Entrance—or at least invitation—arrived for me this weekend into an obscure (to me) Theravada wisdom. Buddhist lineages, particularly those within Theravada streams of tradition, encourage beginning practitioners to spend inordinate amounts of time meditating on things most of us spend just as much time avoiding: corpses, decomposing things, anything suggestive of mortality that would bring a wave of repulsion in cognition or physical awareness. The underlying rationale, as I understand it, is to bring the practitioner into awareness of impermanence, the utter changeability of life, that we are “like grass,” as Hebrew scripture reminds us.
I’ve never found my way into this Theravada wisdom. For one, it seems unnecessarily morbid, particularly when the daily citizenship-duty of reading the news allows you awareness of life’s brevity and unpredictability. Two, any image or sensation that I would bring up myself, in my own mindstream during meditation practice, would not come close to the real thing in sensate experience. The practice has seemed like make-believe, in other words. I knew there must be something to it--millions of people have practiced it over centuries--but way had never opened for me.
Attending a lama’s teaching this past weekend brought some new considerations to mind, however. Perhaps there’s intention for encounter with impermanence, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the practice is also intended as a crowbar into awarenesses of attachment too. That’s the underside of impermanence, after all. Attachments amidst impermanence birth suffering, from which the 8-fold path of Buddhist wisdom liberates.
A vocation into companionship, spiritual friendship(s), connection across differences means that my path necessarily requires wrestling with attachment in a variety of ways. The calling is connection, receptivity, advocacy for the spiritual yearnings and maturity of those within my life. How easy it is to entangle in things not of the path at all! Attachment to person or transferred yearnings of my own?…voilá, attachment. Attachment and a liberating—if painful—release from it urged this blog, prayerful listening to life’s invitations and mires. Various posts have allowed me to sort through “the end of attachment” in some particular venues of my life—to persons, to destructive habits of mind or body, to ideas. In attentive practice, for these purposes of differentiation and liberation, I have been intentional about avoidance. Avoidance of places of probable encounter with persons, post-attachment; of habits in body or mind that manifest in self-criticism or internal loathing; avoidance of past-practices from which attachment grew.
But here’s the funny thing. Avoidance—or the even stronger sensate phenomenon Buddhists call aversion—is simply attachment in its negative or reactive form. If one remains attuned against being somewhere, against being present to another, against being receptive to past pains, then one’s energies are still hooked to the phenomena of attachment—the person, the practice, the pain. Avoidance or aversion suggests the attachment is still governing the mind and actions. The task, in contrast, appears to be an equanimity amidst all, regardless of previous attachments, ongoing aversions.
Nonattachment describes this task within Buddhist lineage, but many misinterpret that to mean no connection or not caring. Nothing could be further from the truth, I discovered this past weekend. I wound up in conversation with a woman who used to be a covenantal companion, a relationship that blew open my understanding of calling before imprisoning both of us with a sickly-sweet attachment. My prayer has been twofold for a couple months—neither to be swayed back into unhealthy comforts in unexpected encounters nor to be overly brisk or do harm in these habits of regained health. What a marvelous surprise to recognize an immediate familiarity upon unexpected conversation and to watch my mind learning its new balance without attachment or avoidance. My hope to live into ways that this narrative is simply no longer a thing is actually strengthening into reality. And it does not mean not caring or actively avoiding. It means equanimity amidst life’s unending rhythms of attachment and aversion.
So this equanimity, I am reminded, does not mean uninvolvement at all. It breathes an ultimate connection or awareness of interdependence into the world—an ultimate concern—amidst a perfect balance between attachment and aversion. We would like to rid ourselves of either or both, of course. We would prefer living a life without attachment and a life with no aversion. Not only is that naïve, but it would be lifeless. Equanimity is much more powerful when it manifests as a perfect balance between attachment and aversion, free of sway or repulsion, aware of connection. An enlivening ultimate concern invites delight at the precious luminosity of life. If we had only one of them, we’d never know the depth of joy whose underside is life’s precious fragility. We’d only know suffering. With both, sustained in practice-balance, life is generative beyond all our imaginations put together.
How about that.
I still find the Theravada meditation practice obscure, probably outside my own path. Its wisdom, on the other hand, is breathtakingly beautiful. Thanks be to God. J
