The Art of Forgetting

First, for those of you interested in my personal life (like Hogen :-): the manhunt is over. Not because we've found anyone, but because through the process of hunting, we've realized yet again that we really need to find ourself first. Thus, we are OFFICIALLY NOT LOOKING FOR RELATIONSHIP. We'd contemplate a vow of celibacy, but that gives the whole thing too much importance.

We are, in other words, Forgetting About It.

Forgetting is a really wonderful practice. If you accept (and through experience, confirm) the notion that all things arise, exist, and disappear, then everything, including mental proclivities, is a candidate for disappearance.

Example: Bizarre self-centered anxiety masquerading as sensitivity? It came from somewhere, maybe even before this birth. Exactly where it came from is unimportant; it came about in dependence on conditions, and it can go away. Ditto for the pervasive sense that one is incomplete without a man/woman in one's life. That one must save the world. And so forth.

So everything, every obsession about every guy who's caught my eye (or more), is available for cessation.

There are two details that keep this from being easy. (If it were too simple, we'd be doing it already!)

One is that, once the thing is arisen, it does have its natural course. Trying to kill something before its time only adds energy to the phenomenon. Once arisen, it has to exist before it can disappear.

So when it dies, let it die. That's the second detail. Things cease only if we let them. If we focus on something and continually give energy to it, it flowers into birth again and again. A habit of mind is born; maybe it even takes root so deeply as to become an aspect of identity. ["I am a sweetie-pie. I've got to make them love me."]

At the monastery last weekend, I fell into conversation around whether or not the current residents miss other long-term folks who recently departed. Again and again, when this question has come up--after people very integral to the community have left--the answer has always been the same. "They're just gone. It's like they were never here." You can be around for years, be integral to the place--but when you're gone, you're gone.

I'd like to allow life to be like that. Letting it vanish without a trace, so that something entirely new has room to grow, bloom, and compost.