“Nothing that we perceive is finally, absolutely so.” A Sucitto
Our father used to bring us chocolate bars. He often drove us to the lake after work for a
quick evening picnic or, in later years, to a vacation week of fishing and swimming under the summer sun. He introduced my brothers and me to the Rochester Red Wings where the excitement of the crowd, the fresh greens of the baseball field, the timbre of the old organ and the fragrance of popcorn wove themselves into our nervous systems and our happy memories. Afterwards there were chocolate sodas for all at the local ice cream parlor. On Saturdays he loaded us into our family’s battered white Ford for weekly excursions to Front Street where the smells of cheese, sausage and chickens scratching the sawdust accompanied our wanderings among the old Polish and Italian storefronts. Our father brought so many moments of nourishment, sweetness and care into our world.
Interspersed with the chocolates and ice cream, the picnics and swimming and baseball, our very same father, at all too frequent and unpredictable times, had passionate and violent outbursts of rage, accompanied by brutal abuse and followed by arctic silences that could last for days. Each of us, terrified, would endure assault and then retreat into frozen isolation, brokenness, and our own unique ways of trying to cope.
It was confusing; my little brain tried to solve its overwhelm by insisting on a single and simple categorical answer; could I count on my father or not? Was I a good child or a bad one? My brain separated, labeled and defined, too young to manage context, complexity, fluidity or paradox. Body sensations and emotions were deemed too complicated and dangerous to know or feel; I shut down awareness of direct embodied experience. These early experiences laid down patterns of perception and story, interpretation of self and other that began to program the functioning of my body, my images, dreams and language, my mental thoughts and emotions and my social expectations and relationships.
Consciously, I made everything fine; I was fine, everybody was fine. I succeeded well in school, pleased the nuns, made good friends and tried hard to follow rules. At the very same time, underneath it all, I was drowning in my own sense of personal badness: clearly, I was at fault for personally causing, or at least – not being able to control or fix – all of those outbursts. I unconsciously began an anxious vigilance that filtered and screened all new sensations, thoughts and emotions, all new predictions, interpretations, conclusions and relationships according to what had come before. Reinforced by endless repetition, my perceptions and stories became ever more and more “real” and “true.” If something didn’t fit, when information was incongruous or missing, my brain ignored it or, like a modern Photoshop program, simply made up what it didn’t really know. Though everything and everyone was officially “fine,” I became inexplicably depressed and spent enormous amounts of time and watchful energy trying to avoid conflict and be “more good.” My underground river of perception and unfelt experience became what the Buddha referred to as “sankharas”: seeds waiting to be watered by external events.
In the genius of evolution, there was an ordinary and functional goodness in these universal activities of my very human mind. They have offered much practical value, over millennia, for the survival of a species that needed to sort through billions of bits of information in order to efficiently locate food resources and quickly find protection from danger. Humans without these perceptual filters – paralyzed by too much complex information and/or forgetful of past experience – were unable to make quick life and death decisions and so they did not survive to be my ancestors. My vigilance strategies allowed me to function like a sort-of “normal” person in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.
The Buddha, however, saw in his own inquiries, that these very same ordinary mental strategies were, at best, deeply limited.
He saw that the limited perceptions and stories that a brain makes up about its pleasant or unpleasant or neutral experience, while useful in the short run, actually contribute to ongoing suffering and prevent us from seeing clearly and acting and living freely. For me, these strategies kept me from learning how to discern and then live in balance with the normal ups and downs of myself and my relationships and my life as it actually unfolded.
In my meditation practice over time, awareness of these patterns began to surface in riots of mental agitation, depression, anxiety and confusion. At first, these experiences seemed wrong; certainly I was failing at this meditation thing! My teachers continued to quietly and kindly offer guidance to “…accept…absolutely everything, without trying to control or judge or pull away.” and “If you can let your experience happen, it will release its knots and unfold, leading to a deeper, more grounded experience of yourself.” With their ongoing support, I slowly came to know that my dis-ease was an important blessing on the road to healing long buried anxieties, griefs, shames and rage. Further, my teachers encouraged me not to imagine that my meditation practice would, alone, solve everything. Just as Siddhartha came to recognize the importance of physical nourishment and a basic level of physical well-being, so too I was invited to receive the additional nourishment of basic mental health therapies. Over time and with the guidance of many, I gradually have come to a more relaxed and kind awareness of the limited and narrow ways that I had stored my sense of myself and others.
The Buddha’s teachings continue to invite me to an ever-deeper discovery of life – and joy – as it is, now.
Today there is more curiosity: ongoing investigation of the experience of the body and of the incomplete summaries that my brain offers. I explore this as a living path; the conditioned tangles of my body and mind continue to unwind as I learn to more happily ride the waves of each present moment. I discover ever deeper wisdom and compassion for myself, for my dear and struggling father, and for all beings who suffer.