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 -- By Rocco Lo Bosco, Author of Buddha Wept When we bring a quiet and clear mind to bear upon our everyday experiences, two things become eminently clear: the interrelationship of all phenomena and the non-existence of permanent identity. Look around you right now. You experience various objects, people and conditions in accordance to your intent. Though the world appears as a shifting set of distinct objects and entities enclosed in borders of matter and flesh, it is truly grounded in your experience. You are inextricably interrelated to the phenomena which itself displays a continual process of interrelationship. Each thing, person, and condition depends on everything else for its existence. There is no object without support, no person without other people, no foreground without a background, no world without a self. Experience carries the whole as its own and carves it into the phenomena we experience. Being fixed to the objects, persons and conditions, we tend to ignore the radical intimacy that unites us with everything we experience, our lived world comprised of our daily encounters with others. Therefore, we mistakenly attribute permanent identity to objects, people and conditions despite the obvious fact that they are continually changing as are we. My car, my house, my sister, my husband, my wife, my brother, my country, etc.— these are the expressions that may carry within them the implicit hope of permanence, the wish for fixed identity. We do not see what is; we see through the screen of our fear, wanting permanence and absolute security in the flux of our lives. Yet, what we would like to see is not there, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot capture the world in a false idea of what it should be. So there is anger, frustration, conflict, violence, bitterness and all the rest. How ironic: that this precious moment, the whole of what one has with nothing further guaranteed, is lost to fear. All things and selves are impermanent and deeply interrelated. In our hearts we know that. Yet, we repress this knowledge, and so become desperately attached to our idea of others and ourselves. This attachment causes us much suffering, and often we mistreat others because of it.. We become angry and frightened when things, people and situations change for the worse. We blame others for this and often behave with malice when someone or something disappoints us. If we recognized impermanence and interrelationship, we would treat our encounters with care and compassion. Why? Because we would clearly see that the encounter—good or bad—is all we really ever have. The encounter is all our life is, all of what the world is, and because we care about our life, we care about the encounter. |
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 "Seeing the tender vulnerability of the world we experience, we become naturally compassionate, forgiving and helpful. We clearly realize that in doing injury to another we are instantly doing injury to ourselves." About the Author Rocco Lo Bosco is a massage therapist, and, along with his wife Regina, the co-director of The Yoga Darshana Center in Babylon, Long Island, NY. The Lo Boscos studied Yoga for over twenty years with the recently deceased Gurani Anjali, a master from Calcutta. Lo Bosco is the author of Buddha Wept, a novel which examines the life of a Cambodian Mystic who with her family endures Pol Pol's holocaust from 1976-1980; the book ultimately celebrates the transcendent power of the human spirit. Bosco is about to release another novel "99" and he is currently collaborating with a fellow philosopher deeply versed in mathematics and physics on a book, tentatively titled "Undecideable World." Rocco Lo Bosco's stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, among them Maelstrom Review, Another Chicago Press, Alaska Quaterly Review, Blue Unicorn and more. ACROSS A DISTANCE OF KNIVES, his book of poetry, was published by Slough Press in 1982. He served as editor for the Moksha Journal from 1987 to 2000. Rocco Lo Bosco may be contacted at yogadarshanacntr@aol.com. 
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Selves and things are not the names or the descriptions we give them. The names and descriptions remain, but the selves and objects continually change. Selves and things are themselves derivative; they are comprised of processes and relationships. Indeed, they have their experiential origin in our ability to recognize patterns in the flux of our experience. A thing in itself does not exist. Every single thing is more deeply a process of change. Again, we are afraid to face this simple truth because it brings us to the edge of the unknown, the groundless abyss underlying the shimmering creation of the world. My car, my wife, my grandfather, my house, my self— radically, these things do not exist in distinction nor could they. Treating them as if they do is an error; it is ignorance. It is a shock to recognize this, to oppose our ignorance; but then comes the liberation from being bound to an illusion. As we live our life through the error of ignorance, we seek satisfaction, fulfillment, stability and peace in a self-world that remains inherently dissatisfying, lacking, unstable and war-like. Through this error we add to our woes and the woes of the world. We know in our hearts that everything is changing, but we live on as if everything will continue forever and some day satisfaction will be gained. We will finally get something out of life, something real, something just for ourselves. Yet, in our hearts we know this will never happen. Still, we persist and deepen the dissatisfaction we feel. If we were to face this simple truth—that there is no stable, unchanging satisfaction in the realm of experience-—our hearts would open to the possibility of care. We would then give to the other, give to the situation. We would see that, in fact, care is the only sane response to being human. Seeing the tender vulnerability of the world we experience, we become naturally compassionate, forgiving and helpful. We clearly realize that in doing injury to another we are instantly doing injury to ourselves. Violence and sorrow will be the natural outcome of a compulsive investment in a lie. But with the truth will come freedom. This is why so many sages have said that the practice of non-violence is the practice of truth. Such a practice is merely the natural outcome of clear looking. Dare we look clearly? |
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