McDonalds Memo - Suffering

 I mentioned somewhere another forum I am on, one for Mental Health. To be honest, the most welcoming and supportive community I have experienced. 

Anyway, just posted this and I will share it here, untouched (I'm exchanging posts with another who has his own problems)

Hello again. I find you - or at least, your posts - more primal than I am capable of. I approach most things via a dustbin mind full of quotes from books, from others. I am always afraid of treading on toes, of misunderstanding. So I apologise if I miss the mark. Trying to make connection, words, sometimes not communion - they can miss the mark and only invite confusion and discord.

You posted:- "The question seems to mistake mindfulness with mindlessness" and that clicked as a starting point, at least for me. It brings me back to the "contest" held in zen, around the 7th century, when the zen community in China were seeking the next "patriach" to hand on the banner.

People were asked to write a verse/poem, explaining/expounding zen/insight.

One wrote:-

The body is the bodhi tree.
The mind is like a bright mirror's stand.
At all times we must strive to polish it
and must not let dust collect.

This understanding failed. The "winner" was Hui Neng (apparently by some accounts a novice with no training) who wrote:-

Bodhi originally has no tree.
The mirror has no stand.
The Buddha-nature is always clear and pure.
Where is there room for dust?

All this can simply be academic, of no interest. Yet we are what we understand and there is a vast difference between them. As I see it, the first betrays this world, seeks to wash it away, this to reveal another, better place. Much like most religion with its promises of a life beyond the grave, with promises of compensation for the sufferings of this one, rewards for those who have persevered, "believed"! and often, punishment for others who have believed falsely.

.My daughter actually works with all sorts (not a saint!) and says - as I do - that we are all "special needs", that we need not know what is "wrong" with any child, we must simply treat them for the child that they are. Now she has two of her own to test the theory! Often another matter entirely! Just recently she has hit some rough patches. One guy, just 29, with cerebral palsy, who she has known for about twenty years, died suddenly after suffering a fit. I knew him vaguely, from way back, prior to his teens. My daughter had been with him, on and off, through the Music Man Project and other such things. She tells us the story - when she is still able to laugh - of a trip he was taken on to Disneyworld Florida, of when the swimming pool heating had broken down. But this guy loved the water, offering more freedom of movement, and he insisted on taking a dip. Put in he cried out:- "Cor, its f*****g cold!" which made everyone burst out laughing. Anyway, my daughter was devasted by his death, and then just a day or so ago a lady she works with told her that her daughter - with her own two children - had taken her own life. Sometimes it all gets too much.

But mindlessness, empty minds. As I see it, clearing the mind, washing it clean, is not the way to go. It seeks to get rid of suffering rather than "redeeming" it. It betrays our past, rather than giving it value. The Jewish Faith has it that without the past there is no redemption. I'm much more conversant now with the Dharma, but enough for now. I tend to sit myself down in McDonalds and start waffling away. To me, harmless stuff, certainly not intended to offend or confront, more almost talking to myself, a search perhaps for clarification.

All the best with your own challenges.

Thank you