The truth of suffering.
We had an excellent discussion at Jewel Heart-Cleveland, on the truth of suffering as the first of the four noble truths. I learned tonight to focus on the suffering that I experience in my life, and less on the suffering of others, as I tend to do. It is a very good point. It reminds me of any number of the people I worked with in domestic violence group therapy. Many were eager for the therapy to take, and to their credit, had been diligent in working on their issues. However, setbacks occurred even with long term participants when they began focusing on the issues of other group members as a "helper" to the therapist. In AA they talk about "working your own program." If your life depends on your sobriety, you have to learn the tricks that your own illness will play on you to keep you sick. If you are all focused on what the drunk next to you needs to do to keep himself sober, you are not paying attention to you. And you need to pay attention to you because you are the one who is killing yourself with the dillusions and insane rationalizations that you use to keep kidding yourself, so that you can stay sick.
I'm thinking that it works the same way with Buddhism. I always want to be seen as the Bodisattva who is only still here to help relieve the suffering of others. A much more comforting self-image, than my present reality, which is that I am here because I keep falling prey to the same aspirations life after life; keep following and feeding the same insatiable hungers. I keep falling for the same sucker bet, and never gain insight as to which pod the pea is really under.
I have the same tendency in Christian practice. With hindsight, much of my alienation from my Christian culture was less about the faults of the church and its practitioners, but derived from my own arrogant refusal to see myself as the imperfect sinner, deserving of punishment. The Christian concept of punishment for sin suffers much from the interpretations of fundamentalists, who seem called upon to deal out the punishment to other sinners as God's surrogate, rather than tending to their own conduct. Which largely accounts for my absence from church on Sunday. The Buddhist approach, being more introspective seems to have a reduced tendency to this particular regard.
So my take-away lesson for tonight is to relinquish my guise as Bodhisattva, and accept the suffering that I experience in my life, in the same vein that I would have to accept myself as a miserable sinner seeking redemption, had I not left the church of my youth.
For some reason, our extended discussion put me in mind of the blues. We talked a lot about how our grasping and our aspirations are a primary source of our suffering. We seek the pleasures of life compulsively, and fear their loss almost before they've begun, that the result is not joy, but bittersweet sorrow. Sounds a lot like the blues. In class I talked about Bob Dylan, and some of his love songs about loving and losing. On the way home, I listened to Oscar Peterson doing "One For My Baby, and One More For the Road." It was all about lost love. This post needs a soundtrack:
Here is "You're Gonna Make Me Lonsome When You Go." Bob Dylan; from "Blood on the Tracks."
"Tomorrow Night" is all about feeling the pain along with the pleasure.
Another sweet tale of a sad affair ending in twilight memories.
Finally, the penultimate song about love and pain...
DHL
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