Robert Augustus Masters Q&A Part Twenty-Five
August 21,2006
A. MichaelD asks:
Reasons for making reasons (within a healing context):
Making or finding reasons for why we are as we are can possibly suggest useful strategies for making changes.
Reasons provide meaning which in turn satisfies a desire…the desire to understand…to solve a puzzle, to satisfy curiosity, provide solace to the ego etc.
Provide the illusion of control (the mind likes to think it runs the show, and meaning is mind-fodder).
Provide story and explanation to reinforce and bolster continuity of identity.
Reasons can serve to reinforce ‘the problem’.
Reasons can provide plenty of materials for purposes of complaining.
Based on the above, it would seem that the negatives outweigh the positives of making & finding reasons. Yet to my often amazed mind, I still continue to look for and create reasons, and frankly, I'm tired of it.
There is the need for investigation and processing that simply doesn’t go away no matter how much I wish it away.
I investigate what is happening within and to me because to not do so is painful. A sense of Wholeness and Understanding that is beyond mere reasoning calls me ever forward, even as the pain of looping over and over again in cycles of one sort or another insist that I bring awareness into dark areas of self via an investigative mode of inquiry.
So I do so. Part of what happens then - is simple witnessing, and another part is analysis. (actually, I think that there are multiple layers of inquiry, and rational analysis is just one of them, but tends to dominate).
And what does the analyzing mind do? Makes and finds reasons and patterns and stories of course.
Reasons tend to go on and on in ever widening circles of self-justification.
What are your thoughts Robert on the question of interpretations and meaning-making within healing?
Robert answers:
What are my thoughts on the question of interpretations and meaning-making within healing? First of all, remember that an interpretation, however useful or fitting, is just that, an interpretation, and don’t stop remembering it. Second, be aware of whatever value is being placed upon a particular interpretation, both by yourself and by others. Third, keep an eye on the interpreter. Fourth, allow your interpretations to retain enough of an unfinished quality so that they have room for further shaping and evolution. Fifth, keep in touch as much as possible with that which eludes all interpretation. And last, but not least, stay in compassionate relationship with the you who needs what meaning-making provides.
When we, in a healing context, do some work and start connecting the dots, it’s quite natural to interpret our experience, to somehow make some sense out of it. There’s a reason, or reasons, for why we are the way we are, or so we think, perhaps finding a needed comfort in such explanation. We may settle for reasons that are mundane, and we may settle for reasons that are more metaphysical, like those employing notions like “karma” to explain -- and perhaps also justify -- just about anything. But Life is not so neatly ordered or mappable, regardless of our conceptualizations of it. We don’t necessarily always have to interpret or make meaning out of what’s going on; we can sometimes simply be with it, letting it make unexplainable sense; or we can allow our interpreting and meaning-making to remain functionally peripheral to our simply being with whatever’s arising.
I know I’m skimming over some deep waters here. Rather than continuing to scan the territory, I’m going to plunge into the notion of meaning itself, examining along the way the “why?” that more often than not fuels our meaning-making enterprises. Though my approach to meaning is not exactly gentle, I do not intend to diminish anyone for whatever relationship they might have with meaning, or for whatever comfort they might derive from meaning and meaning-making. And once again what started as a relatively concise response has morphed, with no real resistance from me, into something essayish...
OURS NOT TO REASON WHY
An Inside Look at Meaning
Life is too real to have (or to need) meaning.
And just what does that mean?
Read on...
Given the actual condition in which we find ourselves, it is quite understandable that we’d look, and keep looking for -- and at times require -- some sort of comfort or reassurance in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness, even though our attempts to find or extract or assign meaning ultimately only distract us from the raw contingency and absolute mystery of our existence.
We act as if we need a reason to go on (plus a reason to keep on needing reasons), but, as James Hillman points out, “A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directly with reality.”
Significance, unlike meaning, does not explain, but reveals.
Many of us believe that everything happens for a reason. But it actually happens simply because various factors have, in their mutual intersecting and coming together, made such manifestation inevitable. Each of these factors has its factors, and so on, back and back and back, in cartography-eluding, surpassingly complex contingency. This, all put together, constitutes something far more real than “a reason.”
We may not want (or be prepared) to fully acknowledge the contingent nature of whatever arises -- including us (especially in our wanting to be special, to stand out against the rest of existence) -- trying instead to assign some kind of meaning to it, but such explanatory strategies do not even remotely approach what is really occurring.
The assumption that anything possesses — or can truly claim — intrinsic meaning is important to cut through, but only when we are ready to do so. Whatever its value developmentally (as part of formal reasoning’s unfolding) and under certain conditions (psychotherapeutic, for example), meaning remains an interpretive process designed, however automatically, to distract us — and, more often than not, protect our separative self-sense — from that which has spawned us and paradoxically also is, as always, literally making an appearance as us.
We make meaning, and it makes us, and on and on this goes in Möbius loopity-loops, more often than not leaving us eventually circling ourselves so tightly that there’s not much more to breathe than just more data. “Just when I found the meaning of life, they changed it” (George Carlin). And we is they.
So is Life meaningless? Coiled deep within-and-beyond this question is the “answer,” existing not as a facile yes or no, but rather in the transconceptual illumination of what is really motivating the question. Identifying who — or, more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important than just attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the question needs to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not only intellectually, but with our entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question be viewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response.
That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyond the cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participation in deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — or what we “normally” think of as answers — is sought, intuited, taken in.
Life makes sense only when we stop trying to make it make sense.
Put another way, when we cease projecting meaning onto Life (an undertaking that should not be engaged in prematurely) — thereby giving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s natural significance begins revealing itself to us.
The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficient depth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of the functioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and its various framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold it all.... There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attempts to find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with the unknown.” We forget that that which seeks to explain the Mystery is just part of the Mystery, as ultimately unfathomable as anything else.
However, the point is not to make existential real estate out of meaninglessness (which is where existentialism has floundered). When our mind is quiet and our heart open and our belly relaxed, Life can be before us in its horizonless, nameless, naked, ultravivid reality and absolute mystery, and we have room for it all to be just as it is, not minding that it carries no intrinsic meaning. Its bare existence and seeming paradoxicalness — a neverending perishing that is never other than Eternal Being — draws us to it, beyond the reach of our mind, until our relationship with it becomes, at least to some degree, identification with it.
Nevertheless, the usual “I” is but a thought away.
So easy it is to shift from Be-ing to me-ing.
To reiterate: Life has no inherent meaning, both including and transcending whatever seeks to explain, conceptualize, frame, or contain it.
Meaning provides a relatively secure (and, at times, necessary) sense of certainty, a psychosemantic hedge against the Wild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to hold up and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatory facticity (and corresponding values) in which to dwell when emissaries of primordial Being — like death and nondual stirrings — come knocking.
As important as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridges over stormy or confusing waters — it nonetheless remains little more than a mental strategy. It may take us to the very edge of the personal, but to proceed further, we must cease hanging onto it.
And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seduces us with hope — nostalgia for the future — meaninglessness seduces us with despair — angst for the future. Beyond (and yet also simultaneously prior to) both hope and despair is the Now in which we are always already Home.
Meaninglessness is a grave problem to most, a burdened sea with no habitable coast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existential ghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is the glum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crowned legitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to be able to restore meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that much of a core concern, being peripheral to issues like purpose. In brief, purpose involves the uncovering and fitting-as-possible embodiment of a kind of psychospiritual blueprint, simultaneously simple and complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisational possibility. Purposefulness may seem to share some overlap with meaningfulness, but it is much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose is more organismic than meaning, rooted not just in mind, but also in body, emotion, psyche, and spirit.
In such totality, there is a naturally felt sense of significance. Significance transcends meaning. Meaning is rooted in dualistic apperceiving, but significance, in the crunch, is not nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited, signaling the impact of direct contact with What-Really-Matters, whatever the level.
Significance doesn’t ask “Why?” (because it has no need to), but meaning does, and in fact is an attempt to meet “Why?” with answers/explanations/beliefs that will silence it. But “Why” is asking for something very different, if we will but really listen to it...
When we are suffering, we may find ourselves asking: “Why?” There is, however, no genuinely satisfying answer at the level at which our suffering is the prevailing reality for us. And nor are the metaphysical and “spiritual” reasons and beliefs spewed out by our intellect truly satisfying.
The understanding we seek is not in our everyday mind. But it exists. It is often first sensed when we cease turning away from the pain that centers our suffering. And it is found when we — in the form of awakened attentiveness — penetrate that pain so deeply that we connect, intimately, with its essence. Then suffering’s “Why?” ceases being a conventional question, and simply becomes one more catalyst for opening the book of our life to the most fitting pages.
Philosophically, we may rebut suffering’s “Why?” with “Why not?” or with cosmic smooth talk. But when we move beyond these and other such strategies, our sense of identity shifts from everyday selfhood — which both centers and animates that dramatization of pain which we call suffering — to the selfhood that knows itself to be but Being making an appearance. Pain may still exist here, but not suffering.
So when you, in your suffering, ask “Why?”, shift your attention — your undivided attention — to whatever it is that you are feeling. Thoughts may be campaigning for your attention, but shift, and keep shifting, your attention from thought to sensation and feeling. Don’t try to silence your mind; simply let it be as you focus in on the feeling dimension of your suffering. Enter it. Explore and illuminate its geography from within, touching all of it with care. See it without eyes, hear it without ears, know it without thinking. Don’t stop short; enter it fully.
Permit yourself intimacy with detail — detail of location, shape, texture, pressure, temperature, speed, color, directionality, imagery. Don’t wait for a seemingly more auspicious moment; go, go this very moment, now. Enter it deeply, passing through it until you reach the place where pain is but fierce grace. Then observe who or what it is that is asking “Why?” -- is it really you, or is it just a habit that has been given permission to refer to itself as you? Looking for meaning here is just a detour.
Check out the billboards lining your journey into and through the feelings that are central to your suffering. Notice which ones grab you, seduce you, hook you. Maybe ones like “Life’s not fair” or “I don’t deserve this” or “Why me?” snare you. Don’t, however, get focused on the dramatics at this point — it’s enough to simply recognize that you’re caught. All the places, faces, and embraces that hook us weave the net of our suffering.
Suffering can be one hell of a drag, but it also gives us an identity — I suffer, therefore I am. We tend to be reluctant to give up our suffering. What would we then blame for our failures? And who would we be (and who would we be responsible for being) if our suffering were to cease?
The end of suffering — which does not mean the end of pain — means, among other things, ceasing to adopt a problematic orientation to Life. Then every feeling and thought and state, however dark or tight or dense, becomes a portal into Being, the open sky of which effortlessly renders transparent suffering’s “Why?”.
As Presence — the self-illuminating, effortlessly sentient imprint of Being — becomes primary, and perception secondary, we find ourselves reassembled as motivelessly awakened openness, as at home with the ouch as with the aahhh!
The answer to suffering’s “Why?” is not really an answer, but rather an openness ablaze with a recognition before which the mind gets so quiet, so unburdened by meaning, so dynamically empty, that the arising of a single thought is thunderously apparent.
Instead of trying to get rid of suffering’s “Why?”, we could treat it as a kind of divine appetizer, signaling a feast not so far away, to which one and all are invited. The main course includes the self that turns pain into suffering, cooked to perfection. Not exactly tenderloin, but quite edible, nevertheless, and easily digested when not allowed to become food for thought.
Suffering is but pain that’s gone to mind. Instead of minding pain — thereby letting it overfuel thinking and thinker — be with it, breathe it, feel it, inch closer and closer to it. The more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.
Ours not to reason why, ours but to come alive.
Perhaps later on we will understand what is not ours to understand now, but that is not the point — what matters is the degree of intimacy that we cultivate with our not-knowing.
Allow suffering’s “Why?” to be like a roll of newspaper used to stir a fire; soon, it becomes food for the flames, its transformation its gift to us, the ever so brief calligraphy of its ashes eloquently traced across Big Sky.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A. MichaelD asks:
Reasons for making reasons (within a healing context):
Making or finding reasons for why we are as we are can possibly suggest useful strategies for making changes.
Reasons provide meaning which in turn satisfies a desire…the desire to understand…to solve a puzzle, to satisfy curiosity, provide solace to the ego etc.
Provide the illusion of control (the mind likes to think it runs the show, and meaning is mind-fodder).
Provide story and explanation to reinforce and bolster continuity of identity.
Reasons can serve to reinforce ‘the problem’.
Reasons can provide plenty of materials for purposes of complaining.
Based on the above, it would seem that the negatives outweigh the positives of making & finding reasons. Yet to my often amazed mind, I still continue to look for and create reasons, and frankly, I'm tired of it.
There is the need for investigation and processing that simply doesn’t go away no matter how much I wish it away.
I investigate what is happening within and to me because to not do so is painful. A sense of Wholeness and Understanding that is beyond mere reasoning calls me ever forward, even as the pain of looping over and over again in cycles of one sort or another insist that I bring awareness into dark areas of self via an investigative mode of inquiry.
So I do so. Part of what happens then - is simple witnessing, and another part is analysis. (actually, I think that there are multiple layers of inquiry, and rational analysis is just one of them, but tends to dominate).
And what does the analyzing mind do? Makes and finds reasons and patterns and stories of course.
Reasons tend to go on and on in ever widening circles of self-justification.
What are your thoughts Robert on the question of interpretations and meaning-making within healing?
Robert answers:
What are my thoughts on the question of interpretations and meaning-making within healing? First of all, remember that an interpretation, however useful or fitting, is just that, an interpretation, and don’t stop remembering it. Second, be aware of whatever value is being placed upon a particular interpretation, both by yourself and by others. Third, keep an eye on the interpreter. Fourth, allow your interpretations to retain enough of an unfinished quality so that they have room for further shaping and evolution. Fifth, keep in touch as much as possible with that which eludes all interpretation. And last, but not least, stay in compassionate relationship with the you who needs what meaning-making provides.
When we, in a healing context, do some work and start connecting the dots, it’s quite natural to interpret our experience, to somehow make some sense out of it. There’s a reason, or reasons, for why we are the way we are, or so we think, perhaps finding a needed comfort in such explanation. We may settle for reasons that are mundane, and we may settle for reasons that are more metaphysical, like those employing notions like “karma” to explain -- and perhaps also justify -- just about anything. But Life is not so neatly ordered or mappable, regardless of our conceptualizations of it. We don’t necessarily always have to interpret or make meaning out of what’s going on; we can sometimes simply be with it, letting it make unexplainable sense; or we can allow our interpreting and meaning-making to remain functionally peripheral to our simply being with whatever’s arising.
I know I’m skimming over some deep waters here. Rather than continuing to scan the territory, I’m going to plunge into the notion of meaning itself, examining along the way the “why?” that more often than not fuels our meaning-making enterprises. Though my approach to meaning is not exactly gentle, I do not intend to diminish anyone for whatever relationship they might have with meaning, or for whatever comfort they might derive from meaning and meaning-making. And once again what started as a relatively concise response has morphed, with no real resistance from me, into something essayish...
OURS NOT TO REASON WHY
An Inside Look at Meaning
Life is too real to have (or to need) meaning.
And just what does that mean?
Read on...
Given the actual condition in which we find ourselves, it is quite understandable that we’d look, and keep looking for -- and at times require -- some sort of comfort or reassurance in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness, even though our attempts to find or extract or assign meaning ultimately only distract us from the raw contingency and absolute mystery of our existence.
We act as if we need a reason to go on (plus a reason to keep on needing reasons), but, as James Hillman points out, “A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directly with reality.”
Significance, unlike meaning, does not explain, but reveals.
Many of us believe that everything happens for a reason. But it actually happens simply because various factors have, in their mutual intersecting and coming together, made such manifestation inevitable. Each of these factors has its factors, and so on, back and back and back, in cartography-eluding, surpassingly complex contingency. This, all put together, constitutes something far more real than “a reason.”
We may not want (or be prepared) to fully acknowledge the contingent nature of whatever arises -- including us (especially in our wanting to be special, to stand out against the rest of existence) -- trying instead to assign some kind of meaning to it, but such explanatory strategies do not even remotely approach what is really occurring.
The assumption that anything possesses — or can truly claim — intrinsic meaning is important to cut through, but only when we are ready to do so. Whatever its value developmentally (as part of formal reasoning’s unfolding) and under certain conditions (psychotherapeutic, for example), meaning remains an interpretive process designed, however automatically, to distract us — and, more often than not, protect our separative self-sense — from that which has spawned us and paradoxically also is, as always, literally making an appearance as us.
We make meaning, and it makes us, and on and on this goes in Möbius loopity-loops, more often than not leaving us eventually circling ourselves so tightly that there’s not much more to breathe than just more data. “Just when I found the meaning of life, they changed it” (George Carlin). And we is they.
So is Life meaningless? Coiled deep within-and-beyond this question is the “answer,” existing not as a facile yes or no, but rather in the transconceptual illumination of what is really motivating the question. Identifying who — or, more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important than just attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the question needs to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not only intellectually, but with our entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question be viewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response.
That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyond the cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participation in deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — or what we “normally” think of as answers — is sought, intuited, taken in.
Life makes sense only when we stop trying to make it make sense.
Put another way, when we cease projecting meaning onto Life (an undertaking that should not be engaged in prematurely) — thereby giving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s natural significance begins revealing itself to us.
The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficient depth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of the functioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and its various framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold it all.... There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attempts to find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with the unknown.” We forget that that which seeks to explain the Mystery is just part of the Mystery, as ultimately unfathomable as anything else.
However, the point is not to make existential real estate out of meaninglessness (which is where existentialism has floundered). When our mind is quiet and our heart open and our belly relaxed, Life can be before us in its horizonless, nameless, naked, ultravivid reality and absolute mystery, and we have room for it all to be just as it is, not minding that it carries no intrinsic meaning. Its bare existence and seeming paradoxicalness — a neverending perishing that is never other than Eternal Being — draws us to it, beyond the reach of our mind, until our relationship with it becomes, at least to some degree, identification with it.
Nevertheless, the usual “I” is but a thought away.
So easy it is to shift from Be-ing to me-ing.
To reiterate: Life has no inherent meaning, both including and transcending whatever seeks to explain, conceptualize, frame, or contain it.
Meaning provides a relatively secure (and, at times, necessary) sense of certainty, a psychosemantic hedge against the Wild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to hold up and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatory facticity (and corresponding values) in which to dwell when emissaries of primordial Being — like death and nondual stirrings — come knocking.
As important as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridges over stormy or confusing waters — it nonetheless remains little more than a mental strategy. It may take us to the very edge of the personal, but to proceed further, we must cease hanging onto it.
And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seduces us with hope — nostalgia for the future — meaninglessness seduces us with despair — angst for the future. Beyond (and yet also simultaneously prior to) both hope and despair is the Now in which we are always already Home.
Meaninglessness is a grave problem to most, a burdened sea with no habitable coast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existential ghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is the glum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crowned legitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to be able to restore meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that much of a core concern, being peripheral to issues like purpose. In brief, purpose involves the uncovering and fitting-as-possible embodiment of a kind of psychospiritual blueprint, simultaneously simple and complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisational possibility. Purposefulness may seem to share some overlap with meaningfulness, but it is much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose is more organismic than meaning, rooted not just in mind, but also in body, emotion, psyche, and spirit.
In such totality, there is a naturally felt sense of significance. Significance transcends meaning. Meaning is rooted in dualistic apperceiving, but significance, in the crunch, is not nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited, signaling the impact of direct contact with What-Really-Matters, whatever the level.
Significance doesn’t ask “Why?” (because it has no need to), but meaning does, and in fact is an attempt to meet “Why?” with answers/explanations/beliefs that will silence it. But “Why” is asking for something very different, if we will but really listen to it...
When we are suffering, we may find ourselves asking: “Why?” There is, however, no genuinely satisfying answer at the level at which our suffering is the prevailing reality for us. And nor are the metaphysical and “spiritual” reasons and beliefs spewed out by our intellect truly satisfying.
The understanding we seek is not in our everyday mind. But it exists. It is often first sensed when we cease turning away from the pain that centers our suffering. And it is found when we — in the form of awakened attentiveness — penetrate that pain so deeply that we connect, intimately, with its essence. Then suffering’s “Why?” ceases being a conventional question, and simply becomes one more catalyst for opening the book of our life to the most fitting pages.
Philosophically, we may rebut suffering’s “Why?” with “Why not?” or with cosmic smooth talk. But when we move beyond these and other such strategies, our sense of identity shifts from everyday selfhood — which both centers and animates that dramatization of pain which we call suffering — to the selfhood that knows itself to be but Being making an appearance. Pain may still exist here, but not suffering.
So when you, in your suffering, ask “Why?”, shift your attention — your undivided attention — to whatever it is that you are feeling. Thoughts may be campaigning for your attention, but shift, and keep shifting, your attention from thought to sensation and feeling. Don’t try to silence your mind; simply let it be as you focus in on the feeling dimension of your suffering. Enter it. Explore and illuminate its geography from within, touching all of it with care. See it without eyes, hear it without ears, know it without thinking. Don’t stop short; enter it fully.
Permit yourself intimacy with detail — detail of location, shape, texture, pressure, temperature, speed, color, directionality, imagery. Don’t wait for a seemingly more auspicious moment; go, go this very moment, now. Enter it deeply, passing through it until you reach the place where pain is but fierce grace. Then observe who or what it is that is asking “Why?” -- is it really you, or is it just a habit that has been given permission to refer to itself as you? Looking for meaning here is just a detour.
Check out the billboards lining your journey into and through the feelings that are central to your suffering. Notice which ones grab you, seduce you, hook you. Maybe ones like “Life’s not fair” or “I don’t deserve this” or “Why me?” snare you. Don’t, however, get focused on the dramatics at this point — it’s enough to simply recognize that you’re caught. All the places, faces, and embraces that hook us weave the net of our suffering.
Suffering can be one hell of a drag, but it also gives us an identity — I suffer, therefore I am. We tend to be reluctant to give up our suffering. What would we then blame for our failures? And who would we be (and who would we be responsible for being) if our suffering were to cease?
The end of suffering — which does not mean the end of pain — means, among other things, ceasing to adopt a problematic orientation to Life. Then every feeling and thought and state, however dark or tight or dense, becomes a portal into Being, the open sky of which effortlessly renders transparent suffering’s “Why?”.
As Presence — the self-illuminating, effortlessly sentient imprint of Being — becomes primary, and perception secondary, we find ourselves reassembled as motivelessly awakened openness, as at home with the ouch as with the aahhh!
The answer to suffering’s “Why?” is not really an answer, but rather an openness ablaze with a recognition before which the mind gets so quiet, so unburdened by meaning, so dynamically empty, that the arising of a single thought is thunderously apparent.
Instead of trying to get rid of suffering’s “Why?”, we could treat it as a kind of divine appetizer, signaling a feast not so far away, to which one and all are invited. The main course includes the self that turns pain into suffering, cooked to perfection. Not exactly tenderloin, but quite edible, nevertheless, and easily digested when not allowed to become food for thought.
Suffering is but pain that’s gone to mind. Instead of minding pain — thereby letting it overfuel thinking and thinker — be with it, breathe it, feel it, inch closer and closer to it. The more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.
Ours not to reason why, ours but to come alive.
Perhaps later on we will understand what is not ours to understand now, but that is not the point — what matters is the degree of intimacy that we cultivate with our not-knowing.
Allow suffering’s “Why?” to be like a roll of newspaper used to stir a fire; soon, it becomes food for the flames, its transformation its gift to us, the ever so brief calligraphy of its ashes eloquently traced across Big Sky.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
posted by adastra at 10:29 AM
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