Acceptance

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It may be that this last five years has basically been about teaching me to accept, even embrace, contradiction. Contradiction and chaos, the stuff of life. My upbringing wasn’t especially unpleasant, my mother and many of my family members are kind, generous, wonderful people. But, there was a certain amount of instability - inside and out. My life has been characterized by pendulum swings towards mimicking that instability and then away, towards a sort of over-structuring in an effort to neuter the fear producing chaos that life inevitably brings.

I don’t feel the need to go into much detail about this.  Let it suffice to say that the course of events, still surely underway, has taught me a few things.  At least, it’s handed me a few new questions to puzzle over.

For one thing, I’m no longer particularly interested in the notion of a universal truth.  In fact, I think I could use a whole lot more in the way of tools to critically examine anything I might be treasuring as a universal truth.  Why?  Because they tend to do nothing but get in the way between me and everything I love.  For some people, even some close to me, universal truths soothe them, help them, usher them along their path.  For me, they just tend to make me a jerk.

I don’t have much to go on.  In fact, I don’t have anything.  It’s just me.  This body, this set of relationships, this whatever else it is.  This doesn’t distress me.  I haven’t a shred of existential dread in my body.  I look at the world, and despite its tendency to exhibit horrific ugliness, I find myself entranced by beauty.  I find myself captivated by thinking about things that can’t be thought about.  I find myself practically blown over by the sheer joy of living - even when everything sucks.

What I’ve got to go on is myself, and the faculties given me.  Maybe these were given by a Creator and maybe they weren’t.  The question, frankly (and sorry to my friends who would have me say differently) bores me.  These faculties tend to lead me towards beautiful things, towards simple things, and towards those practices and ideas that lay bare the truth so clearly that anyone can see it.

And see through it.

When the Buddha hung on the edge of enlightenment and was assaulted by every manner of demon, he stayed there with them and yet was not defeated.  He reacted not with aversion, nor with attraction, nor with indifference.  He stood outside the clinging, sticky, ugly, human thing that we often call desire.  He simply was.  But the most important part of the story comes at the end - when he is asked for independent verification of his experience.

He touches the ground.  That’s been interpreted a lot of ways by a lot of people better qualified than I am.  But, my simplest reading I can offer finds Buddha pointing to the reality of his lived experience as all the proof he needs.  That should be good enough for me.  When I let it be, it is.

Eric