Dear Claude: An Epistle #4

Worthiness, Sadness and Jewishness Revisited

Stories by Sarah Neufeld

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Dear Claude:

Very shortly after my last letter to you I had a series of encounters with people, face-to-face, remotely and with written words, that have in a kind of helix fashion come back to me at some different place of personal awareness. In that way I have been expanded on some of the themes of that letter.

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Nope, not Jewish

I’ll get this out of the way: my more genealogically aware sister has confirmed that, for a few generations at least, I have no Jewish blood beyond what the various diasporas may have by happenstance contributed.

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Dear Claude: An Epistle - #3

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Life’s No S’More than a Cookie Sandwich

Stories, S’mories; Show Me Where There Aren’t Any Cookie Jars

Stories, it seems, make the world go round and will round us up and knock us down and out for the count, although we hope not before we have grabbed that last oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. And so I hesitate to start this ‘mallow’ meander because I see so many options of where to go. And all of them are stories. Of course. Or at the very least I think I can imagine them as stories even if they have hidden themselves behind the veil of the truth of my experience of Maya as directed by Mara. (‘Maya’ I translate as the illusion, or perhaps delusion, that what we see and experience through the senses and mind are the total experience of the complete truth of reality. See Maya for a more traditional or ‘official’ definition. And Mara I translate as the rationalising ego-voice or mind-focused energy that convinces us that Maya is true using clever lures, bribes, seductions, goads, guilts, shames or fear to bring us into misalignment from integrity with the truth of impermanence. See Mara for a more traditional definition.)

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On Music

And I’ve decided to more relaxedly continue to incorporate music in my essays. I had been thinking that since few respond that maybe it is more of a distraction than not. And yet I’ve had two people respond so well that I’ll continue the practice now with the creation of a YouTube playlist that can be played while reading it. And here it is: Dear Claude Worthiness Playlist

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Moksha by Vas

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Pain? What Pain? A Story of Moksha (Freedom)?

I’ll start with the story of pain, ‘my’ pain, and Yoshiko’s great recent question. Well, actually I’ll step back to the interesting comment made by Tommy Rosen’s teacher Anand Mehrotra, in an on-line course we attended in 2021.

Anand Mehrotra Self Awakening (This is not the On-Line Lesson to Which I Refer)

Paraphrased, Mehrotra asked us to consider that suffering is not personal. There isn’t, for example, your suffering or my suffering. Instead consider that life is inherently comprised of suffering, as Gautama Buddha observed. There is suffering. That’s all. We are infinite creatures in a finite world and there will be frictions and some of that is discomfort. When we start saying ‘me’ and ‘mine’ to the experience of suffering, we create a stickiness to that suffering in the form of a story that is easily, quickly and delightfully claimed by Mara who uses it to strengthen the little ’s’ self of ego-identity that delights in the artificial joys and suffering in Maya. 

Mehrotra adds that our task — which is actually our opportunity — in being here and alive is to reduce suffering. Period. That begins when we release the stories of me or my suffering or of you or your suffering and move with the — my phrase — appropriate eccentric action that magically and automatically reduces suffering. For my experience and description of ‘appropriate eccentric action’, see":

8. Appropriate Eccentric Action Pt. 1

Okay, okay, I hear you muttering that I’m talking a story. Am I walking that talk? That was Yoshiko’s question when we shared our concurrent experiences of our painful and ostensibly inexplicable physical discomfort despite good food and sadhana practices. She in her right leg and hips and hands; me in my right hip, upper arms and shoulders. Is my inability to lift a cup without wanting to cry out a story or my story? She struggled to pick up even a pencil from the floor. Really, is this pain the result of resting in my story, or in her story? WTF is pain?

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An answer:

Question: What is pain?

Inner Teacher: Pain is nothing. When you ask the question, "What is pain?" you ask as if the answer is, "It is something." And you ask as if I can give you a special formula that will help you to permanently avoid this something you do not like. But I cannot give you a formula that will help you avoid something if that something is nothing. I can only ask you to trust me when I tell you it is nothing.

Questioner: I feel what you are saying as you say it, and I can even feel the edge of realisation that teaches pain is nothing. But I feel I need more. Please talk to me about pain and the practice of purification, and how all of this fits with your teachings.

Inner Teacher: Purification seems necessary as long as you are identified with the false "I." For as long as you think you are it, you will also think that you are experiencing pain. But the key words in the previous sentence are “think" and "you".

Who is this "you" that experiences pain? Isn't it also the one who thinks? Isn't it also the mind that defines and separates? Is this mind what you are? And if not, then is it true that you are experiencing pain?

You see, the placement of your identity is more important than you may have previously thought it was. It is more important and more profound. If you place your identity with the false identity "I" in the thinking mind, then you experience everything it thinks up to prove that it exists. You are fully invested in it, and you fully experience all of its experiences. But this does not change the fact that you are not it, and it and the experiences that come from it are fully and perfectly illusion.

You see, the answer is this: The answer is to realise that it is not you. This is why s/Self inquiry works. As you realise the illusion is illusion, and it is not you, you are not affected by its dreams because you have found your Self to be beyond them and before them and above them. Your mind (attention) is anchored at a depth where they do not exist. Therefore, they touch you not (p89-90). The Teachings of Inner Ramana by Regina Dawn Akers.

In my last letter to you I wrote about Jacobo’s question ‘When did you quit smoking?’ and his connecting the trapped smoke since twelve as holding my sadness in my lungs. Is that a story, of which I had no conscious recollection, and the pain that is nothing a path to remembering it, bringing that stale sadness out of the shadows and into the present within which my body by birth and breath resides? Is it a coincidence that I was about twelve when I read for the second time, after a teacher’s strong recommendation, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding? And with that reading I clearly remember feeling a break inside me, a split away from my fundamental trust in life. Likely it was within a year of each other, the start and stop of smoking and reading LotF.

Hold On, Hold On by Neko Case

At a deeper level, of course, Yoshiko’s question is the question my body has been asking with the language of pain for the last few weeks. Well, realistically years. It has been only in recent weeks that the pain has been particularly pointed and focused enough in my upper arms and shoulders to impede ease of function for most day-to-day activities including writing and filling a cup with water. The hip pain I’ve been experiencing since 2020 does not have the same level of diurnal impact. And gout, which can be truly crippling, has jumped in and out of my life since 1986 or so and responds quickly to medication.

Yoshiko’s wise question wasn’t actually a question! Here is what she wrote, in her Japanese-English, in a Line-chat about both of us experiencing pain in our bodies. 

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Yoshiko: June 28th, early evening. I hope you are better. When you asked my pain reason is coming my sadness, I was supposed as I hadn’t thought the reason of my pain is my sadness. I don’t care what is the reason. I would like to heal by myself. I don’t make my story.

Guy: Yes. That is the great path, to not make our story, like what Gautama and Micheal [Stone] and others say. I thought I wasn't making a story. I don't think I am. I think what is happening is that the sadness that I didn't let go when I was young is now coming out. So, not really a story beyond the release of sadness. Not my sadness, the sadness of my experience and the sadness perhaps of my parents and their parents.

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Yoshiko: June 28th, night Then I got out the futon at 6 am. Then I did Simon practice with comfortable. I enjoyed it. But I felt pain and I am tired so much. Hmmm I don’t know why. That tells me don’t hurry and be patient. I don’t understand your childhood sadness isn’t making story. How different between them?

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Guy: Great question. It is possible that my saying 'childhood sadness' is a story. I don't think it is because I hadn't thought that I had sadness in me anymore as we do our yoga. And yet I was crying, and then Jacobo, and then clowns [which are, for me, an epitome of sadness and that I’ve seen thrice in the last two weeks] and hurting.

So, my 'story' isn't coming from my mind. My body is releasing it, and I'm not attaching to it. I think that that is the difference: it is coming from my body, not my mind and the body has been given enough space [with our yoga and deeper svadhyaya ] to let go more and more deep hurt (my emphasis).

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Even as I wrote that I wondered, is that simply a rationalisation? Am I being blind to the story-maker that puts sadness into my arms as pain, if that is what is happening? Or have I limited ‘story’ to be simply what my mind creates? I remember reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés write, paraphrased, that the scars of our bodies express the stories of our lives and are to be worn and shown with a pride of the accomplishment of living and of being alive. (I think that was in Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother's Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul. I don’t have the book with me to confirm.)

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Our body as story?

In a nice small synchronicity Janice similarly asked a ‘my’ story question ‘Why did you first experience gout?’ Gout has been an intermittent presence in my life since I was 25 or so. Yet I haven’t actually asked that question. And even the thought of that as a possible question fell away when I had a meditation experience during an intensive in which I met and talked to my gout. And walked her out the door of my four-square house. (I’ll look to address Janice’s question in the future.)

Claude, you may find my experience of gout interesting because I know that you also experienced it from time-to-time. My vague understanding or remembrance of your experience was that for you it was largely associated with, at least consciously, an overindulgence in certain foods. And then that sidesteps the question of why the overindulgence, of course! Endless helixes.

And, while researching for ‘sadness’ I was directed to Michael Stone’s Buddhist exploration of the Lotus Sutra 15: Emptiness and the Necessary Obstacle. That was an out of the blues of sadness exploration because in it Stone talks about his father. I had forgotten that Stone talked about his father in a podcast. Yoshiko reminded me that Stone had described his father as having been traumatised as a Jew in the Second World War and had shut himself away from God and all people. He became very bitter and lonely as he grew older.

The Writing on my Father’s Hand by Dead Can Dance

Father

The self doesn’t exist independently, it doesn’t exist separately from what is happening. We’re all coming into being, coming into being, coming into being, together. Except for my dad. Consciousness is always a uniting, a meeting. But my delusion, the fires of my delusion attaches itself to stories. We attach ourselves to stories, we grip them, and our grip creates a view, so it’s as if I’m all the way over here, separate. I’m completely separate from you. I’m completely different. I’m not the floor, I’m not even floor-like, there’s no part of me that creaks. I’m not like the floor and there are many other things I’m not like, and out of those not likings I am creating the story of myself. And the thing, the quality, the person I’m most not like is my dad. Sorry, dad.

I like to say the word ‘father’ because he’s 18,000 feet tall — dad never fully embraced the metric system — and I don’t know if you’ve been following the reports of star showers from what was thought to be empty space in the galaxies beyond galaxies? But that’s just my dad, combing out the stardust. I like to make him really big so I can [make] myself really small, call it a parody of interdependence. Of course, I don’t stop there. Can’t get too much of a bad thing, at least not in my family. So I turn myself into a projector, and I lay his face down on people that I meet, even on this creaking floor here, when it seems like it’s too much. So reliable, so hard and fixed and unchanging. I’ll never be as reliable as this floor. I’ll never be as good as this floor. I’ll never measure up to this father of a floor, let’s face it, I’m only going to let this floor down, I can already see the floorboards curling away from me in disappointment (my emphasis).

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Small? Is that All? 

I didn’t see that coming! I read Stone’s essay a couple of weeks ago, and there was a resonance in my unconscious that flagged this to attend. I did not see how pointedly this was talking to my pain, which I’m now seeing was your pain that I took into my bodily self that I have struggled to keep imprisoned within smallness.

Nor did I see how that connects with the following: I had become aware, after about fifteen or maybe twenty years into my long term relationship, that I had become you! I remember laughing at and/or with the shock of it, of yet another ‘never’ coming to pass. At the time it hit me, like a ton of bricks, that I had taken on several, perhaps even many, characteristics and attitudes that had re-embodied you within me, or at least my perception of you blurry as it was behind that haze of smoke and matriarchal condescension and misandrist anger.

Now my memory is fuzzy about the timing of that awareness, especially around that time in my life. That was when as I was still diligently practicing Gerald Jampolsky and Louise Hay mantras to heal those unseen wounds while reading the complete works of C.G. Jung.

At the time that glimpse of awareness provided some feeling of liberation because I recognised the truth of that. At an intellectual level at least, and that recognition began the process of disentangling myself from being my ‘partner’s’ helpful door mat who was barely tolerable as chauffeur and buyer of groceries. As was once described somewhere, I was the unwanted butler who had barely enough value to be worthy of carrying the luggage.

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Along With Small Comes Lack of Worthiness

Wow! Jacobo’s intuition is so powerful and on point! In my session with him on Thursday, as mentioned briefly in my last letter to you,

Dear Claude:

the mantra Jacobo gave to me to evoke during part of the session was ‘I am worthy!’ When he suggested it I was surprised because, like before and just mentioned, I had spent many hours doing that very mantra and similar.

And he added ‘In what way are you worthy?’

Worthy or Unworthy Tree? Ajijic, Jalisco Mexíco; The Trees by Rush

I have asked this question to some of my close friends, especially when they drop the deserve word. ‘Deservedness is a way we separate from other people in life. We don’t say to that tree, it deserves to be alive, or it deserves to be killed and turned into furniture and firewood.’ I am as worthy of being alive as any tree. I, like the tree or insect or animal, am an expression of the manifest physical world. And that is true of all of us. ‘I am as worthy of life as the tree on the street corner, or in the forest’ was my answer, paraphrased, to Jacobo. (It was walking from the second session with Jacobo that I came to the tree growing out of the wall, above.)

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What about Love?

During the second session with Jacobo he gave me the mantra ‘I am loved’. At the time that also surprised me for the same reasons the worthiness mantra surprised me in the first session. And I repeated ‘I am loved’ many times during that part of the session. And yet… 

Wow! As I wrote that it hit me that you were not loved. And I didn’t see that you weren’t loved until now as I wrote this. On several occasions I’ve described to others the open contempt you received from your wife in some part because you weren’t good with your hands like her brothers and father were; and the contempt from your mother who openly called you worthless in front of her grandchildren by praising your wife for her forbearance in putting up with your uselessness. 

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Silence is the Small Fools’ Golden

And your silence during it all. And, of course, your absence physically and, more importantly, emotionally. And the very few and brutally violent outbursts of anger, just to keep us on our best walking on egg shell toes.

Silent, absent, disembodied. Hmmm. That most certainly describes me and much of my life. For example, it was at the end of a three day silence intensive in 2017 that I heard my voice for the first time. Before that I heard my words, but not my voice. When I heard it — me? — it was like listening to a cassette recording with some kind of sound enhancement turned on.

And why wouldn’t I have an actual voice, with having constrained myself from all freedom of expression for forty years of being a ‘perfect’ unworthy doormat aching for any alms of being seen as worthy. And that that bit of worthiness would be a step towards, perhaps, being loved.

My friend Ricardo asked me some good questions about my last letter to you. He was particularly interested in my crying. His intuition is so great because his questions helped me to see way more clearly beyond trauma and beyond sadness, while powerfully connecting me to the mantra Jacobo gave me last week, ‘I am worthy’. 

I started bawling my eyes out at the precise moment the homonymously named Vietnam vet, Claude, declined the monk’s robes that Thich Nhat Hahn had extended to him because Claude did not feel worthy to be a human let alone a Buddhist monk.

I was crying because the writing was telling me that my body has been living a Maya truth, that I have no value on the earth in my life. And now I know that much of that lack was my body having taken into itself the truth that this was your experience too. 

I cried because I hadn’t loved you.

How did Jacobo know this deep deep truth resting in the bones muscles and fascia? And how did these various experiences synchronise themselves perfectly in time for me to discover that the story of my pain and sadness was more accurately the suffering of my father moving itself into and out of my body with the help of Jacobo and writing.

And so, Claude, my father, I apologise for all the ways that I hurt you. Please forgive me. Thank you for listening. I love you. Amen, namaste, shanti, shanti, shantihi. (For more on the power of the Ho’oponopono process of complete personal responsibility, see The Power Of Wholeness And Healing: Ho'oponopono.)

And when will I experience the nothingness of pain? Ah, Jacobo, do you have that kind of magic in your hands to help me along the path?

And the answer is, of course, now. There is no other time, because this is where the body is, it cannot be any other place or time. Where the body is, the breath finds its way there, too.

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