(This is Part 13 of a series. Go back to Part 12.)
I had lunch with another dear friend recently and she was also greatly distressed.
She was crying as we had lunch and she said, "How come people are always crying around you?" And I said, "I think it's because people take one look at me and say to themselves 'Oh that poor guy' and then they start crying."
But anyway. As we continued talking she told me about the various things that were distressing her, and how various people wanted her to change this and that, and how she needed to change herself.
At that point I told her the simple truth, that she didn't need to change anything. That she was perfect and beautiful just as she was. Further, that if any changes did happen—because the universe is always changing—that she would just be moving from one perfection to another.
I used a metaphor: If we water a plant, that plant goes from one perfection to another perfection. It was perfect before it was watered, and it's perfect after it's watered. Just two different states of perfection.
It also became clear that she was unhappy with various aspects of her current situation, and she needed to drastically change it but wasn't sure how or to what. And I told her the simple truth again, which was that she didn't need to change anything.
It's a remarkable thing, which it's taken me a very long time to appreciate, that the things we call "problems" are not actually the cause of our suffering, but rather, the cause of our suffering is our resistance to those things being the way they are.
Things show up—or we could say reality shows up, or we could say that God shows up—however they do. And the mind labels them all: "good," "bad," "this shouldn't be here," "this should be here," etc. And then the things that are labeled "this shouldn't be here" we start resisting.
That is, we begin pushing things around in the external world to make whatever go away, and we begin pushing things around in our internal world to make certain thoughts and feelings go away.
And in general it doesn't work because we haven't yet addressed the root cause of our suffering, which is our resistance to what's happening rather than what's happening itself.
For those of us who don't think we're suffering: Don't think of it as 'suffering,' think of it as 'dis-jointedness.' Can you find any dis-jointedness in the world? Can you find any dis-jointedness inside yourself? That's the suffering.
It seems to be there for all of us in one way or another, one degree or another. Hence the Buddha's first Noble Truth: "There is suffering."
Back in the '60's and '70's when I tried some psychedelic drugs, I found that "bad trips" were invariably caused by my (and others') resistance to what was going on rather than what was going on by itself.
If the picture on the wall turned into a giant spider and started crawling up the wall I could either say "Far out" or I could resist and reject and say that I didn't want to be experiencing this.
In the former case I'd have a good trip, in the latter case I'd have a bad trip, but the phenomenon was the same. The "bad trip" was being created by my resistance rather than the trip itself.
Similarly...
(This is the end of Part 13. Go to Part 14.)
—jim sloman, 9.9.03 for 9.5.04
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