(no subject)

[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]

(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*