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Spiritual Self-Inquiry
Leslie Ihde LCSW, 15 Oakcrest Rd., Ithaca, NY  607.754.1303

Just Pain

7/29/2015

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One of the many phrases from Zen Buddhism that resonates with me is the simple instruction, “Eat your rice, wash your bowl.”  The beauty of this phrase is endlessly deep, and yet it is so deceptively simple that one wonders why the instruction even exists.  

As I reflect on the phrase, I wonder if the reason for it is that we human consciousnesses just can’t do anything without assigning meaning to our activity, or meaning to ourselves in doing it.  “Assign” is probably the wrong word because it suggests a deliberate choice.  It might be better to say that we discover ourselves to be inside of a matrix of meanings when we undertake an examination of our experience.  For example, rather than ‘just doing’ we want to do what is important.   Alternatively, in our doing we may want demonstrate that we are good.  If we are of a different bent of mind we might indicate that we are injured.  We signify the chip we carry on our shoulder by the way we lift the rice to our mouth and sadly wash our bowl.  Another common attitude might be resentment.   Why should we have to serve ourselves our own rice in the first place?  Shouldn’t we be served by another?  We could imagine that if we were loved enough, we wouldn’t have to preform ‘menial’ tasks.  Since attitudes dominate our experience, our doings in the world are never simply what they are.

It is even possible, with the endless creativity of being oneself, to flip the whole thing on its head.  Why not use the opportunity of serving rice to another to demonstrate our significance?  Let me show you what I mean.  Have you ever been served by a haughty innkeeper or waiter?  I was, and his bearing was such that our whole table wanted to impress him.  As if he alone knew the secrets of good taste and culinary discrimination, this man sadistically teased us as we tried to guess the contents of the soup.  Finally, with a flourish, he revealed the recipe (a pumpkin soup in a chicken broth base) shaming each of us.  My brother in law even tried to win his approval by buying him an expensive bottle of wine at the end of our stay.

Eat your rice, wash your bowl.  What does this mean?  Freeing an action from symbolic and projected meaning is no easy task.  Human consciousness swirls in dreams of self-importance or injury, outrage and anger.  We invest our actions with meaning and are quick to take offense if these meanings are violated.  It is enough to cause us offense if our own assigned meanings simply aren’t noticed.

The journey to eat your rice, wash your bowl requires self-inquiry.  We can start by asking ourselves who we imagine that we are.  Unlike the TV show that explores our DNA and our heritage, this “Who do you think you are?” is about our unexplored attitudes.  How do we explain the apparent actions of the world upon us or our own actions in the world?  Do we have some secret justification behind our actions; some unarticulated assumption?  We must tease apart the circumstances of our life from the meanings we ascribe to in order to discover that the way we live in circumstance is a manifestation of our attitude.  In seeking to be released from our notions, we seek ‘eat your rice wash your bowl.’

Our attitudes are an excessive embellishment to the good of simple action.  I think of the designer’s phrase, “form follows function.”  The elegant object that is made by the practitioner of this edict demonstrates simple beauty.  Maybe this phrase, ‘form follows function,’ is the craftsperson’s ‘eat your rice, wash your bowl.’  

In the case of psychology attitudes are also constitutive.  In other words, the attitudes can shape experience.  An example might be a paranoid person who sees danger even from innocent people.  By believing in the malevolence of others, this person may even elicit that malevolence.  Even if he does not, he is able to experience the world as threatening regardless of the reality of that threat at any given time.

People often use objective fact to counter the suggestion that their attitudes inform their experience.  It can be a convincing argument.  What is left out of this argument are the twists and turns consciousness can make in the effort to support its own claim.  The fluidity of argument has an intelligence that seems to combine self-insistence with a prejudiced opportunism.  It is as if each person we speak with manages to twist the words of others to accommodate a preexisting vision of reality.  Rather than being available to uncover their own vision and its ramifications, the individual interprets fact and action to fit into the un-self-seen vision.  The versatility of intellect required to do this demonstrates a creativity that we can hardly say we are the source of.  It is too fast, spontaneous and automatic for us to have calculated it so well and so quickly.

Let’s see if I can indicate this intelligence that we are and yet are not the source of.  It can be witnessed hundreds of times each day and yet ordinarily missed.  How do you know even how to lift your arm with the attitude of yourself?  Watch another move and you will easily see how perfectly he is himself in moving.  In another example, anyone who has been in an argument has seen the uncanny way in which his opponent interprets remarks and configures discussion along unrecognized but rock solid terms.  (We ourselves are guilty of the same.) 

The easy predictability of human actions also illustrate this intelligence.  What perfect consistency our actions reveal!  If one had to hold one’s personality together like so much formless silly putty, the work require to live each moment would be monumental.  Instead, we are ourselves as easily as animals are themselves.  The intelligence that we are manifests with our each and every breath.

There is genius in responding to a circumstance in a way that confirms one’s attitude.  It is far savvier than any personal genius.  I’ll offer a story to illustrate this.  My husband had a client who was a large and irritable man.  This man frequently came to trouble as a result of his argumentativeness.  The man himself experienced the world as hostile.  What appeared to others as his provocativeness was borne from within by him vulnerability to attack.  On one occasion, the man described a complaint by a female colleague.  He considered the woman’s complaint completely false.  Gingerly, in the effort to explain to the man that he could appear threatening, my husband told him that women can feel intimidated by large men.  Jumping on the opportunity to support his claim, the man declared that this was indeed true.  He was, he said, regarded unfairly because of his size.  He was, he asserted, a victim of prejudice.


Let’s apply eat your rice, wash your bowl to the experience of pain.  We suffer illness, pain, and injury.  We suffer heat and cold.   Since, as I’ve already suggested, our doings and experiences are laden with projection and meaning, is our experience of pain likely to be an exception?  If not, how does our personal history, our desire, our projection, and our self-image influence the way we experience pain?  What would “just pain” be?   

As long as pain is a part of our lives, this question is relevant.  There are many forms of emotional pain, but in this case, I want to consider only physical pain.  As I raise this question, I imagine that you are already wondering how your own attitudes may influence your experience of pain.

Let’s say you are sick and your doctor doesn’t listen to you.  Are you outraged?  If you are outraged, is your pain worse?  Or, imagine that you feel that you should be self-sufficient.  Because illness often requires us to ask for help, will you greet this as a failure of self-sufficiency?  Will your pain be doubled by the pain of realizing your project to be self-sufficient fails?  I think you can see quickly where I am leading.

For most of us, the majority of the pain that we feel in life is not physical.  It’s psychic.  Our disappointments are disappointments of meaning.  You will not be able to avoid all physical pain,   but learning to experience just pain, stripped of projection, will offer significant relief.


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The End of Medicine

7/4/2015

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My uncle was an old fashioned Christian, and, at one time, a farmer.  He had the earthy practicality of a man who had spent his life with animals, witnessing life and death with a regularity that would stun the city dweller.  As his time came to die, his questions reflected this earthiness.  “What will happen to my body, exactly?” he asked.  He wanted to donate his body to science and was interested in the minutia of what would be happen to his body, and how it might be useful.  “It isn’t as easy a process as one might expect” he explained to me.  “It isn’t at all clear that my particular body will be accepted.  Some bodies are useful to science, but it depends on what they want to study.”  Finding a comfort in the thought that his body would be helpful to science, my uncle conducted research and made the necessary arrangements.

My uncle remarked that the good thing about being in hospice care was that he no longer had to take the pills that he had been taking to stay alive.  It was a relief, he said: the side effects were unpleasant.  One might wonder at the sensibility of such a man, a man who could cheerly seek the silver lining behind the clouds, even under such conditions.  It was also no longer necessary for him to force himself to eat.  He was dying of esophageal cancer.  Swallowing was painful.  His appetite was gone.  He, a big man who had enjoyed food, finally set aside the chore that eating had become.  While he occasionally reminisced wishfully about tacos and fresh peaches, he let go of eating and pill taking.  He retained only his pain pills.

My uncle’s final purchase was a large, flat screen TV.  A luxury he never would have allowed himself during the bulk of his life, he splurged now.  He was able to watch a few football games on that TV.  The big, shiny screen added a modern touch to his clean, traditional living room.  Gorgeous colored images on the moving screen flashed with eerie brilliance, drawing the eye from the clean room with white carpet.  It was wonderful to see his smile and the heartiness of his enjoyment.  His laugh echoed my grandfather’s.  Tickled by new technology, with the farmer’s love of tools, my uncle clicked through channels with his remote.  The game was really all that he was interested in, but he couldn’t get enough of the miraculous gadget.  Commanding the screen from the ease of his big chair, Jon seemed to have complete ease using his final days of life in ordinary activities.  Perhaps the ordinary was no longer ordinary to him.

Sometimes the mystics speak of life as a kind of play.  The play of good and bad, wrestling and dancing throughout eternity, joyful only to the unattached.  Yin and yang, perhaps the most beautiful circular symbol every created, illustrates the mysterious play of opposites.  And sometimes, on the occasion of deep insight, a belly laugh rises up from the void and shakes the body of the meditator.  Could my uncle’s full belly enjoyment of the football game, a game witnessed after he accepted his death, carry the unattached joy of the one who has let go?  I like to think that it did.  There was a peace in his face during those last days, and a full smile beaming love.

“The good thing is that I don’t have to take those pills anymore.”  His words circulated through my awareness.  I returned to them periodically, wonderingly.  He really seemed to mean it.  No more medicine was a good thing: a burden off his back.  He was strangely relaxed, like all the troubles had been lifted from his shoulders.  What must it have been like to let go the tense energy in his body: let go the struggle to continue?  No more pills.  No more fighting to live.  No more arguments with his wife or son, or long, soft-voiced talks with the two troubled daughters who loved him so dearly.  No more feeding the hungry, or feeling unimportant.  No more vacuuming, shaving, or shopping for clothes.  

When he said good bye to each of us, individually, he told us in his simple, but completely sincere way,  how much he loved us.  He assured us that he would be watching us from heaven.  He was so literal that some of us were sending messages of love to our grandparents through him.  He would be waiting for us, he said.

No more pills.  The Buddhist teacher, Hakuin, advised his students to die before they died.  What would it mean to relax away one’s worries?  No more trying to be good: no more trying to be perfect.  No more need to be angry or need not to be angry.  No more wanting to win and hating to loose.  What is it to die before you die?  Was the freedom that my uncle seemed to feel a suggestion of the Buddhist master’s attainment?

There is such a hustle and bustle to life.  It all seems imbued with such importance.  What is it that is so important?  Sometimes it seems hard to remember.  In the early morning, before that first cup of coffee, there is a reluctance to get engaged with it all again.  Is it just a dream?  Sleepily, we pull on the mantle of ourselves and shove our feet onto the familiar paths.  Hating or loving each step in turn, we might long to stop, stop like Robert Frost who lamented that he “has miles to go before he sleeps.” 

Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening has been interpreted as reflections of a death wish.  But what if it’s not?  What if it’s a life wish?  Isn’t true life the life of freedom from attachment?  Isn’t the weariness of life really the weariness of repetition?  If we were released from the repetitiveness in our life would all our days be fresh and new?

Each person longs to live his life the way he wants without the negative associated with that life.  Who doesn’t want to have things go his way without the accompanying trouble implicit to his choices?  No more pills.  Could one refuse?  
Could one awaken one morning and not push one’s feet into misshapen shoes worn by weary patterns?  Refuse the medicine that allows for repetition?  Refuse to survive with only the shreds of happiness we seem allotted, and instead make our bid for freedom?

Perhaps only the immediacy of our impending death can shake loose our usual attitudes sufficiently to spawn letting go.   Even in the heart of despair freedom can be born.  Don’t give up, but strive continuously for liberation.   Perhaps, in facing despair, you will be released from attachment.


~

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