Going on retreat is my annual detox but I'm starting to notice some disturbing patterns within the cannon of current Buddhist teaching that give rise to a couple of questions. First, are we really engaged in some consuming, desperate search for happiness as a means to avoid 'the wasteland of life and what
it can do to people' as one teacher recently described it? Second, is there really no joy to be found in my thinking self? Must my critical faculties become redundant, to be replaced by a sturdy gaze at my own navel?
I understand that so much of what we think of as suffering is self-inflicted but I come away from a retreat again with the feeling that a whole week of teachings have just ignored the structural. I could be missing something but sometimes it's not just our emotional habits that need looking at. I would imagine that the pain of a woman who has to now negotiate with her partner
because suddenly she is doing all the childcare and house work and
helping out on the farm, is more about patriarchy and lack of affordable child care than a lack of understanding duality.
It is interesting that there is always a predominance of women at these gatherings (or maybe it's just the ones that I go to). The examples as a result centre on family and child rearing but not women as managers, as negotiators, as leaders, as individuals that may possibly have a life outside relationships that define them (wife, mother etc). And there is a sense of genuine loss and despair for some, caught between rocks and hard places; finding themselves in impossible positions not of their own making in which something has to give, most likely them; women trying to find a solution that doesn't (or maybe does) involve imploding relationships, repeating cycles of dysfunction, trying to find skilful ways of dealing with life.
But it's not enough, in addressing these challenges, to just turn and face our fear of rejection/failure/our parents didn't love us enough. It's about turning and facing violence, poverty and politics. I know I cannot live only in my head, but I still need to use it. And if cognitive knowledge is not what we need why do I hear teachers now consistently referring to neuro-psychology and quantum physics to justify the ancients ... athough I really wish they wouldn't. The Quantum and the Buddhist are two different ways of
seeing the same world and one does not have to be authenticated by the other. I know I'm just a novice in this journey towards, or back to, enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure there should never be, in one or consecutive sentences, the words:
Jung, neuroscience, energy essence, yin nor yang, meridian, Chi, Taoism, Buddhism & electrons.
I know that electro-magnetic force is one of the four that hold our
existence together, I'm just not sure that doing my yoga outside on the
grass is necessarily going to have much effect on my ions, free
radicals or electrons. Must I really wade through any more layers of sweetness and happiness and new age gurus before finding that resonating nugget that I can actually hang onto? Must I really be talked at for hours at a time while in the lotus position, regurgitating memories of being dragged off to Church and made to sit and listen to a sermon foreveeeeer? Where's my interactive powerpoint?
I do have the empathy to realise that I am not one of the walking wounded this time for which I am
grateful. And who am I to denigrate anyone else's search for a life worth living which if nothing else demonstrates the grace to pass the tissues around the circle without a word to reach the person who needs them. But I'm not sure I need any more pop-therapy, any more blaming of the family for all eccentricities (some yes, but not all). I'm not sure I need any more affirming aphorisms or Californian songs telling me to 'get it together'. I'm definitely sure I don't need any more love stories. We are saturated with love; true or not, authentic or not. What I need, my teachers, is quiet. Peace. Skillful reflection. Enough with the talk. Just let me be with my cognition, my distractions from time to time. It's good for my soul.
