MILAREPA AND THE LITTLE GOAT
i am a little goat high up on a howling mountain side.
i can hear the demons in the howling,
and i can feel them snufflig and shuffling behind me,
but i am not afraid,
because when i turn around they will have vanished.
But i make my goat eyes into slits
as narrow as the track i walk on,
and i know they are still there.
Milerepa knows how to deal with demons.
i can see him, far below, in the valley,
his little cook fire ablaze, and the demons drinking his wine, and their laughter
making them holy.
Mine are too afraid to come near me.
i walk step by step, high up on the howling mountin side.
It's OK, little goat.
It's the wind.
It's the wind.
Explanatory note:
Milarepa was the great saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet. It is usual that the gods of the previous religion become the demons of its successor. Christianity has some good examples as any of this. Christian missionaries in Britain were advised to incorporate pagan themes into their new Christian worship. Churches were built on the old holy sites, for example. This was a kind of hegemony, for sure, but also an acknowledgment that change needed to happen incrementally and that the old ways still had some credibility. Milarepa went a step further and he is famous for inviting the demons from the warry old Tibetan religion of Bon to dinner, and negotiating through rational argument their submission to the new spiritual regime.
Nowadays we take a wholly psychological approach to demonology.
i wanted to combine the literal and psychological approaches, and to express something of the subline perils of the spiritual journey.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Manly Arts
i have been watching some of the Olympic Games on TV. At odd times, catching some unfashionable coverage.
i liked the women's archery, which went all the way down to one arrow. It was between Mexico and South Korea. i rooted for the Mexican woman, because she was cute and because the Koreans were winning every damn thing. And as the saying goes: 'Poor Mexico: so close to the United States, so far from God'. The Korean won.
The Modern Pentathlon amused me. It was developed by Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, to show the skills of the ideal soldier, namely a cavalry officer caught behind enemy lines. Not an infantryman, mind, a cavalry officer. Coubertin may have had dreams of modernity and internationalism but this sort of classist and Eurocentric thinking places him nicely of his age. Thus, the skills of the Modern Pentathlon are those most manly European pursuits of
epee fencing,
pistol shooting,
equestrian show jumping,
swimming, and
Resident Evil: No Hope Left.*
Naturally at London 2012 there were no Eritreans or Peruvians competing, although there was an Egytpian, bravely challenging the class and race barrier as it manifested itself in some weird early twentieth century time warp.
The manliness bit reminded me of the Mongolian Festival of Naadaan. i went through a big Mongolian phase a while back and learned a lot about it. i even considered a very expensive expedition to the Gobi desert where i would be looking for the extremely rare Little Brown Gobi Bear. The brochure showed lots of pictures of rocks and deserty bits. The itinerary went something like this:
Day One: Ulaan Baatar
Day Two: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Three: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Four: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Five: Looking for......etc
Day Fourteen: Ulaan Baatar
It is almost fortunate that the LBGB is so rare, because if you found one on Day Three what would you do then? You'd have to call the whole thing off.
Anyway the Festival of Naadaan is famous for its four Manly Arts, which are:
wrestling,
horse racing,
archery, and
Resident Evil: No Hope Left.*
i have sometimes thought about the heritage of these sporting festivals, and their genesis in the traditional male activities of war. This is why we throw javelins and hammers, and wrestle and run. These sports are so far away now from modern warfare. If we had sporting festivals based on modern warfare we we have - i dunno - Drone racing over 5,000 kms. Hardly Coubertinian. Hardly sporting.
Perhaps we could have sporting festivals based on the traditional female activites. We could have the 5 km Jog With Child On Hip. Of course we would no longer use real children, but we would have titanium plated aerodynamic child-shaped objects designed for carrying at speed, that cost thousands to design. We would have half forgotten the orginal race that required actual children.
We could also have the 10 km Walk With Pot On Head, the Firewood Collecting, and the Rice Planting Marathon. Not exactly riveting stuff for the viewers. Why are women's activities so unglamorous, repetitive, slow, small in scale, lacking in drama? Gosh, there's a thing.
So we could have an alternative girly Olympics with a programme like this:
5 km Jog With Child On Hip
10 km Walk with Pot on Head
Rice Planting Marathon
Sweatshop sewing (a recent addition, to account for globalisation)
Synchronised Swimming
The Sims Livin' Large*
* Some of these are not real sports in any part of the multiverse. It's just that i am bad at lists.
i liked the women's archery, which went all the way down to one arrow. It was between Mexico and South Korea. i rooted for the Mexican woman, because she was cute and because the Koreans were winning every damn thing. And as the saying goes: 'Poor Mexico: so close to the United States, so far from God'. The Korean won.
The Modern Pentathlon amused me. It was developed by Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, to show the skills of the ideal soldier, namely a cavalry officer caught behind enemy lines. Not an infantryman, mind, a cavalry officer. Coubertin may have had dreams of modernity and internationalism but this sort of classist and Eurocentric thinking places him nicely of his age. Thus, the skills of the Modern Pentathlon are those most manly European pursuits of
epee fencing,
pistol shooting,
equestrian show jumping,
swimming, and
Resident Evil: No Hope Left.*
Naturally at London 2012 there were no Eritreans or Peruvians competing, although there was an Egytpian, bravely challenging the class and race barrier as it manifested itself in some weird early twentieth century time warp.
The manliness bit reminded me of the Mongolian Festival of Naadaan. i went through a big Mongolian phase a while back and learned a lot about it. i even considered a very expensive expedition to the Gobi desert where i would be looking for the extremely rare Little Brown Gobi Bear. The brochure showed lots of pictures of rocks and deserty bits. The itinerary went something like this:
Day One: Ulaan Baatar
Day Two: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Three: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Four: Looking for the Little Brown Gobi Bear
Day Five: Looking for......etc
Day Fourteen: Ulaan Baatar
It is almost fortunate that the LBGB is so rare, because if you found one on Day Three what would you do then? You'd have to call the whole thing off.
Anyway the Festival of Naadaan is famous for its four Manly Arts, which are:
wrestling,
horse racing,
archery, and
Resident Evil: No Hope Left.*
i have sometimes thought about the heritage of these sporting festivals, and their genesis in the traditional male activities of war. This is why we throw javelins and hammers, and wrestle and run. These sports are so far away now from modern warfare. If we had sporting festivals based on modern warfare we we have - i dunno - Drone racing over 5,000 kms. Hardly Coubertinian. Hardly sporting.
Perhaps we could have sporting festivals based on the traditional female activites. We could have the 5 km Jog With Child On Hip. Of course we would no longer use real children, but we would have titanium plated aerodynamic child-shaped objects designed for carrying at speed, that cost thousands to design. We would have half forgotten the orginal race that required actual children.
We could also have the 10 km Walk With Pot On Head, the Firewood Collecting, and the Rice Planting Marathon. Not exactly riveting stuff for the viewers. Why are women's activities so unglamorous, repetitive, slow, small in scale, lacking in drama? Gosh, there's a thing.
So we could have an alternative girly Olympics with a programme like this:
5 km Jog With Child On Hip
10 km Walk with Pot on Head
Rice Planting Marathon
Sweatshop sewing (a recent addition, to account for globalisation)
Synchronised Swimming
The Sims Livin' Large*
* Some of these are not real sports in any part of the multiverse. It's just that i am bad at lists.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Remind me again why i don't drink
Friday night, finishing work at eleven. i'd had a cold for the last few days and it was getting worse. Then the toothache started. i had never had toothache before but i have automatic sympathy for anyone who does, because i figure that our teeth are rather too close to our brains for tooth pain to be manageable.
Wracked with pain, i went to the local bottle store, because this is Linwood and you can, and i bought a bottle of Napoleon brandy. It had to be Napoleon brandy, for my husband the Archduke Piccolo, who is keen on his Napoleonic campaigns.The bottle store was empty of custom and the two Sikh guys there were pumping hip hop music out into the empty street, a splash of light and sound that tried to hint at Good Times but made me feel slightly bereft as i left with my obvious bottle shaped paper bag. At my age, at that time of night, good grief. i was planning on an old hitch hiking cure for toothache, which is to hold spirituous liquor in your mouth for as long as you can, thus numbing the mouth and dulling the pain, and after a while you stop caring anyway.
Back home i tried the old hitch hiking cure, and a quarter of a bottle of brandy later my mouth was indeed numb and the pain had abated. i then dealt to the cold. i took some day and night flu thingies and then a small amount of Phenergan, only a small amount, mind, 'cos i'm not stoopid.
i went about my late night chores, folding washing and cleaning the kitchen, managing rather well i thought despite the developing tremor. i let the animals in and out and in and out and in and so on almost without incident. It was the putting the clothes in the wardrobe that defeated me, as i faced some suprisingly aggressive and complicated coat hangers and, flailing in the wardrobe, discovered a whole new gift for physical comedy.
i went to bed, still sniggering to myself about the coat hangers and how they flew out of the wardrobe somehow in a wiry flock of flappping flappiness, and how i fought them off. i sort of slept and woke not hung over but still with a cold and still with the toothache making a late morning bid for supremacy.
Now, i don't drink alcohol for several reasons and those reasons have changed over the years. My reasons have become less ideological and more experiential. Mostly, nowadays, i value what brain i have too much to compromise it. And while the use of substances has its place in shamanism, i have enough experience inside my own head to realise that consciousness is pretty malleable stuff, and you don't need to mess with it artificially to discover that. Moreover, i have always thought of alcohol as the least sophisticated of drugs. If drugs were music, alcohol would be Big Dumb Rock.
From a relatively drug-naive perspective, i am not sure i would recommend the old hitch hiking cure for toothache. Next time i hitch hike i will take paracetamol or something with me - it's less hassle to carry than brandy anyway. Today i saw the dentist and got my tooth filled. The dentist liked my brandy story, and he took due note of the fact that the pain was so great it drove a teetotaller to drink!
Wracked with pain, i went to the local bottle store, because this is Linwood and you can, and i bought a bottle of Napoleon brandy. It had to be Napoleon brandy, for my husband the Archduke Piccolo, who is keen on his Napoleonic campaigns.The bottle store was empty of custom and the two Sikh guys there were pumping hip hop music out into the empty street, a splash of light and sound that tried to hint at Good Times but made me feel slightly bereft as i left with my obvious bottle shaped paper bag. At my age, at that time of night, good grief. i was planning on an old hitch hiking cure for toothache, which is to hold spirituous liquor in your mouth for as long as you can, thus numbing the mouth and dulling the pain, and after a while you stop caring anyway.
Back home i tried the old hitch hiking cure, and a quarter of a bottle of brandy later my mouth was indeed numb and the pain had abated. i then dealt to the cold. i took some day and night flu thingies and then a small amount of Phenergan, only a small amount, mind, 'cos i'm not stoopid.
i went about my late night chores, folding washing and cleaning the kitchen, managing rather well i thought despite the developing tremor. i let the animals in and out and in and out and in and so on almost without incident. It was the putting the clothes in the wardrobe that defeated me, as i faced some suprisingly aggressive and complicated coat hangers and, flailing in the wardrobe, discovered a whole new gift for physical comedy.
i went to bed, still sniggering to myself about the coat hangers and how they flew out of the wardrobe somehow in a wiry flock of flappping flappiness, and how i fought them off. i sort of slept and woke not hung over but still with a cold and still with the toothache making a late morning bid for supremacy.
Now, i don't drink alcohol for several reasons and those reasons have changed over the years. My reasons have become less ideological and more experiential. Mostly, nowadays, i value what brain i have too much to compromise it. And while the use of substances has its place in shamanism, i have enough experience inside my own head to realise that consciousness is pretty malleable stuff, and you don't need to mess with it artificially to discover that. Moreover, i have always thought of alcohol as the least sophisticated of drugs. If drugs were music, alcohol would be Big Dumb Rock.
From a relatively drug-naive perspective, i am not sure i would recommend the old hitch hiking cure for toothache. Next time i hitch hike i will take paracetamol or something with me - it's less hassle to carry than brandy anyway. Today i saw the dentist and got my tooth filled. The dentist liked my brandy story, and he took due note of the fact that the pain was so great it drove a teetotaller to drink!
Monday, July 30, 2012
Croissant trip
It is a little over a year since i had lap band surgery, and lost 17 kilos. i have been really pleased i did it. i can reach for my seat belt, and walk up hills, and run, and wear ordinary clothing. For a while i thought maybe my arms had somehow grown in length because i no longer needed to roll sleeves up over and over, but then it dawned on me that my new clothes actually had shorter sleeves (doh!). So i have been a happy camper.
About three weeks ago i started to become uncomfortable. i could no longer manage food in the mornings; it would get stuck in the band and i would regurgitate it. After a while i could manage food only in the evenings and the only thing i could reliably eat was ice cream. Then i became unable to drink. i lost energy. i was uncomfortable all the time. i was becoming dehydrated. i was not even thinking particularly well. This morning i drank about 50 mls of water and a couple of hours later at work i was vomiting blood.
i saw the surgeon and he was unympathetic. He said - did you actually think this would get better. Why weren't you here three weeks ago. i couldn't answer him. i suppose i thought it would get better, or i would have seen him earlier. But really i was figuring i ought to staunch it out. Well, i would have drunk my harden-the-fuck-up juice, but i couldn't get it down.
Anyway the surgeon thought the band had slipped, and took the whole 5 mls of fluid out of it, and recovery was instant. i drank some water. i drank some more water. i went to the Beat Street Cafe, home of the radical Womyn of Occupy, and had the world's best coffee. It was so good i could not even read my book*. It was textured and smooth and bitter and sweet and strong and everything. Then i ate most of a croissant. Oh God the spinach! And if that was not enough, the tomato! i ate slowly and with real mindfulness possibly for the first time ever. i probably looked a bit strange but i was so focused. Can you trip out on croissants? It felt like the first time i had ever eaten one. i figured the second one i have will never be quite as good. i will spend the rest of my life trying to recapture that first rush, consuming croissants the size of houses, found dead one day alone in my tiny flat, with that light buttery flaky bread all around my mouth and brie cheese wedged in my cleavage.
The Archduke's spag bol was not half bad either.
So 5 mls lighter and i am a free woman. i will continue to eat as i need to - side plate sized portions, and no more ice cream i think because now i will run screaming from the room at the sight of a Magnum. In two weeks the band will be reinflated and i will be back to normal.
* The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism, by Tariq Ramadan. This very humane author is Oxford don and traditional Islamic scholar both.
About three weeks ago i started to become uncomfortable. i could no longer manage food in the mornings; it would get stuck in the band and i would regurgitate it. After a while i could manage food only in the evenings and the only thing i could reliably eat was ice cream. Then i became unable to drink. i lost energy. i was uncomfortable all the time. i was becoming dehydrated. i was not even thinking particularly well. This morning i drank about 50 mls of water and a couple of hours later at work i was vomiting blood.
i saw the surgeon and he was unympathetic. He said - did you actually think this would get better. Why weren't you here three weeks ago. i couldn't answer him. i suppose i thought it would get better, or i would have seen him earlier. But really i was figuring i ought to staunch it out. Well, i would have drunk my harden-the-fuck-up juice, but i couldn't get it down.
Anyway the surgeon thought the band had slipped, and took the whole 5 mls of fluid out of it, and recovery was instant. i drank some water. i drank some more water. i went to the Beat Street Cafe, home of the radical Womyn of Occupy, and had the world's best coffee. It was so good i could not even read my book*. It was textured and smooth and bitter and sweet and strong and everything. Then i ate most of a croissant. Oh God the spinach! And if that was not enough, the tomato! i ate slowly and with real mindfulness possibly for the first time ever. i probably looked a bit strange but i was so focused. Can you trip out on croissants? It felt like the first time i had ever eaten one. i figured the second one i have will never be quite as good. i will spend the rest of my life trying to recapture that first rush, consuming croissants the size of houses, found dead one day alone in my tiny flat, with that light buttery flaky bread all around my mouth and brie cheese wedged in my cleavage.
The Archduke's spag bol was not half bad either.
So 5 mls lighter and i am a free woman. i will continue to eat as i need to - side plate sized portions, and no more ice cream i think because now i will run screaming from the room at the sight of a Magnum. In two weeks the band will be reinflated and i will be back to normal.
* The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism, by Tariq Ramadan. This very humane author is Oxford don and traditional Islamic scholar both.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The Jesus nut
This post is about the nature of belief.
i have always had problems with the idea of belief. In some modern thinking, the idea seems to be that belief affects the physical world. If you believe, you can make things happen. If things don't happen, you didn't believe hard enough. This is a lynchpin of new age thinking, as expressed in books like The Journey. i am not convinced that i can change the physical world with my thoughts. Like Barbara Ehrenreich, in her excellent RSAnimate video Smile or Die, i advocate realism rather than positive thinking, where positive thinking makes us feel guilty for our failures or unable to see difficult truths. And like Alice, i can believe in six impossible things before breakfast, and yet somehow the stars remain in their courses and gravity continues to work.
Another modern feature about belief is that you have to believe in something. It seems to matter less what you believe in than that you believe. You have to have a dream, whether it is a dream of world peace or the Aryan nation.Think of all those inspiring family movies where an act of sheer will makes the dream come true. But this is no ontological fact. It is just a fancy way of sanctioning ambition.
Belief is a prominent feature in modern Christianity. Raw belief seems to be thought of as the engine that drives faith and good works. It is more important than thinking or experiencing. It was not always this way. Karen Armstrong in The Case for God talks about how early Christians struggled to express what Jesus was on about, and hit on the Latin word credere to try to engage with a complicated idea. What Jesus asked of his followers was to open their hearts and minds to the experience of following him. Try it, work with it, see it for what it is, let it work on you, live it. This is different from the current notion of believing in somethng for which there is no evidence.
So belief is a problematic notion, but there is one thing i have been forced to believe in, at least temporarily.
It's the Jesus nut.
The Jesus nut is the nut or pin that fixes the rotor blades in some helicopters such as the Iriquois. The term arose during the Vietnam war - try reading Chickenhawk, for example, for some awesomely deatailed descriptions of flying choppers.
Last week i went in a helicopter, a Hughes 500. i flew up a mountain, landed on its summit, walked about for a bit, and then flew down again. It was astounding. It was incredibly beautiful. Perspective and scale is almost meaningless up there. i think i was inches away from Mt Cook. Tiny square dots were trampers' huts. Sweet little tarns dotted the high hills like puddles. i loved every minute of it. But it occurred to me that i needed a lot of belief to sustain myself up there. i needed to believe in the existence of helicopters and to have some crazy notion that the daft things actually work. i needed to believe in the Jesus nut, and also the gear box because i hear they are tricky things. i needed to believe that the pilot was a real pilot ,that he had his licence, that he was not on meth, that he maintained his helicopter well, that he had slept well enough the night before. It seemed an awful lot to believe. i only needed enough belief to make myself climb onto the seat, mind you, but it was something. i think about other things i have believed in, such as ferris wheels and jet boats - and cars, for that matter.
Here are photos. i really did it!
i have always had problems with the idea of belief. In some modern thinking, the idea seems to be that belief affects the physical world. If you believe, you can make things happen. If things don't happen, you didn't believe hard enough. This is a lynchpin of new age thinking, as expressed in books like The Journey. i am not convinced that i can change the physical world with my thoughts. Like Barbara Ehrenreich, in her excellent RSAnimate video Smile or Die, i advocate realism rather than positive thinking, where positive thinking makes us feel guilty for our failures or unable to see difficult truths. And like Alice, i can believe in six impossible things before breakfast, and yet somehow the stars remain in their courses and gravity continues to work.
Another modern feature about belief is that you have to believe in something. It seems to matter less what you believe in than that you believe. You have to have a dream, whether it is a dream of world peace or the Aryan nation.Think of all those inspiring family movies where an act of sheer will makes the dream come true. But this is no ontological fact. It is just a fancy way of sanctioning ambition.
Belief is a prominent feature in modern Christianity. Raw belief seems to be thought of as the engine that drives faith and good works. It is more important than thinking or experiencing. It was not always this way. Karen Armstrong in The Case for God talks about how early Christians struggled to express what Jesus was on about, and hit on the Latin word credere to try to engage with a complicated idea. What Jesus asked of his followers was to open their hearts and minds to the experience of following him. Try it, work with it, see it for what it is, let it work on you, live it. This is different from the current notion of believing in somethng for which there is no evidence.
So belief is a problematic notion, but there is one thing i have been forced to believe in, at least temporarily.
It's the Jesus nut.
The Jesus nut is the nut or pin that fixes the rotor blades in some helicopters such as the Iriquois. The term arose during the Vietnam war - try reading Chickenhawk, for example, for some awesomely deatailed descriptions of flying choppers.
Last week i went in a helicopter, a Hughes 500. i flew up a mountain, landed on its summit, walked about for a bit, and then flew down again. It was astounding. It was incredibly beautiful. Perspective and scale is almost meaningless up there. i think i was inches away from Mt Cook. Tiny square dots were trampers' huts. Sweet little tarns dotted the high hills like puddles. i loved every minute of it. But it occurred to me that i needed a lot of belief to sustain myself up there. i needed to believe in the existence of helicopters and to have some crazy notion that the daft things actually work. i needed to believe in the Jesus nut, and also the gear box because i hear they are tricky things. i needed to believe that the pilot was a real pilot ,that he had his licence, that he was not on meth, that he maintained his helicopter well, that he had slept well enough the night before. It seemed an awful lot to believe. i only needed enough belief to make myself climb onto the seat, mind you, but it was something. i think about other things i have believed in, such as ferris wheels and jet boats - and cars, for that matter.
Here are photos. i really did it!
Monday, July 16, 2012
Winter poem
There should be a prayer for evenings.
A prayer to put alarming blackbirds
To sleep gently
With the charm of woodsmoke.
A prayer for the shops to stay open a little longer –
And the heart, too, long enough for morning.
A prayer for the small flame of company –
Or at least the company of a small flame.
And if you do have to go gently,
A prayer to show you how
To go wideawake,
And thinking and thanking.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
On dogs and caves and ecstasy
'If you can sit quietly after difficult news;
if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;
if you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;
if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;
if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;
if you can always find contentment just where you are:
you are probably a dog.'
The quote is by Jack Kornfield, one of my favourite Buddhist thinkers, of the Theravada way. He wrote the wonderfully titled 'After the Ecstasy, the Laundry'. i related well to that, having had in my life both ecstasy and laundry. A fair bit of laundry, actually.
The first and obvious thought is that i am not a dog. Should i emulate a dog? There is a view in Islam that animals are already Muslims. Islam means submission, and animals already submit to the will of God, without effort. Muslims are not into dogs much though. Only one dog gets to go to heaven. That is the dog who guards the Seven Sleepers. These early Christians hid in a cave from their persecutors, fell asleep and woke hundreds of years later, into a Christian world where they were welcomed. It's not a big story among Christians but it features well in the Islamic world, and the faithful dog who guarded them got to go to heaven with them when they died.
So i can't be like a dog, i do not naturally submit, nor do i easily give up my limited view of the world, even when i recognise it's illusory, or unsatisfactory, or problematic.
We suffer and we are aware of our suffering. i used to be quite blithe about the meaning of suffering, when i was younger and actually was suffering more than i am now. i thought that suffering was either due to spiritual tests of some obscure sort, or due to my not trying hard enough. i did not see suffering as mysterious. And it is mysterious.
i have said before that we live in a society that seems to deny suffering any meaning. We go from - A bad thing happened, to I feel bad, to I should not feel these feelings, to I cannot tolerate these bad feelings even for a moment. Thing is, we suffer, we just do. We need a far more sophisticated and intuitive way of thinking about it, so we can do more than just tolerate it but actually derive some wisdom there.
i struggle to lean into suffering and to discern its lessons. i wish i was a dog. i am glad i am not a dog. It is mostly OK to be this human.
if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;
if you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;
if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;
if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;
if you can always find contentment just where you are:
you are probably a dog.'
The quote is by Jack Kornfield, one of my favourite Buddhist thinkers, of the Theravada way. He wrote the wonderfully titled 'After the Ecstasy, the Laundry'. i related well to that, having had in my life both ecstasy and laundry. A fair bit of laundry, actually.
The first and obvious thought is that i am not a dog. Should i emulate a dog? There is a view in Islam that animals are already Muslims. Islam means submission, and animals already submit to the will of God, without effort. Muslims are not into dogs much though. Only one dog gets to go to heaven. That is the dog who guards the Seven Sleepers. These early Christians hid in a cave from their persecutors, fell asleep and woke hundreds of years later, into a Christian world where they were welcomed. It's not a big story among Christians but it features well in the Islamic world, and the faithful dog who guarded them got to go to heaven with them when they died.
So i can't be like a dog, i do not naturally submit, nor do i easily give up my limited view of the world, even when i recognise it's illusory, or unsatisfactory, or problematic.
We suffer and we are aware of our suffering. i used to be quite blithe about the meaning of suffering, when i was younger and actually was suffering more than i am now. i thought that suffering was either due to spiritual tests of some obscure sort, or due to my not trying hard enough. i did not see suffering as mysterious. And it is mysterious.
i have said before that we live in a society that seems to deny suffering any meaning. We go from - A bad thing happened, to I feel bad, to I should not feel these feelings, to I cannot tolerate these bad feelings even for a moment. Thing is, we suffer, we just do. We need a far more sophisticated and intuitive way of thinking about it, so we can do more than just tolerate it but actually derive some wisdom there.
i struggle to lean into suffering and to discern its lessons. i wish i was a dog. i am glad i am not a dog. It is mostly OK to be this human.
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