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Talk: 19980603-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-shining_the_light_of_death_on_life_part_1-43031 Leandra Tejedor.json Start_time: 01:03:03 Display_question: Keyword_search: ovarian cancer, Los Angles, commitment phobia, intimacy, aging, sickness, death, meditation, breath, relationship, Buddhist dharma, CIMC, field hospital, materialistic world, spiritual world, non-hospitalizable schizophrenia, impermanence, suffering flowers Question_content: Questioner: When I was 23, my mother died of ovarian cancer. And during that time, I was trying to watch myself. I was a musician, I just graduated from college. And I had been in this very coveted world of music, that was very intellectually engaging. And in the moment that my mother died, I was making the transition into temping in downtown Los Angeles, as a secretary, during the late part of the 80’s. Looking at something as real to me as my mother's death, and as unreal to me as the real world. Larry: What's unreal about the real world? Questioner: I guess what I wanted to say is, that I don't feel as surrounded by death, by old age, sickness, and death, as much as I feel surrounded by death by, commitment phobia. Larry: This doesn't exempt that. Questioner: A lack of intimacy Larry: Yes, but you see the fact that people are not intimate, that they can't commit themselves, they're still going to die. Let's say they do become intimate, and can commit themselves. So, you don't have that problem. They're still going to get old, sick, and die. It's not to exclude all the other things. Now, what I didn't get into tonight is that the idea of intimacy, I'm glad you brought that term up. One view of practice, and it's one that I found very helpful, is that practice itself is the practice of intimacy. And that one of the challenges is, these events of aging, of sickness, and death. What could be closer? Right? They're right in our face. And what do we push further? We push it way away. Intimacy of practice begins with the breathing. Do you do this meditation practice? Questioner: Yes. Larry: Okay. So, when we learn to be intimate with the breath, which is not so easy, and we learn to be intimate with the sensations in the body, and we learn to be intimate with the sound, and so forth. Finding out, what does that mean? No separation. That, of course, extends into relationship as well. But if you're adding a problem, that is that you're not seeing this, that's fine. I won't disagree with you. People don't commit themselves or they have a difficulty being intimate. But can you relate that to what's being said tonight? I'm not saying that this is... I'm talking about everything. I'm just talking about this underlying aspect of living for all of us, no matter what the rest of our life is like. Questioner: I guess what I'm saying is that I'm glad that you talked this is about being more fully alive. Larry: Yes. Questioner: Because I feel that I have even heard little glimpses at times, when I’ve been in here, people even using the meditation practice, and using the Buddhist dharma, to perpetuate that lack of community. Larry: Quite right. That's a very good point. It's not just here. It's a byproduct of meditation. And you'll find it, I mainly know the Buddhist schools. You'll find it in all of them. And sometimes it goes something like this. We've all gotten wounded in life, right? Maybe we meet people who don't want to be intimate, and then we want to marry, and they leave us, or we leave them, or we've been disappointed, and we can't make a commitment, or the people we want to make a commitment can't. We've gotten hurt in occupations. We've gotten hurt in any number of ways. So, we crawl out of the battlefield, to the field hospital. In war terms, there's like a tent in the middle of it to heal up, and that's the meditation retreat center. And then real teaching is saying that's helpful, if you're sick, to go into the hospital. Break_line: CIMC, in that sense, is a hospital, but we don't want you to live your whole life in CIMC. I mean, I do. I live up on the third floor. But fortunately, you will be able to get a pardon from the governor, and get out of here. So, what I'm getting at is that meditation can be misused. So that we have a dualistic notion. We divide life into sort of the crass, ugly, materialistic business world, where people are mean, and they're ambitious, and they just want to make money, and they eat meat, and they have no sensitivity, and they don't want to commit themselves, or be intimate. And then the spiritual world, where we sit on our cushion, quiet, nice, and everyone's a vegetarian or 90%, or they hint at it, and we go to these retreats, and it's even better. It's out in the country. And that can become a kind of non-hospitalizable schizophrenia. Questioner: Or life is impermanent therefore, you know marriages end, relationships end, therefore why bother. Larry: Okay, but wait, now we're getting close, because the fact that things are impermanent doesn't mean they're worthless. Questioner: Right Larry: It can mean they're even more precious. That's what I've been saying. But now if they become precious and you grasp on to them, you see, because there are plenty of people who love life, but they don't love the Dharma. And often they're wonderful, they are salt of the earth, but they're suffering a lot, tremendous amount, too. This is a different way of loving life. That is, because things are impermanent doesn't mean they're not of any value. Quite the contrary. That is, if you begin to see the law of impermanence, in a vivid way, personally, not just as a concept, then your children, your loved ones, they've become incredibly precious to you. You know, you don't have forever to enjoy them. Okay, but someone could go the other direction and said, well, they're just going to go and die on you anyway, so why even get involved? And some practices maybe even imply that. But I would say that is not what we're teaching here. Break_line: Now, on the way, you may have to crawl into the field hospital, and relatively poo poo the rest of life, so that you can strengthen your sitting practice. But the day comes if you have a teacher who understands, they're going to say, okay, let's get back into the battlefield. You see, there's no field hospital. There's no place to hide. Can you hide from death, or age, or sickness? There's no place to run, even in terms of anything else, there's no place to hide. Even if you're alone, you can be miserable. So, I hear what you're saying now, and this teaching, it depends what you do with it. This teaching could get you to become more despondent. That's why you have to be careful about taking it up as a practice. And say, well, I'm not even going to have flowers on my altar. They just go and die on you. They're beautiful. Two or three days, and then they're gone. I'm never going to have flowers, and I'm never going to do… well soon. Do you see what I'm getting at? Whereas there's a more subtle point to me. It's more wisdom in it, which is you don't throw, or you get plastic flowers, which is not wisdom. You get flowers. You fully appreciate the beauty of the flowers. That's what flowers are. They're beautiful, and they do something nice to us, and when they die, they die. And so, you love them while they're there, and you allow them to go. Most of us can do that with flowers, but we have a harder time with other things. End_time: 01:10:48
