Sitting with absence?
One of the most precious gifts we have is the ability to perceive time, space and that we have a place within it, and if it is an illusion is the most spectacular show ever created, it is worth appreciating it. It gives us our sense of self, our sense of agency and the knowledge that our actions have effects, that we can be the cause of change. However like any gift it has a cost, we can feel a longing for and desire for something that no longer exists, except in our perception, what we remember, we are able to miss and as the only certainty is change, and the cost of love is its absence, like every hero, every person who chooses to engage in life, it comes with a bitter-sweet cost of loss and absence.
Absence is a built-in feature of life, and the downside of cause and effect, we are given life, something that we never asked for and which is completely indifferent to our consent. The decision has already been taken whether you are taking the ride or not. We are locked into a roller-coaster that has no rests, time-outs or even height restriction, though it might be more accurate to say we have been pushed out of plane and we are falling without parachute. It is entirely your right to scream in horror (most of his engage in a primal scream for the first several years of our lives), you can complain, moan, refused to participate, be angry, sad or even grieve for your own loss of life, however not a single one of these makes a difference to anyone but yourself.
You have the benefit and cost of taking a single point of view on all the drama that is involved in life. Whichever viewpoint you take you will be correct, you can view your life as a tragedy or a heroic drama, they are often exactly the same story except with a different attitude and better editing, because when your Princess Charming rescues you and we have the happy ending, it is cutting the story short. It is worth
remembering that there are only ever time-limited happy ends, you get forty or so years of happiness, then every life ends in a little tragedy, loss and very personal drama. That is why it is so important to enjoy the telling rather than the results, as the result is exactly the same in every life, you only get to change the atmosphere of the story, it is up to you whether it is a tragedy or a comedy.
Every moment that you cannot sit with absence, is one that is spent in pain with suffering, it is a companion that is only ever chosen. It is the vampire that you have to invite over the threshold into your house, and it is not a charming guest, it does not flatter or enjoy a cup of tea with you, instead it sucks the joy of life out of your heart. And our hearts are such precious thing, they light up with joy when you feed them the fuel of your awareness, you are prepared to face the world as it is, rather than playing a sad commentary of suffering over your experiences, your experience is just the raw sensate of what is actually happening in your sensory world.
That is the actual sensations you are having in your six senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and thoughts (which includes your feelings and emotions), the plain data is not happy or sad, it is neutral, informative, it is only when it goes through the mind that it picks up emotional resonance. It is only your sense of self that makes it personal, and what is happening to you is undeniably personal, but to who?
The strange thing is, the who to which what is happening is happening, is not really you, that is not to say there is not a who, if you were to ask who you are now plenty of labels to go around. However a label is not really you, the you is the one who asked the questions and listens to the answers, it is the observer, the watcher of the ego who is operating as a separate human in a world of separate humans. As there seems to be plenty of other humans wandering around the place thinking that they are individual humans, it seems natural to assume that we are also a human as everyone else in so convinced of the fact that they are real.
Though it might be more accurate to say that we have all turned up to a masquerade party and have had collective amnesia and now think that the masks we are wearing are actually who we are. All of which clearly sounds like insanity and delusion, except for the irritating fact that the old, wise and experienced human beings who have spent a lifetime sitting with the absence of normal human stimulation and drama. Those
irritating monks who have sat in meditation for tens of thousands of hours, all report a very consistent and universally accepted experience of enlightenment where there are three characteristics of reality that are true there is always impermanence, suffering, and no-self. They also report that enlightenment is the ability to sit with that absence.
Whilst most of us have no desire to sit for 10,000 hours with it, it is useful to have the roadmap of knowing where some people travel to and what the destinations like, just so that we know that moving closer to it will probably make us happier and when we move further away from it we are probably going to be sadder. That is if we act in alignment with reality it is probably a positive idea, so when Stoics ask what am I in control of, it reflects the underlying reality of life, that there is really an I that is in control of anything, and what we have the most control over is how our ego operates in the real physical world. That there is a game that is being played between those egos, and the only thing we are really in control of is how we play that game, what kind of player we want to be and how much we suffer whilst playing, and the ability to sit with absence simply makes you into a better player, because absence is going to find its way into every life, so it turns out being at ease with it is a crucial part of playing the game. When you sit with absence, the game is to sit without suffering and with elegance and skilfulness in the presence of that absence.
