Flo:
Now that I think about it, I have one more "urgent" question.
After finishing most of Daniels book, enlightenment doesn't seem too desirable anymore.
I feel like most of what he describes is actually negative, and I remember that it gave me a surge of demotivation.
Is it really worth attaining in the end?
All the concentration states and nirodha etc. sound very nice, but the insight part sounds mainly like a burden. The only truly "positive" statement I remember is that his friend Bill described fourth path as "highly desirable, but he cannot explain why".
Sincerely
Flo
Hi Flo, This is what I think of as "Where's the beef?" territory (a sort of joke on an old US commercial, played for hamburger comedy there, but deadly serious in this sense). It's the heart of practice, and if you don't find an answer that makes the heart beat, you roll up the mat. The very good thing about asking it whole-heartedly is that you find that your tolerance for bullshit and fluff and sugar-coating and glibness will be very low. This is your life, and you're asking why you should be all in on a path. I ask it myself pretty much every day. There are a couple of broad approaches to allowing the question its full and authentic scope, and the first one I think of is: what got you started on your path in the first place? In your case, it was quite clear: your father's illness, and death. It's the same thing that got Siddhartha going, when he left his palace one day, a happily married prince with a wife and child, and on his way along the road his eyes opened to the godawful reality of a sick man, an aging man, and finally a dead man. So Gautama, the awakened one, found his first awakening, awakening to the first noble truth, samsara dukkha, to the relentless reality of suffering pervading mortal human life. And then he saw a guy in orange robes, a yogi on the way, a rumor of solving that dilemma of relentless inevitable suffering, and he went off seeking the beef. And again, the rumor is that he found it, and everyone who has followed in his footsteps on the path has faced the question of whether that rumor has anything to it, and what that beef of nirvana could actually be. There are as many answers as there are people who consider the question, but the only answer that really matters is the one that rings true enough to you to motivate you to walk the path "toward" it. And at this point you've seen enough to know how difficult the path is, and to get a sense of how long and hard it may be, even if the rumors are true.
And you're at a point where your previous sense of the beef has been lost, through practice, partly, paradoxically enough: you've let go of some previous answers, and rumors you're hearing now sound sort of lame. I really do think, as a veteran of the high mortality rate of every rumor of "attainment" that had me chasing its truth, and every framing and image of the carrot that had me running after it as it dangled from the stick, always out of reach, that this is all to the good. What is the truth of the three characteristics, of transience, the incredible disappearing self, and the dukkha born of wrong desire? Let the 3 Cs take every rumor, there's fire test number one. Nothing is going to hold up, pretty literally: we see the emptiness of the formulations of the beef. But you've also got the deep, visceral, gut-and-heart corrective to bullshit beef: you know why you started, you know the unanswerable reality of deep and genuine grief. That's fire test number two: any rumor of beef that doesn't hold up at a loved one's funeral is not going to do it. This isn't an intellectual exercise, this is your life, and you've got to get out of bed every day and raise your child and love your girlfriend and everything else the duties of love require. What does meditation practice bring to that?
The thing is, I suspect that you're fucked, at this point. Can you really imagine "going back"? Is there really some stable place of satisfactory existential eden somewhere behind you that you could possibly be satisfied with at this point in your life? If you rolled up the map, is there enough beef in your life for you to live it out without further desire for an answer to the questions that got you started in the first place in meditation? You're a deeply authentic person, that comes through strong here. You need to be honest here, ruthlessly honest, while your bullshit detector is on its high setting, it's a blessed window of that universal solvent doubt, and you should trust the scream of that bullshit detector. It may look like nihilism, letting the fire take all the rumors, all the supposed motivators, all the reasons and good things to attain and good things to be. It may feel like despair: emptiness and meaninglessness are less than a breath apart, in practice. But again, I suspect it's too late for you, you're not going to settle for hand-me-down bullshit now. I'd say sit with it. Sit with it like your life depends on it, and you don't know, and really obviously can't possibly know, what "it" is or could be or whether it's worth all the fuss and labor. And see what comes of that. Let "where's the beef?" be your koan, and let all the answers crap out. That's a daily practice I find I can live with. Seems like you're at a place where you could give it a try, lol.
