hoist with his own petard

Who you think you are right now, in your body, with your likes and dislikes, families and jobs, good points and bad points—who you think you are right now—needs the promise of reward, or at the very least, of relief. You work so you can take a vacation, perhaps. You exercise so you'll stay healthy or look good. You eat right for the same reason—or maybe you eat compulsively to avoid feeling the feeling that makes you want to eat compulsively. You meditate and read spiritual books hoping that you'll be less angry, or less compulsive, or more peaceful. You participate in charity events because doing things for other people makes you feel less disadvantaged within—relieves some feeling of isolation.

Always implied is the idea that in some future time-space, as a result of the doing, there will be relief from "this," whatever "this" may be. Maybe for you it is physical or emotional pain. Maybe it's a feeling of anxiety, or dis-ease of some sort. Maybe it's guilt, or confusion, or sadness, or poverty.

This mind, the mind that never stops talking, the one we think of as "me," will not do anything without the promise of a reward. The self that identifies with the body, and feels separate from other bodies, feels as though if it could only add to itself one more experience, one more thing, perhaps it would feel at-one, would feel complete, would be done feeling anxious and endangered.

This whole ball of wax—feeling identified with the body, feeling isolated and impoverished, believing that the answer is to add something to the self in order to complete it, enrich it—is the theme of this human experience. It's very convincing, very thick with seeming consequences. It's difficult to extract a thread of awareness from this dense and tangled cycle.

And yet, once the mind is sufficiently quiet, you realize that, in truth, what you wanted relief from—what was giving you pain—was the very same mind that was sending you on endless wild goose chases to find the one thing that would quench its appetite for completion.

When that mind is quiet, the pain disappears. The goal becomes transparent. The chasing stops. The seeking stops. 

The mind that is sending you out to find the antidote is the mind that is feeding you the poison.

Its goal is to keep you busy chasing after experiences, enlightenment, heaven, pain-relief, so you won't notice that these goals are unattainable by the self that is chasing them, for the simple reason that when the chasing ceases, that self deflates, dissolves, loses its source of life, like a marionette when the strings are cut.

In the arena of chasing after enlightenment, however, there is always a chance that the seeker will see this fact, and then the game is over. So the ego is playing a dangerous game when it co-opts the spiritual search. Given the promise of ultimate pleasure, the mind is willing to be tamed. But once the mind is tamed, there is the possibility that the whole idea of ultimate relief will be seen as irrelevant, because the feeling of being flawed and incomplete has ceased. And the engineer is hoist with its own petard.

Comments

[Simon]

The dark side is ultimately self-destructive, isn't it? Especially when its objective is that sort of control. You HAVE now reminded me of my trip to Mexico in a few weeks. And I refuse to feel guilty about going!
;)

[marian]

Simon--enjoy yourself!

And yes, the dark side is ultimately the cause of suffering.