The Ocean of Pain

Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon 1953, detail

I became enlightened for a brief time today and it really, really sucked. So I stopped doing that.

Forgive me Lord, you offered me your cross today and I was unready for it.

A little background: some people drink, other people shoot smack or watch porn, I smoke cigarettes. Just like them, I smoke so that I am not aware of the real world. So that I am insulated from it. So that the pain stops, for a time.

I had started an experiment, based on my last blog post. The experiment was, that once I truly understand the basis of my smoking I would be able to defeat it and the way to uproot the sin of smoking was to truly understand it and understand the illusions upon which that behavior is based. I became aware that I smoked in order to deaden my real feelings, in order to become numb. And so I sought to embrace and understand my true feelings, my real state of awareness.

This, as it turns out, was a little too much and so early in the morning I set out on the mighty BattleSchwinn (my cargo tricycle) to go to the store and get some smokes. Because I was starting to have some real issues coping. I went into my favorite donut store first to pick up a couple eclairs and at this hour it was completely packed full of people seeking oblivion in the form of beautiful sweet donuts. A man was at the counter ordering enough donuts to provide breakfast for a battalion of U.S. Marines. And I thought to myself, all these folks are here for the same thing. Sweet sweet donut oblivion. You eat that fucking eclair or that chocolate glazed, and for that moment (and these folks make great donuts too) there is nothing wrong with the world. Cigarettes, donuts, liquor, smack, lust, greed, it's all the same.

And we all, in our desperation for oblivion, go about madly bumping into each other and causing each other pain as we seek our own particular way to assuage the pain of existence. For some pain is assuaged by power, or violence, or the consumption of luxury items, or by looking down on others - lust greed lying theft murder - any of the varieties of sin in this world. This is the most essential fact in existence, and in this the Buddha was on to something. We all seek to dull the pain of consciousness. And for a time I was really conscious, and it really sucked badly.

I knew that I could judge no one, we were all the same. Give a man enough consciousness, and he would stab his own grandmother with a rusty AIDS needle to make it stop. I bought my cigarettes and biked back, and as I got back in the door it really started flooding in. Congratulations, you are enlightened. You now understand the true state of the world. And all you want to do is make it stop.

This is the cross Jesus was offering me, to know. To feel the cry of every starving baby in the world echo in your soul. To feel the promise of new life get sucked out to a cold death in the abortion clinic. To feel every poor junkie blotting himself out in an alley, their heartbeat still, their breath leave, their bodies grow cold. I felt I could feel all of it, the true condition of humanity in the world. And I couldn't bear it. So I lit up, and for the first time in my life I was truly aware of the numbness spreading within me with every inhale. The blessed, cursed, terrible numbness.

For the first time in my life, I was truly aware of why I smoke.

Now what do I do? I cannot go back nor forward. I can't really embrace that, that awareness, nor can I ever forget it. So as always, I guess I work my way forward as best I can.