Superglue

Mortal Fusion

This mortal fusion of the spirit with the flesh Superglue — buckets

It’s more than just a faint-hearted adhesive like the glue-experiment-gone-wrong that (when viewed from a different angle) also went right and became what made Post-It notes stick (and as easily unstick) from most surfaces. No, it’s not a temporary glue of the Post-It kind that fastens the spirit to (or in) the body — that accomplishes the impossible fusing of the nothing to the something, of the soul to the flesh.

While admittedly temporary, and logic certainly agrees, for it dissolves along with the body when the body dies and gives itself up to the worm population, and so lets the spirit go; still, while alive so to speak, this glue is the glueiest of all glues, the king of glues, the undisputed champion of glues.

On paper, though, it should not be like this. Not at all: for how can a nothing (with no surfaces to glue down, with no limbs to shackle) be trapped by a something? On paper, this makes absolutely no sense. Yet. Yet.

Here we sit, immured it seems, in a brain, looking out through eyes, listening through ears, and eating — eating, for heaven’s sake.

Most days we seem to enjoy, or at least not mind, this captivity; foundationally, though, we don’t. The word the Buddha used was dukkha, which most of the time is translated as “suffering”. However, dukkha is more encompassing and far more nuanced (and less drastic) than that: I think “unsatisfactory” would be a better (if more cumbersome) word — pleasures are all too fleeting and pains, while they too eventually go are usually in far less of a hurry about it — and so tend to linger. That is dukkha.

We rarely get what we want and often get what we do not want. That is dukkha. The pleasure of five minutes ago is now gone, and shows no signs of returning. That is dukkha. You’re run out of cigarettes. That is dukkha. Modern divorce rates are hovering around or even over the fifty-percent mark. That is a wide and easily detectable footprint of dukkha. Birth is never pleasant, not for the baby not for the mother. That is dukkha. Death, they say, is not so pleasant either. That is dukkha. Ware and tear is dukkha. Fear is dukkha. Illness is dukkha. The Corona Virus is dukkha. Jealousy is dukkha. Impatience is dukkha. Listings that go on and on are dukkha.

Life, some say, is a game.

Life, I would like to add, would be a game if you were allowed to leave. My guess is that the few who can, leave laughing.

Meditation, however, in my experience, softens the glue. Drop by less adhesive drop. Drop by less adhesive drop.

Meditate long and well enough and, eventually, the body (without dying) will let go.

I am convinced of that.

© Wolfstuff