I'd rather have a bottle in front o' me...

angie b (hi Angie!) writes:

The no-self teaching, as I understand it, is about no fixed, permanent self. Even Buddha said "I." Our delusion is not that we exist, but that we won't/don't want to change, or die, or have the world change around us. Our suffering comes from our supreme effort to protect and maintain what's ephemeral and temporary...

Suzuki Roshi (right), the Japanese Zen priest who found such a fertile ground for Soto Zen in the San Francisco of the late '50s, was once asked to summarize millenia of Buddhist teaching. Echoing Heraclitus, he simply said, "Everything changes."

Does this necessarily mean that we resist inevitable change? Yes and no. If I'm in pain, if I'm hungry, if the kid at the next table won't stop crying, then I crave change! If things are going well, sure I resist. That's the nature of the beast.

I suggest that pain is inevitable in life--it's nature's way of keeping us on our toes. We worry about, say, where the next meal is coming from because if we didn't--if we lived in a chronic state of bliss or apathy--we'd die. These genes that we're born with were refined and honed by the anxiety and pain of our ancestors--the very feelings which led to their survival and reproduction.

Where humans seem to differ from animals, though, is in our intense desire to avoid pain. Walk into a bookstore, turn on the TV, glance at the newspaper ads--so much of the stuff of our world is about doing something about pain and anxiety. Anything! Therapy, drugs, meditation, Hawaii, gambling, booze…whatever it takes to avoid pain.

Does it work? Short of a lobotomy or a lifetime on Prozac? Does anything work? We're still messed up after a hundred years of therapy (to paraphase James Hillman's book title). How can it be otherwise? The enemy is us! We're supposed to have pain, we're designed that way.

Don't you feel better already???