The Trauma of Everyday Life

As I was prone to do with my toast on my retreat, we look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want, and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets. We are attached not only to our possessions and our passions but to our smart phones, our tablets, and our devices, obsessively consuming connection while, in the words of MIT professor Sherry Turkle, “avoiding conversation.” This is another manifestation of the rush to normal that the Buddha warned against. We want to be like everybody else. We don’t want to have to feel dis-ease. We are wary even of the more subtle joys that arise unbidden when we get out of the way of ourselves. As Professor Turkle wrote recently in the
New York Times
, we want to be digitally in touch but often do so at the expense of a deeper conversation with one another and with ourselves. “I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod,” she wrote, “and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices. So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.” 19
    The Buddha would have agreed with Sherry Turkle. In the moment of his childhood memory he looked up from his smart phone and unhooked himself from his obsessive self-preoccupation. He, too, was trying to be like everybody else, or at least like the very best holy man he could imagine. But, lucky for him, he had a spontaneous experience that surprised him. He felt the fear that often provokes a phobic response, but his curiosity protected him. He looked at his fear and it did not make sense. He began a conversation with himself that continued for the next several weeks and that culminated in his enlightenment. And he continued that conversation for many more years, with Yasa as one of his first contacts.
    While the Buddha erred on the side of self-denial, not self-indulgence, his core understanding pertained to both. Up until his childhood memory, the Buddha had not recognized that the seeds of liberation were already present within. The spontaneous arising of his memory provoked a recalibration of his psyche. It resolved his conflict over how to relate to himself. If the joy he remembered under the rose-apple tree was not a result of the blind pursuit of pleasure, if it had nothing to do with sensual desires, then it must be intrinsic to the Buddha’s own nature. If it was intrinsic to his nature, then there was no need to turn himself into a stone or a dry, sapless piece of wood, no need to erode the physical and mental substrate of his being. If this joy was a key to enlightenment, then his approach had to change. How could he use this remembered joy to guide him on his path? He could investigate it rather than trying to wipe it out: He could engage it in conversation.
    The first thing the Buddha decided was that if he wanted to sustain his joy, he needed to eat. “It is not possible to attain that pleasure with a body so excessively emaciated. Suppose I ate some solid food—some boiled rice and bread?” 20 At this point in the story, a maiden appeared, a young village woman named, who brought him some porridge or rice pudding called
. The five ascetics who had been cheering him on grew disgusted when they saw him with her. They thought he had gone soft, lost his edge, become a convert to some other guru, the way we might feel when a respected professor suddenly discovers the New Age. “The monk Gotama has become self-indulgent, he has given up the struggle and reverted to luxury,” 21 they cried. They left him and wandered on, searching for new inspiration. In the legends that have grown up in Buddhist culture over the years, this incident has taken on special meaning. As if to drive home the relationship between the Buddha’s childhood memory and the return of his lost mother,is described in one famous text as having been the Buddha’s mother in five hundred previous existences. 22 In another text she is remembered as a village girl who prayed to a local tree deity that she might give birth to a son. When her wish comes true, she brings an offering to the tree, sees the Buddha