Tuesday, January 29, 2013

One of those restaurant dreams.  The restaurant has just opened an outdoor patio gated in four blocks away.  Tonight, the weather is warm, and people, liking the novel, decide what a good idea to be seated there.  The owner lets them sit there, and 6 tables come all at once.  Only problem, I'm the only one to wait on them.  Four blocks.  Hard to carry drinks that far, so you do it piece by piece, falling behind, forgetting, only able to bring one table at a time, and there's one table, just two drinks, I just seem cursed at as far as being able to do.  Like it's in your hand, but you just can't do it, too many interruptions, too many inherent impossibilities, and the owner/manager thinks its all doable when it's not.  In the dream things grind closer and closer to a halt, and finally, you are just about to give up trying what isn't possible to do, and there are the people waiting, still waiting to be waited on, back there, as you go back to the busy bar area, other staff just sort of milling about, in your own mind the different odd stylish cocktails you have to make, the glass of white wine, and then back out on the street under the street lamps, through a gate you have to open each time, down to the little patio.

It probably is, indeed, very hard to see yourself as a Buddhist.  It seems to smack of too much giving up.  How could you really accept that thought, when life is about making what is possible happen.  To become a Buddhist seems to be opposed to the American cultural attitude.  How could such ideas of apparent resignation enter your head?  To be detached?  Such cosmology is nothing but the usual mumbo jumbo of religions, no?, for weak and simple minds.

And then life happens to you, even just a plain, common, humdrum experience similar to, and probably even a whole lot easier than what a lot of people must go through if you were to lift back the covers of life and the mind's veil of privacy.  But slowly it grows, or it lingers, the pretty girl, the perfect meeting, the perfect kiss, the perfect embrace, the perfect misunderstandings and miscommunications and stubbornness of personality, the perfect setting, and you all expect it to all work out, except that it doesn't, leaving you in a situation of chagrin that daily visits itself upon you for years, even as you attempt to work it out as creatively as you can, the unhappy brick wall you can do nothing about, even trying to avoid its distraction.  Trained, perhaps, as we are, the history seems to be part of one's personality and persona, part of the self.  It is through no fault of one's own that one remembers such things, and that there is a natural resistance to deflating the importance of them.  And you can listen to the parameters of psychological health and common sense wisdom like 'don't dwell on the past, live in the now,' and try to take it to heart, but, to convince oneself to loosen one's grip can be difficult, maybe precisely because it's natural for us to look for meaning in life.

In the meantime the wisdom of the Buddha floats down on you.  It feels good.  You have momentary experiences of the light amidst the routines of life and jobs and indirection.

And it dawns on you more and more, the great wisdom, the essential quality to it as far as its allowing to understand why we are here and what is the meaning of life.  No, those are not silly questions only allowed sophomores, completely unanswerable.  Those are questions which are the main engaging ones when we wake in good health and enjoy a healthy day without distractions.  And the Buddhist philosophy really does offer a salvation, the salvation of being able to believe what you sense to be true,   something related to understanding the difference between what is essential and what is excess, sensual enjoyment overdone, distracting, throwing one off.

Maybe it's not so wild after all, the sense of life being a matter of learning Enlightenment, the sense of the gentle teachers in your life with whom you go back a very very long way.  Those special people in your life, you finally glimmer toward an understanding, are, as they always were, full of deep meaning. And this is the same reason why you respond to the gentle laugh of Buddha and the awakened lotus-like wisdom.  That is the meaning of life, to call upon others to wake up as well.




To reach up to a larger significance, one has to allow himself to be inconsequential as far as society understands itself.  The rule of law has become such an obsession that people forget that a human being is perfectly able to distinguish right from wrong.  Too much obsession with 'upholding the law' leads to a society which allows itself to break the law, to be excused from knowing independently right from wrong.  So many lawyers lead us to a situation where it's simply a matter of what you can get away with.  Then down the line.  In this way, more guns lead to more crime.

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