Whether self-imposed or not, suffering's reduction involves knowing the score. There are lessons in both aversion and attraction. Learning them means "setting our faces like flint" amidst the things that cause aversion responses, and intuiting when to let go of the things that cause attraction responses. This is as simple as "expecting work to suck, and being unsurprised when it does." It's as simple as "applying some gentle force in the service of leaving office conflict at the office." It's as simple as saying "I want the chocolate cake, but I don't want what eating it will cost me." Gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride don't manufacture control or security. Self-pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment and self-aggrandizement all take a nervous toll in anxiety that exceeds the temporary highs they afford. It's trite but true: wisdom is learning to breathe, listen and feel until these forms of self-harm recede from our attention, until we recover the intent to be here, now, just as it is and just as we are.
Christ healed the demoniac. Despite Legion's great desire to join the Apostles on the boat, he was told to go home and speak gratefully to his family and friends. In other words, he was rejected by the one who healed him, then invited to act deliberately only on the nobler half of his emotional response. More than causing gratitude, this would initially cause grief. As in all the miracles where Jesus either does nothing or tells someone to go away, both the grief and the distance are a mercy. Shadow work throws practitioners back on themselves, purifies ego, craving and attachment. Divinization is a strong catechesis for the self, offering "Christ's real presence in humility" as a grounding influence. These days, there are many people seeing God and their own ugliness--but Jesus' methods teach the lesson of Naaman the Syrian: afflicted with leprosy, Naaman was told to wash in the Jordan seven times--something entirely unglamorous. His servant reminds him: if he'd been told to do something heroic, he'd have done it. It's a sign of pride and vanity to balk when purification's a matter of bearing daily unpleasantries. Jesus says "do what's normal repetitively" and leaves us scandalized by our own boredom.
Legion would have known, viscerally, why waiting is important. The question is "is the one in need the same as the one receiving?" The Teacher said "blessed are you who are weeping now, for you shall laugh." Laughter and weeping deal with the same bodily sensations--the same unremitting tensions. When "letting go of self" happens before the disgust response ceases--when there's an energetic, emotional or perspective shift within the sensation--laughter is the result. The Teacher said "blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled." When a Christian hears "later," the secret's that equanimity and kenosis must come first. Equanimity, because pain and pleasure are just sensations, and kenosis, because emptiness will not abide being pried open by the willful energy of self. Emptiness only opens to those who have become the nothing they are seeking.
So many stories depict the tensions commending our spirits into the Father's apparent absence and coming to oneness. Legion is like "the adulterous woman" without the crowd--whether true or false, the adulterous woman had to sit still amidst accusations. Legion is like Peter James and John who suggested building tents at the Transfiguration, but didn't know what they were saying. In other words, Legion had to learn to sit still in a position of tension. Eventually he'd become quite practiced at this. He would have had to drop the rocks with which he gashed himself. He would have had to install the Father in his mind, the Son in his body, the Spirit in his nervous system to peacefully admit what he didn't know and tolerate the psychosomatic purge. And he would have had to listen to the silence of the tombs where he lived until that silence went, as it were, inside him. After that, clothed and in his right mind, he would have been with Christ alone.
Laughter seems instinctual, but comedians craft sets like zen masters craft koans: "one hand clapping" invites us to intuition instead of intellect, realization instead of reason. Koans yield no answers till egos yield to confusion. Similarly, a good joke walks us into something we're afraid to face, then makes us sit in it. Fear, rendered communal, loses its power. "Punchline" is an interesting label for the end of a joke. In Zen, a bloke walks around the meditation hall with a big stick, administering light blows (first on one shoulder, then the other) to sleepy meditators who request it. Jesus says "when someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer them the other." If we have the cheek to equate a joke with a blow to the face, a tooth loosened by initial witty banter requires only a well timed punchline to be knocked clean out. In such a guts-level confrontation with divine humor: fear, aversion and disgust all shift, and our laughter is the signal we've let go of it.
The first word of the Psalter is "Happy" and, like the Tao Te Ching, the rest of the work is an exposition of that first word. As hard as it is to understand intellectually, sorrow and abandonment and and suffering are all contained in divine happiness. To see all of this in ourselves is to look at the cross and live. The Psalter's first full line is "happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked." A mirthful man can be happy-in-deed, he can work without anxiety, because he's not attached to outcomes. A happy man need not follow the counsel of the wicked. Though it feels tense on an ego level, he'll have learned to wait while the Spirit's energy rises to his heart. See, in the heart, divine energy is called the Spirit of counsel. Practitioners are grounded enough, attentive to subtlety enough, that the "counsel of the wicked"--craving and attachment, in other words--are no longer interesting enough to move compel the body to movement. If attachment is bacon, practitioners are simply too tired to break out the skillet.
We'll be here now when we become everybody and everything. It's not that the wicked are bad, and we ought not follow them. It's that the wicked are within us and, indeed, they are us. The poor we'll always have with us, and the wicked will always have the option to be turds in the cosmic punch bowl. The last trumpet is silence, and it sounds, always, for the just and the wicked alike. When we become nobody, nothing and nowhere, so will they. Glory, glory be!
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