A Day in the Life of Love - Pt 5

By: Stephen Levine

Posted: November 17, 2010

Satisfaction

This morning as I went to wash my morning cereal bowl I noticed a crack across one side. And it reminded me of one Buddhist master’s teaching that “the glass is already broken” He said that though a crystal goblet given him earlier in the day seemed so everlastingly beautiful, so able to catch the sun, impermanence was always encroaching. And it was just a matter of time before gravity pulled it from the table or the winds of change blew it off the shelf and it lay at his feet as a scattering of shards. That life is to be discovered fully now and if not now when? The glass is already broken. Entered wholeheartedly now instead holding it at arm’s length inspecting it for imperfections with the imperfections of the eye.

What would it be like to wake up on a day in a life of complete satisfaction?

What would it be like to live with a sense of wholeness not so easily wobbled by dissatisfaction?

Love is the highest form of acceptance. Judgment the mechanics of non-acceptance. Some may say that without “good judgment” there would be no “discriminating wisdom” but discriminating wisdom is the process of weeding out the causes of suffering and choosing love, “ the greatest good”,

The mind judges and complains through out the day. It complains about where we’ve been and where we’re going. It complains about those we meet along the way, about family and neighbors, coworkers and bosses, friends and lovers, spouses and ex-spouses and all those it feels have not given us our due.

We lament not being loved.

We complain about how we feel, about how we look, about being too cold or being too hot, about things not being as we desire. We complain all day about being alive. We complain all night about death.

We complain from want and alternately brandish and are embarrassed and embossed with remorse by desire. One moment the mind says, “ Have a hot fudge sundae!” and fifteen moments later, as you wipe your mouth says, “ I wouldn’t have done that if I were you!” Conflicting desires, it’s the story of our lives.

We rarely notice the occurrence of desire until, some unfolding later, we find ourselves leaning into the refrigerator or closer to our sorrow being someone we don’t even like in order to get what we want.

But desire is not, as rumor would have it, “bad” it is just painful. It engenders a feeling of not having until we get what we want and then complains about having it too briefly or not quite as advertised in the catalogue of our desires. It is the ache of wanting and impermanence in the gut and at the center of the chest.

Everyone has a desire system which leads the mind ever forward. Even Jesus, even the Dalai Lama, even Gandhi had desire. At the very least for the welfare of others, at the most to continue to live and perhaps at times to evade pain.

Ironically the greater the satisfaction the greater the potential for dissatisfaction, the deeper the rope burns and scars as what we hold to is pulled beyond our grasp by impermanence. Desire out lives memory.

Which is not to say we must stop desire no matter how strong our desire to do so may be on occasion, instead that we meet it with compassion and a satisfaction in momentary beauty.

Of course the problem is not just desire but our attachment to its continual satisfaction which turns desire from an object of awareness to an engorgement of consciousness. We are addicted to satisfaction.

One of the great ironies of desire is that when we are chewing, making love, embraced by loved ones, the quality we call satisfaction only arises in the momentary absence of desire. The desire that so often keeps us superficial and unable to experience what some acknowledge as the deepest satisfaction. Satisfaction is a glimpse of the luminosity exposed when the clouds of desire momentarily part. The “great satisfaction”. This is not philosophy this is just the design of our very human architecture. When we watch it for ourselves we see how it is the momentary absence of desire that gives rise the state of satisfaction.

Observing our attachment to desire as an act of self-mercy, as well ironically to really enjoy ourselves when we are enjoying ourselves, so that mindfulness of acting on desire becomes like a window through which we look at the beauty of the moon but in which we can still see our own refection because of the lights within.

Mindfulness of what we want and what we are willing to endure to get it opens the possibility of inhabiting our life with love and being whole heartedly satisfied. It offers the option of cultivating a liberating awareness and living inside our life instead of being like a horrified bystander at the scene of what we imagine is an accident.