I've
a question
for you: what if we didn't make anything wrong? That's right: whatever
"it" is, what if we didn't make it wrong? (and "it" could be
anything). Now that would be an
interesting
place, an
interesting
place to stand, an
interesting
place from which to view life, an
interesting
place from which to come.
I've been looking into the possibility of not making anything wrong
(perhaps that's better phrased as "I've been looking from
the possibility of not making anything wrong."). In trying that on,
what I'm noticing is making wrong is
embedded in the
machinery.
Like breathing, like digesting, I don't own the doing of it. It's on
automatic. When something's wrong (the government, the politics, the
economy, a person etc), then it is wrong. I don't relate
to it like I make it wrong. Rather, I'm merely
reporting (ie I "tell the truth") that it's wrong. It just
is wrong. It's not like it's
my opinion
that it's wrong, nor that I have any authorship in its wrongness. It's
like the entire process of making wrong is immutably automatic, and I'm
just the messenger, a reporter carrying
the news.
My inquiry started dislodging that entrenched way of looking at things.
If it's true that the entire process of making wrong is immutably
automatic, then who am I in the matter of making wrong? If something /
someone occurs for me as wrong, and that's an automatic process, then
they're not really wrong as a quality I imbue it / them with. If
it / they occur as wrong, and I then relate to them as wrong, I miss
/ don't get that their wrongness is my doing, not theirs.
So what if nothing in the world, is wrong? Phrased another way, what if
nothing's wrong with the world? That's
my next question.
But
that question,
floating in and out of
Buddhism,
is an almost impossible
question
to be with in its current form. The way we listen, "What if nothing's
wrong with the world?" is it's untenable. It's too reactivating. What
it reactivates is our
opinionated
arrogance,
clamoring to offer why "What if nothing's wrong with the
world?" is wrong.
The question
(if we're going to grapple with it in a way that makes a difference)
needs to be rephrased. Instead of asking "What if nothing's wrong with
the world?", let's rephrase it as "What if everything in the world is
exactly the way it is, and exactly the way it isn't?". There's no
"wrong" in that phrasing. And there's nothing wrong in things being
exactly the way they are, and exactly the way they aren't. Things
are just that way obviously. Then the spring-loaded judgement
that something's wrong, is sharply differentiated, being laid bare as
just an opinion,
not as some
inside scoop
about the way things actually are.
Would
the Buddha
be pleased? Can we have things be exactly the way they are, and exactly
the way they aren't, including
our own opinion
that something's wrong? Is it possible that even "Something's wrong"
isn't wrong ie that it's just
an automatic opinion
we have on top of things being exactly the way they are, and exactly
the way they aren't? Maybe what's also exactly the way it is and
exactly the way it isn't, is
our immutably automatic
opinion
"Something's wrong.". And
so what?!
Maybe "Something's wrong" isn't significant after all. Maybe things are
just the way they are, and aren't the way they aren't. Totally.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that this (or something very close to it)
would be OK with
the Buddha.