July 22, 2014

Day 35

I suffer a lot at work. I mean seriously, there are some days when I think, couldn’t I be driving a snow plough on the Alaskan tundra? Wouldn’t that be better than one more freaking email? Okay, maybe the Alaskan tundra is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much, believe me.

Yesterday, I realized how I create my own suffering of suffering at work. On Sunday, my Dharma friend Tashi talked about pain, and how it could be worked with in the body. He said one approach was to look for the pain. He went on to explain that if you did that for long enough, using a technique that sounded like analysis to me, you would eventually realize that the ‘pain’ was in the mind. He went even further to say that it would become apparent that the pain wasn’t real.

Hmmm….my skeptic mind kicked in. I had to try this for myself. I don’t have much pain in my body, but work…that’s another story. I decided to try this technique with the pain of being at work. I felt like Sherlock Holmes on the trail. The game was afoot!

I asked myself—which part of my job causes me to suffer? Mind, accommodating as always, had many answers: driving in traffic with no a/c in my car, the emails, the not-comfortable-enough chair, the production quota, and on and on.  Okay. Good. Now I had a trail of clues.

I experimented with methodically removing all of the aspects of my job that were supposedly causing my suffering. My hypothesis was, (Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of me), if I could remove all the aspects of my job that caused the suffering, then the suffering would go away. Fair enough, right?

What I found shocked me. After methodically using my mind to remove all of the elements of suffering from my job, I found one very simple desire was left, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. What it really comes down to with the suffering of being at work is simply this: I want to be somewhere else.

Great. Now the trail of clues was narrowed down to just one.

l looked at that desire to be somewhere else. Where would I want to be? My first choice was to be at home baking. Then came other things that I find pleasurable, like going to a thrift shop or reading at home, or working on a writing project. All right. So far so good. How, I asked myself, are those things different than being at work?

That’s when it hit me. What actually makes me suffer at work is the wrong view that instead of being there, I could be in a place where there is no suffering. In samsara, that’s impossible. No matter where we find ourselves in this realm, we are subject to birth, aging, disease, and death. But based on this wrong view of being able to escape the suffering of work, and go to a perfect place, I created the suffering of my own suffering.

Becoming aware of this was incredibly powerful. Until that realization, I had always felt victimized by the suffering of being at work. It always felt like something bigger than myself, an inevitable cycle of suffering that I’m subject to unless I want to be homeless and hungry. But seeing it this way, and understanding in a very visceral way that the suffering isn’t real because I’m the one creating it, was like discovering the key to my own prison.

Now when that particular suffering arises, I know what to say…I see you, Mara.

Having solved this mystery, I thought about a teaching I’ve heard many times now. We have no experience of a state where there is no suffering. If that’s so, why do we yearn for a state of perfection? How do we even know there can be a place without suffering? In going through this experiment with pain and the suffering of suffering, I saw our yearnings for perfection in a different light. I saw our constant yearnings for a permanent and lasting release from suffering as near-perfect expressions of our Buddha Nature, the part of us which only knows the perfection of true purity, true self, true bliss, true permanence.

This new adventure with Interplanetary Title, Inc. so far has been an interesting walk on the path.

The all-ground is untainted,

Incidentally covered but naturally splendid.

Buddha Nature is perfect—empty of the separable, the fleeting stains;

Not empty of the inseparable, unsurpassable qualities:

True purity, true self, true bliss, true permanence.