Christian Life 40 - On Aversion
Today is Sunday. All this year, I've been starting my Sundays with a chapter from How to Train a Wild Elephant by Jan Chozen Bays. I found two paragraphs from today's chapter particularly quotable: "It may be dismaying to discover how pervasive aversion is in even a single day in a life we might describe as happy. It is, however, very important to become aware that feelings of dislike are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Aversion is one of three afflictive mind-states described in the Buddhist tradition - greed (or clinging), aversion (or pushing away), and delusion (or ignoring). They are called afflictive because they afflict us the way a virus afflicts us, causing distress and pain not only to ourselves but to those around us... "There are few ideas more absurd than the notion, 'If I could arrange things - and people - to be just as I want them, then I would be happy.' It is absurd for at least two reasons. First of all, even if we had the pow...