Everything we see is always simultaneously being born and dying. There is nothing in this world you can hold on to, but love. Love necessarily implies an ability to die, to be reborn in every moment. It is simultaneously a great joy and a terrible curse. Reconciling these two aspects of it is the essence of wisdom. There is something beyond both: peace.
Everything you love will die. You will die. But you always have the present moment, and the closer you stay to it, the more life you will have before your dying and rebirth elsewhere. These are of course core Buddhist teachings. It is my belief that we need something beyond Buddhism, though. Something new, something for our time, and our places.
[I’ve added things, so the flow is not great. I’m OK with that.]
As I slowly open up–and I’ve been doing a lot of work recently I have not discussed here–I realize, I feel, how much I lost growing up, how much could have been there, how much should have been there, the happiness I could have felt, the relationship I could have had with parents and brother.
Thawing emotionally is like thawing physically: it hurts. Unpleasantness opens up, which you had hidden in emotional numbness and more or less conscious forgetting.
To begin anew, you have to mourn what was–and what could have been, but was not.
The other day I posted on recently, where I felt bursts of happiness, and relief from the constant attacks I feel in my psyche every day, I also felt considerable irritability. I think sometimes growth is learning to pay with the worst, so you can get access to the best. They must be mixed, because they HAVE been mixed: all possible joys have been pounded with deep sorrows, twisted and enmeshed, and then frozen.
They have their own energies, their own pathways, but everything that is in there has to come out and you have no choice, no way forward, but to take the good with the bad, and accept all of it without complaint or resistance. You must have stamina, and patience, curiosity, and perhaps even a sense of humor.
And it occurs to me there are types of humor. We might perhaps speak of the humor of acceptance, and the humor of rejection. Robin Williams practiced the latter.
I’m sure I must have posted on this at some point, but I have this theory that most people exist consciously in perhaps 60-70 percent of their personalities, their experience, their psychologically important facts. This is what they know. This is what they think about and allow themselves to feel. The remaining 30-40% is where Jungs Shadow lives. I don’t think all of it is negative, but I think much of it is.
Comedians who practice the humor of rejection, who live their lives avoiding their sorrows and rages by making people laugh, percolate the tensions that create the absurdities that make us laugh from their unseen self, via a visible, and perhaps outwardly vibrantly happy and alive self.
I would contrast this with the ability to laugh at ourselves, with love, with affection. I think I’ve spoken of this before, but one of my proudest moments with my oldest was when she came in to the living room laughing and crying. She had hit her head on a closet door in the bathroom, bounced off reactively, and managed to hit her head on the OTHER door. She found this stupidity and clumsiness hilarious. I thought “I must have done something right. This is a resilient kid.” As indeed she is.
That’s enough for now.