Shallow Love

Last night we had some friends over for dinner. It was really great seeing them and getting to talk with them. They left around 815 or so–my wife and I and I went upstairs around 915, I got in the bedroom first. My best friend’s father had died 6 days ago and I was very sad, so I put in my headphones and started listening to a passage in “zen mind, beginner’s mind” about the waterfall at Yosemite National Park.

It’s incredibly peaceful to listen to. In the middle of it, my wife came up and flipped on the lights. She was trying to get my attention, I shook my head as if I didn’t want to engage, and climbed into bed. She tried flipping the lights on and off, and I kept engaged with the book. She tried coming up and rubbing my nipple with her hand, and I kept engaged with the book. At one point, she took my earbud out and said in my ear something to the effect of “this is why our relationship is so bad.”

The next morning, after briefly cuddling, she remembered what happened the night before, and asked me why I didn’t respond to her. I said “I was feeling sad about my friend’s dad dying, and there’s a passage in this book I’ve read that is really peaceful. I felt I needed to listen to it.” She pretty quickly ignored what I said and started telling me I had no right to do that, no right to ignore your wife, etc. etc. She asked me something, and I responded with, “honestly dude, I don’t really care.” Then I got out of bed. She kept talking, at one point I said “well, it sounds like you have it all figured out” and I mentioned that she was making this all about herself. She got more upset at this. I went downstairs and started my day. Honestly, I was pretty detached from it all—-there was some residue of longing, but I pretty quickly realized how fruitless it was.

There are a couple of thoughts that have been going through my head about this. The first is one that I recently wrote about, and that’s the idea of being “chained” to something. Whereby you feel pulled by some strong emotion to act out of a habituated, conditioned response. In the past, my wife getting upset or throwing her own version of a temper tantrum would cause me to respond in kind—I was letting her lead where things were going, and principally I was letting my mind tell me what to do. The mind is a beautiful servant and a bad master, but I had lost this fundamental understanding a long time ago. The chains of conditioning are horrible–it’s very much like being in a prison, where the thing you know you’re supposed to do and the thing you know that is good for you is also the thing you don’t do. Fighting with her and playing the good/bad or right/wrong game is toxic.

Two quotes come to mind about this: “To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind” and “all one’s effort becomes concentrated on the study of the complex means of the ‘good.’”

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is what our “love” really is. And one correct answer is that it’s incredibly shallow. Our “love” has turned into a measuring and weighing game, whereby each of our monkey minds are trying to figure out what we can get out of the other person, what we can make them do or make them be, and how we can control them. This is what happened to my parents, and at one point in my life I had consciously decided I wanted nothing to do with it. And now I see that “the effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence. Making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.” I let fear and my lower self lead the way, and as a result I find myself where I am today.

At some point in the last few days, either all at once or dramatically—I don’t remember which—it became clear to me that all of these things were true: our love is conditioned, and I’m chained to so many things that do and don’t involve my wife. It’s like a host in Westworld waking up and seeing the loops that they’re caught in, and realizing that the life they thought they had was a delusion and a lie. I thought about my interactions with my wife, and determined that I was discontent with her probably 95% of the time. So all this striving I was doing to control her, and trying to make her happy, was yielding a pretty weak ass return on investment.

When she gets upset, one way to look at it is that she believes her getting upset will change you, or pull your strings. Your mind does the same thing, as does any manifestation in the world: it tries to pull your strings. Your job is to ignore the strings. Don’t look at the strings, and say “don’t pull my strings,” either to yourself or to someone else. Let them try to pull your strings as much as they like, and let your mind try to pull your strings as much as it likes. Instead of reacting to the string pulling that the outside world is trying to do, concentrate on your breathing, and lose yourself in your fundamental nature.

To do this well means to practice. First, it means practicing it alone, in a quiet place, a few times per day. It means listening to and reading books on zen, the Tao, and concentrating on where you are in this present moment with all the will you can muster. As time goes on, concentrate on resuming your fundamental nature throughout the day, count your breathing while you cook in the kitchen or while you are at work. Practice object consciousness—when your mind is spinning and running, let it run, and just watch it. Observe it, and with enough time, you will find more moments throughout your life where you instantly recognize that those thoughts are not you, and let them go.

This is not a state to reach, it’s an existence to experience. You don’t “get” here, you practice it in this moment. The moment you start looking at it as a place to get to, or even worse as a place you’re already at, you lose your way and you will quickly be back arguing over puppet strings. Just to stay focused in the present moment is your way.