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Originally Posted by Angela  I guess I'm asking: why are you even bothering with karma? Are you opening yourself up to the possibility of something other than randomness, and just trying on karma to see how it feels? It doesn't sound like it works well for you. I'm just surprised you don't lay it aside, as you would astrology or tea-reading. |
I'm not particularly bothering with karma, for exactly those reasons, but I find its wild popularity inexplicable, and simply trying to understand that out of curiosity. Perhaps I am missing something. I don't think so, though.
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Originally Posted by Angela That's twice you've made me laugh out loud today. |
Ah, very good. Then my work for today is done.
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Originally Posted by Angela I can see where it might be challenging to wrap one's head around. But I think that's probably because we've been taught that desire and attachment are the same thing, the way we were with sex and intimacy. |
I understand the semantic distinction but about some things I have difficulty separating desire, attachment, and caring in practice. I can avoid attachment by not caring or by sublimating desire, but what is the point of that? Besides, desire and attachment, while not the same thing, cannot be said to have no interdependencies. One breeds the other. To use your parallel, even though sex is not equal to intimacy, it takes concerted effort to engage in meaningful sex without becoming intimate, assuming that's even really possible. And it is damn hard to be intimate without being attached. Intimacy: good. Grog want more. Grog not want lose that!
I have to say though that I have always been clear that it's not about me, even in those times when my partner hasn't been clear on what is their junk and what is mine. I have never looked at how well the relationship was going at the moment as a referendum on my worthiness as a human being. The attachment for me is rather the desire to experience the whole story arc from boy-meets-girl to walking hand in hand into our dotage together. To have a sizable time span over which to amortize all the worries, cares, heartaches and missteps and compromises of a normal shared life. To have what every couple understandably wants to end up with -- a rich and gratifying and transcendent history together. I had already modified that story very significantly to remarry in my late 30's. I am simply not willing to modify it again at this late date, and I'm quite comfortable with that choice.
So the question is relevant in my particular case to dealing with my wife's suffering and death and the meaning of that whole messy debacle. Without mandating the minute details of how it would play out, and actually expecting and allowing for some difficulties since she was not well when I met her, I did nevertheless hope that both of us would be able to look back on the total experience with fondness. But it became a total joke in that department, ending as horribly and agonizingly as possible, in the most over the top way conceivable -- no, beyond conception. People romanticize these things and imagine tearful bittersweet goodbyes with a string quartet playing in the background, but the truth is that grinding chronic illness turns life in to a daily slog of survival and a fight against madness. It's no way for a relationship to end.
So my wife is minus a life that she embraced with gusto but which did not return her kind regard, and I'm sitting here with my last memory of her a gray face and a fixed stare, and the last remotely carefree happy times together at least 6 years ago.
And I am supposed to in effect say, "oh, well! better luck next time! The universe has better things in mind than my silly idea"?
Frankly, I don't think it was a silly or unrealistic idea. So yeah, I'm not pleased with the outcome. I don't think that I should be.
I could rationalize all this if I could understand it. But it is beyond understanding. It was just our pathetic little life, but it's all we had. Sheesh.
So I let it be as it is, but coming from such an experience it is very difficult to trust life and just "choose" joy. Even if it'd work, I can't figure out a way to do it without symbolically capitulating to what I think of as an obscenity that should never have happened in a sane universe.
At the bottom of this whole thing I suppose that is nevertheless what I am supposed to do, but it is still too fresh and still feels to much like eat-♥♥♥♥-and-like-it.
No, it's not a referendum on me at all. But it
is to me a question of what I can reasonably expect from life for a given effort, what the risk vs reward ratios are, what basis I have going forward to do all the manly things like tell your wife It's Going To Be All Right when she's afraid, that sort of thing. I don't claim to have ever been Mr. Sunshine but I was
much closer to your worldview before than I am now.
That is why I understand Maguru's point of view ... we can to an extent chose or stir up certain emotional responses and at times successfully jump-start our moods, but emotions are also a perfectly normal and legitimate response to experience, and some experiences are very big indeed.
--Bob