…or it’s just your life that sucks?
I understand samsāra here as the cycle of life-death-rebirth, not just the cycle of suffering.
Yes, yes, life does suck. There are wars and injustices and I am priviledged to be able to say that my life is good …enough. I am mostly writting this for priviledged people who think suffering is part of life. If you think some people are worth suffering, you are not ok either.
While I was walking around town today looking for a blooming tree to tie a red and white thread to, as per Romanian tradition*, I realized that life isn’t good or bad, and it definitely doesn’t mean suffering by default. Life just is. At nest it’s neutral. We can make anything of it, but we make it suffering, and we created all those concepts to justify said suffering. But we don’t have to suffer, and if we don’t suffer, nor will we make others suffer. I’ll get back to this.
For the documentation on my current project, I looked into Neolithic civilizations in Europe. I realized they were used to death. For them it wasn’t an end. Most likely, they believed and honoured the life-death-rebirth cycle. This cycle is obvious from the the environment changing with seasons and I do not think they were unintelligent. If they can make the ceramics and sculptures they did, they understood life. Maybe more than we do today since we are continously seprating ourselves from life out of fear of death. It’s the fear of death which made man violent and the fear of death came from attachment to stuff they made once agricultural settlements appeared.
A Buddhist practice is contemplation of your own body’s death and decay. In Neolithic times, they were burying only the bones after the flesh and organs decayed. So they were used to that sight. It wasn’t a practice for them, forced and artificial. It was their very life. Their attachment to life was minimal, and I don’t think they suffered much beyond momentary pain. Buddhism** also identifies attachment as the root of suffering.
Neolithic people didn’t have a calendar because they didn’t need one. The solstice and Moon cycles guided their life, especially since agriculture was developped, but they didn’t need to know what they will do in the future. Those guides were only for the Now. Now the sun light hits the head of the statue, Now was the time to plant the fields…
…until it wasn’t. Shifts in temperature caused crops to fail, animals to die and since they became attached to their settlements, a great number of them died. Sometime after 4000 BCE single graves were replaced by mass graves, bodies weren’t let to decay anymore. Incineration started to be used. Different tribes started to kill for resources. No evidence of violence of human on human existed before, which doesn’t mean there was no violence, just that it wasn’t glorified, like we do today.
The Roman calendar is seen as a win of humankind over time, but there is no time beyond human experience. There is only the Now. Trying to control time is useless and it also comes from fear and attachment. Time became important not because of agriculture, but because of hoarding stuff one cannot take with them beyond death, so death became increasingly terrifying.
This is why all the spiritual practices and religions from the last 5000 years speak of freeing ourselves from the cycle of rebirth, to escape this suffering, but the suffering does not come from being born, it comes from attachment to stuff. “Researchers” will show how children get attached to their toys, but children need only one attachment – human connection. A child raised in human connection will grow to be an independent beign. Unafraid. Secure. Mothers have held their babies on their bodies sinces forever. Only modern parenting says that’s not ok, because modern societies need mothers to work, but women have always worked and looked after their children, in communities where duties were shared and no one was alone to deal with something. Today, with the family cluster, and the father not involved, the women are alone to deal with both work around the house and raising the children, on top of a job. No wonder some women promote “the trad wife” life style or the “stay at home mum”.
We made life suffering and we use science to normalize it. Then we weponise spiritual practice/ psychological therapy to further blame and shame the individual. But life is not suffering. Unfortunatelly, you cannot understand this unless you experience life without suffering. And than that experience can be so short-lived that you either consider it a fluke or start chasing it without understanding the possibility is already in you.
Two years ago, I understood one can live without stress, without anything else having changed on the exterior, I was calm, dettached, but not uncarring, not uninvolved, not apathetic or bored. I became even more involved, I started doing more, caring more, but different.
My baseline mood used to be neutral, or at least that’s what I thought. Over the past year my baseline mood became peacefulness. Since the begining of this year, I was angry a handful of times, but only once did the feeling persist – the first time I felt it this year. Anger was a stranger this time, but we uses to be intimate. I realized that my baseline mood used to be anger, not neutral. It wasn’t truly a surprise. When my anger subsided four years ago, it left space for something worst …depression. Anger is an active feeling. It this kind of suffering which is produced by anger, you can’t be complacent. You will do something. If you do something, something changes. If changes happen, suffering can end if you are present enough to remain where there is no suffering. For me, peacefulness felt like a threat at first. I realized, when doing a certain yoga asana that just as I was about to relax in that pose, my brain had a fleating moment of panic. Relaxation of the muscles is dangerous. If we relax, we cannot run/ react fast enough.
For the past week, something triggered an old wound I thought I may have been over, but no. I could observe my reaction, but I couldn’t fully control it. I would have bursts of crying before I could tell myself I am safe now. Until last Friday, when I went for a manual therapy done in Japanese style, which apart from deep tissue massage and postural correction, also works with your energy. I find it is very important to trust the person who is performing this service. And the person who did this for me has my full trust. The reaction evaporated. I don’t think the wound is fully healed, but the current trigger has no more power iver me. No one can do any miracles for another. The possibility lies within. But you can definitely and should get help.
To conclude this, go to teraphy, yes, but also do any somatic/ spiritual practice which may work for you. Do something that stabelizes you and which can become your life, not just a practice. Like breathing.
You do not have to not be reborn to end suffering, nor are you destined to suffer in this life. Irespective of the karma you accumulated, you can choose not to suffer Now. The possibility is inside you.
*the tradition is to tie a thread of twisted red and white fibers you receive on the 1st of March to a blooming tree once they bloom. There are many myths around this and no clear origin for the tradition, but I like the white/ death / bones – red/ life / blood interpretation and the thread as a symbol of the rebirth cycle
**I say Buddhism and not the Buddha because we have no idea what the Buddha said
The joy of creating 