It hit me this morning that Kun Zhi (“hard ground”, in Tibetan, or so I understand, and which I have mentioned in the past, albeit most likely a few years ago) is really the emotional ground we walk on.
You have all your normal emotions that you go through your day with. The ones you walk with and drive with, which are present when you are upright physically.
But you move on a substrate of emotions which are NOT consciously available to you. This would be, in a less elegant term, the unconscious.
The ground creates the sky, and in turn both create your “world”. The purpose of meditation is for the ground to disappear and merge with the sky. Shunyatta.
We cling to forms–which very certainly includes most importantly emotional forms–but what we really want are higher feelings, such as that of release, of joy, of belonging. We settle for constancy, and the vague promise of a permanence that is of course impossible.
The image came to me a few weeks ago of what I called “The Crying Stone”. This is something I conjured as a reference point. It is all the memory and thus presence of misery. Any time I get confused, I can orient myself by bringing forth and touching the crying stone.
That such a process is severely limiting should be obvious. Some part of me just has not yet come up with something better. The only something better that makes sense to me intellectually is a better way of walking emotionally.
But that walking will need, eventually, to be done without feet, and without ground. This “walking” is what covers levels of meditation.
And that connects with an experience I had yesterday. I was listening to some sad song, that misted my eyes up. And I thought “oh the HUMANITY. I feel people’s pain so much.”
Then I looked more carefully: what was REALLY happening was that I was sad, and I was rationalizing my own reasonable and appropriate responses by making them something more high minded.
For me, I was never given permission to feel my own emotions. I am therefore, of course, obsessed with them, with obsession itself being perhaps at root a LACK of feeling, not overabundance of it.
It is in some respects a calming and easing thing to do, to project and generalize your own painful emotions. You are upset and sad, and sadness easily can seem like compassion, and such sadness can easily lead to anger, and such anger can easily be rationalized. You just flip on the news and get your dopamine hit of self righteousness, and you have taken a transient personal emotion, that you could and ideally would have identified, felt fully, accepted, and allowed to pass, and transformed it into a more or less concretized and enduring politics.
You have, in other words, avoided dealing with an intrinsic emotion, an endogenous, personal feeling that was telling you something important about yourself, and created a prison out of everything that followed; and at that, one with generally negative social and often even physical (in terms of policy outcomes) consequences.
If arrogance is a “mistake in the future” (Practical Thinking: worth the read), as Edward de Bono rightly observed, then self righteousness is a conflict in the future.
And feeling this, I felt myself get softer. I quickly fixed it by flipping through my news, but it was there for a split second.
That is a joke, but it is also more or less true. These are not the confessions of an innocent man, and even though I often moralize, I do so from a very short stump, if not sometimes a hole in the ground.
In reality, I probably float up and down continually. I likely have some basis for saying what I am saying at some moments, and none whatever in others. The words endure. The man who said them changes continually. Their life, I suppose, is what you choose to do with them.
Most authentic spiritual traditions exist to point these sorts of things out. As I say, I am partial to my understandings of some sorts of Buddhism (it is, by the way, always perilous to speak of “Buddhism” as if it were unitary; it branches off in many ways after the 4 Noble Truths, or so it seems to me), but I think any tradition which involves long periods of silence, and a focus on something transcendent–with Buddha Nature being a sort of ersatz God–is going over time to lead in approximately the same direction.
As time goes on–or appears to go on–it seems to me that one of the Idealisms seems most likely to best accord with how the world “really” works, which is to say that Mind is the main reality, and that speaking of anything else as “actually” existing is a mistake. We can create anything we like, so there is no limit to what is “really” real.
Oh, the whole thing can simplify down, I think, to being glad you are alive. That is simple enough, and if I get my choice, that is what I choose. Enjoy your coffee. Enjoy Autumn as it slowly makes its way into your life, if you get one; and if you don’t, then enjoy the flowers and persistence of Spring.
Even if we are eternal beings, it’s nice to have a cookie once in a while, and I am partial to fondue. On some days the air feels wonderful, and of course we always feel better after a workout.
I’ll stop the rambling there.