Fixing and Healing
Our usual modus operandi is to try to rid our lives of suffering through
rearranging things. Rather than admitting suffering into our experience, we
tend to manufacture hopeful strategies of avoidance. My friend Buddy, a
structural integration practitioner, says that a client will often walk into his
office expecting to get “fixed”—to arrive at a physical state that is totally
pain-free. This is not an unreasonable desire. Nobody wants to suffer. But
we need to ask ourselves: “Is this mysterious, dynamic organism we inhabit
fixable? Does it ever reach a final state of equanimity, where it no longer
feels the movement, the pleasure and the pain, of the infinite universe it is a
part of?”
Here is a simple comparison: suppose you go and sit in the middle of a freeway with the cars and trucks charging down at you. You can't get angry at the cars, shouting, ''Don't drive over here! Don't drive over here!'' It's a freeway, you can't tell them that. So what can you do? You get off the road! The road is the place where cars run, if you don't want the cars to be there, you suffer.
It's the same with sankhāras. We say they disturb us, like when we sit in meditation and hear a sound. We think, ''Oh, that sound's bothering me.'' If we understand that the sound bothers us then we suffer accordingly. If we investigate a little deeper, we will see that it's we who go out and disturb the sound! The sound is simply sound. If we understand like this then there's nothing more to it, we leave it be. We see that the sound is one thing, we are another. One who understands that the sound comes to disturb him is one who doesn't see himself. He really doesn't! Once you see yourself, then you're at ease. The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it? You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound.
-- Ajahn Chah
When people are born into the world they are without names - once born, we name them. This is convention. We give people names for the sake of convenience, to call each other by. The scriptures are the same. We separate everything up with labels to make studying the reality convenient. In the same way, all things are simply sankhāras. Their original nature is merely that of compounded things. The Buddha said that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self. They are unstable. We don't understand this firmly, our understanding is not straight, and so we have wrong view. This wrong view is that the sankhāras are ourselves, we are the sankhāras, or that happiness and unhappiness are ourselves, we are happiness and unhappiness. Seeing like this is not full, clear knowledge of the true nature of things. The truth is that we can't force all these things to follow our desires, they follow the way of nature.
My mother, who spent many years working with people who had lifethreatening illnesses, said she witnessed many of them move from states of
physical and emotional “dis-ease” to a place of deep acceptance of their
physical condition, their life, and their death. When people go through such
experiences their whole demeanor changes; their outlook broadens. They no
longer want to go back . . . they want to move forward. And as they move
forward they have no regrets. She heard them say things like, “This disease
was the greatest blessing of my life.”
On National Public Radio I heard a woman talk about her experience
with her daughter, a heroin addict who lived on the street. She tried taking
her to rehab, talking to her, intervening in various ways, but to no avail.
Finally, this courageous mother came to accept her daughter’s situation.
And rather than trying to rehabilitate or change her, she just went and sat
with her in the park—she started to bear witness to the truth of her
daughter’s predicament. In one way, her story as she told it remained
unresolved. She was unable to fix it. And yet, as a listener, I could feel the
bravery and clarity that came from this woman’s ability to work with her
situation in a healing way.
SANKHARAS
We must see that there is no reason to be born. Born in what way? Born into gladness: When we get something we like we are glad over it. If there is no clinging to that gladness there is no birth; if there is clinging, this is called 'birth'. So if we get something, we aren't born (into gladness). If we lose, then we aren't born (into sorrow). This is the birthless and the deathless. Birth and death are both founded in clinging to and cherishing the sankhāras.
So the Buddha said. ''There is no more becoming for me, finished is the holy life, this is my last birth.'' There! He knew the birthless and the deathless. This is what the Buddha constantly exhorted his disciples to know. This is the right practice. If you don't reach it, if you don't reach the Middle Way, then you won't transcend suffering
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