How to Stay Human in a F*cked Up World by Tim Desmond

Author:Tim Desmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

THE CLOUD IN YOUR TEA

In Buddhism, we learn about the teaching of nonself. It’s complicated, subtle, and really easy to misunderstand. However, when you apply it correctly, the result is that you feel freer, more connected, and more fully alive. Maybe most important, at least in terms of staying human in a fucked-up world, it’s a teaching that can help you not to feel ashamed of your suffering or unskillfulness, and it can help you let go of your attachment (or aversion?) to praise.

Everything you hate about yourself isn’t you, so don’t worry about it. Everything you love about yourself isn’t you, so don’t feel too proud. They’re all nonself elements. They’re transmissions from past generations. They’re entirely made out of things that aren’t you. You don’t even exist, at least not in the way you usually think.

Here’s how the practice of nonself works: we’ll choose something and then apply a special kind of analysis. We’ll start with tea and then progress to human beings.

Pour yourself a cup of tea and hold it in your hands. Take a moment to look at it. Let your body and mind relax. Can you see that there’s a cloud floating in your cup? Look deeply.

Where did this water come from? From your tap. Farther back, from a reservoir. And before the reservoir, it was rain. Before that, it was a cloud in the sky. Each molecule of H2O in your cup has been H20 for millions of years and longer. It has been part of every ocean and floated as vapor above every continent. It’s been the blood of countless animals. For the moment, it’s your tea. Soon it will be your blood. Before long, it’ll continue its journey and know every ocean again. Can you see that?

You might believe this tea used to be a cloud, but it isn’t anymore. That’s the idea I want to deconstruct now. I want to help you see that the cloud isn’t gone. In our normal way of thinking, which Buddhists call sakkaya ditthi (self view, as opposed to nonself view), every object has a separate self. For example, I am separate from you, and the table is separate from the floor. In this view, each object exists independently of everything else. It has its own separate self. However, I want you to look at the tea differently.

The existence of the tea in your cup is not independent. It depends on many factors. If the cloud hadn’t existed, this tea couldn’t exist. Since the tea’s existence is dependent on the cloud’s, they can’t be truly separate, and the cloud is not really gone. More precisely, the tea is the continuation of the cloud. The cloud is called a nonself element, and the tea is made of many such elements. Without the farmers and truckers who grew and brought your tea leaves (and all their ancestors), the tea wouldn’t be here. Its heat came from natural gas in your stove, which comes from prehistoric plankton that absorbed heat and light from the sun.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.