The process of discontent (an example)

I remember my sister giving an excellent example of the process of discontent...

My father bought her a Matsui hi-fi stack when we were kids - which to a kid is a brilliant present. It had tape-to-tape high speed dubbing, record player and radio all in one we all thought it excellent.

That was until my sister moved into university and saw her Matsui along side proper stacks that would have cost 10 times as much. It was then that she realised that the stack which had seemed so excellent was really quite cheap. In retrospect the sound quality was not that good, but what were we to know we were kids and knew nothing better.

That is exactly the reason why we are never satisfied in life - the dhukka that Buddah speaks of - the eternal suffering of unenlightened existence - the pain of sin and ignorance.

It is looking at what we "have" in-relation-to-other-things which causes both knowledge of what we have, but at the same time divorce from what we have and the possibility of both happiness and sadness.

i realised once standing on a mountain that when on top of a mountain you can see all the surrounding mountains except the one on which you stand. We always know everything except what we are. Infact what we see is only possible because we are not it, and not being it puts us in a position to see it. The emptiness of the self is the space into which the world we see can flood in. "Knowing" the outside world both at once seems to put us in a place and we can fix on the certainty of knowing what we have. But it is a demon because in the same moment that we know what we have we have lost it. The Masui is no longer ours when we see it a a thing amongst all the others instead of the music player that plays music to us.

Even if the Matsui was a state-of-the-art hi-fi stack, a £1000 Philips or Pioneer, my sister would have gained the apparent "satisfaction" of "knowing" that she "had" a good music player. But she wouldn't really "have" it because it was the knowledge she was now satisfied by, not the player, and knowledge is always for things we don't have which are away from our mountain.

As a child it makes no difference to her whether it is Matsui or Pioneer, it was the player that player her music and objective elements like "how good" actually have no bearing at all on real satisfaction. They are filmic satsfactions of knowledge not real satisfaction.

I have found this very useful in defusing the heart ache that remains after the puzzling relationship with my muse. It is easy to doubt what we went through. I replay the moment a once lover of hers asked me why i don't sleep with her. It is not that I didn't want to, it was my greatest desire, it is just that it never came about because of other things. But the poison in that conversation is that I have taken it to mean that I "should" have left some objective physical movement within the relationship - something I could talk about in a pub rather than diffuse personal emotions, hopes and dreams. I had the Matsui this guy had the Pioneer. I had only my simple pleasures and wonderful daily experience with her when the real world was the most pleasant place amongst all the dream worlds. How do you explain that? In reality it must look like a childs dreaming compared with a full physical relationship - yet the point is that I was satisfied until the Pioneers moved in to "claim" my world. That was my fault. The relationship had 1 rule - no names! Not in 'Last Tango in Paris' sense, but no verbilsation or naming of what we were doing. We never spoke of our real intentions, I never "knew" what she really meant, she never "knew" what I really meant, it was all in the moment and enjoyed for what it was, oblique, inventive and quite possibly perfect. That is mostly why we never negotiated the complexities of our physical needs. Without names how can it be anything but perfect!! There is nothing to compare it to. This is ecstacy in its purest form, it is what i strived for, it is what i believe she was so entertained by, it is what I lost faith in, it is what let the sky come crashing in.

But rediscovering it through the pain, finding out where i went wrong has been the growing bit of the experience. Ironically she has now decayed completely, into a new birth somewhere with new parents and a new world - unless it is the heaven realm she has returned to. Pain is something - when we are ready - we must face square on and stand firm until the storm has blown by. It can't be avoided, if we cower under the force of the onslaught we must build up until we can face it again. It will only go through us, it will not go past us. But faced it will pass away, even the greatest most crippling pain. Mine is not bad but it has still taken 9 years to get on top of. My lifetimes dreams shattered, you really can't see a reason to be alive, but no reason to despair who ever said life was supposed to be happy or successful. These are names, given by others to makes us look big or small and therefore useless to us.

Just accept the Matsui for what it is.