Velvet Verbosity

In 1999 I read a small passage that would both dramatically and subtly forever alter my life’s path. In a small class at a local community college, I opened a textbook on World Religions and stared The Four Noble Truths in the face. They are, according to that text, as follows:

1. All life is suffering
2. The origin of suffering
3. The possibility of cessation of suffering
4. The eight-fold path - the “way out”

That is my translation as I remember it. I won’t expand on the meanings of those truths here because you didn’t come here for a lesson in my religion. You came here for a story. If you want to know more about the Four Noble Truths, I can point you in the direction of some very good books, or you can just use trusty old Google.

When I read the first Noble Truth, “all life is suffering”, I had what many would call an “enlightenment” experience. Reading those words, I felt all confusion instantly fall away and I was left with a clear “360 degree” mind. I felt like I could see the interrelatedness of everything past, present, and future. Yet to try to look at any one thing meant I would lose the clarity. It was so swift, so complete, and so…fleeting. For the first time in my life, I felt I had read something true. Truly true. Indisputable, clear, swift and complete. It was freeing, and joyful to read that “all life is suffering”.

“Strange,” you might think. How could such grim, damning words be translated into an experience of joy and freedom? At the moment I read the phrase, I couldn’t have possibly articulated why. Now I can try. It seems that questioning the meaning of our existence has been the curse of human consciousness, and what we seek in that meaning is comfort. We want to know that there is a reason for our being here; both the large “our” and the individual “our”. In short, we want to know that our suffering has some point. We also want to find comfort in thinking there is a reward for that suffering. The rewards we seek are the meaning we seek. The rewards we seek are joy, pleasure, and a final resting spot where there is no more suffering.

Thus, many of humanity’s great philosophies and religions gave us rules of what kind of suffering we ought to endure, and how, and then carefully laid out what our rewards would be in the here and now, and in the after life. I had struggled with all of these traditions, yet was never able to exactly pinpoint the illusions I couldn’t align to. To read that “all life is suffering” was freeing to me. It meant that I didn’t need to escape anything. I didn’t need to try anything. There was no judgement, no reason for judgement, and no “one” to judge. Life just simply was. Life was suffering, and the source of that suffering was that we were always trying to find a way out of that suffering.

It wasn’t grim to me. It was joyful. It seemed that I could suddenly see, and hear, and feel, and smell, and touch, and experience everything fully. I didn’t need a storyline. I didn’t need a reason. I didn’t need to interpret and determine whether my experience was something I wanted or didn’t want. It just was what it was. I had found the way out of suffering by just being.

That was then, this is now, and if you’re interested, I’ll tell you some more stories about my journey on the Buddhist path.

So Woman Remodeled and I were talking on the phone last night and I was on one of my usual spiels about something frightening, maddening, and even depressing. In this case, it was our tanking economy. She was firm in her optimism, and I firm in my resolve to get her to understand the situation we’re facing.  Not that WR is one to keep her head in the sand about important issues (just read her blog and you will see she is a woman of depth and carries concern for the world), just that this was an issue that she couldn’t do anything about.  Finally she asked, “Why do you read about this depressing stuff?” I don’t remember what I said, something off the cuff and vaguely humorous. Then she emailed me today with an article on the Federal Reserve stepping in that she had been reading, and I thought, “Oh, this is not good. What have I done to the cheery sprite?”

So I started thinking about why I DO read the things I read. Why does it seem I’m always looking for the problems? The answer to that is more complex than I can tease out, but I do know some of the core reasons. It is not that I am looking for problems. One reason is my untiring quest to see life as it really is, without the sugar coating. I do this with people too. A friend told me recently that I have a way of walking in a room and looking like I’m seeing right into people. Another person told me essentially the same thing, and then added, “not everyone wants to be seen that clearly”. It’s not that I’m looking for the bad or the negative, it’s just that I can’t really know anyone, truly, without seeing all of them, and it’s only the bad bits that anyone or any institution doesn’t readily reveal. I’m just always looking for the authentic person.

I carry this into my interpretation of the world too. I want to know the truth about what is going on. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It just seems to be part of my nature. The thing is, it doesn’t really depress me the way it depresses others. It just motivates me to do something, or say something, or write something so that others can be willing to see through to the truth of things, and make decisions for themselves about what they’re going to do about it. I realize that sometimes this makes me seem too serious for my own good. Sometimes people just don’t want to hear about it, much less talk about it. But I can’t change who I am. I’m passionate about all things generally. Whatever I become passionate about in any given moment, is usually either a truth I’ve myself recently discovered, something I’ve come up against in my own pursuit of personal freedom, or what people most don’t want to hear.

Yesterday, I was driving home from work and there were two police cruisers in front of a house. The officers were walking from the house with a man between them, cuffed, and obviously being arrested. Some people would see this and feel a sense of relief. Ah, score another one for the good guys, right? Another criminal sniffed out and taken care of. I can’t see it that way, I just can’t. I see this event, and I see the whole picture. It makes me a little sad. I know all too well, for example, from my studies in Neuroscience, that it is highly likely that this “criminal” they are arresting suffers from a frontal lobe disorder. I also know from my studies of Neuroscience and genetics that it is highly likely that a frontal lobe disorder can be attributable to a chaotic and “dangerous” environment during the early years of development. I know that we, as a society, actually breed criminals by our failure to address poverty and violence, and that our punitive institutions as well as our social services (arguable part of the punitive system) do little to help, and much more to harm. I know that it is likely this man will be released in a short amount of time, that our tax dollars will go into housing him, but not into reforming him, or getting him treatment that might help. I know that we cannot allow him to be free because we didn’t take the steps for preventing it in the first place, nor will we take the steps now to reform him. I know that the police arresting him may very well have their own dirty secrets but they are protected because they are on “the right side of the law”. I know they’ve been trained to think in terms of black and white, and I don’t just mean race, but it is probably not a coincidence that both arresting officers were white and the arrestee was black.

I find it a dangerous state of affairs when people don’t want to face truths, in themselves especially. It’s not that I fancy myself as some crusader of truth, or that I think I’ve got myself and everything else nailed down, it’s actually more innocent than that. I’m trying to make sense of things, and then vocalizing it to further help me make more sense. People don’t want to talk about things they can’t do anything about. While I know that I can’t fix all these problems with a magic wand, it still inspires me and gives fuel to creative forces within me. I’m a “big picture” person, and I can’t talk about the environment without talking about sociology, and I can’t talk about sociology without talking about evolutionary psychology, and I can’t…well, you get the picture.

So, if I sometimes seem the bearer of bad news, look a little deeper and you will see that I am struggling to make sense of it all, so that when the time comes in each little moment everyday, that I will make the best choices. The choices that will cause the least harm and do the most good. I’m far from getting it all right, but I aspire to at at least try.

Oh, and I also temper all of my media input with less violence on television and my daily dose of Gimundo, all good news all the time.

Look at those dimples.  Look at that creative brain.

“Nothing is absolute.” I woke up with this phrase repeating in my head over and over, though it took me the several slow minutes to consciousness to realize it. This phrase is hardly comforting to a person whose most fervent affliction in life is to know for sure. I want to know that my children will be OK in life. I want to be able to see the entire path of their future laid out. I want to see every fork in the road, every lake of quicksand, every pit full of vipers and scorpions, so that I can help them navigate around them before they even get there. I want to know that I will be loved unconditionally and with absolute certainty by my future partner so that I can relax and trust and be myself. I want to know that all my struggles to build a financial future will pay off. I want to know how long I will live and how I will die. I want to know when I get in my car that I will make it safely to my destination.

Embracing “nothing is absolute” is being willing to live with uncertainty. It is letting go of fear, or rather learning how to sit alongside fear and to transform it into a sense of curiosity. I know all that, and it’s all very wise, I know. Some part of my brain is obviously very wise and felt compelled to burn the message of “nothing is absolute” into my consciousness this morning.

Really, the only thing that is certain is death, only I will never know when it’s coming.

Damn it.

What is the “future”?

From Wikipedia.org: “In a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the timeline that has yet to occur, i.e. the place in space-time where lie all events that still have not occurred. In this sense the future is opposed to the past (the set of moments and events that have already occurred) and the present (the set of events that are occurring now).”

The future is unknown, unwritten. A plane of infinite possibilities recommended by the now. Each event builds upon the first to write the future. We can’t know it, and any discussion of it is no more than fanciful theory. Five minutes from now I could die in a freak accident or from an undetected bloodclot wedged into my brain, or I could discover a disease that will irrevocably alter my path. Or, we could kiss, and what future would that write?

(Image: “The Unfolding”, Oil on Canvas by Rassouli.
http://www.rassouli.com/occult.htm)

Driving through Connecticut with my Dad and brother this weekend, someone in the car asked, “why do you think barns are mostly red?”.

Now, given that the three of us are genetically predisposed to strong opinions (presented as fact) and liking to hear ourselves talk about theory on just about any topic, the silence that followed was highly unusual. I was sufficiently moved enough to google this question as soon as the next free moment arrived.

I found some interesting theories and myths about the origins of the red barn craze. The most interesting (i.e. coherent and short) and perhaps plausible (i.e. it doesn’t cause my skeptic alarm to sound) explanation was found here, and copied for you here:

Centuries ago, European farmers would seal the wood on their barns with an oil, often linseed oil — a tawny-colored oil derived from the seed of the flax plant. They would paint their barns with a linseed-oil mixture, often consisting of additions such as milk and lime. The combination produced a long-lasting paint that dried and hardened quickly. (Today, linseed oil is sold in most home-improvement stores as a wood sealant.) Now, where does the red come from?

In historically accurate terms, “barn red” is not the bright, fire-engine red that we often see today, but more of a burnt-orange red. As to how the oil mixture became traditionally red, there are two predominant theories:

• Wealthy farmers added blood from a recent slaughter to the oil mixture. As the paint dried, it turned from a bright red to a darker, burnt red.
• Farmers added ferrous oxide, otherwise known as rust, to the oil mixture. Rust was plentiful on farms and is a poison to many fungi, including mold and moss, which were known to grown on barns. These fungi would trap moisture in the wood, increasing decay.

Regardless of how the farmer tinted his paint, having a red barn became a fashionable thing. They were a sharp contrast to the traditional white farmhouse.

As European settlers crossed over to America, they brought with them the tradition of red barns. In the mid to late 1800s, as paints began to be produced with chemical pigments, red paint was the most inexpensive to buy. Red was the color of favor until whitewash became cheaper, at which point white barns began to spring up.

Huh, tinted with blood eh? Well, that’s kind of, er, disturbing. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a quaint country barn in a field somewhere and feel that sweet nostalgic wave again. (Shudder)