18 - The magic, spiritual number.
ONE - The ONENESS that is ALL. All there ever was; All there ever is; All there will ever BE!
(8) INFINITY - The ETERNAL PRESENT Moment. Eternity; Forever!
That which was never born; never dies!
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." Oscar Wilde
Oscar was being a little naughty with this statement. But then again, naughtiness came easily to Oscar! We do learn from our mistakes.Often in my recovery meetings I share my story and tell some of the mistakes and mishaps in my life, and that usually there is a learning curve associated with these incidents. In the shadow of my life I discover the light! Also my experience is fed by the stories and incidents that other people share. That's why I love to read. On a daily basis I enrich my experiences by allowing myself to be teachable. You really can teach an old dog new tricks.
Grief
Frozen. My inability to grieve. Personally that is the key or the first tiny
pre-step to grieving: That I cannot grieve!
Because
I’d rather quickly forgive and forget and lock up and survive.
To
me grieving knocks on my dark dungeon-mind late in the nights when I wake up in
anger or anxiety or incomprehension of why I can’t sleep, why am I not normal,
why am I so sad and frightened and anxious and angry as well. And then I
realise, maybe first intellectually and later emotionally, that it was because
of my broken childhood. And sometimes I stay with that sadness and grief and
cry out why did it happen to me , WHY, WHY, WHY...
And
then instead of remaining with this bewilderment and brokenness I feel in the
middle of the night (which has a strong shaming in it, this question, “what is
wrong with me, why am I like this, why am I not normal?”) I tell myself,
console myself, that it is not my fault. IT IS NOT MY FAULT. These shaming
defects and shortcomings, THESE ARE NOT MY FAULT.
I
still do not know what hurt me back then as a child, but I know I got hurt,
badly hurt, tearfully sadly hurt, and I FROZE UP and LOCKED IT UP and
FORCEFULLY FORGOT IT UP.
And
in this dark night present moment I grieve about the fact that I’m not able to
grieve, not able to even remember or want to remember that hurt.
And
then I pray to my Higher Power to give me the Strength and the Courage and that
Magic I don’t have. That magic torchlight to unlock that darkness and locate
that Hurt and stay with that hurt long enough so that I can wash it with my
tears (some tears are dry, it’s just a heaving of the heart and soul). Yes, I
pray that I stay with that hurt and wash that wound, that frozen pus, with my
sadness and tears. I’m told that my survival defense mechanism will quickly
yank me away from that wound and that I can’t force myself to grieve. This is
happening on its own, and like riding a bicycle I slowly learn how to stay
there. Initially God and CoDA and my therapist help me in this exercise. They
actually run behind me, holding that bicycle before I finally start cycling
myself.
Our bodies are not our enemies, treat your body with care and give it the support it deserves.
Our bodies are like living temples, and deserve all the love and
care we can give them. Amazingly flexible and strong, they allow us to
experience the world. If we notice that we're not feeling our best, that
we've put on extra weight, or that our favorite clothes don't fit, we can
make the choice to be good to ourselves in a new way today.
There are times we become conscious of a deeper hunger that will not be
satisfied physically. We can make a new, healthier choice for ourselves in
any moment, regardless of the hour, day, week or month. And when we make the
choice lovingly, we work from a creative place of improving our lives and
nurturing the best within us, so there is no need to punish ourselves. From
this place, we can be gently honest with ourselves about the reasons we want
to eat certain foods. We can reach out to doctors to help us determine if our
bodies are out of balance at a level that requires something other than basic
nutrients. We can also reach out to our friends for support and to share the
journey of health, which is just another part of our adventure on the
physical plane.
When we treat ourselves and our bodies as we would a trusted and loyal
companion, we keep our energy free from negative thoughts that would
complicate our journey. Our bodies are not our enemies, and we are not
fighting a battle. Instead, we are investing our love and attention into the
care and support of a beautiful creation--our selves.
There is a story in the Talmud about Shabbat Mishpatim. It says when Moses went up to the Heavens to receive the Torah, the angels asked the Creator, “Master of the World, why is there a human being here among us?” And an argument, or conversation, ensues. Because what was being given to humankind, through the Torah, was not wisdom or a spiritual path; it was an actual detachment of the essence of the Light of the Creator, being sent down for anybody who wants it. The angels could not understand that, therefore, they asked the Creator, “How can you give over control of the essence of Your Light to man?”
If the Creator was simply giving over wisdom, or even giving over a spiritual path, the angels would have no difficulty understanding. But the Creator is giving over His essence, and that is what this Shabbat is about: the concept of the giving of the Torah, which is a giving over of the Creator’s essence. And because the Creator has given His essence over to us, the Creator can no longer fix this world; only we can.
Shabbat Mishpatim is about the Creator giving us the Light. And once it is given over, whether we take it or not is our choice, but the Creator can no longer fix this world. Only beings of this world – not angels or even the Light Itself - can fix it. So not only are we given the opportunity to own the Light, and, therefore, receive the protection that comes with that, we also receive this tremendous responsibility to do something that cannot be done by the Creator or the angels. We have to take control of this Light, and through that, fix this world.
What was given to us at Sinai, what was given to our world in what is called the Torah, and through the Zohar, is the essence of the Light that the Creator has cut away for us. The Creator put it there, and it is here for us to take. This is why the angels were so scared. They asked the Creator, “Are You sure about this? Are You sure You want to send Your Light down into the world in a way that is not retrievable by us, or You? We cannot fix it anymore once you make this choice.” And the Creator says, “Yes. It might take a while, but there will come a time in human history where enough people understand that we have sent down into the world the essence of the Light. Nobody else can touch it except humans. Humans who understand this, and make it their focus of their lives to own this Light, can use that Light to fix the world.”
It is a very important shift of how we see our spiritual work and the responsibility that comes with it. And on Shabbat Mishpatim,we have both the gift of being able to refocus our spiritual work around this understanding, and of being able to take this essence of the Light that was given over to us and fix this world.
How the Buddhists view loneliness, and why it can actually be a good thing and beneficial to your spiritual practice.
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” ~ Janet Fitch
The below is a great quote…
Reminds me of Robin Williams’: “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.”
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche & Pema Chodron.
Via my mom, via Trungpa Rinpoche
“Although the warrior’s life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others…Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.”
From 2009: Tonight in Boulder there’s a Valentine’s Ball, which elephantjournal.com is proud to be sponsoring (it’s 80s style, and benefits the Women’s Bean Project). There’s hundreds of gorgeous in-and-out people going to St. Julien, friends partying at b.side, and all the other restaurants and bars will be full of sweet lovers and banded-together loners alike.
But the ‘shadow’ side of St. Valentine’s Day, is, of course, similar to the ‘shadow’ on Christmas, that other warm and bright holy-day all about togetherness. For tonight more folks than not find themselves alone. And whether we’re ashamed of that loneliness, or fine with it, we have Hallmark to thank for this day which reminds us that loneliness, uncovered, is at the heart of being a true, full human being. At least, that’s what I was taught.
My first love was a girl named Susannah Brown (a common enough name that revealing it will not enable anyone to google or FB her). We met when we were in high school, and had a glorious, tragic, intimate year and a half together. After we broke up (all my fault), I missed her every day, for years. Every single day.
It helped somewhat that I’d been raised in the Buddhist tradition. I’m sure other religious and agnostic childhoods would bear other helpful fruit, but what I know is my own experience. Reading a teaching on lonliness by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun who was an early student of ChogyamTrungpa and now studies with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, I was amazed that in the Buddhist view the feeling of loneliness is identified as the feeling of Buddha Nature. In other words, loneliness is not a lacking of something, but rather the aching fulfillment of our open, raw, caring nature. I remember thinking about this under the moon up at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, in 1992, and my friend Jenny comforting me. I missed Susannah so badly that night, the stars and moon and silhouetted mountains seemed to prick little holes in my silly red heart.
Other Buddhist texts remind us that when we fall in love with our teacher, or the Dharma, it is only a recognition of our own enlightened nature in others, or externally. We have only to realize, in such open, empty moments, that the love that we seek is present, now.
‘An analogy for Bodhicitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment and blame. But under the hardness of that armour there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.’ (The Places That Scare You, p4)
ChogyamTrungpa on “desolation, relationships, and loneliness as consort.”
Student: I’d like to ask a question about loneliness and love. In my experience, the kind of love where two people try to be together in order to protect themselves from loneliness hasn’t worked out too well. When you come in contact with loneliness, it seems to destroy a lot of things you try to pull off in trying to build up security. But can there be love between two people while they continue to try to work with the loneliness?
Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think anybody can fall in love unless they feel lonely. People can’t fall in love unless they know they are lonely and are separate individuals. If by some strange misunderstanding, you think you are the other person already, then there’s no one for you to fall in love with. It doesn’t work that way. The whole idea of union is that of two being together. One and one together make union. If there’s just one, you can’t call that union. Zero is not union, one is not union, but two is union. So I think in love it is the desolateness that inspires the warmth. The more you feel a sense of desolation, the more warmth you feel at the same time. You can’t feel the warmth of the house unless it’s cold outside. The colder it is outside, the cozier it is at home.
S: What would be the difference between the relationship between lovers and the general relationship you have with the sangha as a whole, which is a whole bunch of people feeling desolateness to different degrees?
TR: The two people have a similarity in their type of loneliness. One particular person reminds another more of his or her own loneliness. You feel that your partner, in seeing you, feels more lonely. Whereas with the sangha, it’s more a matter of equal shares. There’s all-pervasive loneliness, ubiquitous loneliness, happening all over the place.
In the middle way, there is no reference point. The mind with no reference point does not resolve itself, does not fixate or grasp. How could we possibly have no reference point? To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other. If I can’t go left or right, I will die! When we don’t go left or right, we feel like we are in a detox center. We’re alone, cold turkey with all the edginess that we’ve been trying to avoid by going left or right. That edginess can feel pretty heavy.
However, years and years of going to the left or right, going to yes or no, going to right or wrong has never really changed anything. Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. It’s like changing the position of our legs in meditation. Our legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so we move them. And then we feel, “Phew! What a relief!” But two and a half minutes later, we want to move them again. We keep moving around seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, and the satisfaction that we get is very short-lived.
We hear a lot about the pain of samsara, and we also hear about liberation. But we don’t hear much about how painful it is to go from being completely stuck to becoming unstuck. The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA. We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It’s the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution. We can have whiter teeth, a weed-free lawn, a strife-free life, a world without embarrassment. We can live happily every after. This pattern keeps us dissatisfied and causes us a lot of suffering.
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.
Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being.
The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts.
Less desire is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood. Practicing this kind of loneliness is a way of sowing seeds so that fundamental restlessness decreases. In meditation, for example, every time we label “thinking” instead of getting endlessly run around by our thoughts, we are training in just being here without dissociation. We can’t do that now to the degree that we weren’t willing to do it yesterday or the day before or last week or last year. After we practice less desire wholeheartedly and consistently, something shifts. We feel less desire in the sense of being less solidly seduced by our Very Important Story Lines. So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior. That’s the path of bravery. The less we spin off and go crazy, the more we taste the satisfaction of cool loneliness. As the Zen master Katagiri Roshi often said, “One can be lonely and not be tossed away by it.”
The second kind of loneliness is contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to lose. We don’t have anything to lose but being programmed in our guts to feel we have a lot to lose. Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear—of loneliness, of change, of anything that can’t be resolved, of nonexistence. The hope that we can avoid this feeling and the fear that we can’t become our reference point.
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.
The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecessary activities. When we’re lonely in a “hot” way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That’s called unnecessary activity. It’s a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o’clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness.
The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? What about practicing not jumping and grabbing when we begin to panic? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Japanese poet Ryokan says, “If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.”
Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline. We’re willing to sit still, just be there, alone. We don’t particularly have to cultivate this kind of loneliness; we could just sit still long enough to realize it’s how things really are. We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions—all our ideas about how things are—keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, “Oh yes, I know.” But we don’t know. We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.
Not wandering in the world of desire is another way of describing cool loneliness. Wandering in the world of desire involves looking for alternatives, seeking something to comfort us—food, drink, people. The word desire encompasses that addiction quality, the way we grab for something because we want to find a way to make things okay. That quality comes from never having grown up. We still want to go home and be able to open the refrigerator and find it full of our favorite goodies; when the going gets tough, we want to yell “Mom!” But what we’re doing as we progress along the path is leaving home and becoming homeless. Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are. Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved. The same is true for any other experience we might have.
Another aspect of cool loneliness is not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts. The rug’s been pulled; the jig is up; there is no way to get out of this one…
“Yours, Mine and Ours” is high on my list of favorite movies—the 1968 version, not that nonsense from 2005.
Starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, the movie loosely follows the real life love story between Frank Beardsley, a widowed father of 10, and Helen North, a widowed mother of eight, who meet, fall in love, marry, and attempt to tackle life with 18 children.
I remember watching it years ago, and while it’s incredibly funny (hello, Lucille Ball!), what struck me most, even when I was younger, was the honest, not-always-pretty portrayal of what life is like when you’re falling in love and combining two lives.
There’s one scene, toward the end of the movie, that includes one of my favorite quotes about love and relationships.
Frank, while trying to rush a very-pregnant-with-child-#19 Helen to the hospital, takes a few minutes to explain what love really is to his teenage stepdaughter.
And it’s the kind of no-nonsense, welcome-to-reality sentiment that I hope to one day build my relationship around:
“It’s giving life that counts. Until you’re ready for it, all the rest is just a big fraud. All the crazy haircuts in the world won’t keep it turning. Life isn’t a love in, it’s the dishes and the orthodontist and the shoe repairman and… ground round instead of roast beef. And I’ll tell you something else: it isn’t going to a bed with a man that proves you’re in love with him; it’s getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts.”
Sex is great. And romance is nice. But this is the kind of love I want.
Someone who I can do (and want to do) everyday life with. The boring, overwhelming, less-than-sexy stuff. The fussing-about-money, who’s-doing-the-dishes, I’m-tired-let’s-watch-a-movie stuff.
Someone I can create life with—whether that means having kids, starting a business, following a creative passion, or even just breathing life into each other with kind words, motivation, and emotional maturity.
Relationships are hard, and they take more work than most of us realize. But being able to just “be” with someone, to sit and be okay with both the silence and the chaos and everything in between, and still want to do it all the next day, and the day after that—that’s what I’m looking for.
