The suffering created by resistance to contrast has been on my mind a lot lately. My own intolerance to contrast is frequently front and center, because for the last several years I’ve made it a practice to actively reach out and be with people who are different from me in ways that challenge me. It is sometimes discouraging when I see how long I’ve been working with my own intolerance to contrast and see how little change in myself I’ve accomplished.
At least I have grown to a place where I no longer feel the reflexive need to correct people when I think or know they are wrong. However, that doesn’t stop me from reactively tensing up in my abdomen when, for example, I hear people spouting untruths they’ve learned from Fox News. I still have an internal response that shouts, “NOOOOOOOOOO!” So right there, when that happens, I am suffering from the friction created by my own resistance to that contrast of belief or opinion. And that suffering is a result of my own internally violent response to contrast.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
|
It is important for us to think about and notice our intolerance to contrast, I think, because the friction caused by our resistance to it causes so much suffering for each of us individually, and collectively.
Here at Dkos we like to think that Conservatives are intolerant, but we don’t have to look any further than any of the frequent pie fights that take place to find people who are absolutely intolerant of ideas different than their own. And it isn’t only about politics, I’ve seen pie fights resulting from disbelief in the difference in people’s human experience and their dietary restrictions, or their use of alternative therapies, for example.
It seems to be the human norm for people to assume their sensory experience of life is the same as everyone else’s, when in fact each of our experiences is unique. It is true we all share the same human nervous system and five senses, but in each of us these are tuned differently. One person might be calm and relaxed, while the next person might be jumpy and highly excitable. This difference alone could result in an extreme difference in interpretation of outward events. Some people prefer heavy metal music, while it is a bane to others. Some people look at the color named Teal and see green, others see blue. These are just sensory differences, we also need to account for the difference in human experience. A person who grew up in a loving, well adjusted family has an extremely different experience of life than a person who grew up in an abusive environment. And perhaps human ignorance of these internal differences is another factor in our intolerance for contrast.
Culturally, it seems we’ve become more intolerant of contrast in recent years, and I’ve been wondering why that is. It is true when I was young our society was much more homogenous, and there was less overt contrast. In my first grade class when the teacher put the Lord’s Prayer on the blackboard for us to use as a penmanship lesson, it didn’t create any friction because everyone in the class was at least nominally Christian. Even in this small town where I live, that just couldn’t go unchallenged today, so that is a part of it. Fox News probably should get some credit for stirring people up, making them angry and sensitizing them so they are less able to tolerate contrast as well.
So many people express anger at our elected representatives for being unwilling and/or unable to work together to govern as adults; but if we look at ourselves honestly, we can see how we segregate ourselves in many ways from people who think and believe differently than we do, simply because it is too uncomfortable for us to associate with people who have certain political or religious differences from us. How many of us purposely avoid family members, or discontinue socializing with people, because they are just too…different from us? Our elected representatives are simply mirroring a reflection of our own intolerances.
All of this was percolating in my mind this week, when one morning I was out early driving to the grocery store. Just as I turned on to a busy street, something opened inside me and I felt an awareness that was incredibly delighted in diversity. It was indescribably joyous, and it wasn’t just delight for diversity in Nature, it also included delight in the diversity in human expression and experience. In this awareness was an absolute appreciation and captivation with the diversity of human development, an absolute joy in contrast.
A split second after it started I immediately thought, “Oh Yes! More of this PLEASE!” That was instructive in itself to see how reflexively I reached for the good stuff and tried to cling to it. :-)
The experience lasted only a few seconds, but the happy “hangover” continued for hours, and it forever changed my perception of the continuum for my potential response to contrast. Where I used to consider the extent of that potential to extend from resistance to acceptance, it has expanded to include the potential for delight. And as wonderful as the experience was, it showed me I have further to go than I ever dreamed in my work with my own resistance to contrast.
Since I am such a work in progress myself, I have no words of wisdom or advice to offer. I do know that the quality of contrast is not inherently bad; how would we know light without the contrast of dark? How would we appreciate the sweetness life has to offer, if we were not also acquainted with bitterness? In this relative world contrast is neither good, nor bad, it is simply an essential quality that arises from duality. It is only our intolerance and resistance to contrast that causes suffering. So I offer this quote from Pema Chodron which I also encountered this week, which seems to fit with the overall theme:
Recently, I was teaching from a Buddhist text called The Way of the Bodhisattva, which offers guidance to those who wish to dedicate their lives to alleviating suffering and to bringing benefit to all sentient beings. This was composed in the eighth century in India by a Buddhist master named Shantideva. In it he has an interesting point to make about peace.
He says something along the lines of, “If these long-lived, ancient, aggressive patterns of mine that are the wellspring only of unceasing woe, that lead to my own suffering as well as the suffering of others, if these patterns still find their lodging safe within my heart, how can joy and peace in this world ever be found?” Shantideva is saying that as long as we justify our own hard-heartedness and our own self-righteousness, joy and peace will always elude us. We point our fingers at the wrongdoers, but we ourselves are mirror images; everyone is outraged at everyone else's wrongness.~ (from her book Practicing Peace)~Pema Chodron
The door we avoid walking through