My mental circus, inside and out.

The hungry ghosts

It dawned on Emma this weekend how freakin' stupid she was to think that she could just remove herself from desire unless she became a forest monk or an ornamental hermit.  It's not her own desire that is the problem.  She spent eighteen months deciding to remove herself from that world, months in which she remained quite on her own before choosing this very reasonable course to inflict pain on no one and have no pain inflicted on her.  But what completely escaped her was that other people would continue to project their desires onto her, and would not understand her choice.  It is an unusual one, after all.   Women, after all, are supposed to be desperate for mates, and if they were alone, it could only be out of cynicism, undesirability, or  a bitterness that the right pursuer can overcome.   Emma is not bitter, nor is she a cynic, nor is she undesirable.  She simply believes that other things are more important, such as cultivating compassion for many people rather than passion for one.  And yet even after removing herself, she managed to get tangled in an unhappy situation in which her  pursuer projected a fantasy that she was having a  nascent relationship with him when she just thought of him as an interesting person she had met among many interesting persons she met every week. Of course this was a blow to his ego, but was Emma responsible for this ego and the pain it had ultimately inflicted upon itself because it was acting, in Buddhist terms, as a "hungry ghost"?

" It is said that when the hungry ghosts perceive a mountain of rice or a river of fresh water, and rush towards that vision, they find the mountain of rice is only a heap of pebbles, and the river of fresh water only a ribbon of blue slate."

Listening to Zen teachers like Emma's favorite on Audio Dharma, Gil Fronsdal, she knows that one of the big questions for neophytes is what to do with difficult people.   Here you are, the neophyte, meditating away and coming to all of these  realizations about the nature of reality,  and at the same time becoming more and more eccentric because you see that happiness doesn't reside in any of the normal, expected social goals (gaining wealth, finding the perfect mate, feeling alive only during orgasms but insisting on never being satisfied, producing children who fulfill your goals, accumulating material possessions, obtaining the perfect body, finding fame and fortune, even questing too hard for spiritual perfection).  Well, it 's no wonder people just can't grasp it.  So what do you do when the world around you keeps insisting that these are your goals. And to what extent are you responsible for the mental states of others around you, especially  if they don't like your refusal to participate? Are you obligated to always make them happy? And what do you do if people just manage to piss you off sometimes, for good reason?  

Emmas suspects that's why philosophers retreat to garrets and monasteries.   She had a thought this weekend that perhaps if she shaved her head and gained 200 pounds, she might effectively remove herself from many of the sources of trouble.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 23, 2006 09:20 | link | comments (12)

Comments:

#1  23 January 2006 - 10:23

 

Emma, this is my new one stop shop (or is it one shop stop?) for spiritual enlightenment. I am loving these latest entries.

Leigh

#2  23 January 2006 - 21:52

 

Poor Emma. She is, after all, just a neophyte. I hope that she will one day be able to look more deeply at what she seems to be doing. Her idea that emotional pain is "inflicted" back and forth between adults seems misguided and puts both parties in the role of victim. it also fails to recognize that these pain fests are engaged in by people who are seeking just that. they do it time and time again. Why would that be?

I hope that in her choosing to follow the path of mindfulness she will discover why she feels that (often, always?) she is inflicting pain or having it inflicted on her in romantic involvements. I hope that she will investigate why she attracts so much unwanted attention beyond the stock answers that will get her nowhere. I will be interested to read if Emma ever will decide to engage in questioning what part she plays in not having learned how to say No in a convincing way. Will she explore the possibility that she gets some emotional return out of feeling responsible for the "mental states" of those around her? Will she realize that she is not talking about mental states, but emotional states? Will she question the fact that perhaps she is so afraid of these emotional states that she has chosen to isolate herself, yet cannot understand why other people won't let her alone?

I'm finding the Emma stories fascinating, too. I'm looking forward to the next installments...

howard

#3  23 January 2006 - 23:14

 

Why would anyone assume that Emma is "poor" or "isolated" or lacks a sense of "responsibility," etc etc? Emma is by no means poor or isolated, but finds herself rich in emotional connections and truly deep relationships. many more than she has ever had in her life. This is the second strange "poor Emma" when Emma never thinks of herself as poor at all! There is no lack. This is freedom, not poverty, though she agrees that she has been too wimpy about "No."

EmmaPele

#4  23 January 2006 - 23:43

 

a clash of languages here. i prefer the spiritual dialect myself, but i have expressed that before, ad infinitum. there is paternal judgment in your comment howard, an i know best. these posts have so much in them beyond that reductive reasoning. i reject your intepretation. it chafes with the tone of superior knowledge, it makes the meditation skid to a halt.

Leigh

#5  24 January 2006 - 00:43

 

EmmaPele, I'm not assuming she is poor, but just taking a cue from Emma's stance -- she's lamenting about the behavior of others, she feels put upon. She is playing victim. Poor in that sense.

I put my comment almost entirely in questions because I am searching for the motivation to believe this character. They may seem rhetorical, but they are far from that. They are, however, critical of what I read as Emma's "it ain't me, it's everybody else".

This takes nothing away from the fact that a woman who chooses to take a different path will have a rough time from both men and women who feel threatened by her. It can't be easy and I recognize that. But someone secure on that path would not bother to engage with the ignorance as Emma does. To do so is to still be playing the old game, the way I see it.

The isolation that I was referring to was only in the realm of romantic love, which, unless I misread Emma's post, is the choice she is making. I agree that my choice of the word isolate characterizes the choice much differently than does Emma.

From the (relatively little) that I know of Buddhism, I understand that delving into the pain and discomfort and asking what MY part is in this is fundamental -- that you reach a higher state of enlightenment, happiness or whatever you'd like to call it, by questioning yourself. I felt the whole thrust of Emma's dilemma was focusing here on everybody else.

Leigh, I enjoy getting into interpretation and behind the words. I know that I have no lock on being right and could be completely off base with everything I say -- but it's really reductive to haul out the paternal judgment bit again. Let's get past that. Criticizing Emma's text for what I still see as a confusion of ideas is not paternal or judging, it's having a different opinion. Let's argue about the issues, OK?

Emma's wimpy No belies the bedrock of the rest of what she says. OK, that may seem like bull to you, and it may very well be. But there is nothing paternal or judgmental about it. My tone is just confident in what I believe. It's just my opinion fergodsakes. Geesh.

I somehow had the idea that by publishing provocative thoughts Emma was open to an honest, even if highly charged, discussion. Isn't that what makes blogging powerful?

All I'm getting from Emma is defensiveness, and from Leigh pigeonholing. I also love spiritualism, and dreams, and poetry, myths, stories, chance and NON-LINEAR EVERYTHING, but when it's employed to avoid looking at the real issues, I think it's so much touchy feely nonsense.

You know from past experience that I am willing to take criticism and consider carefully and with respect. I ask the same in return.

If all that I will get here is defensiveness and a lack of respect for the fact that I disagree, that I say so and say why, I will take that as an invitation not to comment here. Do we just want cheerleaders? Paternal shmaternal!

howard

#6  24 January 2006 - 01:23

 

The funny thing is that your comments strike me as the touchy feely ones. They have a a bull in a china shop quality. It is a tonal thing with me, a complete dissonance. I felt it in my blog, and it seemed the exact replica here. The charge of defensiveness may be right. I guess I don't respect your comments when they seem intrusive and bullying which to me translates into the Freud's King Baby category that seemed so right on when Emma mentioned it. It was like you were the personification of that. I just think you completely miss it. My right. I don't even see anything in your comments to hold onto beyond the accusatory tone. I guess we are out of sync. We can agree to be out of sync. What I'd really hate is if your comments silenced this thread, because it is giving me so much.

Leigh

#7  24 January 2006 - 03:25

 

The river became turbulent.

-V

Anonymous

#8  24 January 2006 - 03:44

 

One thing that has got lost here is that our host is an excellent writer and a creative thinker. And in so being, she invited us readers, few posts back, to think about Emma as a persona, "view Emma Pele as if you are watching a play."

if you noticed, I always carefully referred to Emma in the third person and took the invitation to heart. The owner of this blog is a skilled writer, and has created a complicated persona, writing about subjects that touch us in places where it matters. I realize that I have no idea how much of what is written here is real or fiction. And it hardly matters. Emma created a great space to get away from the "personal" by going with the "persona".

Just one little letter of difference.

The device of the persona, to my mind, liberated the discussion to a kind of after theater discussion after the play -- a brilliant move. And I think the character of Emma is rich with with issues to discuss. I'm just disappointed that instead of talking about the issues raised by the character, we're talking about accusatory tone, blah blah blah. I'm used to being able to offer a challenging viewpoint and then having a good argument about.

This offshoot argument sucks the energy out of the whole thing and in the end is just boring.

howard

#9  24 January 2006 - 03:47

 

Good golly! So this afternoon I was talking to my good old friend who's been studying Buddhism for 20 years. . .we were talking about institutional politics and I said, "I think it's a good time to be a Zen Buddhist since you can just let all this pass by," and he said, "Are you kidding? You've got to read the stuff about Buddhist nuns kicking some ass." Calmly, of course. So, howard, don't take this personally (since in Zen, you don't take anything personally), but shut up. Or at least try to get the gist of the arguments being made before you pound away on the keys and reproduce the conditions described. Well, maybe that wasn't really *kicking ass* per se, but I *am* a neophyte. Next time, Ju-jitsu!

EmmaPele

#10  24 January 2006 - 10:35

 

Well done, everyone. I vote for a new group blog for Howard, Emma, and Leigh called Parry.

maxinejones

#11  24 January 2006 - 10:58

 

Please continue the verbose pounding of one another! I am amazed to be seeing such ferocity here... regarding such a serene post. Emma, you are a brilliant writer and a marvelous thinker. Keep pouring it out for us to enjoy!

Howard, I agree it's great to have passionate arguments here from time to time, but I can't help but wonder from the strength of your rhetoric if Emma somehow ran over your dog or something, or even worse, if you two are MARRIED in real life....

Leigh, keep making Howard squirm. It's great entertainment for those of us too cowardly to take it on the chin.... :-)

TheMissingScrew

#12  27 January 2006 - 13:15

 

wow. just words after all...interesting to see the passion they inspire. kinda cool actually. blog on.

bluematrix

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