on suffering (by popular request!)
Wednesday 9 July 2008 | 8 cookies in the jar
And now it’s time for a nice little homily on, as I once typoed in a desperate 3 am email to a college friend, “mortal agnoy.” (And then I cracked myself up and couldn’t be pained any more and had to quit emailing and go to bed.)
Currently we here are suffering through a bewildering attack of productivity, featuring the federal tax return, with many its attendant and multifarious schedules; I am so close to an economic stimulus package I can already feel its battery-operated buzz. But I interrupt my valiant wrestling with tax law to recapitulate the Buddha’s Smart Moment, brought to you in tendentious, irreverent translation. Please, Mandarins or Umbrellas or anyone else—please feel free to leap in and save us all from my flawed doctrinal succotash.
Nasty Reality #1: Life is suffering.
Alive? Got suffering! Birth, sickness, old age, and death—to say nothing of the Byzantine federal tax code.Nasty Reality #2: Suffering has a cause.
Since this disagreeable stuff exists, it’s gotta start somewhere. Let the finger-pointing begin!Noble Reality #3: Suffering has an end.
And if it starts with something….there damn well better be an end in sight, right? If X, then not-X.Noble Reality #4: There’s a path to that end.
Thus there must be a way to bring this happy state of non-affairs to pass. Other than the Amy Winehouse solution, that is.
Sadly, I’ve perversely skewed these on purpose to make clear that their commonly received interpretation hosts several gross oversimplifications of the capitalist swamp-Yankee sort—ayup, there they be, a-sneakin’ in, roaming to and fro upon the earth, seeking whom they may confusticate.
Alors [digs out notes]. So Kosho’s talk in the Beautiful Trench, lo these many five year past, was based on his reading of a book called The Feeling Buddha by David Brazier (a British psychotherapist who’s also one of those Namu Amida Butsu-chanters). He began by explaining how the usual approach to these statements of purported fact is often not unlike following some complicated cookery direction: “So if you did four, then you get two, which would do three, thus extinguishing one. That’s not a good recipe!” We’re focused on making that nasty suffering GO AWAY, so we approach it in reverse, and with our minds—with problem-solving, trouble-shooting, and trying to improve it out of existence. (Which incidentally can make you pretty miserable on the cushion, to say nothing of during walking/talking/interacting/getting-into-trouble life. Because you’re all: By tunkit, I’m still suffering! Must not have that dang #4 nailed down yet. Better sign up for another 90-day retreat, or give up dairy, or quit hating the way the guy next to me swallows all the time, or change my setsu tip, or something.)
What if, instead, he asked, the Buddha actually meant for us to follow all four in the order presented? Without squirming or jumping from one to another?
The four realities, according to Kosho, are noble because they’re inevitable and therefore worthy of respect. When loss appears, “Suffering simply arises. Affliction happens and there’s a natural response that’s out of our control, that’s animal. It’s not our fault, or a character flaw.” This is what Herself would have called pain, actually, not suffering qua suffering. When someone comes up behind you and startles you, you jump. Your human body has an autonomic reaction. To be sure, most Buddhist students have heard of or encountered adepts who, through time and practice, have pretty much dismantled this reflex. But most of the rest of us non-lamas still gots it.
But the real cause of suffering, he said, develops when we personalize the affliction: “We take offense to the ‘I,’ personalizing what happens to the self as a coping mechanism. To deal with the pressure, we may externalize it and blame others, or turn it inward—our conditioning informs how we’ll handle this. But there’s usually the same old box into which we put ourselves and others.”
There exists in each of us, Kosho concluded, the powerful energy of not wanting to suffer. But when we try to avoid it, suffering becomes the dangerous, fire-spouting dragon which we in the West usually want to kill in order to get to the treasure—instead of taming it and riding it home.
Instead, what if we think about the truths this way:
• Affliction exists.
• We have a reaction to it—no choice about that.
• We have a choice about how we react to the reaction. Kosho suggested: containment, embracing, intimacy, sitting with, staying close to, holding in the heart. “Can you feel what you’re feeling? When it hurts, say ouch!”
And now having thoroughly mangled this poor priest’s once-articulate talk, I betake me to the bedchamber wherein the Brujo already slumbers, there probably to dream about tortuous prose like the following:
Figuring your deductible loss. If all amounts are at risk in this business, check box 32a. If you answered “Yes” on line G, enter your loss on line 31. But if you answered “No” on line G, you may need to complete Form 8582 to figure your allowable loss to enter on line 31. See the Instructions for Form 8582 for details.
If you checked box 32b, first complete form 6198 to determine the amount of your deductible loss. If you answered “Yes” on line G, enter that amount on line 31. But if you answered “No” on line G, your loss may be further limited. See the Instructions for Form 8582. If your at-risk amount is zero or less, enter -0- on line 31. Be sure to attach Form 6198 to your return. If you checked box 32b and you do not attach Form 6198, the processing of your tax return may be delayed.
Any loss from this business not allowed only because of the at-risk rules is treated as a deduction allocable to the business.
For details, see Pub. 925.
If you understood a drivelling word of this then you’re a better bloody man than I am, Gunga Din. Within seconds of my handing him the booklet, the Brujo impatiently returned it, muttering something about Greek. In which, of course, he can recite the opening of the Iliad. The really weird thing about this Vogonesque passage is that the IRS repeat themselves about eight times, in a dizzying swirl of circularity, albeit with obvious hopes that their refrain will eventually penetrate your thick skull; but they do so USING THE EXACT SAME LANGUAGE, like tourists who shout at native-language speakers, as though volume could compensate for fundamental incoherence.
In fact I have a fond memory of Ms. Zlatarog getting all feisty after dinner one night, about silly Americans who won’t just shut up and bite down and pay their taxes the way good Europeans do so uncomplainingly. I was too overcome with double-malt and Gloucester at the time to defend our stingy asses but in the dim recesses of my brain later came the objections: 1) Yes, but your taxes actually PAY for things—good things—things which as a rule more or less do not consistently flaunt the Geneva Convention; and 2) at least when you pay them it’s just a big flat 35% you never see again—common citizens aren’t expected to master a major urban phone book’s worth of reverberating, fevered bureaucratic blabbering. Of course now that British students have to take out loans for university and the railways are decentralized and all manner of New Labourish improvements have been made, perhaps Inland Revenue has taken a diabolical leaf from the States and is now requiring people to file these preposterous annual documents.
Right, where was I? Oh yes, suffering. And taxes. And bed.
[to be continued…]
8 cookies in the jar
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I was going to use this quote by Thich Nhat Hanh for my post on pain and mindfulness (but it is so much nicer here):
“If we touch the truth of suffering with our mindfulness, we will be able to recognize and identify our specific suffering, its specific causes, and the way to remove those causes and end our suffering.”
Having identified taxes as suffering, can we remove this cause and end it?
“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” B. Franklin
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Editor: The cause is removed! It is finished! At least for 2007. And the economic stimulus shall be mine, all mine, nouahahaha….well, until I die, anyway.
I think Thây’s words are in harmony with Kosho/Brazier when he says, “touch the truth of suffering with our mindfulness”—using the word “touch” sounds to me like he means precisely this embracing, becoming intimate with, holding in our heart: loving our suffering selves. But the trouble for Westerners, or anyway for this Westerner, lies in the concept of “mindfulness,” which has that ridiculous syllable MIND in it. My by-now absurdly belaboured point is that we can’t do it with our MINDS. We do it (to the nonexistent extent that it, whatever it is, has anything to do with anything we do anyway) with our spine, belly, pelvis, lungs, breath? Or by thinking non-thinking.
And I do so resist this idea of a flow-chart or objectives-based strategy for attaining inner peace—this very, I keep insisting, American idea of enlightenment-by-numbers (though grasping after attainment’s been around since Bodhidharma at least) (that was a joke). By the end of the quotation, TNH himself waxes so teleological (to steal the Brujo’s word) that I feel depressed just reading it. (And in fact Thây IS a very depressed person, at least according to Herself—of course he’s also a trauma survivor who has every reason to be depressed.) The Plan for Getting Rid of Suffering starts to sound like a project again: If you just do four, you discover two, achieve three, and then don’t have to put up with one anymore. Bake in a 350º oven for 20 minutes; garnish with self-congratulation; serves everyone.
And, yay! You commented! Welcome to our freakish, faithless little e-family.
I wonder what Buddha meant by the word “suffering.” That’s where my wheels get stuck, very early in the game so to speak. I’d imagine there are reams and reams of dead trees covered with attempts to explain what the Buddha was trying to say.*
The Sponsor defines suffering as an awareness of separation. The greater the perceived separation the greater the experience of suffering. This too is dangerous. The “solution” to the “problem” is easy, like the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor: “Make me one with everything!”
And clearly we are not able to manage our little unity/disintegration meters. It is only for Clever People to imagine that once they understand what causes suffering, it’s easy to get rid of. The mind doesn’t even know what “separation” means (being the Great Separator itself), let alone “unity.” But, like letters in a formulaic math problem, the terms get nicely thrown about. Let separation be x. Let unity be y. The trick would be to eliminate x, solve for y, etc. But obviously since the truth is neither separation nor unity (as unity can only be postulated if separation is real, and it’s not) these mind games arise only in separation.
I’m most often left simply with surrender. I just don’t know.
Also, when the Buddha says suffering has a cause and an end, I can’t help but get teleological. Arising and passing away happen in time. The path to the end is outside time, where there is no cause nor end.
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Editor: “The trick would be to eliminate x, solve for y.” I think you’re making exactly Kosho’s point, that trying to do this is just another mind-game. What the Brujo is TRYING to say is that he agrees? (Per Mandarin/Unnarrator in-joke about sophomoric lit seminar analyses: “I think what Ezra Pound is trying to say here….”)
Thank you for this, it did go exactly to the heart of the strawman I had constructed. I don’t know whether to congratulate my inner Eeyore on the skepticism about a perceived promise of circumventing suffering, or to console my inner Wol that it’s just as well not being so Clever that one has perceived a gaping hole in system of thought thousands of years old.
Still muddling through self-improvement and Buddhism and suffering I picked up, today, Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and got:
In the synchronistic way these things happen, I am now reading to my (middle school have mercy on them) older boys the section of Sophie’s World on British empiricism and so just two nights ago we had a long conversation about Hume concluding that the feeling of having an unalterable ego is a false perception. So now I am not just questioning what suffering is, but also, who exactly it is that is suffering. Or being improved. Or whatever.
In the meantime, I suppose that all of my other religious beliefs are now so heavily infused with how much sense Non-Violent Communication makes, that I know that if someone else is suffering, the correct answer is not “Oh, hey, that’s an illusion” any more than it is “It’s not that bad” or “Oh, that reminds me of this one time when I was really suffering.” It is “Yes, it’s awful, and I am here with you.” And sometimes that suffices to cut the sense of separation.
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Editor: Who is experiencing what as suffering? What is this world we are trying to save?
Mandarin had a running gag in college (when she was our dorm’s RA) about the Wrong Things to Say to people in distress. They seemed so funny, I think, mostly because we’d either said things like them ourselves, or had them said to us. And I’m sure that even now I just find fancier ways to tell people, “Um, why don’t you just get over it?”
Sudden blinding déjà vu. Perhaps I’m reminded of something a well-meaning senior student said to me once during a retreat. (The backstory is that she’d reprimanded me that afternoon for something small, something which would have been pretty minor to a non-shame-paralyzed person, but which had me hiding in my car sobbing hysterically and pounding the dashboard for about three hours, during which time I somehow managed to turn on the headlights and run down the car battery, making it impossible for me to leave the retreat as previously planned. As the Professoressa noted wryly later, “If it had been a dream you’d have known exactly what it meant.”)
Anyway, said student was trying to help me jump said car later that night so I could go to work the next day; and I was presumably apologizing all over the place, because in her thick Swiss accent, she informed me with unconcealed disgust: “You know the trouble with you? Is that you always think you are so unworthy.”
It was so right-on and so badly put that even in my mortal agnoy I was hard-pressed not to laugh aloud.
Oh, and another priceless one, from an NVC training at Chez Zen—with a bewildered woman trying to post-mortem why her interaction with a angry gas station attendant (mistakenly accusing her of stealing) had gone so badly. “But I tried to validate her! I did! I told her, ‘I understand that you have a problem….’” We all burst into laughter and the unintentionally violent communicator grew even more confused. She never really was able to hear how condescending that sentence must have sounded to the angry attendant.
Mark Epstein is fab; et aussi, I don’t think non-Buddhistic Buddhism gets much better than Stephen Batchelor. Of course I attended a four-day retreat with him and his wife Martine where they lectured on, what else? But the Gautama’s interdependent relationship with Mara.
Holy MOLY this is a long comment-comment. And for no good reason, your Eeyore/Wol-populated inner pantheon reminds me of this DSM-IV diagnosis of the Sesame Street characters.
I couldn’t help but put my 2 cents on the question of what is suffering as I try to understand more deeply Kosho’s idea of embracing suffering. What I thought was if we read the Buddha’s first noble truth, “Life is suffering,” as an invitation for people to accept that suffering is a natural part of life, then the challenge is to experience any situation without an intention to change that situation. This acceptance allows one to be in the moment, to embrace it, without judgment or a need for action. For me then suffering is not a separation but an attachment. What does this attachment look like? Well, the Bhagavad Gita says that it is not acts in themselves that bind people to the round of rebirth, but the selfish intentions so often behind them. The true opposite of selfish action is disinterested or selfless action (I suppose since total inaction is impossible). The danger being to read into selfless action, total detachment without the possibility for intimacy.
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Editor: What he said. :o)
(Though I’ve never understood what’s supposed to be so terrible about rebirth!)
Late to the party here…and the quote is less apt than I thought I remembered, but I’ve been thinking about it for days and finally dug it out of the box of stuff in the corner of my office so I’m going to post it here anyway….
Henri Nouwen says, “Those who do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and new strength. The paradox indeed is that the beginning of healing is in the solidarity with the pain. In our solution-oriented society it is more important than ever to realize that wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt.”
I guess it falls more in the category of what to do about others’ suffering, and I’m not sure I agree with him as much now as I did when someone gave me the quote a few years ago. Maybe because I haven’t figured out how to keep doing this without it costing me too much. I remain impressed with the doctor who gave it to me, because so many MDs tend to be so ’solution-oriented.’ Though this is a doctor who likes social workers. Or at least a doctor who liked me.
Oh piffle, you’re not late, you’re just making a dramatic entrance!
This (perfectly apt) Fr. Nouwen quotation reminds me of Bernie Glassman’s version of the three tenets of Zen: 1) not-knowing, 2) bearing witness, and 3) healing. The idea being that the third emerges naturally out of the first two: only when we give up our fixed ideas and are present with suffering (whether our own/others’/the world’s), can healing arise.
I suspect the tenets overtly include bearing witness to our OWN suffering partly to help hold the balance between self-care and service. So that the precious heart-workers like yourself (and maybe this doctor?) don’t burn out completely. Can I bring that same gentle curiosity to my own pains, and not run screaming from them.
Miss you; and hope you and your girls are WELL.
I like Glassman’s version. I think I got hired because of the moment in my interview when my (now) boss asked, “What would you do for a parent standing by the bed of their child who has just died?” and (after thinking for what felt like a long time) I said, “You can’t do anything at a moment like that. The best you can hope for is to really be there,” etc. I still prefer the bearing witness to making phone calls and referrals. Though there are days I would rather hide in my office than go into patient rooms.
It’s the balance between self-care and service that eludes me. I’m getting better at it, but I have a lot—maybe too much—catching up to do.
And as a chaplain friend pointed out to me yesterday—look where the good father ended up….in the end his own solidarity with the pain of others may well have shortened his life. And he didn’t have a family to be present for at the end of the day/week/whatever.
My girls and I are well. Gymnastics classes, swimming lessons, and probably a wedding coming up soon… Miss you too.
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Infernal editorial voice: Now, by wedding, you’d better not mean Viv’s—because then I think we really need a catch-up phonecall.
Persephone and I’ve been emailing about this little inner seesaw too—just today we were talking about looking to see when service comes from that “full” place inside, rather than when it’s coming out of the “empty” one—the place of “I have plenty and want to share” rather than “I have to say yes to every request, otherwise people won’t like me and/or I won’t be good enough, because I’m already fundamentally not.” Emotional sobriety, basically.
And I didn’t know until just recently that Nouwen’s denial/repression/renunciation/whatever you want to call it, of his being a gay man, was such an informing/decisive part of his thinking and, probably ultimately, his end. I would say this is terribly sad except that in fact it makes me angry (see emotional sobriety, above).
And now I am taking my headache (TOO much yard work in the heat) and going back to bed with a novel. Ugh. Tell H. I said she should give you a foot rub. ;o)
PS and puhleeze let me know when you’re next in Phoenix! I don’t imagine it will be ANY time soon, nor should it be….the B. and I will probably head back to Baja for Dec/Jan, frustratingly (insofar as seeing friends goes, though it is at the same time one of our greatest joys). Sorry for the comment-letter….much love.
Re: inner seesaws—hell yeah. And it’s more complicated when there’s the element of “I have to say yes because this is what I have the privilege of being paid to do.”
Nouwen was gay? Day-um. I’m going to have to do some re-reading. That is sad.
There’s some possibility of Phoenix in the fall. MIL moving soon, probably close to Scottsdale. Will keep you in the loop.
And no, Viv’s not getting married. (Good Lord, just thinking about that makes me hyperventilate.) We just figured we should take the opportunity to make it legal before the voters have a chance to, well, make it illegal again. No hoopla (or rather, much less hoopla) this time.