A letter written but that will not be sent (because I’m too much of a wussy? Maybe…)
(Tiffany emailed me last night. It was a short email, bland and for the most part impersonal; no warmth or friendliness [probably so that there’d be nothing to get my hopes up or that might lead us to crash into each other again and then give her cause to sling-shot me back out into my Ort Cloud]. In it she told me she wouldn’t be writing at length [ya think it’s over, John? ya think that ship might’ve sailed, big boy? lol]), and told me basically that as far as her inner work and solitude goes, that it was so far so good, and that her intuition is telling her that she’s on the right path [her intuition is telling her that this feels right, is closer to her own words]. She also shared some lyrics with me to a song she liked that she thought I might find amusing. Honestly, I had no idea what she was trying to say to me or about herself through those song lyrics.)
“So far so good”? So you are “enjoying” your inner work? You are just taking a stroll through some sort of psychological Ikea & Hallmark store, doing a little window-shopping, trying on the latest fashions, accessorizing your psyche with a few new tricks and pleasant fictions, buying a few new blankets for your ego? Eleven years ago, when I was actually first starting to grow in earnest as a person, at this point I was getting my butt kicked, I was seeing all sorts of ugliness and uncomfortable and unpleasant things in myself and others. I was having truth crammed down my throat, I was having my nose shoved in shit, I was having my eyes taped open and head held in place and having to watch all sorts of brutal images play out on a screen in front of me—images of our inhumanity to one another. So “so far so good” would have been the last thing I would have uttered. I would have said something more along the lines of, “Help! Make it stop!” or “I give. Let me up; let me out of this. I don’t want to now what I didn’t know then, not to mention just 5 minutes ago.” Not some namby-pamby “so far so good” after a week or two. At this point eleven years ago my psyche was splayed open. So just what effing books are you reading and what precious moment Ikea thoughts are running through that lovely low tolerance-for-tension-and-discomfort brain of yours?
By the way, your warmth and care are always so lovely to be on the receiving end of. I am well, thanks for asking, which of course you didn’t, my lovely little Ice Maiden, o you who at one time were so important to me and who would have likely even been more important to me by now but who instead got skittish and flighty and now is just a rose without a rose, but still full of thorns, and exists amid a field of undifferentiated weeds and roses all equally unimportant and insignificant to me, and all who have nothing to say to me. (& that is reality, Tiff; no softeners.)
And I may be sarcastic and caustic, but it’s only because I still at least give a damn about you as a person, the person who was supposed to be my friend and who was apparently going to try to tame me but then started making me her whipping boy and jerking me around. Way to go! Yes, Tiff-Tiff, you are responsible, forever, for what you tame. But you are also just as responsible, forever, for what you mis-tame and what you tame badly. That is also your responsibility and part of the legacy you leave behind on this earth. You behaved yourself into this version of me, Sweets. So here’s a personal growth-oriented idea for you: try stepping up and acting courageously and beautifully for once in your life and behaving yourself out of what you behaved yourself, into instead of hiding out from life again. Wow, what a novel concept!?
“One only understands the things that one tames. But people have no time to understand things anymore. Instead, they buy things readymade at Ikea, soulless, mass-produced, stock things. But there is no Ikea where one can buy friendship. Not to mention wisdom or personal or spiritual growth. So people have no friends, no wisdom, so soul, no real growth, and no real relationships any more. Everything is comfortable and readymade and unchallenging. People have no need of each other any more. Everyone is disposable and replaceable and expendable. No one is unique to anyone else any more. No one can just sit still and sit quietly with another any more.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
We could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the Personality Ethic trying to change our attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to approach the phenomenon of change that occurs spontaneously when we see things differently.
If we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa. Even in instantaneous paradigm shifts, a change of vision is a function—and thereby limited by—the basic character of a person. We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
(Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)
* * *
One must learn to see. Learning to see—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it, taming our vision, postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts (the instincts of self-preservation and “taste”). Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will”—to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depends on the inability to resist a stimulus: the person must react, is a reflex of the world, and follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion. Almost everything that unphilosophic crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand.
(Nietzsche, from Twilight of the Idols)
Yes, my mind is on fire. Inspiration is everywhere. Everything is grist for the mill. Everything is relevant. Nothing is being excluded. My heart isn’t broken; not in the least. My heart has been opened, broadly re-opened. The scales have been removed from my eyes; everything is more alive, more vibrant, more wondrous, even you and your darkness and iciness.
In fact I wonder if life would have such beauty and urgency again if it were not for your strong opposition, apathy and hostility toward me, your treating me as insignificant and disposable and expendable and as if nothing that we did or said meant anything to you or mattered or touched you and instead sling-shotting me out of your universe and out into my little Ort cloud.
Ask yourself, why you will not be writing at length to me? (I doubt you even read anything I wrote or write, including this) You put in more time and effort on me when we were naked than you have here. “Love is a decision that we can make any time under any circumstance or condition. But first we must know that it is a decision, a choice. Opening our awareness even in a situation that doesn’t seem loving, can change everything.” (—Samahria Lyte Kaufman)
* * *
“It is our true nature to have an open heart. Sometimes this is called our divine nature or our Buddha nature. But whatever we call it, know that each heart has an enormous capacity to hold the world. Sometimes, however, we become afraid. We don’t recognize that the heart has the capacity to be open in the midst of all things. The power of the heart is enormous and transformative. Through our inner courage, we awaken to the greatest capacity of human life, the one true human freedom: to love in the midst of all things. Each of us has our own gifts that come from the flowering of our heart. For some the journey to the heart’s generosity is long and hard; but even those who are abused as children can, out of those difficult circumstances, grow to be beautiful adults in our community. I have seen it in my work again and again. And always those wounded adults remember one person—a teacher, a grandparent, a friend—who saw them or touched them or loved them, and it is on this love that they base their healing.”
(—Jack Kornfield)
* * *
“Living in fear is like being frozen. The Buddha taught love—particularly metta, loving-kindness—as the antidote to fear. The Buddha said, “Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles open space”; meaning, develop a mind such that if someone where standing in room throwing paint around in the air, it couldn’t land anywhere: there’s nowhere in space for paint to land. We can develop a heart or a mind so that it’s like space—boundless, open, vast, unpartitioned, free. Any amount of paint, any irritant, any inner or outer trouble, won’t land. Metta is not a fabricated decision like, “Now I am a very spiritual person and therefore I will love all beings”; nor does it mean that if we’re really seething with rage or filled with fear, we’re somehow going to overlay a nice little veneer and pretend and be smiling all the time. Metta is the moment when the sense of “us and them” crumbles. It is born of an understanding that we might soon be dead, so why bother upholding all those boundaries and barriers? With the collapse of those boundaries, the effortless, natural love for all beings wells up. In Lovingkindness, I tell the story about my friend Sylvia Boorstein being on a plane that developed a problem with its hydraulic system. The pilot got on the PA system and said, “We have five minutes before we land.” Sylvia realized she had five minutes before she might be dead. She found that there was no way in the world that she could limit herself to opening her heart to just her immediate family. The only thing she could do at that moment, when she might have only five minutes left to live, was to open her heart to all beings everywhere. This was without any contrivance or force or pretentiousness. This is what the Buddha meant by metta.”
(—Sharon Salzberg)
What the heck else do you think personal growth is about, if not being able to be more courageous, more open, more in touch with reality, to see more and more others as REAL, to live with less fear and more love and openness? Where do you think growing as person is going to lead you to other than a being a person who can better deal with emotionally with stress and difficulty and tension and challenging situations without having to pull back self-protectively or behave skittishly and erratically? (Are you listening to this yourself as you write this, John??) What do you think this is all going to be about if not making you more differentiated in a legitimate way?
So, Tiff, your intuition says this feels right—holing up and ignoring me? Well, fuck your intuition; it’s the worst part of you, Tiff. Every time it’s had a spasm in this relationship and you’ve listened to it, I end up getting the shaft and pushed away by you for no good reason. And I did nothing to deserve this from you. Got it? Your intuition needs some serious help; it needs to get into therapy pronto, it needs to be filleted and rewired and reworked big time. Too direct for you to hear? Too effing bad: deal with it. I’m tired of your coldness and apathy and indifference.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of the desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if I had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
A little poem for you, my lovely little Ice Maiden, by way of Robert Frost.
All your intuition is now is a little self-protective jerk or reflex that gets the better of you. But, hey, that’s what life is like when you’re not very differentiated. You exist as a reflex of the world, a plaything of circumstance, a namby-pamby who bases her life on feelings and reflexes, and not on anything that is more elevated and differentiated and wiser and more proactive and centered and more complex and multi-faceted and soulful and challenging and courageous.
See, you don’t have the integrity or honesty to ask yourself this one simple question: what if your intuition is wrong? I mean, how often in your past has your intuition failed you? (Your marriage; Hans—although you may be taking back up again with him by now and running back to something familiar after having been exposed to something so far out of your comfort zone; who knows.) Your intuition needs personal growth as well. And a lot of it. It needs a lot of refining. I mean, where did you get the idea that it can or ought even be trusted as it is, as undefined and undifferentiated and default as it is? Where did your intuition get its wisdom and certainty from? Are you content to base the significant decisions and moments in your life on the instincts and reverberations and echoes from thousands and thousands of years ago, from thousands and thousands years of chance and evolution? Is that what you call living in the now or living in the moment? Clearly you’re not yet shipwrecked; you’re not yet at ground zero. You never read those words of Ortega y Gasset that I sent you (on more than one occasion) about the ideas of the shipwrecked. And clearly you’ve never read letter 8 in Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” where he writes of a person who has suddenly been yanked from his familiar surroundings and placed on the heights of a great mountain range and what a colossal lie he would have to invent in order to explain the situation of his senses and soothe his insecurity and lostness. Delusion is not caused by objectivity; it’s caused by subjectivity.
Clearly none of this makes much of an impression on you. It reminds me of that line from Se7en, which is basically an updating of what Kafka wrote about real reading—the type of reading and encounter with a book (or even another person) that actually leads to genuine personal growth … “A book or a letter must wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t startle us and grab our attention like a blow to the head, then why bother reading it? So it can make us happy, more comfortable, more our smaller selves? For God’s sake, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all! Books that make us happy or more tranquilized we could, in a pinch, write for ourselves. What we need are books that make us feel like we’ve been banished into a forest far from everyone, books that hit us like the suicide of someone near to us. What we need are books that affect us like a disaster, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like the death of a child, like the death of our only child. A book must be an ax for the frozen sea within us.” (Kafka, my paraphrasing, which I actually thinks works better) … and from Se7en, paraphrasing from memory—“Wanting people to listen you can’t just go up and tap them on the shoulder any more. You have to hit them over the head with a hammer, and then you’ll find that you have their strictest attention.”
That’s the stepping off point for real reading and real growth; that level of seriousness and attention. Ships cannot remain where the water is too shallow. To test real gold, you must see it through fire. A good horse runs at the shadow of a whip. Words cannot open another’s mind. If useless things do not hang in your mind, any season, and any situation, is a good for you.
* * *
One day a leader of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu, “Master, will you write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?” Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.” “Is that all?’ asked the leader; ‘Will you not add something more?” Ikkyu then wrote twice “Attention, Attention.” “Well,” remarked the leader rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you’ve just written. Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times, “Attention, Attention, Attention.” Half-angered, the leader demanded, “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean anyway?” And Ikkyu answered calmly, “ ‘Attention’ means attention.”
* * *
Whenever Master Gutei was asked about Zen, he simply held up a finger. He had a young attendant who was asked by a visitor, “What kind of teaching does your master give?” The boy raised up a finger. Gutei heard about this and cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. As the boy ran off screaming in pain, Gutei called to him. When he turned his head, Gutei held up his own finger again. The boy was suddenly enlightened.
(from The Gateless Gate, case number 3)
* * *
“It is obvious that you will listen but will go on in your way, because that is the most convenient, irrational, thoughtless way. And if that is comforting, then it indicates that you really don’t care what happens in the world, that you really don’t have any affection, any love for mankind. And that all you are concerned with is your own little comfort, right?” (—Krishnamurti, in “On Relationship”)
* * *
It can happen to you. In a flashing moment something opens. You are new all the way through. You see the same world un-same and with fresh eyes. Whatever you do or wherever you are makes much less difference now. It doesn’t make sense. But it does make you. Zen aims to make manifest what Buddha himself realized: the emancipation of one’s mind from fear and ego and clinging. The whole intent of Zen stories and koans is to help the pupil break the shell of his limited mind and attain a second eternal birth—satori, enlightenment, a metanoia, a shift in perspective, a turning, a figure-ground reversal.
Gee, maybe a little principled and not simplistic, non-feeling and non-intuition alone thinking might be helpful here, Tiff. Ya think? Maybe your thinking ought not be the servant of your intuition and fears and always just do their bidding and be put to use rationalizing and justifying and carrying out their wishes. Maybe for a change you ought to take a more difficult and courageous and beautiful path! Wow, what a concept. Clearly this spring does not belong to the ordinary person and the ordinary mind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part onto the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining.
It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal; and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer.
These things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity, pettiness and weakness. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leave a Reply