffering?

I would contend that the answer is no. But why is this? I think it must be because in order to be living beings we must grow, and the capacity to grow comes about through butting up against our limitations, either external or internal. When this happens, we become frustrated and unhappy. We seek a solution or response that will alleviate this suffering. But the suffering must come first.

Let's take an early-in-life example. An infant is perfectly content to be fed, changed, burped, held, and put down to sleep. (I know, I know, they also cry a lot, but mostly they are brought back to contentment fairly easily). But at some point the baby "aspires" to something more, wishes to see more or move more. This is a frustrating impulse when the child does not yet have the capacity for controlled voluntary movement. The frustration leads to repeated attempts to get past the frustration by developing the skill required to overcome the barrier to the fulfillment of desire. A more subtle example from adulthood is when we wish for things to be a certain way in a milieu (work, for example), but the reality of personalities, administrative limits, and many other factors makes this impossible. This frustration is compounded by the fact that each person with whom one works (or lives, or whatever) also has a vision of a perfect environment which inevitably does not coincide with yours. Thus the development of a physical skill or the persuasion of language will not suffice in these situations to overcome suffering. Instead, the growth must be in the emotional and/or spiritual realm, where we learn to choose between acceptance, confrontation, or escape. As one of my mentors said, in every difficult situation there are only three constructive actions: change it, leave it, or accept it. We can all think of several other responses (bitch about it, get angry, hate the perceived perpetrator), but these are more or less purely destructive.

Another source of suffering to consider: when we love we will suffer. The Loved One will leave or disappoint or die. This is inevitable unless you die first, in which case the other person (or animal or whatever) in the love equation will suffer. Suffering is simply part of love. To my way of thinking, this fact deepens and reifies what passes between two or more people. But this is probably a subject for a post all its own.

So suffering is essential to our growth as thinking, feeling, loving human beings. Though some people seem to be born wiser than others, it still is true that every one of us must go through this process of emotional growth (anger, frustration, consideration, formulation of a possible response, trying out that response, evaluating and deciding on a future course if that one doesn't work). Wisdom simply isn't possible without it.

But wisdom is not the only outcome of suffering tempered by wisdom. I have been dealing with grief in several forms lately and while, if given the choice, I would have selected some other state of being, there is a distinct upside. Wednesday, when I was actively grieving the lost opportunity at work, I realized that the feeling of grief seems to open up a trap door to a reservoir of comfort. This is hard to describe, but I suspect most if not all of us have experienced what I am talking about. In Sailing Home, Norman Fischer speaks eloquently of seeing "to the bottom of the feeling, through the turbulent waters caused by your stickiness, to the calm clear depth". It is as if we have been living in the parched top six inches of our lives and only by going to depth, miles down—which requires sadness, anger, grief, pain, despair, betrayal, some strong stimulus—can we find the cool underground stream of our selves, a flow of being we hadn't even guessed existed. This is why, as I said in my last post, the way out is down. We must discover what is down there in order to go on; we cannot survive on bread alone, but must have the water of our deepest emotions to thrive. I suspect this is why, no matter how intelligent and well-informed they may be, young people (except those who have suffered out of proportion to their age) still seem rather callow in the view of those who are more mature. I'm still not recommending suffering as a hobby, but it does seem to have its uses.

Which leads back inevitably to the Four Noble Truths the Buddha propounded. The first is that there is suffering (or dissatisfaction). That reflects the discussion above, wherein suffering is an essential part of the human experience. The Buddha is not saying that all suffering is unnecessary, but that it exists for all of us. He could have stopped there; perhaps the Third Noble Truth might then have been, "So get over it". But instead he proposed a radical idea, that there could be an end to suffering. Considering what I have just been saying, doesn't this mean that we would stop growing at the point we stopped suffering? Not necessarily. What I think the Buddha meant is that suffering is useful to a point and then no further, that, in fact, there comes a time when we must transcend suffering in order to continue to grow. This reminds me a bit of how one must treat orchids; once the flowers have finished blooming, the entire stalk must be cut off so a new one can grow. But if you also cut off all the leaves and dig the plant up by the roots, it will just die. So a certain degree of pruning (suffering) is essential to our flowering, but then we must leave well enough alone and go deeper. This is the core of what we are doing in meditation and in studying the Dharma. True wisdom is coming to the point of no preference, where grief is not bad and joy is not good, but all is acceptable. That, I believe, is nirvana. 

The way out

What a difference a week can make! I am feeling very hopeful and strong today. I am content with my life and its course. What made this change? Many things, but I must say that perhaps the most important was for me to recall an aphorism I coined a few years ago: "The way out is down".

Whether we like it or not, the way out is down. When we are in despair or darkness, when we have to struggle just to make it through another day, we can strive to go up (cheer ourselves, turn to external pleasures to lift us up, try alcohol, drugs, sex, being with others, blame the circumstances or other people) but it doesn't work that way, as far as I can tell. We must have the courage to go down into the depths of that darkness to emerge on the other side victorious, to emerge into the light.

This is not  an original concept, by any means. Perhaps its most famous proponent is the poet Robert Bly, who writes and speaks about it quite a bit. His inspiration, in turn, is the world of myth and fairy tale, wherein the the hero or heroine goes down into the pit in order to find the light. This is one of the universals of storytelling. We know that Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and their coevals had to go into the darkness (of the forest, of the hearth, of the long sleep, etc.) before they could be redeemed. Hansel and Gretel could not be adults until they came through the woody exile imposed upon them by their stepmother (and what is that stepmother but an avatar of capricious fate, ever and again throwing us into the quagmire of our daily lives?). It may seem sick to cook the witch up in the oven intended for them, but mythopoetically, nothing else makes sense. The witch (which I suppose is a stand-in for our own insecurity) must be entirely destroyed before we can emerge to claim our birthright.

And we will never be the same people we were when we went into the shadow realm. Frodo Baggins was just never the same hobbit, though he was a wiser and kinder one, following his harrowing journey through darkness in many forms. Nor will I be, though that is perhaps what frightens me most. I don't relish the idea that I can and will change so thoroughly and that such a change is not within my power to choose. Yet resistance to that change is precisely what keeps us caught up in the circle of samsara, in the round of suffering that simply never ends if we don't learn the lessons available to us during such times of sorrow. Life IS change and to ride this rollercoaster is to be forever in the midst of it.

The first noble truth of the Buddha's path is that there is suffering (or, as modern translators seem to prefer, "there is dissatisfaction"). Our lives are such that the things which cause us to feel that something is amiss will happen over and over again. It's not a plot against us, it is just the way things are. Our car wears out or gets hit. We fall and break an arm. We lose a job. We divorce. A loved one dies. A cherished friendship does not last. We age. We grow ill. We face our own death. It happens. This is the stuff of life and the stuff that can lead to suffering, if we allow it to be.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We need to recall that the third noble truth is that there is an end to suffering. The fourth noble truth details the path out of suffering, but can be summarized in the simple word, "acceptance". If we can come to accept what comes our way as the reality of what is, our suffering will come to an end. This is not, I should emphasize, passivity. Often we should and even must take action to alleviate the suffering of ourselves and others, but acceptance must come first. Take a cancer diagnosis, for instance (though, to be clear, I do not now nor ever have had such a diagnosis). Though we may be angry, afraid, dejected and depressed by this, when we come to accept the diagnosis, we can find joy not only in the other aspects of our lives, but in the cancer itself. Hundreds of books (and even a few good ones) have been written about the wonderful teacher such a diagnosis can be. But it would be foolish to stop there. For most of us, in most situations, we will also want to use our newfound acceptance to guide us to study the disease and treatments for it, to realistically weigh our abilities and to do all we can to eradicate it. If we proceed in anger or fear, though, we do not give ourselves the benefit of the great wisdom that can arise with acceptance. And when the time comes when we must lay down our weapons and determine that the cancer will eventually take our lives, we can lie back in the arms of that acceptance to help us take the next step in our journey with love and calm. If we go through an experience such as that while railing bitterly against the unfairness of it all, we will not be able to harness the great peace of surrender.

This Part of the Journey

I just passed through another week of struggle. Fortunately, I have had a companion in a book I am reading, Norman Fischer's Sailing Home. I don't want to review the book here, but from the perspective of less than half way through, I can recommend it with all my heart.

What Fisher talks about with great eloquence is the fact of our journeys, the paths we must take away from our spiritual homes and back again. This is an essential journey and cannot be skipped if we wish to have any wisdom or comfort as we face the challenges of our lives. In reading his book, I have realized that the journey I am currently on is into the realm of the dead. I know that sounds like a downer, but it's just a journey and an essential part of everyone's path. Whether we like it or not, every life encompasses the death of people, other creatures and things that have meant everything to us, have been such an essential part of our lives that we cannot let them go without experiencing a sense of dislocation, as if the world is off-kilter and makes no sense. This is the land of the dead and is one of the stops on the pathway to freedom. You can only avoid this path by not loving anything or anyone that might go away (which is just about everything, of course). To love is to sign up for loss. This is not bad news.

Fischer points to one of the central tenets of Buddhist thought, the fact that in general we humans tend to think anything "positive" that happens to us is deserved and good, and anything "negative" that happens is bad and the result of something amiss. We arbitrarily assign things to these positive and negative categories and then believe our own classifications. Poverty is bad, wealth is good. Death is bad, health is good. Ugliness is bad, beauty is good. Rain is bad, sun is good. (I saw a graffito once that read, "All weather is good weather". This has stuck with me ever since as wisdom. Although I must say that a friend I shared this with replied, "Oh, yeah?", which is more or less irrefutable). When we convince ourselves that only what we like is proper for us to experience and what we don't like is the result of something amiss, we set ourselves up for (what else?) suffering. We must go through these experiences. Unless we die in infancy, before we develop this uniquely human ability to reflect on the possibility of loss, we will lose something we love, if only our blankey. Mommy will go to the grocery store; eventually she will die. Whether the small, reversible loss of infancy or the larger, irreversible loss of maturity, loss will come. Love will die. Dogs will die. Charms and tokens of our youth that we thought would protect us forever lose their power.

The actual Dave

My son once had a zebra named Dave that he loved inordinately. Dave was brand new and a very handsome little zebra. Dave went everywhere with Mitchell. Dave was the center of his universe. One day Dave could not be found. We looked everywhere, but Dave was gone. Many tears, much consternation; grieving. The next day we found Dave under some laundry in the basket (only Mitchell himself would have put him there).  But now Mitchell would have nothing to do with Dave. Dave had abandoned him and lost his authority as a totem of safety.

This sounds like a silly/sad story of a two-year-old's mentality, but how often have we mislaid our faith in places only we could have put it? Have we not given up on beliefs because we have found them to be limited or incomplete? Did we turn our back on teachers, mentors, friends, love, places, parents because we found they were not what we thought they were, without realizing that they never were what we built them up to be but something valuable and powerful nonetheless?

So this is my journey, a journey through the "valley of the shadow of death". Yet I shall "fear no evil", to borrow a couple of phrases from Christianity. The land of the dead is not an evil place, therefore I need fear no evil there any more than I need fear evil in the midst of pleasure. Both are necessary to being human. The prospect of death (that of others and my own) is not something to be endured until we get to the other side where the good times roll. Death is to be embraced and treated with love and respect, invited in for a cup of tea, allowed to sit in the best chair and drink all our wine. We must dance on graves or we will never learn the steps to the dance of joy.