Painus in the Anus

Taken from Google
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There are two things I know to be (at least mostly) true: If someone recommends a book or movie or… almost anything to me, I’ll not enjoy it. I’m still figuring out why this is the case. The other thing I know to be true is that if / when I recommend something to someone, it’s usually enjoyed or valued or, in best case scenarios, both. Maybe I know people really well. Maybe I’m just a bitch. Either way, for a while I’d been encouraging a dear pal to check out Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” and had even offered to mail him a copy – which he pretty much made me promise I wouldn’t follow through with. Finally, and not long ago, said pal indicated to me that he’d picked up his own copy of
this book and was reading it. I was thrilled. Since that time, he’s posted a number of quotes from the book to his Facebook page and seems to be enjoying it well enough. If I can be honest, I’m more
than a little surprised at the speed in which he’s breezing through the pages of the book. I spend portions of my days contemplating things spelled out in this book, and I’ve read the book a number of
times, and it still takes me months to get to the last page. Perhaps he has more leisure time on his hands than do I. Perhaps all of this is old news to him. Perhaps the dark-n-wondrous life-changing-ness of the book is already in place in his life and he doesn’t need to masticate the material as much as I feel I do for the full benefit. I don’t know, and better yet it’s not really my place to know or care about suchery. However, this dear pal did send me a request: That I should write about what Tolle details as the “pain body.” So that is what this post is (supposed to be) about.

I called this post “Painus in the Anus” because everyone knows the concept of something being a pain in the ass. A pain in the butt can be anything that makes life less enjoyable, long-term
or short. But what if something was part of your life, was pretty much complicating your life on every level, and you weren’t even aware of it? That’s the pain body. It’s not just a pain in the
butt, it’s a pain in your very existence and there’s a close connection between one’s pain body and his ego (something else most people aren’t quite clear on, at last regarding what it really and
truly is).

Since the request to write about the pain body came from someone who’s been reading Tolle’s “A New Earth,” I went to that friend and asked for any knowledge he already had regarding the subject. The digest version of his response was something along the lines of, “Not your karma, but having an effect on your karma.” He’s absolutely right.

The pain body, according to Tolle is very closely linked to human emotion. Many humans (most?) are basically possessed by their own minds and the patterns that the mind operates in. These patterns are essentially what Hindus (and others) call samskara. It’s like the deer paths in a wooded area – with enough travel, there becomes a really worn place, not just a path. Sometimes those worn places are actually like narrow ditches – quite deep. Similar impression-like grooves form within a person and account not only for one’s thoughts and behaviors, but also the resultant actions (aka karmas). Be sure, this is what so very much hinges on because as long as a person not only is adding to their internal impressions but also is not doing anything to smooth those grooves out, he or she will be bound to rebirth.

The pain body is a trip, be sure of it.

One of the first steps in understanding the pain body is to understand mind-identification. I think a lot of Hindus understand the basic trickery of the mind and then choose a path that seems not to center around it because it seems safer or because it’s easier for today. In truth, any path one might take that doesn’t afford a decent amount of focus on knowing the mind and all its components will have a tougher time not only getting rid of pesky karmas, but preventing new karmas from forming. This is actually a really vital step in getting anywhere in one’s personal evolution because we are not the mind – a challenge to recognize!

So, thought / mind is at times a tool of the ego (which Tolle writes about extensively). According to Tolle, emotion is as well and may be even more of a tool of the ego since emotions form specifically as a byproduct of thought and act primarily as fuel for this kind of fire. And lucky for us, the two are often not far from one another. They are so practically joined because, according to Tolle, emotion is the body’s response to a thought. So, essentially what happens is that the mind perceives something, emotions form in response to those thoughts, and then the two cycle off of each other. It’s a lot like smoking cigarettes being the smoker’s problem AND solution to that problem. When this ricocheting goes on without examination, Tolle says emotional story-making results. This nonsense constitutes the voice of the ego and ruins most hope for true well-being.

When all of this happens, we’re talking about the pain body. It’s a cyclical mess whirling around within each of us and varying in “size” and intensity depending on the individual. Memories are often a part of this, as are many other components of human existence. The pain body is a semiautonomous thing that forms when emotions and thoughts reverberate off each other, and then feeds on thoughts later produced. To be more precise, Tolle describes the formation of the pain body like this: The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body… This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.

The pain body is very complex and very prevalent – in fact, entirely prevalent. Everyone has one and brings one with them to this life when they are born. I see parallels here between what Tolle is saying and what “Hinduism” says about one’s individual karmas, which also follow one from one life to the next. Certainly, there is a very close link between karmas and pain body.

Karma and a pain body are definitely distinct. The mind perceives, when this goes unchecked emotions form as a result (this is a reaction), the two then pair up and perpetuate a kind of story telling that virtually entirely flavors one’s life view which in turn flavors that person’s responses / reactions to life experiences – the reactions and responses responsible for the creation of additional karmas, which in turn are interpreted according to the pre-existing psycho-emotional story telling. And the whole mess keeps it up. If a person doesn’t awaken in a fairly timely manner, it’s becomes increasingly tough to dig one’s self out of this kind of mire.

So where’s the silver lining in all this? Some might conclude that people not swamped in their pain bodies are necessarily more advanced or developed than those who are not. This isn’t necessarily the case. According to Tolle, the opposite is often the case: People with heavy pain-bodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one. Whereas some of them do remain trapped in their heavy pain-bodies, many others reach a point where they cannot live with their unhappiness any longer, and so their motivation to awaken becomes strong.

So… For me, this is it. This is the pain body in a nutshell and really is the reason for why Jnana Yoga & Raja Yoga appeal to me so much. So much starts in our thoughts and can be transcended by evolving that part of human life. That transcendence, when achieved, affects everything else. Emotions, however, truly fuel so much of what goes into karma. You can think anything in the world, but when it comes down to it you’re actually moved by emotion, whether you recognize it or not. And since emotions stem from thought to begin with, it seems vital to know your way into, through, and beyond the mind. With that under your belt, your chances of forming hard-to-control emotions decreases greatly. And as we’ve discussed already, without those emotions feeding problematic mental stories (resulting in the cycle that grows the pain body), the whole ordeal is minimized, if not entirely avoided – which has a direct effect on karmas and virtually everything else.

Aum Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Aum Shanti

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That Which Comes After Sweetest

I said in an earlier post that knowing the what or even the how doesn’t suffice for me. For myself, knowledge must be thorough and as all-encompassing as is possble. This is probably because Jnana Yoga is my path, and probably is the very reason Jnana Yoga is my path.

Here’s what I think I’ve shared with you so far…

So very much of our functioning in life centers around egoic identification. Some of this is practical, like using words such as “I” as a simple reference point. Most of this, however, surpasses practicality and is really where we get into trouble. Instead of using personal possessive pronouns as reference points in life, we become forgetful and convince ourselves that our beloved reference points are actual extentions of ourselves and when those reference points are “relocated” or our relationship to them is otherwise adjusted we experience misery – much as when a relationship ends and we crash and burn. Because of this usual occurence, people do more often than not serve as the tentacles of our ego.

Ego is about as close to being any devil as there ever was, and while “people” as they are, are not necessarily ego, our identification with them – something that’s literally impossible to avoid because of how we’re created and raised – is securely based in ego (in the I-thought, and consequently associated with me, my, and mine).

But this isn’t all bad. Obviously, this outlet for our ego is likewise an effective medium for us to experience profound connection and love, and I do believe that others in our lives are very often Love’s manifestion, and on that note it becomes apparent (and rather full-circle) that the Source of love in our life is likewise linked to the pain experienced. That connection, of course, is that the pain experienced is technically an act of sweet grace from the all-pervasive Love. We’re afforded (sometimes) wonderful people in our lives (sometimes not-so-wonderful) to serve as extensions of our ego – to cause ego flares.

Little by little, it’s only through these ego flares that sweet grace-bestowing Shivashakti works on and with us so that little by little we suddenly arrive at a place within that literally transcends ego/anava mala, and we find ourselves in the unfoldment of consciousness, otherwise known as Self-Realization. People are an extension of our egos, as a grace-filled act of God, precisely to facilitate the maturation and intensification of our anava mala/ego – without which liberation for us is at least 1/3 impossible.

So there you have it. Ego in a nutshell of around 3200 words. I’m sorry to have made you read through all of it, but I hope you see what I’m trying to communicate to you, my dear reader. As a thank-you for reading this far, I’d like to share a video below of a song that struck me once while at the gym. The song repeats “I love you” about a billion times. That phrase, as well as the beautiful souls interacting sweetly in the video suits everything I intended to convey in this series: Others are a sweet, sweet, part of our egos.

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

Sweetest Satan

Image taken from Ananta Vrindavan Images

Hinduism Today magazine has long been one of my favorite publications. It’s a wonderful and credible source of Hindu vidya, and although the publication was founded by monks from a Shaivite lineage, the magazine itself often contains considerable information pertaining to many of Hinduism’s other sects. The magazine is officially Shaivite, but I think most readers would find it actually quite Smarta. The lineage leading up to the modern day Saiva Siddhanta Church is old and very much intact, and the fact that it manages to have such an immense and open presence here in the West, while remaining so very orthodox is great. For a while I saved every issue, and then as an act of nonattachment I stopped, and now I am again. Some issues carry more weight than others, but every single issue is my favorite issue.

In the most recent issue of the magazine published, there’s an article titled, “From Bondage to Liberation: Explaining the ego’s initial subjugation of the soul as a form of Shiva’s grace.” It couldn’t have come at a better time, considering the formation of these posts, and I feel it offers a warm-n-fuzzy feeling or silver lining to the information presented leading up to this post. I hope you agree.

Grace is a funny religious term. I don’t like it usually. Same goes with the notion of mercy. For one, the difference between the two is often poorly understood (as with myself) or misunderstood entirely (as with many people, in general). The simplest definition of grace that I’ve been able to find is “unmerited favor,” which pretty closely matches my current understanding. The connotation is one of doing something nice for someone even though they don’t necessarily deserve it. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that notion, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t really understand God to operate in that kind of mode. To me, to suppose God shows grace to humans is rather negating to the concept of karma, which itself is fairly supreme. I can see gurus showing grace and mercy, and in some cases I think this is exhibited in the form of the guru mitigating a devotee’s karmas for the advancement of that devotee. But I digress.

So… back to ego and grace and Hinduism Today’s Satguru Bodhinath Veylanswami. According to the article in this issue of the magazine, egoity is named “anava mala.” According to the Mrigendra Agama, anava mala is the “individualizing veil; egoity.” Also according to this Agama, the grace of Shivashakti is bestowed upon not only sentient beings, but also upon “inert things,” and this acts as an intensifier to that anava mala.

Superficially, this sounds counterintuitive. Why would God’s grace intensify our egoity? To be clear, the Mrigendra Agam clarifies, “…but not with the intention of making the soul suffer. Whatever action is done by Lord Shiva, it is indeed and effective and unfailing help to the soul. It cannot be considered otherwise.” The text continues, detailing that liberation cannot happen until the anava mala is removed entirely.

“But even when the power of anava mala becomes ripe for such maturation, its intensification does not, and cannot, take place of its own accord. It is seen that always and by all means, the non-intelligent object, in this case the ego, is kept in action only by an intelligent being,” states the Mrigendra Agama. The Agama then likens all of this to a physician who’s applying a stinging medicine to a wound. The sting is technically painful to the patient, but certainly for his own good. Later, the Agama continues, “Even so, for the sake of the removal of anava mala, the experiences should not be considered as afflicting or aggravating activity, but rather as healing, for they drive the soul’s evolution through the understanding born of its experiences.”

“Since Shiva is all-pervasive, His immediate and active presence in all objects and beings cannot be set aside. But where there is no need for His action, He remains neutral and free from any action… For those souls in whom anava mala is reaching its phase of maturation and removal, Shivashakti descends immediately and unfolds in the form of grace. Grace is indeed the compassionate function which makes the intensities of anava mala’s bonds ripe enough for removal.”

Later on we’re explained that a specific form of Shakti manifests to help the loosening of the ego through intensification. “Tirodhana shakti is a pure and asupicious power, which takes command of and works in concord with the ego’s obscuring potencies in order to sytematically work through them.”

This deep and metaphysical explaination closes with, “Grace is, in actuality, the cognitive power of the bound soul brought about by its evolution through the ego’s dominion and the maturing process of the inert bond. The simultaneous occurance of cognition and the ego’s intensification is considered to be the bestowal of grace” and that this explanation applies identically with the preponderant states of karma and maya, the soul’s other two bonds (anava mala being the third bond of the soul preventing liberation).

Certainly by now, your head may be swimming. Fair enough. But where do we stand? I’m feeling like it might be appropriate to bring this post to a close and attempt a summary in another. Of course, why not have skipped all these many words and just cut right to the summary? It’s not my style. The friend who’s been mentioned before in these posts encouraged me to write a paragraph of 20 words. It made me chuckle. 20 words isn’t a paragraph (for me). It’s a sentence.

One more post. Then I’m done. I promise.

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

Sweeter Satan

Taken from Google Images, “Ego”

As I mentioned in the last post, I believe that other people are indeed often extentions of one’s ego. I intend to explain in this post and perhaps another post or two why I believe that. As I mentioned in the last post, a certain friend has often been the impetus for posts here on Sthapati. It was similarly his idea that I break this information into multiple posts instead of slamming you all with the book this is turning out to be.

Also mentioned in the last post, in addition to that friend, were other sources of knowledge and guidance I draw from on this subject – and many others. I’ll start now with sharing some material directly from Tolle’s, A New Earth:

“In normal everyday usage, ‘I’ embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time, but also into human nature, referred to as ‘an optical illusion of consciousness.’ That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations, of reality… If you recognize an illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality… What you usually refer to when you say ‘I’ is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of ‘I’ in your mind and whatever the ‘I’ has identified with…”

He goes on to explain a person growing up and becoming identified with the I-thought, “When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents’ vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person…Soon after, they learn the magic word ‘I’ and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I-thought. The next steps are thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of ‘I.’ … When ‘my’ toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy has, but because of the thought of “mine.” As the child grows up, the original I-thought attracts other thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the sense-perceived body, a nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things the ‘I’ identifies with are roles – mother, father, husband, wife, and so on… Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think ‘I’ but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken you still use the word ‘I,’ but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.”

Tolle continues a little later to detail how identification is one of the most basic structures through which the ego comes into existence. Apparently, the word identification derives from two Latin words, idem meaning “same,” and facere which means “to make.” So when I identify with something, I “make it the same.” All of this can be somewhat tough to follow if you’re not used to diving deep, but if you’re a nut like me who does nothing without diving deep, this stuff is like gold. For me it’s never enough to know the what or even the how, but the why is also mandatory.

When I came to this world, like anyone else I was in bit of a fog. Through repetition and some basic infantile cognition, “I” came to know that Josh = my body, and later began expanding that association – no, that identification – outside of my personal borders. Suddenly, instead of just me being “I,” there’s now my things, my accomplishments, and …my beloved. From a purely linguistic standpoint, there’s nothing wrong with using words like I, me, my, or mine. Much like having the right tools to get a job done, personal and possessive pronouns are required to communicate relative ideas. From that strictly utilitarian perspective, there’s nothing egoic about those identifiers.

Problems arise when, as the Latins implied, I begin to equate (“make the same”) stuff that’s not really me with my actual Self. The person identified (see how this words arises, time after time?) as my beloved is essentially nondifferent from my Self. We’re from the same Source, we have the same Self, and we’re headed toward the same Destination. Just about anything else is ego, is Maya. In truth, if something were to happen to him/his body, I would be no less. It’s because of my identification with him that the idea of or experience of his leaving causes misery – my ego percieves the notion of “my” beloved leaving as some kind of attack on me. If Truth or Reality is eternal, there’s no logical way we can say that the body or personality of our loved ones or of other people are “real.” The stuff our bodies and thoughts are made of existed as other substances before their current form, and after this all-too-brief human existence, those same stuffs will decompose. The actual Truth of that situation – which every single soul will encounter at least once in life – is that regardless of physical manifestation, there’s never any difference in actual distance between us and Love. We see our beloved’s form, we identify with it – literally that form becomes “my” beloved, the identification means my ego/mind perceive “my beloved” as an extension of who I am, and so when my beloved leaves – in whatever form that might take – I am miserable, because I’ve already ignorantly tricked myself into fully believing that a part of me is lost. Much like an arm being cut off.

Taken from Google Images

It’s because of this, that Hinduism has done so much exploration on the nature of the human’s internal landscape as well as other components like attachment. What are we really attached to? The ego is the object and the subject of all attachment. The ego is like a habit of smoking cigarettes – it’s both the problem and the apparent solution. Smoking causes issues which stress people out, and then it manages to fool people into feeling relieved when they smoke because of stress – which only causes additional problems for the smoker. The ego does the very same. We’re fooled into thinking something based in the original problem is ever part of the solution. We develop attachments to distract the mind from the ego, because as Tolle states, exposing an illusion disolves it. Our Self has no attachments, because all that truly is, is the Self – without going into it too much, this knowledge is precisely the foundation of Jnana Yoga, leads directly to experiential awareness of the One, and is why I can’t adhere primarily to bhakti margs, which for their own existence (at least at the level practiced and experienced by most humans) necessarily mandate, perpetuate, and promote the notion of “other” – which is a tool the ego uses to continue its own existence.

***If you haven’t gathered by now, the common application of the word “ego” isn’t nearly the complete definition of the word. Most equate ego with arrogance, but many humble people are still filled to the brim with egoism.***

But there may be some silver lining to this cloud, after all. According to the current issue of Hinduism Today magazine, Satguru Bodhinath Veylanswami explains through a Shaiva Agama how the ego is a tool of the One, meant to help us.

All that and a bucket of chicken coming up!

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

Sweet Satan

Taken from Ek Akshara/Facebook

After a recent post here, a friend (who’s been inspiration for a number of posts on Sthapati) suggested that other people aren’t actually extensions of one’s ego. I think he’s right, but in the rarest sense.

Most of the time, for most humans, others are an extension of the ego. Parents live vicariously through their children. Spouses develop codependencies, sometimes because their sense of self is so deeply reliant upon another. People often identify politically because of how they feel they relate to the politician representing certain views or goals. Quite often in life actually, and in many other arenas, people are an extension of one’s ego. Sometimes that means relative dysfunction, but far more often it’s a simple part of operating in this world – and it begins before we even cognitively recognize that we’re here.

For me Eckhart Tolle is a modern yogi. The man is shanti-incarnate and is one heck of a Jnanaguru. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying or talking about, for me, it’s impossible to listen to his voice and not be nearly blissed out. Please trust me, any person looking to change his own life would do well to study A New Earth. It’s not an enormous book, only about 310 pages, but the content is immense and makes wonderful protein for your brain and soul. I’m currently on my second time reading A New Earth, (the first time took me nearly a year!) and I find it even more valuable than the first time. To be sure, it was groundshaking the first time, but the content requires so much mental mastication (for me, to get the actual value), that unless you read it more than once you’re almost certain not to fathom fully all that you should from it.

At any rate, among the many jewels found within A New Earth, an excellent explanation of ego, its foundation, formation, perpetuation is laid out. If I were ever again to admit the valid existence of any notion like Satan or The Devil, which I do not on any serious level, I could only do so within the context of the ego. But, surprisingly for anything associated with The Devil, things aren’t all doom and gloom.

In the upcoming posts, please allow me to share more than a little in regard to all of this. I’ll be pulling from Tolle, my personal experience, and another source of spiritual guidance which I’ve found to be indespensible through the years: Hinduism Today magazine, specifically the current issue which places an oddly but sweetly graceful spin on the idea of ego & its purpose.

Stay with me here, and as always, your input or observances are welcome.

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

Proof of Immortality

The following is yet another repost from writings I’d done years ago. I’m rereading each of these before reposting them here and as I reread this one, I was struck. Eckhart Tolle is a jnana yogi if I’ve ever kown one. Almost since I first encountered him, I’ve adored him. I now recognize my path as that of Jnana Yoga, and I think things like this piece that I posted years ago, as well as my strong inclination toward things like what’s quoted below as written by people like Shri Tolle, really confirm that Jnana yoga is definitely for me. It’s was gives me not only peace, but joy. I hope this stuff makes sense to you!

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The following comes from a book titled, “A New Earth.” Eckhart Tolle is the author and is possibly one of the greatest modern minds in the field of psychology. He deals with the human mind and its workings and is also very knowledgeable in many things scientific. He does an excellent job at remaining non-theistic while at the same time presenting psychology as an aspect of existence that imparts huge amounts of peace. This comes from a subchapter called “Incontrovertible Proof of Immortality.”

“Ego comes about through a split in human psyche in which identity separates into two parts that we can call “I” and “me” or “me” and “myself.” Every ego is therefore schizophrenic, to use the word in its popular meaning of split personality. You live with a mental image of yourself, a conceptual self that you have a relationship with. Life itself becomes conceptualized and separated from who you are when you speak of “my life.” The moment you say or think “my life” and you believe in what you’re saying (rather than it just being a linguistic convention), you have entered the realm of delusion.

“If there is such a thing as “my life,” it follows that I and life are two separate things, and so I can also lose my life, my imaginary treasured possession. Death becomes a seeming reality and a threat. Words and concepts split life into separate segments that have no reality in themselves. We can even say that the notion of “my life” is the original separateness, the source of ego.”

“If I and life are two, if I am separate from life, then I am separate from all things, all beings, all people. But how can I be separate from life? What “I” could there be apart from life, apart from Being? It is utterly impossible. So there is no such thing as “my life”, and I don’t have a “life.””

“I am life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how can I lose my life? How can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How can I lose something that I AM?”

“It is impossible.”

…There you have it. The chapter that follows this in his book is called, “The Pain-Body” and has thus far related emotions as being your body’s physical reaction to your mind. Can’t wait!

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Life is about learning. No? From the lowest level of conscious life on this planet, learning is a must – and it’s a blessing. In life forms that are “below” the human level, consciousness of differing degrees is found. And, in many cases in direct proportion to the degree of consciousness, there are degrees of learning capability.

In virtually every sub-human existence, pain in some form is an absolutely necessary part of the learning process. 12-stepping addicts everywhere would agree that this is true in every instance, never mind sub-humans. Most of the animal kingdom operates on a majority instinct level, and learning happens as a matter of survival for the most part -either to avoid pain altogether, or to lessen current pain. When learning for survival provides an organism (or a population of organisms) enough of an “edge” in its existence, sometimes consciousness begins to expand. I have a feeling that this is a foundational element of nature’s evolution, and is also a huge part of why evolution is, typically and literally, painfully slow. In “A New Earth,” by Eckhart Tolle (a book everyone should read, at least once) this “blossoming” of consciousness was first evident in flowers. His words on this, which I think I recall coming early in the book, are very eloquent and powerful, and enlightening. (Through his own dedicated effort, Tolle is certainly a modern living Jnana Yogi. Believe it.) There are many sub-human forms of life on Earth that don’t learn ONLY in this way. Many mammals and some bird species (among an entire host of other life forms) are known to have “deeper” components to their lives. These components point to a level of consciousness much closer to that of humans, although these beings are still primarily governed by instictiveness.

Human life, on the other hand, has allowed its animalistic components to atrophy a bit in favor of a more developed consciousness. An unfortunate aspect of this trade is a simultaneous increase in ego, but that’s for another post. One of the biggest benefits of this swap, however, is the developed capacity for humans to learn without the aforementioned pain so often necessary for other animals. In truth, there are a number of animal species who have been discovered to have this capacity, too, but only in humans is this particular evolution of consciousness so well-developed and potentially (depending on the human individual) so finely tuned. Here, precisely, is where human consciousness has one of the greatest gifts. We can learn by the usual and common method of pain, but that mustn’t be the only way we learn. Indeed, we’re one of the only animals on the planet who are able to learn solely by observation, and we’re certainly the only organism on the planet to be able to learn so thoroughly in this way.

At this point, I’m recalling a common saying among my Nichiren Buddhist friends. I think it comes from the Daishonen’s sayings somewhere, but the idea is that through chanting we’re able to tap into “Myoho,”  and transmute our karmas into something more, thus elevating our life state. I’ve known these great and optimistic humanists to be fond of speaking about “turning poison into medicine.” To me, this points at even deeper component to the human existence. We’re not only in control of our learning, but we’re responsible for it.

As we find ourselves in the middle of the yearly holiday season, many of us would do well to take a look at our “poisons” and search how we might turn them into medicines for our betterment. A poison might be defined, superficially, as anything that seems to rob us of happiness. Anyone who’s followed my writing at all, might be aware of how deeply I adore my parents. For me personally, few things in my current existence are likely to be as painful (…potentially poisonous…) as the eventual death of either of my parents. Certainly, I anticipate very few things with as much dread and immense pre-emptive sorrow as either of these two events.

With this in mind, my heart and thoughts go out to anyone who’s lost a parent, and faced such (potential) poison. Sadly, I’m able to list a number of acquaintances who fall into this group, from this year alone. For this post, and for sake of a wonderful example, I’d like to mention someone who is perhaps surprisingly, and definitely increasingly dear to me. And that’s my mom’s brother’s wife, Wendy. What I know about Wendy tells me that she’s a truly great human. Without spilling everything about her, I can surely say that she loves her family and friends and is loyal to them. She works hard in her career, like so many others. She does her best to enjoy life. And she fights her battles as best she’s able and keeps moving, knowing she has to be strong for the next. One of these battles, recently, was the loss of her own mother.

 

Three days from now will be Wendy’s first Christmas holiday without her mother. Without a doubt this season will be a trying time for her. Certainly, Wendy has experienced ups and downs in her time managing her grief. You can find her story about the poison she faced here.

One thing I’ve noticed is that she’s consistently able to “turn poison into medicine.” She could easily be paralyzed by her loss. I know I would be. She didn’t have much time at all to prepare for the poison she was about to face. Instead, she continues moving forward. She still works. She still loves her family and friends. And she’s investing more of her time in pruning her internal landscape in very practical and hopefully effective ways, which will be the surest sign that the poison she’s experienced has been transmuted into very powerful medicine.

As humans, we don’t need pain to learn. Ideally, we’d be gifted with both the foresight and the time to prepare and learn on our own so that the Universe and our karmas don’t have to facilitate this learning for us. For those of us, like Wendy, who aren’t allotted ample time for preparing for what we don’t want to come, it’s my hope that we can at least enter into such unfortunate experiences with a fully human awareness and, like Wendy, with the capacity to take that experience and turn its poison into our medicine.

As this year and holiday season comes to a close, my prayer is that your awareness and mine will expand and cause our hearts to swell. Realize what an incredible boon you have, being born a human. What an immense opportunity has been awarded to you to assume the responsibility for your own growth. Face the poison in your life, and let the divine with you change it into medicine for your betterment and healing.

In the coming year, all the grace that is mine to give I gladly forward on to you.

Namaste