Handsome Monkey King:
Tim Farrington:
I am inclined here, forgive me, to keep throwing half-cooked spaghetti attempts at wisdom against the wall to see if anything sticks for you. I have dealt with despair, and I have been thinking that you are not dealing with that. Is that true, that despair is not the issue for you here?
I guess I have despaired. But it comes and goes and distracting myself with "normal" life things like career goals, friends etc, seems to work better than meditation.
Okay, thank you. It sort of frees me up, a little here, and seems closer to the substance of any piece of half-cooked psghetti (a typo so funny i'm leaving it in) that could possibly stick to your wall right now.
We hear a lot more these days about "meditated-related difficulties"--- strong techniques setting off all sorts of gnarly psychological and even psychiatric side effects. But one meditation-related difficulty that I think is largely unnoticed is perfectly normal, psychologically stable people, having applied the three characteristics, or the work of the path that goes through dissolution and on into the dark night nanas, in whatever vocabulary, finding that they don't see what good it can possibly do, all things deeply considered, and experiencing despair. I mean, the Buddha set out for nirvana after seeing a sick man, an aging man, and a dead man, and then a monk, which seemed to him to point a way out. But the Buddha aged, sickened, and died. What is that nirvana, then, even in the terms he originally framed the dukha? The whole thing looks like a bait-and-switch. It's even worse with Jesus, pragmatic dharma speaking: pick up your cross and follow me, love love love all the way up the hill to die young and horribly. No obvious fruit in this lifetime there. And J's last words on the cross were "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" , which might at least make a person wonder whether Jesus might have felt like the whole thing was a bust himself, at the end.
I put these two marquee cases starkly and harshly simply to frame this issue: does "spiritual practice", with all the well known dissolutions, sacrifices, etc., the time spent Doing Spiritual Shit, the dark nights, do, uh, shit? In this lifetime. Jesus said "By their fruits, ye shall know them." Does his brief career as an arguably miraculously gifted healer constitute his fruits? Do we really have to defer "fruits" beyond the frame of this lifetime? I mean, if that stone at Jesus' tomb really got rolled away by angels after three days, if we could buy that, it would change the question. But who can buy that, really? And even if we buy it, Jesus got his ass to heaven anyway, pdq, and left the fucking world to deal with the bloody mess that we now call Christianity. (I speak as a Catholic, of sorts.)
And you see despair in yourself, and i am a friend to despair, and a brother to jackals, and a companion to owls (Job 30:29, I take Job as a prime case study in faithful despair). I don't have a dog in the enlightenment hunt, enlightenment is actually against my religion, as a sectarian Jew. But I know despair. You are basically together, but I have known suicidal despair as well. And it is in light of that that i do feel like i can say something to you about your main question in this thread: why practice meditation or prayer? For me, it is because i have found, by going around and around, spiraling up and down through despair at its worst, that meditation alone--- it think it is precisely at the deepest point of the dark night, at absolute pure laser beam desire for deliverance from the hopeless agony that is despair that i have found, not good, but something quite beyond good that is simply . . . relief. It's like dying, but even cheaper, with no messy clean-up left behind for our loved one's. A lot of the time is probably doesn't even amount to what we might call EQ. John of the Cross says:
In this nakedness the spirit finds
its quietude and rest.
For in desiring nothing,
nothing raises it up
and nothing weighs it down,
because it is in the heart of its humility.
When it desires something
in this very desire it is wearied.
You're not going to make much money selling that, or thrill the crowds of spiritual seekers. For me, the benefit is obvious: i don't kill myself, and i get through another day. You're dealing with your own degree of despair, but I believe the parallel holds: the experience of that nakedness of no desire, that paradoxical embrace of the truth despairing of anything desirable, in heaven (for you) and on earth (in extreme cases like me), can, in fact and in practice, be reliably experienced here on this earth, and it does not take anything more than what've you've had for years, a decent meditation practice and letting for of desire for anything else, out of despair, EQ, stream entry, enlightenment, whatever, gate, gate, gone the fuck gate. It happens like the lifting of a weight, and the weightless heart of humility is impervious to despair, though despair will come again in life, and around we go, and then we die. So that's why i practice, and why i'm flinging this strand of spaghetti again your wall.