In A Pile of Our Own Doing
The mind creates its own pleasures and suffering.
It’s something I had forgotten and only remember sometimes. We often go through experiences that have the potential to mark the rest of our lives, maybe even vow to live in the wake of whatever-it-was for the rest of our lives. We forget anyway. The “I love you” of today becomes the “whatever you say” of tomorrow. The former may still be there in some form, but the truth is embodied in the latter. The bliss of today becomes prime matter for the desperation of tomorrow.
The only real certainty comes from what is accessible to you at this very moment. And even that certainty is illusory. You do not remember when you first started breathing. Whatever the moment when “you” popped up online, the breathing was already there, and will likely be there until the moment you die. Yet even that — perhaps the most intimate ongoing act in our lives, which we so conveniently and so mercilessly relegate to the back of our minds — is not what we tell ourselves it is.
And yet the sun still rises every day and goes down every evening. You could say it’s merely the Earth rotating upon itself, so there’s hardly anything magical about it, but you still gobble it up each time you catch it.
Perhaps the most fitting question for humanity is “Why are we like this?”, but the orientation from which you ask it changes across your life. Some ask it from the same place regardless of the vantage point, and it breaks my heart.
“Why are we like this?” is ultimately nothing short of a heartbreaking question. The goodness inherent in us is obvious to the mind that has had the privilege to see it in itself. To see goodness in yourself for the first time is shocking. We despise ourselves. When we find goodness in there despite all the weight we force upon ourselves, we are moved.
To see goodness in yourself is to forgive everything that has happened in your life up until that point and all that will happen after. To make peace with yourself is to make peace with everything and everybody else. As much as I like to argue, this is not up for debate. If, at the deepest and most earnest level of consideration, you believe there is blame to place on the Other, then you have not yet seen goodness in yourself.
That there isn’t a way to reliably have a person find it in themselves is perhaps the biggest disappointment of being an intelligent organism. In a real sense, it’s sheer blind luck — both that it is the case and that one can stumble upon it.
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Ultimately, what is this all about? What do you live for? What matters?
I could call all this bare sensate experience all day long and just dwell in that until the day I die, but is that truly Life?
Upon getting cancer, Culadasa said that, among other things, he wished he had dwelled in the human more than the experiential, and that having dwelled in the experiential when the human was calling may have caused his cancer.
I thought, “bullshit” at the time. I think I still call bullshit in principle, but it also makes my stomach churn because I get it now.
You see, we have within us the power to heal each other. I do not mean it in a woo/New Age way.
What I mean is — for fuck’s sake, when was the last time you hugged someone because they were hurting? Open your eyes wide and look around you and see that we are surrounded by hurt.
Are we delusional? We obviously are. If we weren’t, we would break down in tears at the sight of each other. We are most definitely not fine. The only “fine” we can cling to and profess couldn’t be further removed from being fine at a fundamental level, and this is the life most people lead every day.
From the very first months, when the wonder of childhood — if you even had the privilege of experiencing that — ends, until the very end of life, with brief pauses in between, we are continuously not fine at a fundamental level. And we carry on. I have to sit and look into your eyes, I have to sit and feel your vibe and see the same obviousness of hurt and suffering in you that I know so well in me. And we play it cool. We laugh it off. We entertain whatever conversation for the sake of whatever, until both of us are inevitably back in our own rooms, in the solitude that bears little to no distraction from the crushing numbness we have nurtured within ourselves so we can sleep without breaking down each night.
And yet the mind still creates its own pleasures and suffering.
