I am doing a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I’m really enjoying it. It is good poetry, which for me is words which induce in me deep feelings that are interesting and new to me.
One stanza is titled “The Fire Sermon”, which I had not heard of, so I looked it up. Here is Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta
I had an insight yesterday that the emotional connections I get in bars, which is where I do most of my socializing outside of work, are similar in tone to that of my family. Superficial, characterized often by role playing, and transitory. It’s what I’m used to. It has always felt natural to me.
And it occurred to me that this way of being is not really healthy for me. I can do much better. I can actually be much happier in my own company.
And yesterday I got the briefest flicker of a connection with my authentic self. It has been buried so long under so much garbage that I lost it. And it felt good.
And then I thought of the Fire Sermon. All the senses are “on fire”.
Here is what I would suggest: what we take to be real is a lit candle, which we take to be the source of all light. But we actually live in an ocean of light, and focusing on that candle prevents us from seeing it. We take that candle to be all there is. We take our lives as they are–our homes, our relations, our pleasures, our pains–to be all there is. We cling to them. We focus obsessively on this small candle, which blinds us to what is possible.
Tarthang Tulku, in his book The Joy of Being, discusses how to loosen up and liberate each of the senses, which in the Buddhist canon includes the mind, which makes sense. We do perceive with our minds. I am looking with my mind right now, and so are you.
And I think most people misread what the Buddha was trying to say. He was not saying to eliminate everything which we are. He is not saying to be blind, deaf, without a sense of smell or taste, and insensible to the outside world, and devoid of thought. What an austere and awful thing that is, to dedicate your life to your own death. I would put this confusion on a par with the Christian idea that God had to sacrifice his own son in order to be able to forgive people for being human.
What he was saying is that there is light in our eyes which we do not feel, that every sense organ has the capacity to allow us to feel and register and participate in God, or Buddha nature. What he is saying is that looking at the wrong thing–which is the outer appearance of things–blinds us to what lies behind them. What he is saying is that joy is our natural mode of perception and being, but that our focal point is completely wrong.
He is not saying to contract ourselves into nothing, but to expand into everything, into Oneness and connection.
And Nirvana, of course, means extinction. It is snuffing the candle out. But this not extinction of the self, of what is left after we remember who we really are. Rather, it is an expansion of the self into something vastly better, vastly more satisfying, and vastly more reliable.
It seems to me that all Buddhas are also Bodhisattva’s. Nirvana is equal to Samsara. It is the same reality, but seen rightly. You simply gain the ability to move freely, to go wherever you like, consciously.
God, or Buddha Nature, is in light and darkness, dampness and dryness, pain and joy. We have simply been choosing this, rather than that. That blindness is the fire he speaks of.