“We can only tell the truth when we cease to identify with the part of ourselves we think we have to protect. ... I can never be straight with you if I need something from you.”
I have returned to these words again and again in the last few weeks, tumbling them about in my mind like socks in the dryer, trying to wring every bit of meaning from them. I think my vent is plugged.
In the dharma we come to understand the nature of desire and attachment, the truth of no-self, and the myth of need. I recognize that I have attachments and desires and strong habitual patterns, but intellectually I tell myself I do not have needs. I do not need these things I am attached to, these habits I have developed, even the food and drink and air I breath. I do not need these things, no matter how I desire them. I can even say I do not need other people. I do not need attention or affection.
But do I mean it? I can talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. I act in whatever way seems most acceptable to the people around me. In this, I become many people. I am different with my family than my friends than my classmates than my coworkers. I can kid myself and say this is for their benefit, but it is for myself. I want them to like me. I want to fit in. I want affection and attention. I cannot practice truth because I need these things.
It seems a silly thing sometimes. If I were to act honestly, would I harm people? Probably not because that is not my nature. Yet in reality I do no posses a ‘nature.’ People spend years searching for their identity and I admit that lately I have done the same. I am wrapped up trying to be the person I want to be, the person I think I should be. Yet that is not ‘me’ either because ‘me’ does not truly exist. There is nothing to protect, nothing to harm. No-self.
But what about the ‘self’ that exists in the minds of others? That is the crux of the matter. What I believe my identity to be is a small thing compared to what others believe I am. I can revise my identity at my will, ever changing, ever reinventing itself by each choice I make. I cannot revise the person I am in the minds of others. Which makes it all the more important because of that very lack of control. I can influence their conceptions of me, but ultimately cannot change them.
We all see the world through a set of conceptual filters were have spent our entire lives constructing, our self imposed rose colored glasses. We all believe what we see to be the truth, reality. It’s just a dream. When a person’s conception of me is as I want it to be, I protect that without ever realizing it. When a person’s conception of me is not as I would have it, I feel anger or fear. Anger at being judged unfairly, treated too harshly, maligned. Fear that the pedestal is too high.
Fear is born of a need to escape the anger of others. It is the anger of others which can so easily shatter the conception of myself, my identity. “I need me” is the greatest lie ever told because we told it to ourselves.
I need truth.
5 comments:
Hi Monica
This post reminds me of two things which I always think about - relative and absolute truths, and the definition of attachment. They seem important because 'while we are here' we definitely do need some things - food to stay alive, etc, so desire for them is necessary if we want to stay alive (if we don't, like for example if we knew where we were going after this, then who cares, right?), but obsessing about them it where it goes a bit wrong.
But there are certain things here which may not exist elsewhere, which we do need, and which, while maybe not important anywhere else, are needed for functioning here and can't help but color our experiences. Eg, maybe Buddha doesn't need food where he is, but here we do, and it can't help but color our existence.
There was a very good book 'Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die', in which some various master dudes made dying seem like a very trivial thing - it sounded like they really knew what was going to happen next, and for them, when they finished what they were doing here, they just died quite happily.
I also read somewhere that consciousness can exist quite happily without a body, and so, by putting all of these 3 or 4 points together, I felt I gained some understanding of 'attachment for this life' and 'desire'.
Who knows though right? I'm probably just crazy eh!
I recognize that I have attachments and desires and strong habitual patterns, but intellectually I tell myself I do not have needs. I do not need these things I am attached to, these habits I have developed, even the food and drink and air I breath. I do not need these things, no matter how I desire them. I can even say I do not need other people. I do not need attention or affection.
I guess my thoughts on this subject mirror stuff's. While I find great value in the dharma's instruction of no-self, I do not understand that instruction to be useful outside of the context of the relative self. Stephen Batchelor's book Living with the Devil helped me sort some of this out. I don't have my copy any more, so I'm probably mangling his point, but what I remember was that the absolute idea of no-self is unworkable without a context of the idea of the relative self. No Buddha without Mara.
Admittedly, I tend to list toward yogic dharma more than Zen dharma, but it seems to me that one can accurately perceive the desire for love and affection as a mind-body configuration resulting from karma without concluding that it should be rejected. Indeed, rejecting it seems inconsistent to me with a clear acknowledgement of the interdependence and inter-penetration of all things. Puppies should be snuggled.
To maintain one's non-self as separate and apart from loving brothers and sisters (whether in sangha, families, communities, or bus stops) seems to lure me toward the delusion of my independence and essentiality. So I wonder whether the Buddha might not be delighted to embrace you, if you happened upon him a couple of thousand years ago, or so.
I can talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. I act in whatever way seems most acceptable to the people around me. In this, I become many people. I am different with my family than my friends than my classmates than my coworkers. I can kid myself and say this is for their benefit, but it is for myself. I want them to like me. I want to fit in. I want affection and attention. I cannot practice truth because I need these things.
If your experience is like mine, just being mindful of the different roles you play and the causes of their arising, the nature of their sustaining, and the occurrence of their subsiding will change the way that you engage those roles. For me, that process is simply a different form of meditation.
Once I recognize that (and I still often don't, until after the fact), I can give myself the standard mindfulness meditation instruction: "Notice, don't judge." The noticing, itself, is all that is necessary.
Thanks guys. Your gentle and honest approach has helped immensely. I realize now my post sounded unintentionally harsh. I think this is because of the nature of confusion inherent in the topic.
I'm certainly not attempting to make myself into a stone wall, one who needs no-one and nothing. (Or perhaps, I am only trying to be a stone in the wall, dependent on all the others? Interesting metaphor for thinking on....) I think am simply looking for a way to love, honestly and completely, without the anxiety of attachment.
Though I’m not sure I buy the “No Buddha without Mara,” bit. I’m still thinking on that, but I am generally suspicious of dualistic approaches to reality. Maybe I’m just the incurable optimist who believes there can be ice cream without ice cream headaches, we just haven’t figured out how to make it yet.
Sometimes I just need a (very gentle) swift kick in the pants when I get to sounding too morose. :-) Trust me, I’m never really that down. I’m inherently lazy and being depressed takes too much energy. It’s much easier to be happy. Thanks for the good puppy references. Any mentions of fur-people makes me smile.
I share some of your discomfort with Batchelor's (and my, derivatively) "no Buddha without Mara" point.
Samsara, perhaps.
I've had a lot of the same concerns or questions as you, and tried to find the answers. I sort of feel I've found a lot of them, but attempting to explain them can be tricky and may make things worse.
Plus, I can be wrong, or even appear like a know it all! Also, when I've previously tried to explain things to people, I've actually made things worse before, which is probably why they say to leave the teaching to the Rinpoches . . .
But, I do know how you feel about a lot of this stuff.
As for the dualism, I kind of see it like the mind is a blank page, capable of supporting any image. It can remain empty, or it can have images on it. What the images are, it doesn't matter - they can be of anything, contrasting, happy, sad, bad, this or that - the underlying structure of the empty mind supporting the structures is the point, and our goal is to understand that, and if there are images on the page or not is sort of beside the point.
But now I'm just being a know-it-all and you're at risk at converting to Christianity because of the crap I say, so I'll just shut up.
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