Recommended Listening: Mountains by Hania Rani
Artwork by Lia Halloran
When the Buddha came to the end of the line of self-torment as a way to liberation, he ate and drank deeply of rice pudding and care from another being as the only way out of suffering. In accepting care and comfort from others and myself, I finally accept that I am not alone in the universe and am no longer the center of it.
The best armor to survive this war of flesh and spirit is spaciousness, equanimity, patience, compassion, and absolute undenied nourishment. Your armor should be light and diamond-hard at the same time. Which is to say, you benefit most from having no armor at all.
Deprivation of care equals deprivation of meaning and purpose. What meaning can there ever be in a universe that denies care to its most sacred children? But universal malnourishment and relative malnourishment from other beings can be conflated to disastrous consequences. This is what the Greeks understood. The gods were relative in their power and agency. And were just as fickle and vengeful as we are. How like those Greek gods are the parents that taught us the law and order of the universe!
With every stitch in the cloth, I strike with the diamond hammer of liberation at the chains my ancient twisted karma which bind me.
When you are born into deprivation, the only hope of ever being free and nourished is to become a master of depriving yourself. There is raw power and agency in controlling one’s own deprivation and even suffocation. But deprivation pulls down the veil of Maya over one’s eyes as an attempted act of compassion. Can you pierce the veil? Give shame no quarter if not. Take my hand and we will pierce it together with the sharpened edge of liberation.
Enlightenment is woven into every moment, every breath, every cell in your body, every fiber of your being.
Liberation only comes through a broken heart. Because the mind and the heart must be broken to be liberated. Which is another way of saying that the heartbreak dissolves the self so that the self can let go of all that it can or could hold.
The sense of one’s self is organized across and throughout the entire body. If you want to know what someone feels and who they believe themselves to be (which may be one in the same thing), look how their body operates and occupies both physical and relational space. The gestures of the body or their absence tell you everything about someone’s inner life and world.
The fundamental belief of all anxiety is that life will only be livable at some undefined point in the future when certain impossible conditions are met. Which is to say, life can never be livable and therefore one is protected from the dangers and adventure of living.
The turning point comes when we break through the illusion of our own individual pain, suffering, and fear and begin to see them as just versions of the One’s pain, suffering, and fear of all of humanity, of the entire universe itself. Our pain is never just our own. Our fear and terror are never just our own. Our liberation from suffering is never just our own.
We takes things personally to the degree that we do not know who we are.
When you hold me closer in my pain and sorrow, the whole universe wakes up and lets loose the arrows of its voice in song. And I know then that all of the old tales we told about ourselves were just lies we learned from other souls in pain.
There are two ways to orient oneself to the conditions of deep space: acclimate to the vacuum and deprivation or embrace a spirit of adventure and exploration.
If the choice is between the anxious mind or the ferocious heart, I will choose the ferocious heart every time.
Protection and openness go together. In fact, they are the same thing.
Of course you would be starving when you have lived your entire life surviving on morsels and scraps that strategically or serendipitously fallen from the dinner table.
When the lights go out, the darkness can be so terrifying. But we can make our own light. The edges of the night recede and there is room to walk and breathe. Who ever told you that you can only gather the light from another source? The code that light must be found in another is the law of the land of the dead.
Trauma dismembers and dissociates the body across time and space. My legs are 13 years old. My right arm is 39 years old. My left arm is 2 minutes old. My hips are 8 years old. The mind lives in terror and confusion from occupying multiple points across nonlinear time. Healing and wholeness come when consciousness occupies the body right here, right now. The vehicle of liberation restores all time and space into its rightful, circular order.
It is always more interesting and complex than that.
I have spent 40 long years arguing with the universe. That’s a lie. It’s been 40 years of kicking, screaming, fighting, gnashing my teeth, tearing my muscles, and breaking my bones fighting against the universe as my adversary. I have been at war with reality because I felt, from the very beginning, reality has been at war with me. “Reality started it!”, in my child mind. A bitter, scared child soldier in a secret war where my only weapon was dissociation. I’ve set down my weapon and would like to walk away now. I want to come home to the world. I want to come home to myself which is the world. Because in the end, the only peace and life you will ever find is to finally feel that you belong here, that you are not a stranger in a foreign land.
