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 power to make everything in the world perfect for us, that perfection could only last a second because all the other people in the world have different ideas of how they would like things to be and are working to get them their way.  Our 'perfect' is not perfect to anyone else.  Secondly, forcing perfection on the world is bound to fail because of the truth of impermanence - nothing lasts forever." 

Throughout the last  couple of years I've described my efforts to achieve perfection through self-annihilation, but I have only been talking about making myself perfect.  I am under no delusions that I can or even should make the world and everyone else in it perfect as well.  Honestly, if I can even come close to perfection in myself, I think that will be a big enough job to keep me occupied for one lifetime.  But the more I study, the more I become convinced that the first step in this regard is the constant acknowledgement that everything about Western ideology is wrong.

Twice today, I found myself involved in conversations on therapy and the universal need therefore.  In both conversations, a statement was made about us all having good days and bad days.  Both times I contributed nothing, but my mind wandered to the question "Really?  Is that a Universal idea, or merely a Western one?"  I don't know nearly as many Eastern people as I do Westerners, but among those I know, there doesn't seem to be any sort of neurotic see-saw; they appear to simply be happy or not.  My own anecdotal observations would tend to indicate that the bipolar nature of our existence is a purely Western concept and, if this is the case, it is automatically wrong based on Rule 1.  And, of course, in our Western health system, there is no effort to helping people get off the see-saw as this would be bad for business.  Instead, we simply try to give people advice - or drugs - to help smooth out the bumps at the bottom ends of the teeter-totter.  Why not teach people how to just get off the damned thing?  Then there will be no bumps to smooth out!

I don't know.  I'm really spitballing here.  Maybe I'm the one that's crazy.  Maybe, as has been pointed out a few times recently, I just expect too much of myself and my fellow Earthlings.  It just always seems to me that, if we find we are causing our own problems, the simplest solution is to quit doing so.  Or, as my granddaddy used to say, "when you find yerself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'."

Pax