What Saved Our Ancestors Often Is a Hindrance to Us Now

Suspicious, among other things, is:

"inclined to suspect, esp. inclined to suspect evil; distrustful"

Paying attention to suspicion in my own mind that comes and goes, I'd like to add that it is a desire to pin down, fix, name, and control the unknown.

I have a fairly strong desire for clarity. I want to be able to see through the muck of the world, and live and breathe the truths of my life. Not a terrible thing, in itself. Yet, how much of this clarity seeking is really just trying to solidify what can't be made solid?

Furthermore, how much of this clarity seeking is just creating an artificial division between that which I deem "clear" and that which I deem "unclear"?

Take a simple sour looking look spilling forth from a driver of a car waiting for me to pass on my bicycle. Sometimes, it doesn't take much for my mind to be swamped in worst case scenarios. He's pissed at me. I'm in the way. He probably hates bicyclists.

At the end of the day, the reasons for that look are rarely fully made clear. Even if the guy shouts at me out his window, I don't know the true origin of his anger. In other words, clarity is something usually different than the fixed story I have about it. And whatever it is in a given situation, it's not knowing every last fact and detail about what's happening.

It's likely that this very mind - suspicious mind coupled with a desire for clarity- saved our ancestors from being destroyed by countless numbers of events or predators. however, now it's more likely to be used as a means of standing back from the world. What worked to keep our ancestors alert and clear seeing, now often works to keep us from being fully alive.

Time for some retooling.

Jaws of Clarity

I wrote the following post last October. Seems the same stuff has come around again. You never step in the same river twice, but water is water no matter what river you step into.



"Seek movement and there's no movement,
Seek rest and no rest comes instead.

When rest and no rest cease to be,
then even oneness disappears."

Sengcan "Xinxinming"

I'm a clarity junky. I love being clear, and being able to demonstrate to others that I have that clarity. A confession? Yes. One with a swamp of guilt and shame attached to it? No.

Clarity in life is a beautiful thing. when someone can see through the wild muck of a situation and clearly declare its truth in words and/or actions, much suffering can be alleviated. However, this same skill can become an addition, and lately, I have seen how this is the case in my own life. I've wanted to have an answer about my career future so badly that there's no space for anything new to arrive. And at the same time, I have desired a break from the very same chase for answers so strongly that my actual "rest" (i.e. sleep and free time) has been anything but restful.

The opposite of clarity is cloudiness, or being unclear. Preferring one over the other is just as much trouble as preferring any other member of a binary (Gain or loss, Praise or Blame, etc.). Being clear and decisive, however, seems to be a preference for all of us humans. I've met very few people who actually enjoy living in the mud of not being clear. Sure, many of us are attracted to altering our minds with drugs of various kinds, and like the "cloudy high" that comes from drugging ourselves. But just hanging with the mud that comes up on its own in our lives without any monkeying around? That's not something we humans seem to like much because it's such a strong reminder of how little we control in this life.

How often are you in the jaws of clarity?

Developing Patience with Communal Samsara

Maybe this post won't interest too many people, but I have a little extra time, so I'm going to write it.

The post I wrote this morning about the Treeleaf online community, and the tussle they recently had with one of their members, wasn't one of my better ones. I didn't want to take a firm stand for or against the leaders of Treeleaf, who decided to eject the member in the middle of the tussle, because I really don't know what to think of the situation. It raised a lot of questions for me about online Buddhist practice, and communities - many of which don't have clear answers. So, I wrote the post this morning without a lot of clarity, and failed to make it clear that I wasn't sure what I felt would be the best approach in dealing with challenging behavior in an online setting.

To be honest, what most interests me about the situation is how everyone, including the teachers involved, struggled to work online with the messiness of the various narratives playing out within their community. I saw similar strugglings in my own sangha several years ago, during a major upheaval. And I've seen them at my workplace, in my family, and most everywhere at different times.

Working with communal samsara is tough, sometimes brutal. And even people with great wisdom don't know how to proceed all the time, or maintain the peace. There isn't always clarity available when circumstances arise, and action is called for. You have to do the best with where you are at, and who you are with.

I'm interested in this lack of clarity because I've been experiencing a lot of it in my own life lately. What I have found in my own experience is that not being clear can manifest in many different ways. You can become mousy and subservient, afraid to say or do anything. You can become loud and defensive, feeling like everyone is against you. You can become pious, thinking that if you act the "right way," maybe you will find the way out of the mud. And you might even become nihilistic, saying fuck it to everything because hanging in the murkiness for a long time is just too challenging.

One of the things I've seen online over the time I have been active on here is that there isn't a lot of tolerance for this kind of muddiness. The various kinds of "acting out" that occur in peoples' writings tend to be responded to with another form of acting out. Not always, but pretty often. People struggle to be kind and generous when others are acting out, myself included, which is why I think it's too much to simply slam Treeleaf and call it a day.

This post feels a little clearer then the last one. Maybe some of you would rather I shut up until I knew what I was talking about.

But that is precisely my point. If there is no place in sangha - online or "brick and mortar" - for struggling, confusion, and messiness, then what's the point? If the teachers must always be beacons of wisdom and excellent action, and the students always good and righteous followers, then why bother having a community at all?