True Ancestor: Right View

I've been thinking a lot lately about the vindictive tone of debate in much of the blogosphere, and in life in general: people love blaming others for problems that really reside, or begin, within themselves. Jewish Atheist reports receiving actual threats based on some of the stuff he says. (Great: blogo-fatwas. How very enlightened.)

Among the many resonant passages in Alan Lew's Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life, the one influenced by the Buddhist concept of "Right View" really struck home in light not only of the vindictiveness of others, but how, in meditation, I still become aware of the tape-loop of blame-assessment that gets going in my head when I'm in a funk.

Lew, who was a practicing Zen Buddhist for about a decade before returning to Judaism and eventually becoming a Conservative rabbi, must have been thinking of Right View, the first step on Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path, when he wrote the following:

We are always complicit in the conflicts we engage in. Even if the conflict is completely provoked by people or events outside us, something in us causes us to engage with the conflict. The world is full of schmohawks. People provoke us all the time, but we only respond to some of these provocations and not to others, because there is something in our own inner life that is touched by them, that rises to the bait . . . When we go from situation to situation, and we realize that the same kind of conflicts have followed us from place to place, we begin to get a glimmering that the problem might be within us and not just in the circumstances . . .

Sometimes we get into conflicts because we project feelings onto the present that have their roots in some trauma from the past. But sometimes the feelings we project onto the present have no cause at all. . . Our suffering is not really our suffering. It does not belong to us, nor does it always have a cause in the objective world. Often it is simply a part of a boundless sea on which impulses and feelings ebb and flow without cause. And the moment when we become aware of this is the moment the sense of being constricted by conflict begins to give way to a feeling of spaciousness and the end of conflict altogether. . .

Arguments are constantly going on in our minds; antipathy toward various people and circumstances is constantly arising there as well. When we come to realize that these arguments and these feelings are not what they seem to be, we have taken a big step toward disarming the inner tendency toward external conflict.

I have some big decisions looming on the horizon. I have to clear out all the cobwebs of recrimination so I can better focus on making those decisions on some sane basis. I've had a tendency to change my circumstances out of either anger or hopelessness; they're just opposite ends of the psychological see-saw. Each one gives you a hard bump in the butt at the end of the ride.

Time to get off that ride.

--T.A.