Talking With Your Mouth Full
It grieves me to hear people complain. I do, however, understand the source of their wailing. Let’s face it, we all have needs. I would rather be a little taller for my weight, and would not have elected to have lost so much hair already. These are minor things for the purpose of demonstration, but most people have a much deeper set of issues that must be addressed. Most of the time the issues are too embarassing to discuss with just anyone, and the ones we can talk to have shared so many of their own problems that it would be foolish to seek advice from them. So, we appear stuck.
Everyone has developed a persona. We wear certain kinds of clothes, drive certain types of vehicles, and believe specific ways when it comes to politics and religion. We would never be seen in certain stores or hanging out in different neighborhoods. It is all about impression.
The things we would never be caught doing, saying, or thinking are the very boundaries that cause the suffering we Buddhists talk about so much. Because we have settled on a particular persona, the things that do not fit in are used to draw an imaginary boundary between each other. Since it neatly distinguishes a clear divider among people, that must mean that each person has a seperate being. All of a sudden, we are individuals competing for resources to reinforce our own persona. We somehow feel gratified when we can sneak and leverage resources to make our persona more noticeable or distinct. Ironically, that only makes us more like everyone else.
In America, we are standing knee deep in resources from far and near. We can decorate our homes in the latest fashion from Europe or Australia. We eat food from a hundred countries every week, and we can walk from one church to any number of others. Unfortunately, we seem to be the most unhappy people on Earth. Depression, divorce, crime, partisan politics, and religious tampering with morals are all tied to unhappiness. Incredibly, we still have homeless and hungry poeple in the richest land in the world. In my opinion, this is because the competition for resources never ends once it gets started. We are crying out in hunger with our mouths full.
We do not believe that there is such a thing as enough, and that is a shameful blessing.
The way around this seeming competition is to drop the persona enhancement plan. Let the persona develop naturally, taking the alterations and subtle shifts gracefully. You must understand that the persona is fluid, otherwise you would not be so busy trying to change it. The time has come to let it go, to develop without assistance, to flow freely. Having a mind full of preferences only dams the flow and cuts off tributaries until you are nothing but a stagnant pool. As the drive to magnify the persona drops away, your innate freedom becomes more easily accessed. Reduce the self-imposed limits and your range of motion increases dramatically. With no persona to defend, there are no artificial barriers.
In this way, you become more than the old narrow definition of yourself. That old “self” has burst at the seams and popped open. From here, you can only see the shells of others struggling to be opened. This is the root of compassion.