A Window Into Practice (?¿)

There was a happynaut recently who posted about their happiness and living their happiness and living for their now happiness and not their later happiness, and in general seemed to be riding high on one of those manic or pseudo-manic dopamine plateaus that can be brought about by everything from downing a tube of sweetened condensed milk, to spending a couple of hours playing Bejeweled, snorting some coke, having the first one or two martinis, or paying a bucket of money to go someplace exotic and have an "eye-opening" experience vis-a-vis [fill in the blank with pertinent chemical/mystical nomenclature].

Feeling great is all well and good - but setting up a goal post of "persist in perpetual happiness while alive" is setting yourself up for one hell of a pitfall.

With the mélange of this post and my own mindset in tow, I went and searched zen marrow for the word "FEAR". In response, Baizhang stood up and slapped me in the face...

"Work hard! Henceforth you must take hold and investigate vigorously. Do not wait till your ears are deaf, your eyes dim, your face wrinkled and your hair white - when the pains of old age overtake your body, sadness and affection enshroud you, your eyes flow with tears, and in your heart is fear and dread. Without anything to rely upon at all, you do not know where you are going. At this time, you won’t be able to coordinate your hands and feet; even if you have merit, knowledge, name, fame, profit and support, none of them will save you."

Reeling from the blow, I shook my head and started to explain to Baizhang that I wasn't the happiness-fetishist OP - I hadn't written the be-happy-dappy-forever post and he shouldn't be slapping me. But, before I could get a word out edge-wise, the old bastard bludgeoned me in the stomach with the blunt end of a shitstick...

"Because your mind’s wisdom is not yet opened, you only think of various objects; you do not know how to reflect back, and you don’t see the way of enlightenment. All the good and bad active affinities of your whole life will appear before you - you may be glad, you may be afraid; the mortal clusters of the six states of being will appear before you all at once, all spread with adornments, houses, boats, carts, brilliant shining light. Everything is what is manifest of the greed and craving of your own mind; all bad visions turn into surpassingly beautiful visions, but according to the heavy weight of greed and craving, compelled by your habitual active consciousness, you experience birth accompanied by attachments - you have no freedom at all. Whether you’ll be a dragon or an animal, freeman or slave, is entirely uncertain."

A sobering assessment. I've been self-indulgent of late - crediting internal narratives in several directions, sometimes near simultaneously. I flinched and waited for another blow, but Baizhang just sat down and said:

Greed, anger, folly, and the like, are poisons; the Buddhist teachings are medicine. When the poison is not yet dispersed, the medicine should be removed. If you take medicine when you have no illness, the medicine turns into illness. When the disease is gone but the medicine is not dissipated, ‘unborn and imperishable’ then has the meaning of impermanence.

This made sense to me and I could see both where I had been taking medicines beyond the prescribed course and, simultaneously, neglected to take medicine to treat a growing infection.¹

It does all come down to the warm shit we willingly submerge ourselves in and pretend is a jacuzzi.

I've made many mistakes. Once I felt good and said "it's time to celebrate how good I feel!" Once I had to deal with circumstance and said "this isn't fair at all, I don't deserve this!" Once I felt afraid and said "Staying awake all night obsessing over the object of my fear will solve this problem!" Once I felt liberated and said "I am liberated!"

Constant vigilance is required. "Progress" might be measured by time between de-calibrations, extent of de-calibration, and speed of re-calibration taken in conjunction with however else you're doing.

Anyway - act now, time is short - there's a lot to parse and, statistically, many of us will invariably arrive at a slow, lonesome, painful death in a hospital room - not a good time to do your spring cleaning.

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1. In terms of removing the medicine if the poison is not dispersed - what comes to mind is successfully sucking the venom out of a wound. Not practically medically advisable, but often achievable in a metaphorical sense.

Submitted June 06, 2022 at 09:54PM by Gasdark https://ift.tt/JatU6cq