This Week's Article:
The Zen Lifestyle -
Fall into the Gap
On September 25, I started a new series of articles about Zen understandings. Herein is my peculiar twist on how a "Simple Presence" approach to life might be of use to you.
This issue, my favourite book is by Mark Epstein. Called Open to Desire, it's written by a Buddhist psychotherapist who is a former student of Ram Dass. Oddly and coincidentally, I found the book because of a comment about it on "The L Word" – Epstein even made a cameo appearance on the show. Sounded good, so I ordered it from Amazon while watching the show.
Even more interesting, I was reading in the reading area a couple of days ago, looked up at a bookcase, and realized I own and have read another of Epstein's books. I'll have another look at it, and perhaps it will appear here next.
Anyway, the subject of the book is desire, and how, much like in the west, Buddhism has a bit of a split personality regarding it.
Desire, like sex, makes people uncomfortable. I suspect it's the sudden realization of what's going on for us, just under the surface, that causes us to tremble a bit – such is the power of our desire.
For example, notice your internal reaction when you "get" this poster:
Epstein describes Buddhism's 'right hand path' as that of the ascetic – that desire leads to trouble and the way therefore to deal with it is to repress it, fight it, ignore it, or meditate it to death.
The 'left-hand path' is Tantra - where desire becomes the energy for transformation. In a sense, it's how we actually use the word. Desire stands in the gap between what we have and what we want.
Desire, then, is the emotional or
vibrational pull toward change.
And boy, do we hate change!
There are several things going on here at once, and they're all contradictory. A paradox! Oh goodie!
Desire is a function of objectification. One of the exercises I suggest to clients, (it's featured in my book, This Endless Moment) is to go to a Mall or a beach or some place where lots of people are. Sit there and watch the people go by, and notice which people you are sexually attracted to. Just notice. If you do this with your partner, tell him or her what you are learning.
You'll soon see that, just below the surface, you crave or desire "others." Here is the first paradox. In order to desire, I have to create an-other. I create an "object of my desire." In order to desire, I have to see that object while holding it as a thing.
The paradox is that charge only happens when I objectify. As soon as the object becomes a person, as soon as I give the object subjective reality, (I recognize the person) the charge starts to fade.
Secondly, if you watch yourself, you'll see that desire is a mental process, going on inside of you, in which you possess the object of your desire. As you take a step back, you realize that there is a gap between what you desire to do with the object, and the object him or herself. In other words, the paradox is that desire wants to possess and hold on to something (the real issue is, as we shall see – clinging…) – but the reality of what we are trying to hold on to is ever-changing.
Epstein writes: "But this kind of satisfaction is impossible because the qualities that we project onto the desired object—of permanence, stability or "thingness"—do not really exist…The disparity between the way we perceive things and the way they actually are is at the root of our struggle with desire. Once we learn to make that disparity part of our experience, however, desire can be a teacher rather than an affliction." [p 69]
Most of the people I work with are plagued with clinging. They are looking for the perfect partner. They are looking of the perfect life, the perfect career, the perfect mind-set.
My clients tell me they want to be happy.
As if there is a permanent state called happiness that someone, with effort, could cling to, all the time, despite the reality that all of life is change.
My goal, then, is to loosen their fingers from the death-grip they have on the object(s) of their desire, so that they can accept the paradox of their desire – you can never hold on to anything, including your illusions.
To look at this from a familiar Phoenix Centre place, consider that the Buddha said, in the first of the Four Noble Truths, that "life is dukkha." Epstein says that the Sanskrit Dukkha, (the word usually translated suffering) actually means something closer to "pervasive unsatisfactoriness." An example of dukkha is a potter's wheel that is off-balance, and therefore always squeaks.
Neat, eh? Isn't that really what life, when you are miserable, feels like? Not quite right, annoying, irritating, anger-provoking. The problem comes, of course, when we are feeling dukkha, and blame the experience on persons, places, or things outside of ourselves for creating the feeling we have inside.
As we endlessly say, our feelings are always and exclusively an inside job.
And then, the Buddha said (The Second Noble Truth) that the cause of dukkha was attachment to desire, which is better defined as grasping or clinging to desire. Thus, it is not the desire, the longing, that gets us. It is clinging to the mental picture of the object of our desire.
And remember: the only thing we can grasp or cling to is that which we objectify, or make an object of.
The gap, the place where desire exists, is also the place where we can begin to step out of the world of things. As we allow the things we desire to become real, separate and subjective, we can embrace both their separateness and their deeper meaning.
Now, that's not what we think nor how we normally act. We label everything, and most especially do we judge everything.
Thus, it might be said that all suffering comes from our attachment to what we think someone (or some thing, more precisely) ought to be, as opposed to learning to deepen our love for how "it" actually is.
Now, the language here is tricky – the objectification is built right in. Martin Buber spent a lot of time on this topic, and made it the theme of his book,
I and Thou.
His idea was that most relationships were "I / It" relationships, where I turn "you" into an object for my use and pleasure. I do this by imagin-ing how you "ought to be." I then attempt to make you into that thing that I desire – into my very own "it."
We hear people say, all the time, "My husband said…" My wife ought to…" My child must…" "My relationship is …" In each case, when we label like this, we are treating a person as an object.
Another common labeling technique is to assume that a category of things ought to be one certain way. This does work for categories of objects - thus, we know what an apple is, despite there being many varieties of apples. Where this falls apart is thinking there is a single, correct definition of a role: "Everyone knows that all husbands should…" or "My wife always behaves wrong." Bad, bad object.
Passion, on the other hand, can be a way to open ourselves to encountering the other person as a real, human entity. I can chose to deal with you as (in Buber's language) a Thou. The German is "du," which is the intimate form of the word 'you,' and really has no English equivalent. It's metaphorically similar to the difference between the formal "father" and the informal, intimate, "daddy." The best the English translators could come up with, to make this distinction, was to translate "du" as Thou.
This type of relating is an internal decision to be passionately engaged in an exploration of the gap that exists between myself and another. I also explore the gap between another and my perception of another. At the same time I acknowledge that I can only know "of" another – and that my knowing is more about me than about another.
So, what is the gap, and how does it parallel desire?
As I've said, the gap is created by the space (and the emotional tension) between what is happening and what I wish would happen. In most cases, this tension creates desire – a longing for 'what isn't.'
Now, where most go off the rails is when they freak out over the tension. They endlessly try to make the person – the 'object' of their desire – into the image they have in their heads. What they seek is stability and changelessness. It's the star-eyed lover screaming in ecstasy, "I want it to always be like this!!!"
This approach, this clinging, leads us to 'spending one's life fighting the gap.' Desire that one obsesses over leads to misery. In other words, if I 'fix' only on fulfilling my desire, I will never have a moment's peace.
The 'right hand path' suggests dealing with this by rejecting or renouncing desire. The left hand path, the way 'through' desire, is to accept it, respect it, and use it to work with the gap.
So, what does this look like? Oddly, it's as simple as acceptance. I accept that nothing stays the same, that there is always a gap between what is and what I desire, and I use this tension to relax into being comfortable with my discomfort.
In other words, the meditation is this: I am who I am, and my discomfort is a part of that. If I observe it as opposed to clinging to it and pretending it's real (it's not – it's a figment of my imagination), the distress will lead me to notice what I am doing, and allow me to step away from doing to simply 'being in the moment.'
Life is an endless tension. That is the nature of life. The way through the tension is to simply be present with it in a non-grasping way.
Once I see that life is as it is, I can learn to be in my life, as opposed to trying and failing, endlessly, to fix it, either in time, or by making everything over in the way I want it to be.
Once I stop playing god, in other words, I can simply be me.
Like I have another choice…
