Man oh man, did you hear about…..? And depending on what comes next, we’re off and running with our passionately held opinions on the subject. I think they call it ‘triggered’ these days.
The more volatile the topic, the stronger our opinions. “Who do they think they are?!” “What is happening to this world?!” “We need to stop them!” And so on.
I was that guy. But only for, oh, 45 years or so. Again, slow learner.
The earnest spiritual journey leads you onto a narrow, lonely, very quiet path. Silence, it has been said, is the real currency of the sage and the language of the universe. God speaks to us through silence. Too bad we’re so noisy.
Ever notice how the more turbulent the topic, the louder we humans screech and carry on? Our culture pushes an extroverted agenda, the reasoning being that there’s something intrinsically wrong with introverts who have nothing to say.
But pay attention long enough and you start to recognize the wisdom in the words of the sages, the ones that remind us humans know absolutely nothing about everything.
“You have no idea what anything is, no idea whatsoever. You think you do. Your ego tells you this is a glass, this is a radio, this is a dog, this is a cat, but what do you really know about these things? Do you really know what a dog is? You have no idea what a dog is. It just appeared when you appeared on this earth and we gave it a name, dog. We could have named it cat. We could have named it door knob. We could have called it the moon. We have given the animal the name of a dog. So we call this a dog. But if you answer like this you still have no idea what a dog is, do you?”
Robert Adams
For most of my adult life I was the guy alarmed about pretty much everything. I read voraciously, hellbent on knowing everything I could about everything, and was celebrated as the ‘smart one.’ (The miserable smart one.)
Only recently has there been sufficient grace to recognize I know nothing. These days, when I catch myself starting a sentence with, “Well, I think….” some small part of me smiles. What should be said is, “Well, the thoughts that just popped into awareness are…” That would be honest.
It’s been said here countless times (and far more elegantly in mystical teachings) that silence is the only real teacher. It’s when we’re NOT full of ourselves that Truth can at last be found. Like this beautiful little passage from the Tao Te Ching: “Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.”
In other words, it’s the empty space that actually contains what we need.
Words.
Wu Hsin
At the spoken level,
They are sounds.
At the subtle level,
They are thoughts.
At the silent level,
They are gone.
It is in this silence,
From this silence, that
All arises.
There’s an intelligence running the whole shebang and it doesn’t need our help. Our job, if there is one, is to get out of the way and figure out what they hell we really are.
A week ago I built my ‘teepee’ trellises for the beans in my garden. Within hours the beans ‘found’ them and began to wrap their arms around them as an assist upward toward the sunlight that feeds them. THIS is the intelligence running the show, not you and I.
It’s pretty clear that the world is going to do what it’s going to do. Call it karma or cause and effect, doesn’t matter. Any student of human history knows that there have always been stretches of relative peace and prosperity along with stretches of chaos and mayhem. It will always be this way.
So, we can dive into the mental maelstrom and imagine ourselves critically important players who are ‘right’ while others are wrong. Or we can forget the whole thing and spend our time investigating the one supposedly living this life and thinking these agitated thoughts.
Or put another way, we can be the pot, or we can be the empty space within.
I only exist because of you sex-obsessed loonies. The only reason I do not kill myself is the fact that I was born-again in Christ few years ago. Suicide is indeed rational, because life is irrational. At least when applying a utilitarian calculus to one’s life, if the bad outweighs the good, why keep on living — why play a game you will never win?
The only answer is God, that is Jesus Christ. *If* eternity exists, everyone’s life matters, then suffering has meaning. On the other hand, of eternity does not exist, one doesn’t need to commit suicide — because then there cannot be any oughta anyway –, but suicide is certainly a rational act.
What I wrote above about sex I still hold to: it’s a very base drive, Andy Nowicki, who wrote about the debasing character of sex at length, called our origins a slap in the face — especially for a Catholic who believes to having been created after God’s image (in: “Considering Suicide”). Books that deal with our sex-obsessed age especially are “Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker” and “Notes Before Death.”