pain and pleasure

Human beings try to avoid pain by setting up permanent zones of pleasure. 

The mind is always seeking to create permanent territories of pleasure to avoid pain. 

But these zones, what we might call 'zones of safety' don't last. 

They always fall apart, and because they are fleeting, 

then we scramble to find another zone of pleasure to help us forget our pain. 

This going round and round is what we mean by samsara. 

Hell is just resistance to life. It's counter-intuitive, but if we stop, 

become curious about the pain, learn to befriend it 

and work with it, actually learn how to be genuine friends 

of ourselves, then the pleasures of life become authentic pleasures 

as opposed to numbing agents, anesthetizing us from our genuine experience.

~ Pema Chodron, 

Dharma talk, Karma Dzong, Boulder, Colorado, 1999

 art by Edvard Munch

addiction to pattern - avoidance and repression

 

 You cannot learn the Self. You cannot learn consciousness. 

You cannot learn love. 

You cannot learn trust.

 But you can learn how you deny all of that. 

For this denial, there are techniques and strategies. 

There is either indulgence or repression, 

and with both there is an avoidance 

of simply experiencing 

the power and the immensity of the moment.

We are speaking of a certain kind of addiction; the addiction to a pattern.

With addiction there has to come a point 

when you see that the desire is out of your control. 

Maybe the addiction is physiological. 

Maybe it has been practiced for so long that it has its own groove.

 But what is in your control, absolutely,

 is the willingness to not move when the desire appears. 

The willingness neither to indulge nor repress 

but to not move in the fire of this impulse of thousands of years.

 Have you ever experienced this?

Then you know the beauty of this fire. 

You know that in this moment, 

there is actually a willingness to die. 

Because the addiction to mind or to habits can be so strong that

 there is the sense if you don't feed the addiction, 

you will die. 

Eventually, through the maturity of the soul,

 there is a willingness to say, "Okay, if I die I will die.

 But I am not going to follow this demon down this road again."

This, too, is the mind, but it is the mind in service to what was betrayed. 

 It feels like a descent into hell

 because with any addiction, the impulse is strong

 to get rid of the craving, to get rid of the fire.

 How? How? How? There are millions of ways how, 

but to not get rid of it, to not go numb with it,

 to let it burn - this is the fire. 

This is the Buddha and the temptations of Mara.

 This is Christ in the desert. 

Everyone has to experience this -

 Oh my god, I am dying. Okay, so I am dying.

 I surrender. I surrender - and there is peace,

 there is freedom. You recognize what has never left. 

You recognize what is always here. In that moment,

 there is a break in the habit pattern. 

The habit may reappear, but there is something bigger than it, 

so it does not have the same hold on you. 

Do you follow this?

Justification can arise, and a kind of thrill from the adrenaline

 and the power that comes with justification. 

There can be quick excuse making, such as,

 "Well, so-and-so did it," or, "It doesn't matter," or,

 "We're all one, it is all the Self," but this is all thought.

 It is all the sirens saying, "Come, come back, 

back into where you were all-powerful, 

where you were in control, where you were God, 

where you got to say what happens."

 

 Don't follow any of it. DON'T MOVE. 

And an exquisite experience is revealed that can never be taken from you.

There is suffering, yes, but it is conscious suffering.

 This is very different from attempting to delay suffering. 

This is very different from following, 

indulging, or discharging suffering.

 Then suffering is spread out over time,

 and the suffering of the misidentification continues.

This willingness takes enormous resolve.

 Resolve is a little different from vigilance. 

Resolve comes after vigilance has been betrayed, 

after re-identification has set in. It is the mind's resolve

 to recognize the hell that has once again been created 

and to be here, to burn here, and in that burning, 

there is naturally redemption. 

No one is needed to come and redeem you. 

Redemption happens naturally.

Right here, in this universe, patterns of war still appear,

 and war is what we are talking about, right? 

Even though you have tasted peace, 

even though this universe has tasted peace on earth,

 how is it that conflict still has its way?

 This is true of every mindstream, especially in humans.

 War is inbred, and it has gone unmet. 

 So meet that war within yourself consciously, awake,

 refusing to budge. In meeting war, you will find peace.

 If you have tasted it, then you know it is so. 

If you have not tasted it, it may seem impossible,

 but taste it anyway and see. Just take one moment

 in the midst of one attacking pattern and don't budge.

Beneath the behavior is the energy of an emotion, 

and that emotion is fueled by some thought 

of protection from being wounded or hurt or not being seen.

 In the willingness to experience that wounded or hurt

 or not being seen, to really be wounded, really be hurt, 

really not be seen, then it is no big deal. 

Then the wound is nothing, the hurt is nothing,

 and you realize that you will never be seen.

 You are the Self. You cannot be seen. 

You are not an object.




~ Gangaji,
(excerpt from the Meeting, Immovable Resolve, San Diego, CA, January 18, 2001)

.

silent friend of many distances

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your sense in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 29
(Translation by Steven Mitchell)
art by Teresa Evangeline

young woman homeless

~ Terra Gardner

 in Toronto, Canada

Terra tells a very real story about life on the streets. She doesn't like shelters because she was beat up in one, so she sleeps on the streets or in parks. I hope Terra's story will stay in your heart and mind as it has with me. After this interview we took her to get some food. She is intelligent and funny, she just needs some extra love and compassion to change her life. The good news is the outreach nurse I was with is filled with that extra love and compassion and will do everything she can to find Terra some help. Please support all health and medical outreach services in your community.

 ***Terra Gardner was hit by a train and killed while still homeless 

feeling lost

~ Gabor Maté

 

 

 

now?

If the one I've waited for

came now, what should I do?

This morning's garden filled with snow

is far too lovely

for footsteps to mar.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

the beauty and precision of this

When we are mired in the relative world, 
never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted,
 incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise
 that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words 
and ideas and abstractions- such as merit, such as past, present,
 and future- our direct, spontaneous experience 
of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision
 of this present moment. 

~  Peter Matthiessen
from The Snow Leopard

steps out of the circle

The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

~ Lisel Mueller

 from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

 

for the asking

Augustine said his soul

was a house so cramped

God could barely squeeze in.

Knock down the mean partitions,

he prayed, so You may enter!

Raise the oppressive ceilings!

Augustine's soul 

 didn't become a mansion large enough

to welcome, along with God, the woman he'd loved,

except for his mother (though one, perhaps,

his son's mother, did remain to inhabit

a small dark room).  God, therefore,

would never have felt

fully at home as his guest.

Nevertheless,

it's clear desire

fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's

dynamic action, that scoops out channels

like water on stone, or builds like layers

of grainy sediment steadily

forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,

each feeling, each word he set down,

expanded, unnoticed; the roof

rose, and a skylight opened.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere

by roger housden

 art by Yayoi Kusama

 

the fabric of things

I thought I’d lost you. But you said: I’m imbued

in the fabric of things, the way

that wax lost from batik shapes

the pattern where the dye won’t take.

I make the space around you,

and so allow you shape. And always

you’ll feel the traces of that wax

soaked far into the weave:

the air around your gestures,

the silence after you speak.

That’s me, the slight wind between

your hand and what you’re reaching for,

chair and paper, book or cup:

that close, where I am: between

where breath ends, air starts.

~ Mark Doty

art by: Dali

a standing ground

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;

Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal...

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

from Good Counsel of Chaucer

However just and anxious I have been,

I will stop and step back

from the crowd of those who may agree

with what I say, and be apart.

There is no earthly promise of life or peace

but where the roots branch and weave

their patient silent passages in the dark;

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

I am not bound for any public place,

but for ground of my own

where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

and in the heat of the day climbed up

into the healing shadow of the woods.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

thorn witness

.

Apparent shapes and meanings change.

Creature hunts down creature. Bales

get unloaded and weighed to determine

price. None of any of this pertains

to the unseen fire we call the Beloved.

That presence has no form, and cannot

be understood or measured. Take

your hands away from your face. If

a wall of dust moves across the plain,

there's usually an army advancing

under it. When you look for the Friend,

the Friend is looking for you. Carried

by a strong current, you and the others

with you seem to be making decisions,

but you're not. I weave coarse wool.

I decide to talk less. By my actions

cause nothing. A thorn grows next to

the rose as its witness. I am that

thorn for whom simply to be is an act

of praise. Near the rose, no shame.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin 

from The Glance

a symbolic universe

There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.

 ~  Ernst Cassirer 

from An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

 

weave project

~ David Brooks

terror within

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. 

And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits. 

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? 

The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does NOT live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.

~ James Baldwin

from The Price of the Ticket

art by picasso