Experiencing joy without pleasure
By Rahayu Ratnaningsih
JAKARTA (JP): Existential frustration is something so inevitable. The older we get the truer it becomes. While human civilization has created so much accomplishment to live our external life ever easier and more convenient, not many of us know how to live a bountiful, meaningful and enriched inner life: the kind of life with little waste of energy to alleviate the ripple and waves of daily struggle in the face of constant frustration.
The frustration of not getting what we want. The frustration of constant struggle to avoid pain. The frustration to understand others, and ourselves. The frustration to have others agree with us and accept us. This tiresome kind of life we have, no surprise stimulants are so much in demand.
Meanwhile our "self" is not always kind to us. These petty, mindless and incessant chatters inside our head are excruciatingly unforgiving. Our body is a vehicle of an entity that we have no control over. It has a mind of its own. Still we identify ourselves to this wild mind: to its memories, knowledge, experience, fear, prejudices, pettiness and whatnot. Still we think that our mind, our thoughts, are the solution to our endless problems. Our mind and all its attributes are so real to us, so are our problems. But are they?
What we call our "self" is a mere concept, a mind construct, a product of our petty and shoddy thoughts as well as others'. When we really try to dissect this "self", there is really nothing in it that bears substance. This "self" is purely fabricated. Our self exists when our thoughts creep in. These thoughts are products of memories. Memories are old, they have no ground in the actuality.
Thoughts are fragmented. They are structured, thus limited. They create boundaries: your locked ego and others. When you perceive others you sense a need to protect your territory, your independence, your security. And through this need, fear enters, and then violence, and then hatred... and more violence, more hatred... more need to protect and reclaim your territory, and also another perk called "dignity" that now comes into play, so there should be more violence... ad nauseaum.
Still wondering why we humanoids, after thousands of years civilization and technological achievement, still kill each other and relish in the "glory of war"?
Try this: take a moment of silence, only you and your breathing, meaning leave all those petty thoughts behind for a change. They will force their way into your head for sure, but just ignore them and go back to watching your breathing. Do not respond, do not analyze, do not condemn or judge them, just let them slip away quietly. Soon enough you will be deep in relaxing and effortless concentration to your breathing. You are truly in the moment. It's so light and spacious all over. So silent, so blissful.
You'll see what I mean: when thoughts cease, time and self cease; when time ceases, sorrow ceases because time breeds sorrow; when your "self" ceases, there are no "others." When there are no others, there is no fear. When there is no fear, there is only compassion. When there are no others, no fear, there is no violence. It's so simple, yet so out of reach.
The very fundamental of human problems is the fact that we are a conscious being, and limited at that. Our consciousness evolves around the constricted "self" that gets even more constricted when we focus our awareness mainly or solely on the aggrandizement of it. The expansion of consciousness is the sole purpose of all mystical traditions. When Self embraces self and everything else, there is nothing to fear.
To know thyself is to know thy Lord, says the Sufis. And the Zen master declares: "To study the Buddha way is to study oneself." One's true self is the Self that has always been since the beginning of time which has no beginning. This is your original face: the face you had before your parents were born. There is no becoming or not becoming. It's always been that way.
To study oneself one needs to throw away one's own views on oneself; to forget oneself and to recover from our forgetfulness of our true Self. To throw away all one's acquired affectations, which are the knowledge, memories and experience accumulated since birth, to become a pure white sheet of paper. The Sufi or the Buddha way is the way of returning to one's intrinsic nature itself and the problem is how can one awaken to one's intrinsic nature when one is deluded by acquired affectations?
Thoughts, and our fixation to thoughts, cannot solve our fundamental existential problems. They can only aggravate them. This borderless spaciousness is what mystics from all religious traditions mean when they talk about unity consciousness: the non-dualistic, fully immersed opposites, the world of no boundary, of one taste. This is joy without pleasure, thus without pain.
When one has attained this great self-awakening, where are there such things as ones' own body and mind, and the bodies and minds of others? There is not a bit of cloud to obstruct the eye. One clearly awakens to the fact that self and others were the dreams of an unenlightened person, subject and object were just instances of delusion. To be enlightened is to bring about the dropping away of body and mind of both oneself and others: the skin of ideas, concepts, perceptions, and beliefs, and to become nothing but the one reality.
This is not philosophy, not religion or doctrine. Don't try to intellectualize it. You absolutely cannot grasp the fact of no- self with intellectual studies. Why? Because just intellectually understanding the theory of no-self is like knowing what is in another person's wallet. Even though you may know exactly what is in it, that doesn't make a single penny of it yours.
To have a complete grasp of it is to experience it the way knowing the taste of durian is by eating it, not by studying it intellectually or theoretically. And the key to truly experience it is in the cessation of thoughts.
-- The author is Director of the Satori Foundation, email: satori@cbn.net.id. Website: http://satorifoundation.bizland.com