Enough

Decomposing

So my innovative theory last week was that I might get somewhere by finding the pleasure in my hatred. But at a certain point I lost my willingness. I think that exploring the pleasure in hatred should be something brief, not a day long project.  It’s not the magical art of being tidy.

This morning my intentions shifted from “finding” towards “accepting. In decomposing my emotions, I’m resting more in what is, allowing the pleasure to emerge when it is ready.  Allowing the flow between calm, pleasure, arousal, displeasure to develop the force of the ocean.

I’m also becoming more aware of touch. It is the pleasure and pain sense, the one we take the most for granted, the one that can have the most impact if recovered.

That said, the biggest challenge this week is decomposing my exhaustion.  I’m not sleeping well or long enough and the exhaustion is draining my joy and wellbeing.  The pain of exhaustion is in my forehead and my face, my shoulders, my upper body.  Less T.V. more body scanning.  

The Pleasure of Hatred

I've come across an interesting theory of emotions that I've been experimenting with all week.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett believes that emotions are conceptions we form during our life that work to explain four base sensations: pain, pleasure, calm, arousal.  Our brain only registers these four states, but it comes up with theories for why we are in whatever state we're in.

For instance we don't feel hatred. We feel pain and high arousal. Hatred is the theory we have for why we feel what we do. If I felt most of my early life in pain, and I was surrounded by hostility and hatred, then hatred becomes the default explanation for every bad feeling I have.  Not only this, but hatred then becomes its own driving force, and then indeed it is the explanation.

I spent the week trying out several paths to deconstructing this hatred. One is to just be with the sensations and deconstruct the feelings. I've had a fair amount of opportunity this week because I have a work colleague who sees me as an adversary, and things have come to a head.

She said something to me that has crawled under my skin and doesn't seem to want to budge. She says people are turned off by my dominating tone. It's true, probably, that I enjoy criticizing people. Hatred is always included a component of pleasure.  That's why we stay in the loop. There are all kinds of pleasure in hatred that I'm not acknowledging and if I don't, I will probably stay in that loop forever. There is pleasure in contempt towards others, or we wouldn't be so addicted to television. There is pleasure in hatred of self. Being with that pleasure is one of the most difficult challenges I can imagine feeling because it forces me to confront a self-image that I don't want to have.

It could mean that I take pleasure in causing other people pain.

Not a recipe for a good life.

But it comes down to the realization that we all want to be happy, and that hatred can become the default loop that brings us "happiness" in the form of pleasure, even a cold calm. Ignorance is the defilement that keeps it in place. The challenge is to become aware of this pleasure, and re-route it to lovingkindness and nurturing.

Awareness

Awareness allows me to see the impermanence of my thoughts and above all the impermanence of these stages where my thoughts are stuck in a chaotic jumble.  

Right now for instance, I am committed to becoming more aware of the effort that I need to put into my environment to keep the normal standards of cleanliness.  I am defining them now as a  few forever loops; keep the dishes washed and put away: keeping the kitchen floor swept once a day; wiping down the kitchen table and counters once a day; wiping the bathroom sink, swishing toilet, keeping an eye out for clutter; doing a five-minute room rescue.

There is a mathematics to cleaning.  If I keep those loops going forever I will be able to maintain a normal standard of cleanliness without too much effort.  And then my efforts will go into the deeper cleaning, rather than the restarting after everything has descended into chaos. I hope.  So that’s the method. But no method will keep the house clean.  Only cleaning will keep the house clean.  Only activity, not theory, will maintain the feeling of being nurtured and cared for.

I have had an easier time doing this with writing. Why am I keeping this forever loop of brief daily writings happening?  Because I want to make sure that my thoughts do not become a chaotic, frozen jumble, and that I am cognitively flexible. This is how I connect to awareness.  This forever loop of writing is and has always been the way that I connect to the awareness that is stable and unending that will be there as long as life is here. That life may and probably won’t be human life. We may very well be exterminated, or exterminate ourselves.  I don’t know. These are some morbid thoughts.  But I enjoy this kind of contemplative energy, even when it’s dark. This is how I keep my writing going. Keep on writing.  Just keep on writing.   

I don’t seem to be able to maintain the same daily commitment into cleaning. Or exercise.  Or into wholesome, healthy eating of greens and fiber.  And frankly, those things are more important to my happiness. Writing is not the cause of happiness. Awareness is the cause of happiness, not writing. Writing every day and being successful at writing is a secondary activity. It is not and will never be a prime cause of happiness. That is energy and power that results in sustainable happiness.  But a life of mild happiness with occasional, typically human, disruptions will produce creative writing. For mild happiness, I need a clean home.  I need a healthy body and mind.  So the primary forever loops need to be cleaning, eating healthy food, exercising and meditating, nurturing a sense of family and community.  The same old same old My secondary forever loops are writing, making an adequate living and political and cultural commitments.

And then there's the random stuff in between, and then there's the awakening to the awareness that is forever without my efforts or participation. I supposed we could call that the Tao.