What do you do when someone firmly believes you’re lying? What can you do when someone disbelieves you despite your protestations?
It seems to me that all one can do is reflect on the fact that we have lied in the past and our kamma is bearing fruit now. And, how fortunate we are that such kamma is ripening now when we can use the bitter fruit as medicine rather than simply being poisoned by it and sufferings without cause.
Yes, try to set things straight but if someone is determined to revile and resent you, call you a liar and despise you, take your lumps, because none of this would happen if you didn’t create the causes for it.
Yesterday, after having driven to NH on Saturday, we were set to drive back to NYC. That’s a lot of driving in 24 hours and may have been the reason this happened but who really knows.
Anyway, around 1:30pm I was cleaning out the car, washing the windows and getting it ready for the trip when I began to notice a quiet disturbance in my visual field; my left eye to be exact. It was an undulating, crescent shaped iridescent aura. I knew from my one experience prior that this portended a migraine and went to inform my wife that we may not be able to leave so soon.
She was angry and simply didn’t believe me. She suggested I take 200 mg of ibuprofen (good active) and go lay down but continued to take pot shots at me throughout the day. Eventually, the aura and headache went away and I drove us back home as well as making a stop at an orchard but felt ill for most of the drive.
My point here is this: I was really hurt by her insistence that I was lying and, perhaps equally so, by the idea that my suffering didn’t matter and that I needed to shut up and deal. And yet, as painful as that was, I see now what a good lesson it was.
My suffering doesn’t matter to anyone but me and, truthfully, what does sympathy gain me? An excuse to wallow? Permission to be heedless? A pass to stop striving? So, I should actually be thankful. And, instead of being angry and resentful, giving her the silent treatment as punishment, I should remove myself in whatever ways I can right now to refocus on the Dhamma and in strengthening my inner refuge.
I need to learn how to be a lamp and an island for myself because there is no one else who can do that for me. So, my thanks to my migraine and a disbelieving spouse for pointing out the Dhamma again and rousing me from my slumber.
Ask yourself: is it possible that I could die today? Being honest with ourselves, we know the answer is “yes.” Knowing this, how well we pass this day?
Frame your thoughts like this—you are an old person, you won’t let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you’ll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future.”
Why do we believe our thoughts? Why do we assent so quickly to our perceptions? How much of our suffering is simply a matter of how we’re holding and imagining a situation?
My wife’s partner is on the verge of a breakdown due to the stress and anxiety they’re feeling about their job and is threatening to detonate the company they recently formed. Let no one say that ones anxiety and perceptions are private matters. It’s our duty to root out our kilesas before they swallow us and those around us whole.
The entire cosmos is cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and soil. Our bodily parts function as a cooperative.
When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise, that human beings are all mutual friends in the process of birth, old age, suffering, and death, then we can build a noble, even heavenly environment.
If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall all perish.
I fast on a daily basis but often feel that I am giving in to sensual pleasures and gluttony when it is time to re-feed (I kind of hate that term but it is just vulgar enough to fix the attention on the base act that eating really is). I was happty to find this reminder in my inbox today.
One of the things that the Buddha advocated as an antidote to sensual desire is moderation in eating. […] Moderation in eating does not mean eating nothing. It is eating enough to keep the body healthy. But this is a sensual desire that is easily gratified and one that arises again and again. For some people four, five, six times a day!
If we can put a fence up against one of our desires, we are going to be able to put a fence up against some more. One fence can keep out many desires. So, the one that is so easily gratified and arises so often is the one to start with.
I really found this talk useful and it is helping me to reframe the way I practice. Whether on the so-called protective setting of formal meditation or off the cushion in the myriad postures of life, the inevitability and closeness of death can help to liberate is from defilement. In fact, it is only by truly understanding that all of the aggregate are subject to death and that everything must be relinquished that we can free ourselves. Any other approach is simply self-delusion and only makes our predicament worse.
Cattāri Brahmavihārā 