Thinky thoughts

[goddessfarmer]

I'm reading Christopher Penczak's newest book "Buddha, Christ, Merlin: Three wise men in our age."  I'm not done yet, however this little book's brief synopsis of Buddhist actions is giving me pause to think. Half my life ago when I was exploring my spirituality, before I dedicated my life to the study and practice of witchcraft, I did a small survey of Buddhism. I used some of those practices to teach myself how to meditate, a necessary skill for a witch. In re-familiarizing myself with the concept of non-attachment, I am beginning to understand what I had previously read, but was not yet skilled enough in the world or knowledgeable enough about myself to truly understand. I can't really say that I fully understand it now. What I have now, is just enough experience, sight, and understanding to see how the idea that "attachment causes suffering" becomes true. Human beings suffer when they are torn from the things and/or people to whom they become attached. For example, when a parent or loved one dies, it is painful to us. I might even go so far as to say the amount or duration of the pain is fairly well related to how attached we were/are. Until we let go of that attachment, the pain will continue to be present. To be sure, this is a very simplistic explanation. Something I have learned the hard way over the years, is that it is very possible, and even safer (less painful) to love someone/something without being attached to the relationship. It is no secret that I still feel love for chocorua in my heart, but somehow I was able to let go of my attachment to him, to our relationship, enough to allow that relationship to change without it being particularly painful to me for any great length of time. Witchcraft has prepared me to find aspects of my Buddha Nature so subtly that I live it, frequently, without any effort. I see friends of mine (and I probably am thinking of you, yes, but you are not alone in my thoughts) who are stuck in their attachments to people or things or situations such that they are in a place of near constant pain. I am in no way meaning to belittle their experience. It is very hard to accept that change does happen, and that moving on is good, even though it's scary. Because now we are different, and how does that feel? I love you all, and will try to support you as best I can through your changes, but do not expect me to mourn for you overmuch, for what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Comments

[ialdaboth.livejournal.com]

I wonder, goddessfarmer, if these lines of Eliot's, which I've always loved, will help in thinking about the elated detachment of Buddhism--one unclear line in the poem concerns the dead nettle, which is a species of nettle that doesn't sting:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

The dead nettle might be mint, botanically speaking. But here, the live nettle is clearly the nettle that stings, and the dead nettle the one that doesn't sting, representing the life painfully attached and the life lived in unattached love, respectively, for both of these plants are nourishing, after all. Yet that space in between, the no-mans-land, where no plant lives, that is the place of numb indifference, where one goes without seeing, without feeling, in an absence which to me, and perhaps to the poet is possibly worse than death.

[ialdaboth.livejournal.com]

You have a subtle understanding of the movement of Eliot's thought, dear goddessfarmer!--incidentally I'm lecturing on this poem in sept in St Louis--

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Coming from you that is high praise, indeed! I do not know if I have ever seen this poem before this morning. I read a small volume of Eliot's works when I was in 6th grade (a really long time ago) and didn't understand much of it, but thoroughly enjoyed the sound and the meter of the words in my head. I knew, even then, that there was a deepness and richness of meaning, elusive, but there for the taking someday. Oddly, I have not read another whole volume of poetry since then, only single poems here and there, placed under my nose by friends. Any understanding I may have is not born from study, but from reaching into the depths of the collective soul in the here and now and crafting words around what I feel there.

[ialdaboth.livejournal.com]

Yeats (whose appears in part 2 of this very poem, Little Gidding) considered that all imagination was from the Anima Mundi, the general soul of the human race-- he even thought that Keats's Ode toa Nightingale existed thousands of years before Keats was born--

[cloakmaker.livejournal.com]

Can I hope you still lust for me a little, now & then?

*HUG*

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

Oh I certainly enjoy a little lust every now and then :-) I just try to not be sad when it's unrequited.

[cloakmaker.livejournal.com]

The definition for unrequited is "Not reciprocated or returned in kind" so that does not apply here ;)

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.

http://www.contemplator.com/england/drinkto.html

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

Then yes, unrequited is the wrong word. I would like to taste the fruit after which I lust, but despite the lust being returned, the fruit is still forbidden.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Personally, my own problem is being too unattached... or, at least, thinking that I am.

Mourning my losses is good for me.

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

See the second comment, above, my response to ialdaboth's quotation regarding indifference.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yes, I can see that. I will have to mull on it. Thank you!