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Dharmette: The Strangeness

Okay. So, I got a question from the anonymous text line:

"At times it feels like this path is asking me to love this world less, and at the same time I feel like that interpretation is a deep and tragic misunderstanding of the Dharma. But when anything bubbles up in me lately—love for my partner, wonder of nature, feeling of community and fulfillment and adoration when all my friends are together singing music—there's a narrative that I'm caught up in now: 'Detach, detach, impermanent, impermanent, clinging, clinging.'

It doesn't feel liberating. It feels like grieving, hollowness, emptiness. It feels like the permission to bask in the glory and mystery of life has been taken away. If this is not the path, as I suspect it's not, then where am I? And where is the path? How to trust the path when it appears that what is positioned as a full embrace of the path—monastic living—is in renunciation of many universal splendors of humanity that we see across time and traditions and cultures?"

It's a sincere question, and that matters more than any answer I might give to the question. Sincerity is the lifeblood of this practice. And one of the signs of sincerity is that we become willing to entertain radical transformations. Those transformations may not come. They may often not be necessary, but we're open to their possibility.

And the questioner wonders themselves, suspecting that in a way—and I agree—they've grabbed hold of the Dharma inelegantly.

So the first principle that came to mind: you need to learn to love more than one thing at once. And there's a way of saying that some measure of ambivalence and complexity is woven into the fabric of our heart. The tolerance of ambivalence, and the different directions that our love pulls us—this is part of maturation.

And it's not that all loves need to be subservient to a higher love. You don't need to get your loves in order. It is a little messy for the mind, but tolerating messiness is a significant part of Dharma life.

And so you might explore letting your loves gently rub against one another over time. They learn to live together. Or maybe one love begins to displace another. It's a gradual process, not violent. In a sense, you could say I'm suggesting we sometimes have to honor our neural momentum, and yes, we stay open to the radical wonder of Dharma.

But do not get caught up in the pieties of the mind. We retreat into these rigid formulations or hierarchies when we can't tolerate not knowing, the messiness. The Dharma is so connected to not knowing and the deepest wonder.

It's Krishnamurti^[1], 1929: "I maintain that truth is a pathless land. You cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, any sect. That's my point of view, and I adhere to it absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along any path. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do."

It's a radical perspective, just one, but that's Krishnamurti. We will not know freedom through the adoption of beliefs, through some ordering of our loves. The path must be traversed as if no path ever existed. As if you are the first to walk it, because in one sense you are.

And the person writes, "When my love for my partner, or nature, that delight when all my friends are singing... detach, impermanent, clinging." That strikes me as defensive. Almost like detaching is this kind of preventative measure, a way of blunting the grief of letting go of all of that goodness.

But detachment is not a good hedge against anicca^[2]. Yes, anicca, impermanent. It is fragile. It does not go on forever. But that wisdom makes us love it more deeply.

A love uninformed by grief is a naive love. And Michele McDonald^[3], as I often quote, she said the near enemy of mettā^[4] (loving-kindness) is naiveté. So our love is actually more infused with wisdom. And that doesn't mean that we're preoccupied with impermanence as we gaze into the eyes of a loved one or sing loudly in a group. We're not preoccupied. It's more like the understanding of anicca is already baked in. It's experienced as something like a kind of deep gratitude.

I feel like we have to gradually let the heart acclimatize and grieve the changingness of all things. That's not something we do in a weekend workshop or even a three-month retreat. That takes our whole life. But as we get freer in that way, our love is less dependent on fantasies of forever.

There's a difference, of course, between love and clinging. And the clinging feels like it's love, but it's not. There can be pleasure. The pleasure of clinging depends at some level on this having to go on forever in order to be real. But clinging actually dampens the ecstatic delight and wonder of love.

Life is very weird and very wild. And the Dharma kind of makes it more so.

I was walking yesterday in the neighborhood, reflecting on your question. There was a demonstration at this school in Berkeley, and the firefighters had pulled up this huge firefighting truck. A bunch of them were out there in their gear, and one of them was in their full firefighting gear—face mask, oxygen tank, everything. And it's right on the street. The kids are sitting on the sidewalk. There are like twenty super adorable tiny kids sitting cross-legged in a row, looking completely transfixed by these firefighters.

The person leading it is like, "Okay kids, if you saw somebody get into a car accident and somebody really needed help, what do you do? Who do you call?" One kid raises their hand and is like, "911." And then the firefighter is like, "Okay, let's say it together: 911."

I'm just walking by on the street, completely enchanted. Life, you know.

Often students, friends, and Dharma colleagues tell me about their Dharma adventures. Often, they're not doing anything. They're just sitting in a room, right? But sometimes there are rituals, sometimes very distant lands, sometimes very remote regions of the heart-mind. I just have this contact high of sorts as they share. I get a sense of the wildness. The heart is so wild, and having been born is so wild.

We live in a time when scientific understanding of the human being, of life, is understood in mechanistic terms. We are parts working together that create something. And in some ways, the Buddha was a very mechanistic thinker. The teachings on "not-self" are a very mechanistic understanding. But we have the sense that if we understand life mechanistically—if we root out the dogma of the "ghost in the machine," as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle^[5] said—then we're consigned to a life that is unenchanted.

And I do not think that's so. As somebody who works in AI and research, kind of computational social science stuff, Douglas Guilbeault^[6]—maybe I don't know the pronunciation—says a driving force in the sense of awe and wonder that powers science and artists and spirituality is a sense that there's a fundamental strangeness. Things are so overwhelmingly complex and beautiful and chaotic. There's a strangeness. There's a weirdness to knowing and experiencing something like infinite potentials.

The philosopher Wittgenstein^[7] said the mystery is not what exists, but that it exists. And we have some stable felt reality of that that matters at a foundational level. There's a way in which this mechanistic approach is dismissive of strangeness: "No, I don't need to feel this strangeness or weirdness. I don't need to include that in my models because it's all a machine at the end of the day."

Now, I'm not saying it's not mechanistic. I think there are ways in which these things work. But the mystery is, when we end up developing an understanding of all these things, it will be in service of pointing out this strangeness.

And I imagine that those moments of love with your partner, or wonder in nature, or singing—I think the majesty of some of that is because you're sensing, at some level, the strangeness, and you don't have to let go of that. You don't have to let go of the strangeness. That's worth bowing to. We just, in a sense, let go of the fantasy that we own this strangeness. This deepens our appreciation.

I offer this for your consideration, and I wish you well on your path.