February 6, 2005
My friend Kathy has been grieving a loss, and that makes me think about
the process of grief, and about the difference between dukkha and suffering.
Suffering illuminates. It is spacious. It opens a door that allows
us to see the world more clearly. In our pain, through our pain, we
come to know how large our heart is. It is, if you like, spiritual,
bringing us a more profound relationship to the terms of life.
Dukkha, which I call distress (the fear, anger, guilt, envy, aversion
that may overlay suffering) is contracting, closes us in, sends us false
messages about the terms of life. We may need to go through it in order
to exorcise it, but the result is a casting out, as when you clean out
the attic: “I don’t need this any more.” It is a therapeutic,
not a spiritual experience.
When we are grieving a loss, we need to distinguish between these.
We need to enter into the suffering with our full being, because it
has great value. The distress we can stay with only as long as necessary
to see it, discard it as worthless. If we can’t discard it, we
should talk to a friend or a therapist. The suffering doesn’t
require a therapist—if we choose to share it with a friend, that
is only for “company” on a profound and valuable journey,
not to “fix it.”
Here (see the note for January 8, 2005), I am
using “suffering” to denote pain that is not dukkha.
March 10, 2005
A friend who meditates tells me, “My meditation is no good, but
it’s changed my life.” I love it. Of course, we all know
it will be better when she ceases to judge it, but we all know how hard
that can be, too. I assume she means it’s no good because she
still has a lot of thoughts. I don’t think that the temporary
cessation of our thinking is essential for meditation—clearly
not, since her life is changed. When I talk with friends who practice,
I still hold out that it’s important to keep that intention. Even
if you know you’re going to be thinking nonstop right up to the
bell, it helps to start with Thich Nat Hanh’s mantra, Clear my
mind of mental processes. Why? Because for many of us the notion is
profoundly, if unconsciously, ingrained that when we are not thinking,
we are somehow wasting our time. We need a counter to that conviction.
March 14, 2005
Most of us find uncertainty really difficult, and try to plot, plan,
leap to conclusions rather than endure its pain. I was talking with
Kathy at lunch today, and she confessed how difficult uncertainty was
for her to bear.
But uncertainty has two faces. Not knowing may mean that something
unthinkably awful may happen. But not knowing also may mean that something
that we thought would be unthinkably awful will turn out to be a wonderful
gift. Living comfortably with uncertainty means being equally open to
the unexpected good as the bad. Kathy just went through a nightmare
of illness with her husband that turned out, through the nightmare,
to be one of the best and richest times of her life. The less we try
to seal our lives into airtight certain boxes, the more open we are
to receiving life’s surprising gifts. So it’s true that
if we don’t close our minds in judgment of the person we just
met, we may find that we have spent our time with a bore. But we may
discover he’s just one of those people who takes more than three
minutes to be interesting.
April 18, 2005
Sometimes, faced with political or personal issues, we spend time pondering
whether a particular act will lead to a greater good or greater harm.
This kind of reflection is valuable. But today I recognized that there
is a bedrock, the knowledge of which can support us at those times when
we are immobilized by uncertainty: Any act of caring contributes to
the richness of the world. Any act of cruelty contributes to the impoverishment
of the world. Perhaps they will have other consequences—the caring
act may cause some terrible unforeseen suffering; the cruel act may—for
example—result in a law that prevents many others from suffering
in the future. (So much for karma made simple.) But the acts themselves
lighten or darken our world, whatever follows.
LATER
Today I learned from Chogyam Trungpa how to view other people correctly.
I think it came from his discussion of basic goodness. In “The
Genuine Heart of Sadness”, he observes how we relate to the sun
or the sky. “We don’t reject the sun and the moon, the clouds
and the sky. We accept them. We accept that the sky is blue; we accept
the landscape and the sea...Basic goodness is that basic, that unconditional.
It is not a ‘for’ or ‘against’ view, in the
same way that sunlight is not ‘for’ or ‘against.’”
I see more clearly than I have before that this is how I can view the
mentally ill or drug-blurred homeless people whom I encounter on the
San Diego streets—it is how at the Homeless Sleep-Out I sometimes,
though not always, did. Part of my shyness in the early hours came,
I think, from the uneasy feeling that I should be “for”
or “against” them, rather than quietly and completely accepting
them—appreciating them—-in their individual uniqueness.