Last time, I began to talk about my reaction to the audio book, Beginner’s Guide to Buddhism, by Jack Kornfield. I was very attracted by the idea that there could be a way out of the terrible suffering caused by my Fibromyalgia, but as yet was not clear how this could possibly be so, and I wasn’t so sure about Buddhism either. The four noble truths outlined by Kornfield—suffering/dissatisfaction, the causes of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path out of suffering—seemed straightforward enough, but the details were less so.
I thought the truth of suffering was fairly obvious, given my situation, but the causes he described were not. I really wanted to know the causes, but “grasping and clinging!?” I hadn’t expected that. He went on to say that these “[lead] to greed, hatred and delusion, which creates suffering.”
At this point he completely lost me, because I thought my pain was my problem, but then he picked it up again, with the very true and relevant fact that we always want things to be a certain way but inevitably find that they are not, and then we suffer.
When it came to the truth of the cessation of suffering—Nirvana or liberation—of course, that sounded good—though I knew nothing about it. He said this happens when we give up “the body of fear;” when we “quiet the mind and open the heart,” then we can achieve liberation. But the “how” was still missing! How do we make this happen?
He said that the path leading to the cessation of suffering is “the middle path, or the eight-fold path, . . . when we live in the reality of the present . . . [and] respond with compassion rather than react with greed, hatred or delusion.”
He listed the 8 parts of the path and briefly described them. While this was interesting it didn’t make much of an impression on me. More importantly, as far as I was concerned, was the idea that you can learn to be here and know you’re here without suffering from or getting caught up in what’s happening, but instead to respond to this present wisely and compassionately. The moral tone of some aspects of the path did not appeal to me, as I wasn’t feeling very well disposed towards anyone else, having been rejected and put down because of this invisible burden I was carrying around.
I was ready for some serious relief, but how could I get it?
Next time: Enough about theories, what about specific methods!?
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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