It's been a year now that I've been practising. I hadn't noticed the incremental changes until I'd looked back along the path I'd just come along. "Oh, yeah... I can see small changes in me" However, I've become very interested in how the experience of the everyday can substantiate my practise. I take in a lot of the teachings through reading and in the sangha, and in particular, through the 'audiodharma' of downloadable audio from various talks. I was curious how all these learnings get absorbed in and how this results in any sort of self tranformation. Of course it's a continuous and incremental progress but there are also leaps that occur I think.
This started out as a short note. :-)
This last Sunday was ANZAC Day, really a whole weekend where Australia recognises our particularly sorrowful engagement in world war two. I've noticed my relationship to this anniversary has changed significantly. All my previous years, I've had a very detached awareness of it, purposely unattached, averse even, while this year I felt very close to it, allowing myself, trusting myself to enter into it; not through direct involvement but rather through the contemplation of it, sitting with it, and sending out the heart to be intimate with it. I'm reviewing that contemplation now in terms of some key Buddhist concepts, and if you care to read on, I'll relate them here below.
Empathy/Compassion: I felt strongly the suffering of these men on the battlefields, the fear they must have felt, the lonliness, the disillusionment, the barbarity that was expected of them, to kill like robots and run headlong into machine gun fire knowing that their odds were maybe one in four of surviving the next five minutes and how they lost their will to live amid the fear, sickness and inhumanity. I felt them missing their folk at home, how they were missed, how they called on their God for salvation.
Boundlessness: I realised the absence of border and boundary, feeling this sadness for all of the men in the trenches and the families they were connected to, a few miles away in Turkey or thousands of miles away in New Zealand. I felt how the human spirit was both compressed and inflated, how it was muted and yet enhanced. The reality of brotherhood contrasted with the artifice of nationhood. I note how during the armistice, the soldiers from each side were shaking hands and joking, exchanging gifts and food, only to return a few hours later to the killing. During the advancing waves, amid horredous casualty, a Turkish general appeared above the diggers' trench saying "Stop, stop, stop, for god's sake please stop, you know we must shoot". Of course, No one wanted to kill anyone. I note how a huge number of lives were lost in the securing of very small bits of what was effectively desolate, useless territory.
Impermanence: I understood sharply the transience of the human body, how it can animated one moment, then static the next, and on it's way back to the earth in the following days. How the body is yet another systems that requires continual sustainance in many ways. How the bushland and hills were constructed into a network of rabbit warrens for people, with kitchens and hospitals, and how quickly the floods and fires restored them back to just earth. Likewise the machines and artifacts of war are now mostly just earth again. Also noted how that one site, that was so critical to the campaign, was so irrelevent and unregarded outside of the temporal bounds of that campaign, how all the structures that brought about that campaign were just a momentary vortex of ideology.
Self/Non-self: Why did men run into near certain death? I was able to approach an understanding of how soldiers were driven forward by these ideas of 'protecting the nation', how they had faith in governance, that the generals knew what they were doing, that food would be provided, that the wounded would be healed etc. I noted how they identified with being a Soldier, being a Digger, being an Australian, being a bloke, being part of some collective or several. I noted how they felt they belonged to all those things and how they driven to contain more of that, how they driven to possess not just land or position but identity and notions. I noted the transience in the minds of men, how their notions were transformed, how their deep engagement in the world of actuality brought them 'down to earth' or closer to the true nature of things. How notions were stripped down or distilled under the pressure of trauma. Also noted that the discourses that give consent to war are still present in the media today, noted the words they use to propagate the narratives.
Systems: Had some comprehension of how war is a 'system', that it's made up of connected entities, each composed of smaller entities and so on. Noted how the various inputs into that system each affect the system as a whole, and go on affecting through time and space, that each person plays a role and are both responsible and not responsible at the same time, how everthing's connected in a dynamic way. How one part of the system affects the balance of the whole. Everthing's connected. Suffering will express itself.
Concluding, I felt this emotion rising up. I felt it sitting heavy in the body. I felt my mind unbalanced by it. I felt the sadness and the anger sitting there. However, I had a certain flavour of resiliance that allowed me to not get swept up in it. It's not detachment, rather it's intimacy, it's clarity. It was very challenging though. It's taken me a few days to find my centre again but I feel that it been very educational and I think it allowed me to 'concentrate' or absorb/integrate the learnings. I was able to see this thing clearly for the first time in my life and I've found it to be a liberating experience. Reversing the camera, I've also experienced a real clarity in understanding the Buddha's teachings.
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