I can’t help you
Today at meditation, I was waiting for class to start so I picked up the book I was reading yesterday from their little book shop. The book is called Change Your Mind by Paramananda and I swiftly opened to page 101 where I had left off from Monday. I was feeling a little stuck and lost and kind of hoping it would change my mind. The first thing I started to read was ‘However, we tend to think emotions such as sadness and anger are bad or perhaps shameful and we do what we can to avoid them’.
So as I continued to read I continued to agree in my head as Paramananda continued to explain that pain is part of the human experience, the idea of meditation is not to rid pain… He then goes on to say how ‘I have known people who have spent their first few months of Metta (loving kindness meditation practice) in tears’ and as I read this a young women goes up to the Buddhist Teacher who is awkwardly about half a meter away from me, as the center is so packed and she says ‘Can I ask you a question? I love metta and it’s not that I have a problem doing it but I’ve had some terrible things happen to me recently and every time I…’ She starts to well up and then, suddenly bursts into tears. The kind of tears that are helpless and incredibly sore. She continue with her words broken ‘I..I… just immediately start to cry every time I do metta’. I quickly run to get her a tissue and then she says thank you. The teacher then decides to take her somewhere private.
I then so desperately wanted to give her the section of the book I am on to read as I know she wants an answer and another teacher is explaining it in words to me but she really wants this answer more than me and she is only 60cms away the same question. I continue to read, and keep looking up to see if I can see her again, but also thinking maybe its not the right time, maybe the other teacher will give her what she is searching for.
For the rest of the night I didn’t see her. Maybe she went home. There were 3 classes doing metta tonight so it was very packed. I went downstairs to do metta and then we had our tea break. During the tea break, I continued to look out for her. In the book Paramananda goes on to explain how we are creating a room inside ourselves where all kinds of feelings can be experienced and how we should not be scared to let them in the room. He goes on to say how the people that cry for many months and then their tears no longer rain, it is when they are finally able to feel that the pain has been no more than that an unidentified sense of foreboding.
I could overhear that same teacher say he hasn’t been feeling well. I got the sense that he couldn’t give her the answer, but I might be wrong. At the end of the tea break another teacher told us about his weekend and a reflection he had as part of their announcements that they always do.
He spoke about finishing the film series Chernobyl. He said about how at the time when it happened the Ukrainian people didn’t know what it was, many could just see a bright light in the distance, so they would go to the window or go outside and this small act was exposing them more to the radiation and closer to their death. I imagined that this mysterious light in the distance was probably blindingly captivating and potentially perceived as beautiful before they knew what it was or what it was doing. The teacher goes on to try and quantify this immense suffering, something so incomprehensible.
As the teacher spoke about this ultimate suffering, I thought about the people that died from radiation and my mind just wants to problem solve how on earth could this possibly happen?
I started to think about how the simulation that we are in is pretty convincing and so advanced. If we cannot understand the mechanics and variables of our own mind and body, how long would it take to truly understand the universe simulation? The complexity would is inexplicable.
I started to think about how maybe the simulation for the universe is so advanced but not good enough because at times it kills people who should have survived. I began to think about how could you make a universe where the highest form of suffering + undeserved action = ultimate suffering as the consequence. Its like a mathematic equation that is completely off, like 1 + 1 = -100 trillion.
I imagined the alien guardians (characters from our morphogenic angel universe) and how they would comment on the universe simulation and the programming of a ‘human’ that cannot compute undeserved action + ultimate suffering because the equation is so much more complicated than the mathematics we currently know. Or how many have to quantify it as something beyond death such as heaven which makes the calculation have an answer that seems like it could possibly add up. I think we know that the answer goes beyond our lifetime but I’m interested in how the answer goes not into afterlife but into rebirth. My friend Suhaib said that the Buddhists believe that you are rebirthed in groups and that’s why you have a natural pull towards certain people. What would happen in the next lives of people who had to endure a life where highest form of suffering + undeserved action = ultimate suffering as the consequence?