ABOUT JUDGING, OR NOT

Nov 7th, 2009
You may well ask, what gifts come from what is apparently bad and tragic?

Payson and I had a huge fight about a week ago. Divorcing is easy in America. There is so much social and cultural support for it. Most of my friends here, or at least 70% of them, are single and/or divorced. I don’t mean to judge it from a ‘moral’ point of view at all, but I do believe (after having been much married and divorced myself) that there is a certain learning that takes place from sheer persistence, and from being aware that one cannot really judge one’s experiences and label them so easily as black and white.

To back track, in the heat of our fighting we seriously touted breaking up. I came downstairs to my study, wounded, embattled, hurt. It was definitely, no denying it, a ‘bad’ experience. But Payson went the extra mile to make up, and believe me, we now have a better marriage. The possibility of divorce had taken our marriage hostage and we both had to listen and talk. There was no getting around communication. So, the bad thing was a good thing and its effects beneficial all around. We now have a more loving relationship, and I got a great chapter for my novel out of our fight, to boot.

But in all honesty I have to admit that there are times when ‘bad’ seems just that. Fuzzy Brain Syndrome certainly seems like it. Old age, as my mother keeps saying again and again, is a terrible thing. There’s no going forward, and there’s no going back. As some bumper stickers say, life is a bitch and then you die.

I have paused here at this thought for a long time. Made myself some tea, turned on the heater in my study, taken a shit. (Why do we say, ‘taken’? Why not, ‘given’? Early humans took and gave back. But we, with our crappers are not giving back, making manure but putrescence, rot. Well, that’s a whole different ‘not now’ meander).

Fortunately, when you are scribbling, you can always go back to the thought you had lost: sheer, unmitigated suffering. Is some suffering an exception to the spiritual fact that suffering is good? That Rumi, in the following quote, is right?

When the blossom is shed,
the fruit comes to a head;
when the body is shattered,
the spirit lifts up its head.
Mathnawi, I, 2929

Truthfully, I do not know. But fortunately, Socrates has taught me that not knowing, admitted, acknowledged, honored, is good. That great story will have to wait. I cannot exceed 1000 words. I’ll let Maulana Rumi give the answer in the following story.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHY

Ahmed was sleeping peacefully in an orchard when he was suddenly and rudely awakened to find that for no reason, a stranger was beating him to a pulp.
“What . . .? Why are you . . .?” Ahmed asked, but more blows answered his queries. The stranger’s eyes bulged with rage.
Stunned, barely awake, and wondering if this was a nightmare, Ahmed tried to ward off the blows, but the onslaught was relentless.
“Oh God,” Ahmed cried inwardly. “What sin have I committed? I am a good man, and I haven’t harmed anyone. Why then are you punishing me?”
Ahmed managed to run away from the stranger as fast as he could, and rested, panting and frothing, under an apple tree. But the stranger pursued him, and grabbed him under the tree.
“Who are you and what have I done to you . . .” Ahmed began, but the stranger was obviously deranged. At the point of his sword he forced Ahmed to eat the rotten apples that had fallen on the ground.
“Eat! Faster! More!” cried the stranger, stuffing the apples into Ahmed’s mouth.
Ahmed had many questions to ask the stranger, but his mouth was full of apples. Nonplused and almost crazed, Ahmed replayed in his mind all the other tragedies that had befallen him in his life, and came to the conclusion that life was inherently absurd and full of meaningless suffering.
“I curse you!” Ahmed screamed inwardly at the stranger. His stomach was so full that he couldn’t breathe. And just when he thought he was going to faint, the stranger began to whip him.
“Run,” screamed the stranger. “Run! Faster! Faster!” Gorged with the apples, exhausted, sleepy, his feet and face covered with bleeding sores and wounds, Ahmed ran and ran, the stranger in hot pursuit. All night the stranger chased and tortured him. At dawn they came to a stream, and the stranger made Ahmed go down on his knees and drink the water like an animal.
“Drink!” he yelled. “More, drink more!”
Ahmed drank till he could drink no more, then sat up on the bank, and threw up everything he had eaten and drunk.
“This is the end,” he thought to himself. “We suffer like this all our lives and then we die.”
He looked up at the stranger and said, “I will die easily if you just tell me why.”
Without any words, the stranger pointed his sword at Ahmed’s vomit. There, amidst the rotten apples lay a long, black snake, writhing and hissing, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth.
“I was riding by when I saw the snake slither into your open, snoring mouth,” the stranger explained.
“But . . . but why didn’t you just tell me the reason? I would have obeyed you meekly, done everything you asked me to, and borne your blows knowing that my suffering had a purpose!”
“Because,” replied the stranger, sheathing his sword and putting away his mace and whip, “had I told you that you had swallowed a black snake, you would have died of fright. This was the lesser suffering.”
Ahmed fell at the feet of the stranger, and said, “O blessed is the hour you saw me. Blessed is the suffering you inflicted to awaken me.”

From Pilgrimage to Paradise (Penguin, 2009)

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SAINT EINSTEIN
November 5th ‘09
I have to tell you about FBS and PRM. Before I explain what these mean, let me just say, they are states of body-mind. Like space-time, body and mind are one, though it is hard to see beyond the illusion that they are two. Einstein is a hero of one of the characters in the novel I am writing currently (or rather, not writing currently because of FBS), and my character has dragged me into Einstein’s world. I no longer know if I am creating the character or he me. Anyhow, now I worship Einstein too, primarily because he bends the mind and allows us to see things-concepts, matter-energy in an altogether different light. Understanding even a little bit of what he is talking about – and I myself, being a Pooh- with- very -little -brain, understand very little of it – is illuminating, mind expanding, and transforming. Einstein for me is the perfect example of how science can be and is a religion. Certainly the New Physics, quantum mechanics, has revealed truths that take us back thousands of years to the Vedas: Space-time, matter-energy, body-mind-soul (sorry, I left out an essential part of the equation before).
But this is not what I meant to say at all, at least not consciously, but since my meandering mind has brought me here, here I am. I will say one last thing about Einstein before I return to what it was I meant to say, consciously. Above all, Einstein has taken us, cognitively, beyond duality.
FBS is Fuzzy Brain Syndrome. It is hard to write about FBS because when you are experiencing it, the brain is so fuzzy that words and ideas elude it. Trying to catch them is like grabbing a fistful of fog. In an effort to take the brain a bit further on this track I look up ‘fuzzy’ in the American Heritage Dictionary (my fav), and am directed to the root of the word. Fog, rot, decay, foul, foulness, filth, defiled, putrescent, putrid, all come from the same root. I find myself objecting to the strong nouns and adjectives and hesitate to apply them to my mind, which I honor and respect, at least when it is not fuzzed. When it is, I am lost in mazes of confusion and very low visibility. I don’t remember what day or date it is, what I came to a room to do or get, where I put my glasses or other really important and/or minor stuff. And the brain fog lasts for days, if not weeks and months. It is age related, I think, for I do not recall many, or any, of these in my youth, except when I drank or smoked cannabis a little too much. Complementing this mental state is the physical state of PRM, when your body is so stiff it feels like a living rigor mortis, which, of course, as we know, is the stiffening of a body after death. It gets hard to get up while sitting, and sometimes when you are standing it is an effort to sit down. One goes about as if one were already dead.
I have been afflicted by both of these body-mind states lately. Long observation has taught me that it invariably happens to me when I return to the US after my six month stay in India. I would like to analyze this to gain some understanding, and so far have only come up with a few things, none of which may be the answer: jet lag (but lasting a month and a half?), culture shock (but after I have lived here, off and on, for forty years?), going from connection (sometimes too much) to isolation. The last of these reasons resonates, but I’m not certain this is the answer, either. When I return to India from the US it takes a few days of sleep adjustment, but I am plugged in right away. To my mother, my siblings, their children and grandchildren, friends, domestic help, dogs. There is a jostling, sloshing, full, overfull, abundant, noisy, crazy sense of life in India that my body-mind-soul finds quite congenial. In the US we return to an abandoned house which needs putting together again, a lot of mail, most of which is junk, catalogs that tell us to buy, buy, buy, bills, bank statements: nothing personal at all. After the initial shock and some degree of sweetness in keeping crazy time schedules, eating in the middle of the night, sleeping through the day, a rather conflicted sense of solitude begins to creep in. Both Payson and I do love it here, as well, especially the quiet, the silence, the lack of disturbance and distraction, and the vast unobstructed view to the very horizon of the Pacific Ocean in sunny Southern California. It would be simply wonderful if it weren’t for FBS and PRM that invariably afflict me. I feel unwell, get upper respiratory infections, have no energy, and drag about stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster, in a fog.
But this morning, after altogether too long an unproductive period, I remembered three things: first, to pray for relief, to meditate, and to do yoga, all great ways to unify the body/mind/soul split. The effect of these is that I am sitting down and writing this, and working a bit on my novel, FBS and PRM somewhat abated, plugged into my solitude and isolation as a good thing, something to be borne with patience and gratitude. After all, I do passionately desire to be alive and vital, or at least content, through all the circumstances of my life: here, there, good, bad. As the Sikh Gurus and all the prophets (and I rank Shakespeare and Einstein amongst them) tell us: there is nothing good or bad but thinking, dualistic thinking, makes it so. I know, not from any books or prophets (though these have ploughed and prepared me), but from my own experience, that many, many gifts come from experiences we tend, mistakenly, to label as ‘bad’ or ‘tragic.’
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