Having a perfectly dharmic time?

[magistrate]

I have this memory from when I was a much younger magi. It was some school night, and my brother – two years older than me – was working through some math homework; probably very early algebra. I was curious and bounded over to see, and the problem was something very simple like a + 5 = 13, asking to solve for a.

I, with the assurance of an intelligent child who had not yet learned that being confidently wrong feels exactly like being correct, said "Oh, I know this! a is the first letter of the alphabet, so it has to be 1. So a plus 5... wait, that doesn't work!"

Either my mother or my brother then explained to me the concept of variables.

I immediately went "But if it can mean anything, then you never know anything!"

I was a child.

Later on, algebra turned out to be a subject I really enjoyed. It was just all puzzles! And calculus was also great, because it was just all advanced puzzles! (Geometry, I hated. It was just all proofs. But that's neither here nor there.) I don't remember the moment when that absolute incomprehension turned into clarity, but there had to have been n>0 of those moments somewhere.

I feel like I'm having a similar experience with Buddhist philosophy, of all things, right now.

There's this book that I bought... many, many years ago, called Start Where You Are, by Pema Chödrön. I cannot remember what first motivated me to pick it up. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But over the years I've made a number of attempts to read through it, and every single time, I bounced somewhere in the first few chapters; it seemed needlessly esoteric, by turns too dense and too abstract. It probably didn't help that, rather than being a beginning primer or anything, this was a deep dive and a point-by-point analysis into the lojong (or mind-training) slogans, pithy distillations of instruction on how to practice a certain kind of compassion meditation.

The slogans include such wisdom as "examine the nature of unborn illusion," "self-liberate even the antidote," and "in postmeditation, be a child of illusion." The book itself is very friendly, very inviting, with a gentleness and humor to it, but fairly immediately it confronts you with emotional paradoxes like:

There is a saying that is the underlying principle of tonglen and slogan practice: "Gain and victory to others, loss and defeat to myself." The Tibetan word for pride or arrogance, which is nga-gyal, is literally in English "me-victorious." Me first. Ego. That kind of "me-victorious" attitude is the cause of all suffering.

Which is... provoking. And then there's the bit you get hit with on starting Chapter 2:

The practices we'll be doing help us develop trust in our awakened heart, our bodhichitta. […] Bodhichitta has three qualities: (1) it is soft and gentle, which is compassion; (2) it is clear and sharp, which is called pranja; and (3) it is open. This last quality is called shunyata and is also known as emptiness. Emptiness sounds cold. However, bodhichitta isn't cold at all, because there's a heart quality – the warmth of compassion – that pervades the space and the clarity. Compassion and openness and clarity are all one thing, and this one thing is called bodhichitta.

One gets a translating-poetry-with-untranslatable-words feeling from a lot of this book. Which, to be fair, a lot of Buddhism is about examining very subtle internal states, which I suppose is a kind of poetry with untranslatable not-words. But I could not get a grasp on this book for the longest time.

As part of a combined effort to untangle things in my own brain and to review potential books for the leadership and personal development workshop I'm deeply involved in, I've been reading a lot of psychology and mindset and self-help and skill books over the years. Something I've noticed is that most of them take some subset of the same superset of general principles, and present them through different lenses: one might talk about the importance of opening yourself up to the beneficial energy of the universe and trusting that good things will happen, and one might talk about the importance of moving into a state of open focus where you can be identify unexpected occurrences as opportunities or objects of curiosity instead of obstacles, but both of those paradigms are framing the same idea. Reading widely enough gave me the sense that, even if not everything is universal, enough is commonplace that one can imagine a kind of Ur-manual, not necessarily to Fix Everything, but to be useful in knowing how to address things that arise.

I think Buddhism... I don't want to say it is that Ur-manual, because it, like everything else, is a frame in which to present ideas. But I think that most of the ideas I've found repeated elsewhere are also found in the Buddhist philosophy I've been reading, and usually in a very distilled (or, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, very meticulously detailed) form, probably because Buddhist philosophy has the advantage of having been practiced, tested, taught, and refined for literal millennia. It's something I've found interesting for a while, but I feel like just recently it's started to really get its hooks into me.

Over the past several months, there's been a lot of very painful interpersonal situations in my communities and environments, which have either peripherally involved me or affected me without involving me. Given my general lack of comfort dealing with interpersonal anything, it's been riding me very close to my emotional load-bearing tolerances.

(I've been keeping a list of all the books I've read this calendar year, and you can kinda track how my mental state has been by looking at the periods where I've just noped out of venturing into new content and have just re-read old comfort books. Including that patch where I re-read Book 3 of a ~6-book series, managed life okay for a couple of weeks, and then went back and re-read all five books, including book 3, even though I had completely read through it not even a month before.)

I have noticed that in the past, when I maintained a regular meditation practice, I never really noticed my life getting better, but I noticed that it got worse when I stopped. Also around this time, because I was volunteering in a workshop that really stressed personal accountability and discipline, I started thinking about this quote that had been shared with me when I was going through the workshop as a student: "Discipline is the conduct that de-escalates suffering." In trying to work out where that quote had come from, I discovered that the information I could find online pointed me toward a different Pema Chödrön book: The Places That Scare You. So I went and impulse-bought it. And then proceeded to devour it.

A book I read many years ago – 10% Happier, by Dan Harris – has a line that describes "one of the most satisfying of dharmic delicacies: an accurate diagnosis of our inner lunacy." That's kinda the experience I had in reading The Places That Scare You. I kept reading through and going "Oh, I see that." "Oh, yes, I resemble that remark." "I'm in this photo and I don't like it."

(There's a snippet of Chödrön's writing in Start Where You Are that encapsulates this for me: she says, "Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness." I cannot tell you how many times even in the past few days I've caught myself spiraling or getting entangled in some internal drama or imaginary argument and just gone, "Oh, there's one of my weird little ways.")

A lot of the teachings were still esoteric, but in The Places That Scare You I was beginning to get a feel for the actual framework of reasoning underpinning the teachings. It also talked about the lojong slogans in a general way, and I thought, "Hey, I'm going to see if Start Where You Are makes any more sense to me now." (Reader, it did.)

Anyway, a bit ago, when several things were blowing up at once – some in ways that I needed to actively respond to; others in ways that I desperately wanted to respond to but had no way by which to respond to – it got to a point where the overwhelm had piled so high that it was going to snap me in half. (I'm reminded of one definition of trauma being "something which is too much, too fast, too soon for our nervous system to handle.") And I experienced this moment where I could feel that I was up against the very limits of my ability to handle this, crushed against a wall, and either I was going to fall apart and scream and hit things or shut down and just abandon reality and all my obligations or... just turn around, look at all the unpleasantness, the fear and hurt and anger and sadness, and go "Okay, we're feeling this." Don't try to drown it out or shut it out or escape, just fucking be there with the full-body experience of misery and say "If you're going to kill me, kill me, but I bet you can't. Not on your own power."

And it was a really fucking miserable time. But it was 100% survivable. It didn't even leave me worse off than I had been beforehand. And that was kinda revelatory.

So that's one of the things I've been working with, lately. (There are a lot of things I've been working with, lately. But that's perhaps the most load-bearing and necessary of the things.)

One of the things that has been observed in many of the books I've read is that meditation practice actually makes you more keenly aware of your anxieties, but it makes those anxieties easier to handle. (One of the principles from Start Where You Are that's been very catchy in my brain is that we need to be able to recognize our neuroses as neuroses.)

It's also been observed that emotions tend to become more vivid, and that, especially early in a meditation career, it's "not unusual at all to go from bliss to misery within the space of an hour. […]as [you] get more advanced, the ups and downs won't be so jagged." (10% Happier.) Boy howdy has that been the case. I think for the past week I've been pinballing between "the world is composed of beauty and I can even accept its evils with love" to "everything is terrible and I am going to feel terrible forever and there is no escape from suffering and the best I can do is endure it and accept that things will be like this for all time for everyone", often with very little reference to actual external events. But even the pinballing feels like... I don't know; the bumpers are padded, or something.