Wisdom, Depth and Meaning

    Discernment is in short supply these days - leaving too many of us drowning in negativity, cynicism, meaninglessness, anxiety & depression, externalizing our unresolved, unprocessed inner conflicts onto other people, living creatures and the Cosmos.

"Despair is only for those 

who see the end beyond doubt. 

We do not."

J.R.R. Tolkien

    A radically different, infinitely healthier, wiser perspective is that of the mystics as well as an increasing number of intelligent AND wise scholars like Jeremy Lent ("The Web of Meaning" 2022), Iain McGilchrist ("The Matter with Things" 2021), etc who masterfully integrate science and traditional wisdom to help us feel at home in our Universe. 

    A wonderful living example of a highly-evolved mystic is James Finley, author of the exceptional biography, “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation” 2023 - which I highly recommend! 
    An excerpt from an excellent recent James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "One of the Holy Cross brothers, teaching at the high school I went to, talked about monasteries in religion class. He spoke of monasteries as places where people go to seek and to find and give themselves to God, who’s fully poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life. And they believe that their hidden life of fidelity to that search touches the whole world in ways we don’t understand.

    Thomas Merton in ‘The Sign of Jonas’ on the very first page wrote, ‘As for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God’s face.’ At age 14, I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me said, ‘Me too.’ That is the depth from which he spoke of his own longing for God, awakened that depth in me. And for the next four years, I read that book over and over. And later, I lived in the cloistered monastery for almost six years - it had a profound effect on me. 
    And then Merton, as a novice master, guided me in the search. And he led me into the classical texts of the mystics – St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, etc. I was so radicalized by this sense of communion, this deep experience of incarnate Infinity intimately realized, like the divinity of standing up & sitting down, and how reflective prayer becomes words of wordless silence and oneness, and so on. And Merton once said in one of his talks to the novices, that monastic life is carefully crafted to nurture and protect that oneness. But there are people in the world who are being led to it and they don’t understand what’s happening to them, and have no one to guide them. 
    So when I left the monastery, I found that that was true. I still wanted to live that way - my meditation practice and the mystics … So I started giving meditation retreats.

    I had a chance to study medieval philosophy under Daniel Walsh, who taught philosophy at Columbia, and was influential in Merton’s coming to the monastery. I was very affected by the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages. So when I was writing ‘Merton’s Palace of Nowhere’ on the true self, I said I don’t know how to communicate this to people out here, that we subsist in God like light subsists in flames – the Oneness. And Walsh wrote back. He said you can’t communicate it. But it will communicate itself through you if you’re convinced in what you say. And he said, if you are what you say. And you know it will communicate itself because there’ll be a response in the listener that knows, something very deep inside of them that matters very much is being awakened.

    I think that’s what I do. I try to speak from my heart about this oneness. I try to help people look for little moments where they had a glimpse of it, in the midst of nature, in the arms of the beloved, or reading a child a good night story, or lying in the dark listening to your breathing - how it washes over you like a taste of it, and how in that taste, you get the intuition that in these awakening moments, not that something more was given, but like a curtain opened and that you tasted momentarily the abyss-like divine nature of every moment of your life. 
    And so then ... What’s the way of life in which I can be liberated from what hinders me, from habitually abiding in the divinity of the immediacy of my life? And I get the feeling that people come to the retreat when they hear that it’s in silence and about the mystics, that they’re in some way been touched by that. Like how do I deepen that? Or how do I be faithful to that? How do I understand it? How do I live by it?
    For me where it started was because of the (childhood) trauma that was going on, a lot of the arguments with my father was about Catholicism (but) they fought about all kinds of things. So (my mother) would take us (6 children, I was the oldest) to mass on Sunday. And she would ask us to pray to God to give us the strength to get through the things that happen when daddy gets mad. 
    And so I was lying in my bed at night – I was maybe 4 – and I could hear my father screaming at my mother outside the door. And maybe earlier that day he had hit me. I knew tomorrow he wanted to do it again. And so I took my mother’s word and I prayed to God to give me the strength. I was lying there in the dark, and the experience I had was that God heard my prayer, came to me in the dark and in a moment I can’t remember merged with me. 
    So when I woke up the next morning, the trauma still went on. But when I came out into the living room, it was different, because if my father hit me, he thought he was hitting me, but he didn’t know he was hitting that other me, that other people could see. My father didn’t know that the real me was secretly carried by God into a secret place (my father) didn’t know about.

    Later, when I became a psychologist, I learned that I was dissociating, that I had borrowed the religious imagery of my mother to give meaning to dissociating. But that doesn’t mean that God didn’t merge with me in the dark. And so I had a lot of moments like that. I had a lot of these unitive moments. 
    So when I read Merton, I saw monasteries as places where you can actually go and live all the time, because I was like a flame flickering in the wind, it was very much in the heart of me. But I thought the monasteries were built so people can surrender themselves over to that.
    If we think of the word trauma, the root of the word means a wound or a source of suffering. So we might say that all of us are subject to traumas great & small that can and sometimes do occur in our life together. Small traumas are the slights and the insults, the abandonments, the accidents, the hurts. But the point is, the center holds. 
    Big trauma gets so intense you kind of disappear into the trauma – kind of a psychic death really. If you survive the incest or the beating, whatever, you’re so glad you survived, but not quite, because it got inside of you. And then a triggering event is anything in the present that resembles the original trauma, your autonomic nervous system, you’ll re-experience the trauma – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And so then as a clinician, that needs to be dealt with in its own right. That’s the therapy.  

    Sometimes we get this feeling that we’re skimming over the surface of the depths of our own life, and our own woundedness is carrying us along, as part of that. And we realize somewhere that we’re suffering from depth deprivation. 
    And we know of depth deprivation because we can single out certain moments when we tasted depth: in the midst of nature, in the middle of the dark, or in the arms of the beloved, telling a child a good night story, a pause between two lines of a poem that shimmered & shined. So you know it’s there.

    So then the question is, what are the ways where that depth dimension starts shining out of the therapy itself?
    Let’s say you call me for therapy, and I really don’t know what you want to talk about other than the little bit you told me on the phone. But I’ve done it so much, I already know what’s going to have to happen between us, if the healing you’re looking for is going to occur. And here’s what happens. 
    It’s like a liturgy or a ritual. We’ll both sit down. You’ll talk and I’ll listen. At a certain point, I’ll ask you a question and it’s a real question. I want to understand you better. And the question is such that you can’t respond without pausing for a moment to listen to yourself. And in that moment, you’re becoming more present to yourself in my presence. And it’s already started. 
    You don’t say it. You’re not ready yet, but it’s already begun. So little by little, this way of growth forms an alliance. 
    And in that trusting alliance, the person goes through their work. So one of my theses is that, when we risk sharing what hurts the most, in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can be re-parented in love. Sometimes you get the feeling you’re in the presence of someone who is more present to you than you are. And they see a value in you you’re not yet able to see. And you have faith in their faith in you. And little by little by little, it arcs over and becomes internalized and so on.

    But there’s another level to this. In that process, there is the opening up of what Jesus called ‘the pearl of great price.’ And what opens up within the person is a depth of presence that’s abyss-like. They might start laughing or they might tear-up. It’s deeper than simply freedom from symptoms. 
    And so sometimes at the end of therapy, people are grateful that they have less anxiety with panic or self-cutting, whatever it is. But often they’ll say something like this: ‘Something was given to me and I’m so grateful for it. I matter. I didn’t know that I mattered. I have a value that cannot be calculated. There’s a preciousness about me that came shining out through my woundedness, and no one can take that away from me.’ 
    And that’s the spiritual dimension. I think that starts to put words to that dimension.

    'Sometimes, when having to endure the worst, yet finding God in the darkest place, you are liberated from the tyranny of shame over your heart. Where anguish and ecstasy intersect, it becomes incandescent — it becomes oneness.' James Finley  

    Being a therapist was a good fit for me. I felt so grateful for it - to experience the unrelenting courage of the human spirit. Sometimes people would say something to me like, ‘I feel so safe in here.’ I’d say, but notice I’m not doing anything to you. And I think what it is, when you’re in my presence, you’re more present to yourself. And if you can be more present to yourself in my presence, you can literally be more present to yourself (also) when you’re not in my presence. And you keep sifting it out and sifting it out. I felt so honored by that process."

    “A mystical experience is experiencing God’s presence in your life.” James Finley

    "The question is, ‘what does that mean?’ I’ll give some examples from Thomas Merton and all the mystics. 
    This is from the last chapter of Merton’s ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’: ‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.’ So there he’s bearing witness to the already perfectly holy nature of what is – this dance. 
    And then Merton said a stunning thing. He said, ‘We don’t need to go very far to catch echoes of that game and of that dancing.’ And he gives very simple examples. He said, ‘You’re out walking alone in the midst of nature, and you turn to see a flock of birds descending, and as if out of the corner of your eye, you catch something in their descent that’s primordial, vast and true.’ 
    And then, to use faith language, although the person might not explicitly say it in faith language, you know that the presence of God is the infinity of their descent. And their descent is the incarnate immediacy of God. ((Self realizing that it's looking in the mirror)) And God is the infinity of your awareness of their descent. And your awareness of their descent is the concrete immediacy of God. And that’s the experience of God.’ ((Perhaps it's just a matter of remembering - remembering our True Nature, our Self, our ‘Original Face before our grandparents were born’ as we co-create the Cosmos))

    Another one is, there are moments between two people, in moments of loving union with each other, when they sense something within their love that’s beyond what words can say. It is a boundaryless quality. And in faith, you say, ‘God’s the infinity.' The infinite love of God is the infinity of their love. And the infinity of their love is incarnate in the midst of God. 
    You’re reading a child a good night story. You sense that in the presence of the child you’re in the presence of God. That’s why they’re so disarming. 
    And then what I’m saying also then, in love lost, as painful as it is, if you just sit with it very quietly, you can sense something of God’s sustaining presence guiding you through the loss. And when you come out the other side, you’re grateful to get your balance back, but you know, it’s so important to never forget what was learned in the dark – about fragility, the delicacy of life, grace."
    James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper, more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. 
    If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words, we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe

“Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, 
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, 
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.  
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; 
only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure & silent merge with formless truth.  
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; 
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.  
Whole, you enter the Whole.  
Your personal self returns to its radiant,  
intimate, deathless source.” 
Mundaka Upanishad

    "To have the radiant calm and unswayed balance of mind that we call equanimity is to be like the earth. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go." Sharon Salzberg

 

        "The clouds are thin, the wind is light, 
         the sun is nearly overhead. Past the flowers, 
         through the willows, down along the stream. 
         People don't see the joy in my heart. 
         They think I'm wasting time or acting like a child." Cheng Hong, Chinese poet

 

Beyond Time - photograph by David A. Lovas

 

Objectifying?

    When we hear about "objectifying" we immediately think of knuckle-dragging men who see & treat women "like a piece of meat." Google tells us, "The sexual objectification of women involves them being viewed primarily as an object of male sexual desire, rather than as a whole person." Other forms of objectification of women would be seeing them mainly for other self-serving uses (bearing children, cooking, cleaning, etc), instead of as complex human beings with inherent worth. So being objectified feels demeaning, like other forms of prejudice, which is always based on a shallow stereotype or classification system that denies human dignity.
    There's a critical underlying presumption: if we get to know any individual well, then we'll realize that everyone has far, far greater depth than we assumed, and also, that we have a great deal more in common than our differences. I fully agree with this presumption, BUT MOST WOULD NOT!

    Why not? Because most will not rise above our society's prevailing 'glass ceiling': scientism's materialist dogma that, life itself, everyone & everything is nothing more than a meaningless accident in a cosmos of matter - stuff, and only stuff. If everything, including ourselves, is mere matter, then we are all in fact, objects. So women, like ourselves, have NO depth, NO inherent worth, NO dignity, and 'a whole person' is literally just meat. And of course relationships are merely 'transactional,' or at best 'relational.' Again Google: "... transactional means you expect something in return for your contribution in a short time frame and if not, you will not provide your contribution. Relational means you are willing to be patient for a longer-term mutual benefit and it is okay if you don't get the full return in the short-term." Such mechanical arrangements work fine for model railway sets & robots, and so so for us 'meat.' This same level of thinking proposes that AI is a great improvement over the human mind. AI would be better BUT ONLY IF human beings were mere meat-puppets.
    Those who make do with materialist dogma as their guiding light actually have FAR more in common with the much-maligned knuckle-dragging male than they realize.

    HOWEVER, HUMAN LIFE ONLY BEGINS to FLOURISH ABOVE scientism's GLASS CEILING! Life below this ceiling is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Even in Canada - a paradise compared to most countries - how many live in utter despair, as expressed through the many forms of depression / anxiety, addiction, cruelty & violence inflicted on ourselves, others, the environment? Why?

    Most of us are, to some degree, psychologically & spiritually wounded & stunted. But instead of recognizing this as a cry for psychotherapy & deeper, more meaningful spiritual practice, we instinctively run & hide, angrily branding anything of depth, meaning & real significance (above the 'glass ceiling') "too deep, confusing, unscientific, unsubstantiated, subjective, etc," and sink back into the familiar grim 'ordinary unhappiness,' assuming that this is 'as good as it gets.' We simply cannot see how woundedness locks us into a 3-year old's level who yells, 'I hate you Mommy & Daddy! I'm running away from home now!'

    “We become disabled, unable to function in areas of our lives that evoke feelings we’ve never learned to tolerate. Turning away from this primary pain creates a second, ongoing level of suffering: living in a state of contraction & constricted awareness.” John Welwood

 

    SUPERB 53-minute Michael A. Singer podcast: "Your Highest Technique: Relaxing Behind Your Inner Disturbance." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYGBrG_fDoo

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else
than in the human heart,
in the human power to reflect, in human meekness,
and in human responsibility.”
Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, in his historic address to the U.S. Congress

 

    How few of us experience our birthright: the joy of knowing our true nature, feeling 'at home,' and spontaneously nurturing people, creatures & the environment so we may all thrive?
    We may have a vague sense of this possibility, BUT the momentum of our individual lives & that of our culture powerfully pushes us towards immediate comfort & distraction; and away from depth & meaning. So we wrongly become resigned that our anxious, twitchy, 'ordinary unhappiness' is 'as good as it gets.'

     Living a deep, meaningful life, with increasing consistency, IS ABSOLUTELY POSSIBLE. It does require that we start freeing ourselves from our neuroses - blocked energies, trapped in our bodies, from past unprocessed emotions. Freeing ourselves MUST become our FIRST PRIORITY.
    Michael A. Singer “Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament.” Sounds True, 2022 - a WISE, DETAILED GUIDE to a LIFE WORTH LIVING! Immerse yourself in the skills required to BE MORE THAN A SAD, HOPELESS MEAT-PUPPET!

    "Beyond the clouds, the sun never stops shining.” Gavin Pretor-Pinney

On Becoming The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be

     Below is a transcript from imho an excellent, valuable interview containing important points that our anemic culture knows or cares little about YET is vitally important to every one of us:

1) Most people enjoy light, upbeat music (stories, movies, plays, books, etc), and tend to criticize music outside of that comfort-zone as depressing, "too deep for me," or confusing. Most of us are acclimatized to our stunningly shallow, consumer society. Immediately following 9/11, Americans were encouraged by their president to "go shopping" to show the world what they're made of! While many went shopping with patriotic fervor; history will find such blissful ignorance impossible to comprehend.

2) We see discomfort as a violation of our basic human rights, and respond to deep suffering with strong aversion, anger, & try every possible escape: an endless array of distractions, suppression, alcohol, drugs - prescribed & otherwise, possibly ending in depression, bitterness & cynicism. Yet hardships & pain are not meaningless punishments. Like everything else in life, they're to learn from, to help us evolve. Most people simply can't handle this last point, so they choose to rail against this reality. Arguing with reality is choosing to suffer needlessly. The infinitely wiser alternative is to relax our ego & body, and humbly learn all the deep lessons being offered. There's absolutely no comparison between these two approaches, yet most of us will absolutely exhaust the first, before trying the second out of shear desperation & utter fatigue.

3) Even psychosocial-spiritually-evolved human beings can & do have all sorts of hardships, including prolonged severe physical pain eg Buddha, Jesus, and in current times, Adyashanti, Jordan Peterson, etc. This can be a shockingly unpleasant surprise, at a time when we may have (prematurely) assumed that we've already 'processed' enough pain, suffering & even heavy "dark nights of the soul." But, as long as we're alive, learning - at times from very hard lessons - continues.

4) We mistakenly assume that happiness comes only after we're finished climbing up the mountain, but as long as we live, we can and need to grow. With age, growth clearly becomes increasingly internal ie integrating our values more & more completely into our lived experience ie intention, speech & other behaviors. The quality of happiness we experience also changes, becoming progressively more subtle, deep, independent of external circumstances & independent of others' opinions. Happiness feels more & more like home, equanimity, peace, silence & stillness (not the brief 'sugar-high' of winning a lottery).

     Steven Bartlett asked Jordan B. Peterson, ‘How are you doing?’ Peterson responded,
     “Brilliantly and terribly. You know, when you listen to a profound piece of music, one that sort of spans the whole emotional experience, it’s not happy. Happy is elevator music. Probably, you shouldn’t listen to that at all. And you think, ‘Why?’ Well, it’s harmless, treacly, sweet, simple, lacks depth, it’s shallow – that’s a problem. It doesn’t have that deep sense of awe & horror, I would say, that’s characteristic of the best of all music.
     You know, you listen to some so-called 'simple music' – Hank Williams is a good example. You know the blues cowboy from the 1950s, who died of alcoholism when he was 27, and whose voice sounds like an 80-year-old man. Simple melody, you know, but there’s nothing simple in the song and in the voice. It’s deep. You know it’s like black blues in the States from the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by that tradition. There’s this admission of a deep suffering at the same time as you get the beautiful transcendence of the music. And that’s meaning, you know, that’s awe-ful in the most fundamental sense but, you need an antidote to suffering, and it has to be deep. And deep moves you tectonically and it’s not a trivial thing. But that’s better than happiness. And maybe, if you’re lucky, while pursuing that and while you’re immersed in it, you get to be happy. And you should fall on your knees and be grateful that when it happens. You know it’s a gift. It really is a gift. And it comes upon you unexpectedly – your happiness, you know. But you aim to climb uphill to the highest peak you can possibly envision. And that’s better than happiness.

      Wherever I go in the world, people come up to me and, I wouldn’t say they’re happy to see me. They’re often in tears, and they often have a pretty rough story to relate – they were suicidal, or nihilistic, or homicidal, or trapped, desperate. And they tell me that, real fast. And then they say, ‘I’ve overcome that to a large degree, and thank you for that. And then you think, well that’s really something, to have that happen over & over. In some ways you might think, well how can anything better possibly happen to you, than to have people come up to you all over the world, strangers, and open themselves up to you like that, like they’re old friends, so quickly? But at the same time, it’s an awful thing, because you see even in the revelation of their triumph, the initial depth of their despair. So I wouldn’t change that. But it’s not nothing. It’s certainly not just happiness. It’s better than happiness, but it’s almost unbearable."

Q: "Why do you do what you do?"
     “To see what will happen. Some programs you cannot predict. You cannot predict how they’re going to end. You have to run them. Well, I believe that truth will save the world. I believe that. So you speak truthfully, and you watch what happens. And you take your consequences. And maybe you hope and have some faith that, in the final analysis, things will work out in your favor, but perhaps they will and perhaps they won’t. But that’s faith, eh? That’s faith. Faith isn’t believing in things that you regard as ridiculous, sacrificing your intellect. It’s a decision. Will truth, beauty & love save the world? Well, you can find out."
     Jordan Peterson: How To Become The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be | E113 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uLDin9A9pc EXCELLENT INTERVIEW well worth investing 1hr 6min of time

Curing Power of Kind Attention and Awareness

     The more we practice meditation, the more we recognize the effects of traumas we've sustained over a lifetime. Reading a book like Van Der Kolk's “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” may be a revelation to some of us in this regard. Some of us would clearly benefit from psychotherapy, and all of us would benefit from remarkably wise tools for healing found in meditative practices. 
     Adyashanti teaches an advanced practice he calls "conjoining the opposites." A more easily approachable practice is to hold difficult emotions, as they arise, within the heart area. This is instead of usual tendencies: acting out and or intellectually fighting difficult emotions. Holding the physical manifestations of these emotions in the heart area to me is quite similar to dealing with "open questions." In both cases, we let all of our intelligences slowly, without time limits, work away on big, complex issues, that our (modest) intellect alone is ill-equipped to handle.
     Below is, IMHO, a clear, helpful excerpt from a superb book:

     “It is not easy to maintain mindfulness when our primary defenses are activated. These defenses are forged in reaction to intense feelings, felt from conception through our preverbal years. Our psychological defenses are not ‘bad,’ they are simply strategies we learned that helped us survive as tiny babies. Neither are they necessarily there because of a lack of care. Just our vulnerability or waiting to be fed as babies can evoke powerful feelings of abandonment, fear, and longing. These feelings overwhelm a tiny baby and infant. In response, our defenses were built to protect us from these feelings. However, as we grow up our defenses become imprisoning. They split us away from our innate energy, and we become locked in dysfunctional patterns and end up limping through life rather than having access to the fullness of our energy.
      The desire for nonexistence or annihilation (vibhava-tanha), which manifests as psychological desolation, despair, depression, and self aversion, is a common primary defense. As we bring mindfulness to this dynamic, behind the sophisticated ways we deny and dissociate, we will encounter unsettling feelings. We will find ourselves faced with our ‘shadow,’ a term Carl Jung coined to refer to powerful emotions and beliefs held in the unconscious that influence our life. Behind our ‘shut down’ can be fear, rage, or a fog of confusion. At times when these become triggered, we need to take a lot of care. When touching deep areas of primary feeling, behind our defenses, we need to take space, have kindness, and be patient.
     Instead of crashing out, we can be mindful, one breath at a time. Gradually this becomes a strong container to help us withstand our deepest pains without defaulting to self-harming or acting out. This container is strengthened through moments of kind attention and awareness to the feeling tones that are present. When these factors are in place, then as painful feelings emerge, like despair, or the wish to annihilate ourselves in some addictive pattern, we will know an opportunity has offered itself.
     As our capacity for awareness strengthens it is possible to tolerate the deeper wounds within the psyche. Often these are disguised beneath the restless momentum of desire and our attempts to fulfill its demands.”


       Kittisaro & Thanissara. "Listening to the Heart. A Contemplative Journey to Engaged Buddhism." North Atlantic Books, 2014.

with kind permission from: www.buddhadoodles.com

Real Life is NOT "Picture-perfect"

     “When I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would. That one’s studies, this fabled and much-talked-about period in life, on which one always looked back with pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely and imperfect days. That I had not seen this before was due to the constant hope I carried around inside me, all the ridiculous dreams with which a twenty-year-old can be burdened, about women and love, about friends and happiness, about hidden talents and sudden breakthroughs. But when I was twenty-four I saw life as it was. And it was OK …” 
       Karl Ove Knausgaard. “A Death in the Family. My Struggle: Book 1.” Vintage Books, London, 2014. 

     So, is Knausgaard depressed, pessimistic, cynical, temporarily "down" - OR - is he seeing life as it actually is, far different than our common hopes and dreams? Don't we keep hoping for life to transform into one continuous glorious beer commercial? And don't we repeatedly feel disappointed because our life is "so damned ordinary"? For Freud, "ordinary unhappiness" was the best he could hope for, the goal of psychotherapy.
     In 500 BCE, the Buddha understood deeply the stressful unsatisfactoriness that (unawakened) life entails, even though he was born healthy, intelligent, wealthy - a handsome prince, with everything the world could provide at his fingertips.

      “Dukkha (refers to) stress, suffering, misery, unsatisfactoriness, pain: literally, ‘hard to endure, difficult to bear.’ 
     In its limited sense, dukkha is the quality of experience that results when the mind is conditioned by avijja into craving, attachment, egoism, and selfishness. This feeling takes on forms such as disappointment, dissatisfaction, frustration, agitation, anguish, dis-ease, despair – from the crudest to the subtlest levels. 
     In its universal sense, dukkha is the inherent condition of unsatisfactoriness, ugliness, and misery in all impermanent, conditioned things (sankhara). This second fundamental characteristic is the result of anicca; impermanent things cannot satisfy our wants and desires no matter how hard we try (and cry). The inherent decay and dissolution of things is misery.”
       Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. “Mindfulness with Breathing. A Manual for Serious Beginners.” Wisdom Publications, Boston, 1988. 

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada

Friendship, Love & Wisdom

"Every friendship travels at some time through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again." 

~~

"If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition;
there is no possessiveness or control.
The more love you give away, the more love you will have."

John O'Donaohue
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom


WisdomAtWork.com

Understanding & Releasing Suffering

      “I’d like to underscore a point the Dalai Lama has made repeatedly: ‘Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.’ This does not deny the fact that for many people around the world Buddhism has also come to function as a religion. Like most religions, it offers its followers a rich tradition of devotional practices, communal rituals, and sacred stories. But this is not the origin of Buddhism or its core. The Buddha was a human being, not a god, and what he offered his followers were experiential teachings and practices, a revolutionary way to understand and release suffering. From his own inner experiments, he discovered a systematic and remarkable set of trainings to bring about happiness and fulfill the highest levels of human development. Today, it is this path of practice and liberation that draws most Western students to Buddhism.
     (These) teachings … are a compelling challenge to much of Western psychology and to the materialism, cynicism, & despair found in Western culture as well.”

        Kornfield J. “The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology.” Bantam Books, NY, 2008. 

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