Tag: impermanence

Clearly seeing absolute and relative

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The practice of meditation leads us to seeing things as they really are. In other words, we come to appreciate the continual changing nature of things as they are directly experienced in the present,  the patterns which are beneath our choices, and the way we react, without thinking,  to certain factors.  When we do not see clearly the nature of what drives us and the nature of reality as changing, we seek happiness in mistaken ways and in the wrong places. We can persist in unsatisfactory ways of behaving. When we have a “wrong view” as to how things are, we persist in thinking that certain behaviours will guarantee us satisfaction and we remain fixed in them. We mistakenly believe that absolute  contentment can be found in things that we acquire or in the relative aspects of our lives which are subject to change and decay.  This can be true in so many areas of our lives, some of which are hugely emphasized in today’s society, such as our career, possessions and our relationships.

Ordinary human love is always relative, never consistently absolute. Like the weather it is always in continual dynamic flux. It is continually rising and subsiding, waxing and waning, changing shape and intensity.

….This may seem totally obvious. Yet here’s the rub. We imagine that others – surely someone out there! – should be a source of perfect love by consistently loving us in just the right way. Since our first experiences of love usually happen in relationship to other people, we naturally come to regard relationship as its main source. Then when relationships fail to deliver the ideal love we dream of, we imagine something has gone seriously wrong. And this disappointed hope keeps reactivating the wound of the heart and generating grievance against others. This is why the first step in healing the wound and freeing ourselves from grievance is to appreciate the important difference between absolute and relative love.

John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

Looking forward

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Hope is a dimension of the soul … an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel

A full, but short, life.

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

At the start of August I wrote about the kitten whom our neighbours had brought home, little Minette, and the lessons I could learn from her trust and playfulness. Since then she became a regular feature in our house, coming over early in the morning for what I suspect was her second breakfast and generally exploring under the settee and in the garage, sitting beside me with loud purring or chasing flies at the window.

When I arrived home today my neighbour came to meet me with tears in her eyes. Minette had been attacked in the evening time by another cat and had been badly wounded. Despite the best efforts of the vet she was in too much pain and the decision was made to put her down. My neighbours could not sleep the night she was struggling between life and death, their children really upset at the loss of their little pet.

I was saddened by the loss of this little friend, who brought so much joy each day. I know that my sense of loss is not as great as that of my neighbours, and that the kitten was just a few months old. However, we suffer small losses and disappoinments each day. As I have posted before,  Stephen Levine reminds us that grieving that has to go on for all the little losses and disappointments that happen throughout our days. He calls this “our ordinary, everyday grief” which builds up following the “disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives”.

How to deal with this loss today and the other reminders that life is less than satisfactory at times? I am increasingly noticing the dialogue in my life between the the seeming opposities of attachment and flight, drawing close and keeping distance. And the wisdom traditions seem to have different teachings which emphasize these different dynamics in the soul. It is not hard to find statements that recommend detachment or flight, such as the traditional Buddhist exhortation to frequently remind ourselves that “we and everyone we hold dear will die”. It is clear that some detachment from changing reality is necessary, especially when one sees too much fulfillment in the material aspects of this world. However, that does not work for me today. In relationships I can sometimes I use that idea as an excuse not to engage.  I prefer to see Minette’s short life as being almost perfect, in that she lived fully in this world celebrating her closeness to her family and to us in a joyful way. She trusted and loved fully and did not hold back. Her personality was to be attached and to engage. As I wrote when I first met her, she existed without running the story lines, based on the wounds in our own relationships, which lead us to mistrust and hold back. She did not worry about the meaning of life. She lived.

The soul has an equal task and commitment, to find the treasures and explore the ins and outs of life by being attached. Just as there is spiritual practice in search of the highest and most refined reaches of human potential, so there is soul practice in pursuit of the juices and nutriments of life’s entanglements.

Thomas Moore, Soulmates

It’s not out there

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We have a habit of looking in the wrong place for contentment. We tend to look outside ourselves, seeing others’ lives and other places as possessing a greater level of happiness than we currently possess. This often leads us to instinctively compare, provoking a movement within us that happens in a flash and then prompts the telling of a story about ourselves and about life, which leads to our mood going down. As I have written before, we end up comparing our present self to a better self, or to the ideal portrayal of lives which we find in society or which our insecurities about ourselves have generated. We find that a lot of our anxieties arise because we are trying to match up to what we think our life “should” be like, or what others portray as being happy.

It is easy to fall into this trap when we travel. We see a different from of life, maybe faster and more “exciting” than our own, or houses situated in a better location, or places of quiet that seem much more peaceful than where we live. So we lean towards those things, or we leave ourselves, not realizing that true contentment is found within. We get caught in idealized views of what is possible for ourselves and travel far in our minds and in our spirits from where we actually are. And this often means we end up thinking that something must be wrong with our  lives or with us.

Meditation practice is a training in learning to stay, staying with ourselves, not running outside ourselves after every passing stimulus about things which will pass away. It helps us to not attach too much solidity to these comparing thoughts, letting them pass through our minds without hooking on to them. We realize that they do not bring the contentment they seem to suggest. It helps us seek real happiness within, where we already are.

The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely…is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or…learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Come down from the mountain

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Meditators face a very real danger of coming to prefer the view from the top of the pole to their real life on the ground. But such peak moments, no matter how profound, always end, leaving us with the problem of how to live in accord with the perspective they provide. Unless we learn to step off the pole, our practice will devolve into mere addiction to the highs of peak experience.

Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind

Forever begin

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In Memory of my Father, born this day 1920.

Begin to the loneliness that cannot end, since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

Brendan Kennelly,  Begin