Obstacles occur at the outer and inner levels. At the outer level the sense is that something or somebody has harmed us, interfering with the harmony and peace we thought was ours. Some rascal has ruined it all. This particular sense of obstacle occurs in relationships and in many other situations; we feel disappointed, harmed, confused, and attacked in a variety of ways. People have felt this way from the beginning of time.
As for the inner level of obstacle, perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive. It keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us: Where are we separating ourselves from reality? How are we pulling back instead of opening up? How are we closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter?
-Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with uncertainty
This is a wonderful, poetic passage. Things which bother us such as anger, fear, insecurity and pain will constantly return. However, they can be dealt with by acceptance. Once we have learned to accept pain, when it returns it will not contort our mind into convoluted knots. We will experience the pain, but we will not try to repress or deny it thereby magnifying the pain a hundredfold. Similar remarks hold for other unpleasant emotions. Attempting to deny their existence results in much more misery than merely allowing them to happen. A good example is insecurity. One of my favorite pasttimes used to be getting drunk and trolling the internet for crank sites and cranks on political blogs. I didn't consciously realize it at the time, but this was so I could bolster my own fragile ego and feel smugly superior to these obvious nuts. In fact much of my behavior can be traced to my own insecurity. Insulting others to their face or behind their back, looking for the flaws in people and not their positive traits, a constant evaluating of whether I am better or worse than any given individual. All of these were aspects of a weird misguided attempt to expurgate my insecurity. Instead, acceptance of my insecurity just leaves me the insecurity, which is easier to deal with when it is clearly recognized, and does not entail the massive body of bad karma arising from repression.
2 comments:
While your insights ring true, I think you are being a bit hard on yourself. In otherwords, there seems to be some anger directed at your failing to recognize insecurity.
It was not a failing. It just was.
Further, as you've pointed out before, you are not the same person you once were.
Finally, in line with Pema's thoughts, the problems you were referring to of trolling for certain sites, degrading others, etc., have taught and are teaching you. That is an excellent thing and a blessing, I think.
Finally, remember that loving kindness is as much for yourself as others.
Oops. Two "finally"s. This is because there is no true end.
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