Curiosity, and myth, and suffering

More shabbat notes from 11/27

#2 is Curiosity. This is the attitude to take when “dropping in.” There’s obviously a desire to release, drop, and have the piercing gaze of the enlightened sage. But that gaze is predetermined. If the mindstate aligns, lovely; if not, sad; either way, deluded. The gaze needs to be one of openness and curiosity. What is this moment going to look like? What shape will God take now? The Now is always new. Or as that line on the stairs says - try not to expect anything, in this way everything will open up to you. But observe that ‘everything will open up to you’ will not always have the same flavor, or the same enlightened look in its eye.

I am definitely subject to a desire to have the Gaze. But it does seem as though true enlightenment is not being doughy-eyed all the time, but having an inner doughy-eyed-ness that is always present, even when the small self is yelling at a taxi driver.

Donuts! Donuts! I miss them.

#3. The Bible is really good at myth, and at depicting the conundrum of humanity – better than the sutras, I think, better than lots of other myths and stories. It does not do a good job at explaining what God is or how God relates to us. I mean, no theology, no definition. Perhaps most crucially, no explanation of what “said” means. God said let there be light. God said to Abraham. What is going on at that times? The Bible doesn’t say. So we’re free to take any reading from the most absurd anthropomorphism – which may well be what some Biblical writers thought – to monism and meditation-ism. There’s this conception that the Bible ought to give us our theology, but the Bible is not interested in that mode of teaching, any more than the Buddha is interested in patriarch myths or Aristotle is in meditation techniques. These guys were all contemporaneous - the redactor of the Bible, Buddha, and Plato/Aristotle. They are clearly answering different questions - possibly the same question in different ways. The Torah is just not interested in philosophizing. There’s hardly any in there. Lots of narrative, lots of law, and ample material for midrash and interpretation of myth. But no instruction about how the mind works - just stories. No Greek-style thinking and questioning into reality - just assertion. Let’s not make our holy texts answer questions they’re not interested in.

And yet of course the Torah does have these little gleams, often. Jacob’s dream and his response to it. I-am-that-I-am. V’ahavta. These are Buddhist bits. But let’s not pretend they’re the center.

4. I was blissed out at one point, lying here in bed. I thought “If things stayed exactly like this, that would be fine. I don’t need anything.” After a little while I had to go to the bathroom. Nothing major, but some discomfort. Of course, had I waited and not gone - i.e. had things really stayed exactly as they were - the discomfort would’ve gotten intense, and I would have had to have shat myself and sat in it. Now, perhaps that might still be greeted with equanimity, but, at the very least, not without a lot of practice of being with that kind of shadow.

Then, as I was going to the bathroom, I passed by one of the older yogis, who was kind of limping along somewhat. I thought: there is dukka. The fact is, even if you sit in a peaceful bed all the time, you will eventually suffer. And the discomfort of having to go to the bathroom is nothing to what that guy may experience on a routine basis – just ordinary aches and pains of old age, let alone serious issues. I got the notion of “I am subject to aging, disease and death.” The fact is, no matter how blissed out you are, you’re going to face discomfort. So you gotta do some work with suffering.

I think the rest should wait.