MY OWN WALKING - May Journal 2025

This week saw the start of a 'mini heatwave' as the tabloid press have named it. Its size refers to its projected length, which is forecast to be less than a week. For early May, this level of heat is unusual, though these days its not an unheard of event. The moment the temperature picked up our doors, once left firmly closed to prevent drafts, are now left open to create them. And so bees, wasps and flies begin to suddenly appear as trapped within our house. Inevitably these end up in our bathroom battering themselves on the mottled window glass, quite often to the point of death. If I don't intervene and open the windows to provide them with their liberation, I will find their upturned bodies splayed upon the sill in their last throws of buzzing and rotating in a frustrated death spin. That, or they'll be sun desiccated, left as crisp crunchy crumbled versions of their former insect selves.

I was lounging outside on our patio arbour reading this section from a transcript of a talk given by Norman Fischer on Dogen's Mountains & Rivers Sutra, which says: -

'We turn enlightenment into a problem that we have to solve. Our tendency to do that, itself, is a problem, because it makes us dissatisfied with our life, as our life is, right now.'

Stopped in my tracks, I turned these words over in my mind, as I also observed yet another wasp banging itself against our bathroom window trying to liberate itself from its own self created bind. And I felt an up-welling of sadness and thought, yeah, that is me, that is a whole lifetime of me, banging my head repeatedly against my own dissatisfaction, determined to find a permanently satisfying liberation from it. That, or holding out an eternal hope for someone to turn up to open the window for me, to set me free. Though I can see its a bright colourful place outside, there is this mottled glass pane obscuring me from it, and I cannot get to whatever is beyond that opacity by sheer force of will or desire.  And if I'm not careful, my persistent seeking will be the death of me, without ever fully resolving that compulsion.

I don't think I'm at all unusual in this regard. Trying to escape or evade dissatisfaction is a major motivation in most human adult lives. Constantly in the process of seeking some new source of satisfaction. When this too inevitably fails, I like most people, renew the search for something else to fill that void. All without stopping to question the cyclical repetitious nature of what is actually happening. 

Its a teaching enshrined in the Buddha's Four Noble Truths that desires lie at the root of our dissatisfaction, which bring us suffering in its wake. So to find myself coming back to this, to something so fundamental to a faith I've been involved in for the largest part of my life, is humbling. Little escapes the negative drift of dissatisfaction, even Buddhism can get pulled into the wake of its irresistible vortex. No, that's not quite right, it is I that is pulling Buddhism into it. I've entangled and bound it up with my disappointment. 

Today in meditation I had the sense of a suppressed angry persona within me. And like all things that are kept in that state it leaks out in raw unrefined ways, often negative and nihilistic. As you may have noted, I've been finding myself seriously pissed off with even the idea of Enlightenment lately. So at present, it feels as though I am the living breathing demonstration of Norman Fischer's point. This is not a healthy state to be in.

And yet and yet, even the visual metaphor of a wasp battering itself to death against a window pane, is only one infinitesimally small insight into the futility of running your life according to the needs of one's dissatisfaction. This is not a complete turning about in the seat of my consciousness, it is more like one stone placed on a weighing scale that may incrementally lead to the upturning of my whole way of seeing things - one day. This is a painful reminder too, that on any spiritual quest there is never any way of knowing how much further there is to go. In a way the remoteness or closeness is somewhat immaterial, you're not there right now are you? Or are you?

Where am I right now? I don't think its any coincidence that a reappraisal is happening in the year after the HA! So much of what I've encountered in myself since June last year, is a symptom of a crisis of confidence, one that's bound to ensue after a close encounter with your own demise. It's existential. It puts you on exactly the right spot to reconsider how you have lived your entire life thus far. Reevaluating its raison d'etre, its volition and directional focus. Are there any fundamental changes in your way of being to be made, beyond adjustments to diet and how much exercise you take? Hence there are the necessary questioning of assumptions, that you have chosen to align yourself with thus far. Making changes in later life can be notoriously difficult, so much appears too hard wired into your way of being, and enshrined into habits. Its not, however, totally impossible, you have to focus on what, where and how much effective effort you can muster to apply to it

Its as though you are a boat on the sea. And you have got used to navigating yourself according to an instinctual map of the ocean that immediately surrounds you. Then you encounter a furious upending storm and your boat nearly capsizes. Since then nothing seems to work quite as well using that old instinctual map as a compass. You are literally all at sea, and attempting to reorient yourself in a part of the ocean that appears totally puzzling to you. And there is a need to assemble a new map, partly from the old one. But not everything in that old map is useful, and might indeed be misleading, so one has to take care in reassessing the veracity of your perceptions and ideals. This is where I am at right now, in the process of reorienting myself in an unfamiliar place.

And so it is that I appear to keep coming back to stand roughly in the same place again. My life so far has been very directed and motivated by taking control of where I've been heading. Operating as if I am incrementally moving towards a goal with a known destination. Mostly its been suffused with very worldly desires for pleasure, success, appreciation and status. The pursuit of Enlightenment becoming corrupted by these worldly motives overlaying it like a cloak. 

The real issue here is the model in your mind that rules how you live out your life. What if all your striving to get somewhere and prove something to yourself or others, is all a complete utter waste of time and effort? Given that you will die, what is all of that really in aid of? What if there is actually no where to go, nothing to strive for, no far off destination to be reached, no hard to attain Enlightenment to be gained? What if everything you might ever need or require has always been here? What would happen if we could only stay still, aware and attentive for long enough? Could we then be fully alive? Would we then become what we seek, rather than seek what we'd like to become?

TEACHING OF THE WEEK

'Questions are good, 

questions are necessary,
without questions
there is something to defend, 

and where there is something to defend
trouble and suffering are not far behind'

Zoketsu Norman Fischer