37 - Suffering & Creativity

Perhaps the most frequent cause of our suffering is the loss of one or more of the building blocks with which we construct the universe in ourselves. It could be the severing of a relationship, the departure of or splitting with a close friend, the termination of one's job, the breakdown of one's health, or some financial adversity. Buddhists put suffering down to object dependence. It is not surprising that we feel bereft if one or more of the building blocks with which we are trying to construct ourselves are being removed. We are frustrated by our attempts to construct ourselves, which is the very objective of the universe operating in us.

This accounts for the importance highlighted by Buddhism, of freeing oneself from dependence upon the object. This entails going so far as to question the very existence of an object, and indeed, of a subject. Among the Sufis it is called "fana fi'l madhkur an al dhikr", (the annihilation of the object in the act) and then "fana fi'l dhakir an al dhikr", (the annihilation of the subject in the act. Finally, there is "fana fi'l dhikr an al Hu" (the annihilation of the act in the being of God).

Buddhist schools seem to aim at fostering an already impinging disillusionment in the existential state. These schools stress the impermanence of all formations, unmask the hoax of the optical illusion constructed by the brain as an object made up of short-lived, discrete packets of impressions (as in a film), exemplified by the quantum leaps observed in sub-atomic Quantum Mechanics. They even push the fear about being fooled by the appearance of things to a kind of mistrust, aversion, solitude, masochistic alienation from participating in the joy of the universe, even disgust (the image of the decaying corpse), and eventually, despair. All of this to convince us to give up attempts to recover the lost object?

The same principle is then applied to the notion of the self in as much as it is a notion constructed upon discrete, non-continuous moments of experience and projections precariously based upon success or failure of performance or confrontation-avoidance behavior. This feedback comes from the mirroring of the social environment. Questioning our self image triggers a weakening or dissolution of the ego center and inevitably leads to the doctrine of the non-self, the non-entityness of what we think is the self. The same principle is applied to emotional attitudes: arousal, bliss, dread, anger, resentment, fear, sardonic irony, hysteria, depressing withdrawal.

Our suffering has its roots in our attachment to the mental representation that we make of the desired object. This is how misassessments and inappropriate responses distort the creative process. Since these are moment to moment constructs and as transient and perishable as the objects, Buddhism enjoins its adepts to let go of internal representations. The realization that one is being conditioned or duped by these representations leads to the desire for deliverance from them, yet avers itself to foster the deprivation of psychic content, which is exactly what the universe is constructing in each of us. Besides, paradoxically the projections anticipating deliverance are themselves formations!

A little knowledge of Dr. David Bohm's theories concerning the "implicate" versus the "explicate" state will confirm that those transient formations are only the emergent projections of a continuum in motion (the holo-movement) to which the word transitory does not apply. Dr. David Bohm considers reality as "an unbroken and seamless whole in which relatively autonomous objects and forms emerge, which acquire some relative measure of stability, independence and autonomy." It seems rather counter-productive to be disenchanted in the shadows on a screen and miss what the producer is trying to convey in terms of meaningfulness, emotion, energy, and splendor.

Both Yogic and Buddhist types of meditation aim at unmasking the hoax of the conceptual interpretation that we interpose between sensorial input and ourselves, namely, input processing which reduces experience to the assessment of our commonplace, middle-range mode of thinking. Tibetan Buddhism clearly discriminates between the reactive-interpretive activity of the mind and the active-creative activity (the gross and the subtle mind). They add a third: a grasp of meaningfulness not based upon input-processing, therefore proto-critic: the very-subtle mind, which evidences the fact that our minds in their higher functions think the way the universe thinks. Incidentally, this mode of thinking is noncausal and therefore, transcends the space-time framework we try to fit reality into, thus it originates in the transcendent vector of time, contrasting to that commonplace notion we entertain of time, which is the process of becoming.

Paradoxically, what the brain constructs out of sense date is a cross between interpretation (building a map, but the map is not the territory) and the way the mind of the universe thinks in the form of our thinking, and forms itself in our psyche and body. Therefore, both the gross and subtle mind may work in concert, while we are continually projecting our inherent sense of meaningfulness upon events and our notion of ourselves. Know that the very subtle mind cannot come to the rescue of the gross mind if we discard it altogether. Pir-O-Murshid calls wisdom the (meshing and matching) between the grasp of intelligence and that of consciousness, both together.

The real issue lies in what we construct in our personality out of what is coming through the ebullition at the surface of the world, which is our daily experience. That construct, which is our personality, is not made of the physical or circumstantial building blocks we encounter, but of their psychic counterpart, which we have transmuted them into and incorporated in our psyche. This psychic counterpart continues to live in us, transmuted.

It would seem that if we can see that, we do not need the building blocks whose loss we mourn, because they have become ingredients in ourselves. Yet our objective in life is not just to facilitate the action whereby the universe creates itself as us by our own inventiveness, but also to transform the environment, and even more, reorganize our rapport with the environment

The environment, both physical and psychological, needs first to be incorporated, having been transmuted, digested, ingested, then acted upon with our transfigured personalities. In this case, a relationship or mission or a financial asset is not lost, but reinstated in a new and enriching way; a love relationship can become a most mutually fulfilling friendship. One will find a better way to optimize one's talent, and one's know-how in business will enable one to build up an even more promising situation than that left behind. Instead of alternating between ego dissolution and the construction of the person from the universe, one could integrate both. For example, one can radiate while dissolving, and dissolve into the void in the inverted space while converging the universe.

The world which we might shun by hasty judgmentalism is the very being and purpose of God that we make into a reality in ourselves, or rather as ourselves, in the measure of our insight, of our enthusiasm. our ecstasy, dedication, glorification and our love.
