Someone to hear our deepest story, Part 2

You've got to stop to love

This is a continuation of last week’s post: “Once you hear someone’s deepest story, how could you not love them?”

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I was listening to a podcast of Buddhist teachers Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield while driving back to Portland from Santa Fe. They were talking about the Buddha’s First Noble Truth, that “life is suffering” (dukka —unsatisfactoriness, unease). Without disputing the general truth of that, Brach and Kornfield made the point that the Buddha lost his mother, who died a week after his birth and that our understanding of the Buddha’s teachings should be through trauma, the trauma of someone who grew up a motherless child.

Brach and Kornfield continued with how suffering is the trauma of separateness. Despite his father’s orders to isolate him from the outside world so the young prince would never see suffering, none of the riches and comforts of the royal palace could replace the missing mother-child attachment. But that profound wound, enabled the Buddha to later penetrate the larger spiritual truth: addiction, craving, and suffering result from feeling disconnected to the original source of love.¹

Looking for love in all the wrong places

Buddha’s story is, in essence, a lesson that there are no external solutions to internal problems. And the reason Buddha’s story feels universal is that we all spend most of our lives looking for external solutions. We keep achieving, pleasing, and presenting so that we can present a lovable mask for others. So much of the capitalist impulse (both overworking and overspending) is feeling we’re not OK without it. We distract ourselves from our internal unease², but it takes ever-escalating amounts of achievement and consumption for us to do so.³ I suspect we all know this. But as someone wrote in the comments to the video below, “How is it possible that we all watch this, we all agree, we all shake our heads yet we'll all get up tomorrow morning and do it all over again?”

None of the riches and comforts of the royal palace replaced his missing mother for the Buddha. None of the riches and comforts of modern life replace what missing inside us either. In the meanwhile, we’re accelerating towards an ecological disaster. All economic development models (the World Bank, the IMF etc) depend on global economic growth at 3% per year, which means doubling every 24 years. Do you think we’re going to double again in the next 24 years? Right now we consume (i.e. destroy) the natural resources of 4 planets; do you really think we’re going to double our consumption to eight planets?⁴ Do you really think we’re going to even maintain consuming at four planets?

We all shake our heads and agree that this is impossible, yet we'll all get up tomorrow morning and do it all over again.⁵

Seeing with the eyes of God

As I’ve written about in earlier posts, our core problem is our internal not-enoughness. Producing more and consuming more will never solve it. But we keep doing it. In contrast, Brach and Kornfield assert that:

They are citing psychiatrist and Buddhist scholar Mark Epstein. In The Trauma of Everyday Life, Epstein argues that developing a sense of separation from others is a necessary and healthy part of childhood development, but the development of our separate ego structures is the pain of the human condition. Much of our philosophy and religion tries to cure the dis-ease of intuitively knowing we are part of the Original Source, not yet able to get back.

But to learn unity, you have to know separateness first. That is the universal pattern. Epstein writes that the job of a good therapist, and also a good mother, is to see us, as we are, even in our separateness and pain, and love us for it. The gift of being seen, without our embellishment, without our mask, is a reminder of our Original Source. That is what Father Richard gave to my friend Doug: “Once you hear someone’s deepest story, how could you not love them?” And in being listened to completely, we are reminded of ourselves, reminded of Buddha and Original Source. Tat Tvam Asi: Thou Art That.

Since suffering comes from disconnection, healing must be in connection. Since suffering comes from disconnection, we must see each other in the way Father Richard saw Doug. Our increasing work and consumption is simply a distraction from that. Our solution lies in each other: we must love each “Other,” despite their circumstances. The monk-mystic Thomas Merton writes of his experience spontaneously hitting this point while standing on a street corner in Kentucky. What a miracle:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun… Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

As Merton would agree, he could not have gotten this mystical experience himself, it came down upon him. It was nothing he could achieve, it was Grace granted upon him. But he was ready for it. Merton had been in the spiritual disciplines as a monk for decades before his mystical experience. Dying to your separateness is impossible. You can’t really surrender, you can’t really let go. But you can go to the territory and wait at the gate. And when the moment happens, you can see with the eyes of love. That is what Father Richard gave to my friend Doug.

When you see the world with the eyes of love, you see with the eyes of God. There is no Other.

Slow down, do less

There are so many reasons we don’t see each other and the world with the eyes of God. First, as Tara and Jack say, it's because we don't see ourselves that way:

“We can't see ourselves in the mirror because of the ego mask. We have to clean the lens of seeing ourselves. We have to trust our own goodness. Trust that is who you are. But often you can't learn self-love first. Start with your dog. Don't start with the hardest. The practices are repetitive. Be gentle and gracious with yourself, especially in the beginning.”

Another reason is we don’t have time to offer to someone else the gift of our attention. We live in the modern world, with so little time. We're so so busy, at work and in personal lives. Our news feeds flatten and fracture and fragment our attention: an article about a war in Ukraine is literally next to an article about the first round of the NFL Draft.⁶ Tomorrow it will be an article about a mass shooting next to an article about the "10 Best Places to Visit this Summer." Modern life is not simply superficial, it mixes the superficial with the important. And in that, the most important is lost.

In order to love each other, we have to slow down. We talk in FF1 about voluntary simplicity. The modern world offers more and more, 3% more a year, doubling every 24 years. We’re working more and consuming faster, but it doesn’t satisfy. We have so much material and experiential abundance, but how many people do you know are satisfied? We need to slow down. As pastor and professor Mark Buchanan wrote, "Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest."As Carl Jung said, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.” As Luther Vandross sang, we have to stop to love.⁷

In slowing down and doing less, we’re more able to reject that which produces the oppression of others and produces addictions in us: the Internet, work, possessions, even experiences. All this busyness and internal dissatisfaction, accelerating us off the environmental cliff, 3% more every year. Transformation is letting go of the “self-improvement project; the false flag that we are not enough and we can get something that is.

But to learn unity, you have to know separateness first. That is the universal pattern. "Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shores of silence.” (Pablo Neruda) In slowing down, we become present to each other. Since suffering comes from disconnection, healing must be in connection. That’s the gift Father Richard gave to Doug, the gift Thomas Merton received on a Louisville street corner, the gift we're really seeking from each other. Relaxed, loving attention to the world, and to each other, is the radical heart of an engaged spiritual practice. That’s when you can hear someone’s deepest story, and love them for it. It’s in presence and connection where we find the spontaneous arising of life, of love, living itself through us.

Slow down. Thou Art That. There is no Other.

"The leaves have not suddenly changed their colors at this moment, nor has the sky been transformed. All that beauty was already there. What changed? I did. This splendor was there, but I did not notice it. I became a beholder and I see what is there to be seen" — M. Himes

1. In his ground-breaking book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, researcher Gator Mate traces the roots of most of addiction to malformed attachment due to childhood trauma. We attach to something else because we could not get what we needed when we were younger.

2. People who disagree with this, I assure you, spend a lot of time distracting themselves from their internal dissatisfaction.

3. i.e. addiction.

4. This Nonduality and Post-Capitalism podcast. Yes, I know all the arguments for “dematerialization” and “decoupling” economic growth from natural resource consumption. But we can't even maintain our current rate of natural resource consumption, which is what decoupling models for. No one actually models for lowering consumption while maintaining 3% growth, because, well, it’s functionally impossible.

5. Yes this means many of you, dear readers, working 40 hours a week, spending like there is no tomorrow.

6. Today’s NY Times., April 28, 2023

7. This one’s for you, Steven!