The Plagues Again

Jack Kornfield speaketh: "When we step out of the battle, we see how each of us creates conflict.  We see our constant likes and dislikes, the fight to resist all that frightens us.  We see our own prejudice, greed, and territoriality.  All this is hard for us to look at, but it is really there.  Then underneath these ongoing battles, we see pervasive feelings of incompleteness and fear.  When we let go of our battles and open our heart to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment.  This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.  To come into the present is to stop the war.  To come into the present means to experience whatever is here and now.  Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future, in regret, guilt, or shame about  the past.  When we come into the  present, we begin to feel the life around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding."

Whenver I start to perceive a creeping, oozing sense of smugness and pride about my own wisdom and experience and intellect I invariably run into some dude who can cut through the crap and make cogent observations like this above.

I repeated this phrase to a fellow A.A. this morning: "The good news about sobriety is that we get to feel everything again but the bad news about sobriety is that we get to feel everything again," then I ducked a right cross and this was from a woman I consider a dear friend.  Seriously, it's not easy, ever, to sit with pain and fear but it's downright miserable when we're at all new.  And the idea that we chase pleasure and flee from pain can be found in literally every spiritual movement ever created.

I must repeat once again one of my most beloved passages from the 12 & 12: "Until now our lives have largely been devoted to running from pain and problems.  We fled from them as from a plague.  We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering."  I like that the phenomenon of suffering is labeled a "fact."  As in, we all have to/get to suffer at times.