The first type is what country singers and blues singers sing about. It is poverty and following difficulty and resentment. It is dishonesty in others. It is being a double amputee. It is hunger, both physical and emotional. It is all the felt sufferings of mind, body and spirit, which we call pain.
The second type is a sort of pooling of resistance and tension in response to change. It is holding on to what is passing by. It is disruptions in the smooth flow of breath because we want one thing to be true and not another.
The third type is the most subtle, what they call “conditioned existence”. Put most simply, it is having a self that we want to retain, to hold on to.
I was listening to this series on Buddhism several weeks ago, and when he came to the part about conditioned existence, I inexplicably started sobbing, in a way I have not done in many years. I was driving, and it was a bit inconvenient. I nearly pulled over, but it passed.
Conditioned existence is feeling trapped by your history, unable to break free and fly. It is in the very structure of your body, how you have learned to move in response to your particular psychosocial history.
I watched a bird land on the very top branch of a tree last week. Conditioned existence is that bird thinking that because it is on the top of the tree, that it has realized its full potential, and forgetting how to fly.
You can feel that shrinking, like plastic wrap in an oven. Just because it is transparent, does not mean that it does not hold you.
We all live in cages. We choose these cages because they provide our “four walls of freedom”, to paraphrase Merton. But this is an illusion. We were meant to roam open oceans, and fly in empty spaces. It is fear that holds us back. We create the walls. Those walls protect us from out there, from the knowledge of freedom.