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[sathor]

I happened across a wooly bear on my doorstep this morning - heartbreaking to say the least. The poor creature is most assuredly doomed - it's far too cold, and there's hardly any food I would imagine as spring is barely here. It brought to mind suffering, and what it means to suffer. I don't care for these subcategories of "being" determined by whether or not a creature can feel...based on it's brain, the configuration of it, the nervous system, or lack thereof...It seems horrifying to me, to be born into a world in such a form, knowing only your own limitations, and having no say in the matter whatsoever. We're all like that really, it just feels, to me, as though we as human beings have maybe convinced ourselves that it is somehow different for us. A Police song comes to mind, "King of Pain." I have a hard time describing the sensation that passed through me, but I think that song does an adequate job of doing it for me.

A feeling of powerlessness passed over me in that moment, too. Not only powerlessness in my own life, but in the lives of all mortal things. Suffering and desire seem to be the two primary forces in this plane, be they visible or not.

It seems self-evident to me, that if you or I were the wooly bear, a foot from the doorstep of a warm house and pointed towards it, that we were probably trying to escape the cold in futility. It's so utterly heart wrenching.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Do you know this poem by Robert Frost?

To A Moth Seen In Winter

There’s first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket,
A perch and resting place ‘twixt wood and wood,
Bright-black-eyed silvery creature, brushed with brown,
The wings not folded in repose, but spread.
(Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks
If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?)
And now pray tell what lured you with false hope
To make the venture of eternity
And seek the love of kind in winter time?
But stay and hear me out. I surely think
You make a labor of flight for one so airy,
Spending yourself too much in self-support.
Nor will you find love either nor love you.
And what I pity in you is something human,
The old incurable untimeliness,
Only begetter of all ills that are.
But go. You are right. My pity cannot help.
Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched.
You must be made more simply wise than I
To know the hand I stretch impulsively
Across the gulf of well nigh everything
May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate.
I cannot touch your life, much less can save,
Who am tasked to save my own a little while.

by Robert Frost


... your post here also reminded me of Loren Eiseley's essay The Judgement of the Birds: "In the days of the frost seek a minor sun."

It's true that that wooly bear probably won't become a moth. The baby ants need to be fed too, y'know, and there will be enough moths to carry on.

Reality is horrifying when compared to fantasy. The truth is that we're not born into the world, but rather out of it, temporary manifestations of the enduring life-force of Earth. Planets don't last forever either, of course; this whole biosphere is assuredly doomed (though hopefully not on our watch.) Is this any reason to spend our brief lives lamenting having been born mortal? There isn't any other way to be born.

Sure, humans convince themselves of all kinds of lovely fantasies, and then are horrified to discover they're not true. We didn't get a say about being born because we didn't exist before our physical bodies grew. The Universe does not care about us; there's no Great Spirit making plans, keeping score or handing out rewards or punishments. We'll never be anything but human, and most of our questions will never be answered, because there's no one to answer them. When we die, we don't go anywhere else; our brains stop functioning and our bodies decay; we don't get a second chance to live.

Buddha said the cause of suffering is attachment. I think you might be interested in this essay, The Path of Non-Attachment: note that he points out that "Karma and rebirth are both concepts Buddhism has taken from Hinduism." (in other words, they weren't part of Buddha's teaching.)

Now, note that I am not a Buddhist, but rather a Pantheist Wiccan, and I don't hold with non-attachment:

"Inescapably, this is how life is: nothing is permanent, everything changes and will disappear. Knowing this changes our perception of the world and the priorities we find in being here. One reaction, therefore, is to view the world somewhat sceptically, in a nonchalant and detached manner. Knowing that someone you love is going to die, changes your love for them somewhat.

Yes, it does change one's love, but it certainly doesn't make it 'nonchalant and detached' - rather, it makes it more intense, more precious and poignant, more worth the pain. Suffering is inevitable; joy is optional; embrace as much of it as you can while you have the chance.

There's my counsel to you in a nutshell, young Jedi: live in such a way that your life is worth the pain. You are not powerless just because your power has limits; all power has limits.

[sathor.livejournal.com]

Yea, Buddha did say that desire was the root of all suffering. I've never heard the attachment spin on it, but nonetheless it fits just fine. I'm not sure if I'm completely buy the non-attachment deal myself - just like I'm not sure I buy into Hinduism on all levels because their caste system and reincarnation seem to be a GREAT method by which their priestly class can hold power over the proletariat...much like how Christian doctrines in many ways seem to be a great way to do the same.

You may have mentioned this in the other comment, but I'm not sure I've ever met anybody who would say matter-of-factly and without a doubt that magick is real. Just interesting, is all. I've always found it hard to prove because it seems to me that it operates on a synchronous, or coincidental level, if it operates at all. When coincidences start racking up in a short period of time, I often wonder what's going on spiritually for me, or what the message is.

I love the poem. I thought about trying to write one about the wooly bear, actually, but decided that I was far too exhausted to hold on to the feeling for long enough to do it any justice. I haven't written poetry since I was a very angsty teenager...admittedly, not much has changed besides my age and my tolerance for pain.

Life is worth the pain, sometimes I just wish things would ease up just a little bit and that I might make progress on some of these fronts that bother me the most. Hope things are well

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

(Sorry to be so tardy in replying to these; will try to get to all your comments this morning - I tried last night, but lost my post twice; this computer is not long for this world.)

There are a lot of different types of Buddhism, of course, and a lot of opinions about what Buddha meant. I believe the Zen sects are the ones that stress non-attachment most. My own 'take' on it is basically that attachment='addiction' in the H2HC sense: like every other living creature, we like pleasure and dislike pain, but as humans, we fall into the error of thinking we're supposed to have pleasure all the time, and that therefore there must be some way to get it. Thus, religion: the pervasive notion that if one does what God wants, one shall not die, but have eternal life in Paradise, reunited with one's loved ones, and never suffer pain or loss again.

You're so right; throughout the ages, priesthood of all religions has mostly been a way to foster and exploit that erroneous notion, because telling people what they want most desperately to believe has always been 'nice work if you can get it.' Gerald Gardner's wisest move, IMHO, was setting 'Do not take money for the Art' as a main precept of Wicca - though of course that precept has taken a pounding in the Commercial Age, and people have found all kinds of ways around it. The Craft is not for sale, period: "often imitated, never duplicated".

Magick is real. However, most of the explanations of what it is and how it works are left-over superstition from primitive times, repeatedly cut and pasted and trimmed to fit over thousands of years. Any sufficiently advanced Magick is indistinguishable from Science - that was Crowley's main thesis, and for all its egregious flaws, Magick In Theory And Practice is a crucially-important book because it describes a methodology for putting one's Faith in the fire of Reason. Unfortunately, Crowley was a product of his repressive, mechanistic times, and also the enamoured slave of his own ego, and there was no such thing as neuroscience in his day - even psychology was new then, and mostly Freudian - but at least he gave us a start:

"We place no reliance on Virgin or Pigeon;
Our method is Science, our aim is Religion."

(One of the annoying things about Crowley's writing is that he capitalizes for Emphasis, especially in his more high-falutin' pieces. The Western Esoteric Tradition is full of that sort of thing, though; everyone trying to sound Ancient and Noble, and often just sounding silly, particularly to readers of a later era.)

Anyway: I think it's quite true that suffering is mainly caused by attachment to an Ideal of never aging, hurting, grieving or dying. As far as we know, we're the only species aware of the inevitability of our own deaths, and if there's no fixing the inevitable, one can either console oneself through faith that it won't be permanent, or accept one's natural place in the natural world as a being who lives and dies and is no more.

I love Robert Frost. When we moved to New Jersey from California when I was 9, I went to Robert Frost Elementary, on the edge of a wood just like all the woods in his poetry. I set a bunch of his poems to music in my teens and twenties. You can see some of my own poetry and other original stuff here - I haven't written any since my parents died, but I have hopes of writing some this season.

Off to go answer the next comment! *hugs*