Contentment, Spirituality, and Illusion (plus sadness and dreams)

11/9
Tuesday
(from notebook)

One week since al-nakba. I should be gentle with myself for that reason only. What a trauma. The obsession with politics is fading, but I suspect the anguish is still there.

Practice questions here are so minute. Sometimes I’m OK with that, remembering that we are focusing on mind, not God. Other times I feel like I am the worst practitioner here, with my indulgences and philosophies.

* Remember: We are not here to learn what the world is, but how to deal with it.

I.e., to be mindful, compassionate, attentive.
So that’s why all the vipassana pilpul.

Dreams last night, abridged:

1. At some kind of fair, this was after the burningman party, we decided to get ice cream. Line, various problems. Dream ended when we ate the ice cream, it tasted bad, and someone said “Ugh, this ice cream tastes like soda pop that tastes like ice cream.”

2. Sitting at a picnic table with a bunch of people. I don’t remember who started it but I ended up in a play-fight with one guy. He carefully squirted ketchup all down the left shoulder & sleeve of my lime green polo. I was devastated since I like that shirt and it was ruined. “You better think of buying a new one,” I think someone said. I tearfully, childishly asked my sister to buy me a new one. Went upstairs (in the Tampa house [lived there from 1981-89]) to wash shirt. Wasn’t coming clean. Dream ended as I looked in the mirror and screamed until I made a sound (in real life too, I think I screamed).

3. Someone staying in M’s room, large luggage carts of stuff in my room. Said more was coming. Girl wanted to try on some of my clothes, I said no. Went downstairs to find huge trucks unloading whole stores of stuff into the garage etc. Ordered them to leave. Told Mom I had no idea this was going to happen. Young girl wanted to come in the side door of the house to use the bathroom – I said no, and continued talking to mom. The girl asked again. We let her in. The dream ended when I confronted one of the main moving people, a woman, in the driveway, and said in my lawyer voice, “You’ll be getting a lawsuit from us in the mail.”

These dreams seem less clear than on other retreats. Just like this retreat. Without the religion context, I feel very disoriented and cold. I think the scariest part of that is, What if God really is an ingredient we add to the mix? If God doesn’t appear without our marinating in God sauce, is It real? Or is everything, including this atheism, a projection? All it took yesterday was a sunset for me to feel religious. Is there a willful turning aside here?


Later...
(computer)


Contentment is the key. I have been disappointed on this retreat, alienated, tired, angry, and sad. I am still a little of these things. But I am completely content. And that is, well, isn’t that “it”? The release from clinging?

At this point in retreat, I usually have some experiences of closeness, of spirit - sometimes I call it ‘sweetness.’ But for a variety of reasons, that hadn’t really happened. The practice, the election, the foreignness of the place and its customs. I struggled with how to try to work with it, or how to surrender to it, deal with it, whatever. Finally I gave up. Okay, this is how it is. And that did it for me. I gradually felt a deep contentment, and now there is a joy in the slightest of details, so many more of which are able to be observed by my attention.

I had a couple of spiritual experiences earlier in the retreat - was it last night, or the night before, that the place seemed magical? Yet they passed, and were soon overwhelmed by difficulty. There isn’t enough protein in the food; Buddhism is too much about death and denial. Too monastic. There is no home for me; not the constricted Jews nor the monastic Buddhists. And so on. What few positive moments there were - and there were some - passed quickly. The negative bits also passed, but were often replaced by other negative bits.

Now, there are positive and negative bits. Sitting, there is pain in my leg. I don’t particularly like it. But I accept it in a radical way.

This is how it is related to enlightenment: because we are sure that God is not the pain in the leg.

Or Bush winning the election. Practicing a week after the election is like meditating in the shadow of a mini Auschwitz. Ignorance has given birth to so much suffering, so much destruction of nature, all now inevitable. Yet I am content with it. It is how it is. I desire it to be otherwise, and I will work to make it otherwise, but “I” am not at stake in that desire. I’m not clinging to it (to use the usual word).

Sure I want to cling to God. But the only real God is the God that is everywhere and everything, including places which suck. Otherwise I’m clinging to an idol, a happy God that is just made up of all my wishes and projections.

So this ‘clinging,’ this devekut, is actually the opposite of clinging. It only is possible when we completely surrender to whatever is.


–


How does this relate to nonduality?

You need a total surrender to what is to experience nonduality. Because otherwise there is a self that is resisting the world. The weather is cold, I want it to be warm. That ‘i’ is strengthened, set against the ‘it.’

Also, how do you stay with anything like the radical acceptance of God? Attention.

And, how can you think everything is God when you’re still pissed off about that cramp in your leg? You have to learn to be with the cramp and not be pissed off about it (or at least notice the pissed-off-ness, and identify with the noticer, not the person who’s pissed off) in order to accept it as God. And as for a cramp, so for Bush/Auschwitz.