Insufficiently Disillusioned

Held Hostage by Pleasure

Those who chase pleasures are insufficiently disillusioned with them

While I strongly disagree with Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) — who ridiculed anyone so dumb as to believe that all you had to do to bail out of here (for Nirvana) is to stop thinking, to master your thoughts, something I quite firmly believe will in fact bail you out — this selfsame man made a beautiful point about pleasures (illusion) and their disillusion.

If you still chase the pleasures of your senses, he said, you are as yet insufficiently disillusioned with them, inferring, of course, that the sensual pleasures you chase are indeed, ultimately, pure, misleading illusion.

In this rather tranquil autumn of my life, I am happy to report that I have indeed grown sufficiently disillusioned with many of those illusory pleasures that anchor you in Samsara, both for the now and for the many tomorrows.

For I have stopped chasing them.

To wit, although physical age has definitely lent me a much-appreciated hand with this, I have finally managed to elude the sticky clutches of sex.

Also, it has been years since I as much as tasted alcohol and I haven’t smoked tobacco since the mid-1980s.

As for clothes and such finery, my motto is and forever shall be “comfort before style” as evidenced by a wardrobe filled with small pack of one-size-too-large sweatsuits. All both warm and comfortable. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Car-wise, I have no desire to “upgrade” or “newgrade”, I am staying true to my 2008 Toyota Yaris (which I still think of as “new”). These days, though, she is little more than a glorified shopping cart but seems happy in that role. No complaints.

My drug of choice over the years has been “approval”, something I would go to some lengths to acquire. All to stroke and self-confirm my precious (though fragile, of course) ego.

Moving up to and settling in my current little California town just south of the Oregon border and now living the life of a hermit has worked like a very efficient approval-rehab and I’m finally over worrying about that “they” are thinking about me. In fact, I no longer even care what I think about me. Cool shades of equanimity, that.

There were times in my life when music (just like for the wood elves in Tolkien’s tales) was as important to me as food. Though music is still important to me, I am no longer obsessed with it. Again, to a degree, I have physical age to thank for this since my hearing is slowly but quite definitely fading, taking with it some of the finer/higher frequency pleasures of both classical and popular music.

One curious thing about the down-shifting frequency response of my aging ears is that I now discover basslines in some songs that I never heard before — since in the past they were out-muscled by, say, the lead guitar or the organ or the strings whose higher frequencies have now toned down a bit letting the basslines step up front and center. Lamentable? Yes, to a degree. Interesting though. Very much so.

I read a lot. Mostly for illumination (Buddhism in the main) but also for pleasure at times. Twenty years ago most of what I read was indeed for pleasure. These days, even though I have access to thousands of mystery and drama titles via electronic library lending (Kindle books) I find myself disillusioned indeed by those writers I clung to and swore by in the past. I’m thinking Stephen King, Frederick Forsyth, John Grisham, et al., whose words and works now strike me as shallow, of insufficient depth. Instead, I have turned to those who manage to combine a great tale with spiritual exploration — Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy” comes to mind, as do Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings. And those of the enigmatic Cormac McCarthy.

Still, I tend to buy more (Kindle) books than I will ever have time to read (given that time is indeed running out), feeling that by owning them I am on some strange level fulfilled, even if I don’t get around to the reading part. I’m thinking Thomas Pynchon, Gene Wolfe, Paul Auster, and his brilliant wife Siri Hustvedt. Obviously, I am insufficiently disillusioned by the need to possess books. Working on that.

Then there is food. Genetically speaking (i.e., DNA-wise) I come from a family whose conversations rarely make it beyond sentence number four without mentioning food in some form or another, and my body seems to be all too well aware of this.

To combat this (I could see myself ballooning just like some of my close relatives if I didn’t watch myself) I turned vegan in the mid-1980s and I have worked out a good daily food regimen that supplies all nutrients I need and which comes in under budget. I normally stick to this, religiously.

But. But. But. When it comes to food I love to cheat. Still insufficiently disillusioned by taste and such things as the mellow sugar-rush of, say, ice cream, or the spicey allure of cheese-flavored popcorn, or the yellow cheesy heaven of Cheatoes (yes, that’s how you spell it). I am still doing monthly (sometimes weekly) battle with my genes, sometimes winning and (less and less often) sometimes losing. If there is one pleasure I need to cease chasing it is this flavory one, an illusion I need to disillusion myself about, and for real (as they say).

And it is still a battle for my flavory “lettings go” are only partial, and therefore not very convincing, for I don’t believe myself and my decisions and I find my gullet an amazing debater. Outdebating me at times, not at others.

Work in progress.

But in the main, I live by the rule “Simplify, simplify, simplify” and I am the very much happier for it.

© Wolfstuff

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