How to End Suffering: A Practice for Relationship

In the depths of silence, conventional wisdom seems to dictate, one needs an attachment to another human being to keep oneself grounded, so as not to lose touch with reality.  From my admittedly limited collection of experiences, I have come to conclude that this is not the case.  What works, from my perspective, to keep one truly Grounded in pure, open reality, is non-attachment.  Non-attachment, I should clarify, is not detachment, per se.  It does not shed any bond to which the self is tied.  It merely recognizes there was never any self to begin with.  It uncovers the simple, obvious truth that the personality never existed.  It was always a dream.  You were always as you are and you only needed to WAKE UP to realize this simple, ever-present fact.  It is the human condition to ignore this, to contract from its brilliant, boundless light within the shadows of contraction.  We forever return ourselves to a sea of self-delusion, a sea of samsara, a tumultuous sea of sin.

From an inherently limited sampling that constitutes my own abilities of exploration, this simple realization seems to lie at the deep, mystical core of every major spiritual tradition on the planet.  Attachment leads to suffering.  To attach oneself, to give over into desires and wants and needs which are part of finite wills and finite gains is by its very nature to turn away from Emptiness, to turn away from Over-soul, to turn away from God.  To seek, to need, to want, is the human condition.  The human being is a myth, forever trapped in sin, samsara, suffering.  To accurately speak about non-attachment one must realize that to identify one’s self as the hand which is holding this page, the eyes which overlook it, the mind which interprets it; to say that is ME is the essence of attachment.  What is reading the page?  I am.  What is writing the page?  I am.  That is the essence of non-attachment.  Or so we say.  An actual ability to rest in non-attachment must be honed through a constant, committed, and disciplined practice, but it is possible.  It is possible for the aching, suffering human mind, which is attachment itself, to gradually open up to its own realization that it, in itself, is an illusion and that, ultimately, there is only is.  Human beings are trapped in samsara, yes, but it is possible for samsara to open up, to awaken to Nirvana.  All one requires is to practice non-attachment (which is to say that all one requires is non-requirement).

Why then, do we always seem to insist that depth of relationship should be equated with a depth of emotional attachment?  From the insights of the world’s mystic religious traditions, it would seem the opposite.  We are here in a sea of attachment, and attachment will exist as long as the human being exists, so why should we care if there is more or less attachment in the world.  It is non-attachment which lies at the greatest depth of depths, including the greatest span of spans, uncommon and extraordinary from the perspective of the human being, still trapped in its grasping mechanisms of suffering, but it is ever-present and obvious to the intrinsic condition of reality itself.  Attachment is going to exist.  Suffering is going to happen.  Who the fuck cares?  I’m talking about non-attachment.  I’m talking about liberation from suffering as it can and will be embodied in this living world.

What am I actually suggesting?  I am suggesting, quite simply, that we WAKE THE FUCK UP!  At this stage of the evolutionary game I’d say we can afford to play a little fast and lose with our emotional baggage and just get right to the heart of the matter.   And here it is:  We suffer because we attach ourselves.  Our relationships are built on attachment.  Thus, if we’re not explicitly out to suffer from the get go, our relationships are doomed to fail.  Unless we change.  Human beings have changed as a species so many times before.  We’ve morphed our societies from foraging, to horticultural, to agrarian, to industrial, to informational, each transformation designed to mitigate personal suffering and that’s fucking BREATHTAKING, but we are now at the privileged point in human history where we actually have the ability to systematically address the issue of suffering itself.  And it starts with relationship.

Think of your lover.  One that was, is, or will be your exclusive partner in this adventure and knows the very depths of your soul.  Does he or she really love you?  Can you ever really know?  My point is this: within our apparent human nature there is a seemingly inevitable desire not just to attach to each other in relationships, but to attach to one, single human being exclusively.  Because, as human beings, we are attachments ourselves and thus veritable attachment factories in this Golbergian chain-reaction game of attachment, it makes less sense to fight this urge to confide within the confines of an Other and much more sense to use this tendency within the world of attachment to forward the cause of non-attachment and thus come closer to completely ending suffering (which will never happen as long as we’re here, but it seems to be where we’re headed so why hop off the train when the party’s just getting started, what do you say?).

Anyway.  The point.  Non-attachment.  No more suffering.  It is a practice that requires constant commitment, and so it is a shame that our fragile, facile human brain continually makes a connection between “commitment” and “attachment”.  The goal is to break this connection down.  Here is the practice I am suggesting:  By looking into the eyes of another, by peering into the depths of another’s soul, along with a thousand other perfectly useful and fitting clichés, one can begin to let go of one’s boundaries.  One’s sense of self can be transcended completely simply by exploring, in endless depth, the perspective of another human being.  The attachment unattaches to the attachment.   We unask each other’s questions.  We discover that behind the supposed Other their lurks our own One Face, hiding behind a mask of human visage.  It is beautiful, yes, but it is beautiful because of what it masks, not in spite of it.  When all is said and done, the boundaries of finite self will still exist, they just won’t matter to us anymore.  We may even feel them more powerfully.  They may grow more apparent.  We, these human shells, will reel with the intensity of this endless moment as infinite liberation is embodied in a single human form. He or she sits right in front of me.  He or she exists as me.  This is what I mean.

What I am suggesting is that each of us find one other human being willing to engage with us in a practice of exploring our own Universe, our own infinite Self, through the perspective of one other human being.  And then we use whatever means at our disposal, meditations staring into the eyes of one’s other, a passionate kiss where the universe unfolds and ends in a single moment, the act of sex, exploring another’s body in the process of intrinsic energy that propels us to face one another, that drives us to be here together, the biology of it and the chemicals that drive its mystical processes, and the way we are somehow are intimately connected to the way each one of us was born, the forces which brought us here on the winds of evolution, on this unlikely little ball of rock.  The face we had before microbes were born.  This is who we are.  This is the end of suffering.