I’ve been pretty sick lately. Due partly to arthritis, partly to two chronic sleep disorders, partly to who knows what else, I haven’t been in deep sleep in about two months. As a result I have migraines nearly every minute of the day and can barely function. My mind is like a boat in fog. I haven’t been out of the house in over a week. <\/p>\n
My very dear friend Charlie (he of the amazing poetry, magic camera, and sagely teeshirt slogans) wrote to me today:<\/p>\n
I hope you will be doing better soon. I don’t like you to suffer. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I replied:<\/p>\n
I’m not exactly suffering. It’s interesting. My body can hardly move, it hurts like hell when I roll over in bed, I have a migraine 24\/7, I haven’t been out of the house in almost two weeks … and right now I’m as happy as a clam. <\/p>\n
Maybe those old dead guys were on to something when they said, “You are not your body or your mind or your feelings.” I don’t especially feel that I’m one thing or another but maybe that’s the explanation. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Charlie replied:<\/p>\n
Looks like your sadhana is working well if you’re able to be settled and peaceful in the midst of that physical discomfort. I admire that. \ud83d\ude42<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I answered him:<\/p>\n
Whatever I got, it surely wasn’t from sadhana. \ud83d\ude42 I barely ever did any. Well, I hardly ever did any voluntary sadhana. Involuntary sadhana — that’s something else. This situation is lucky in a way but it’s about as admirable as having toenails that grow. I can’t take credit. It’s not something I’m responsible for. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
The Goddess told me the reason I got what I got was simply because I wanted it. I had a desire for God and the desire for God is automatically self-fulfilling. That is its nature. I never chose that desire. Nobody chooses their desires. Desires are given to us not chosen. Put those two ideas together and I suppose we can call them “grace.”<\/p>\n
When I was about 24 [40 years ago] I wrote a song with a chorus that went like this:<\/p>\n
You can’t want what you want to want
\nYou only want what your heart’s got
\nA-throbbing and a-kicking and a-burning and a-beating
\nInside it’s fevered hot spot
\nHot spot! Hot spot!<\/em><\/p>\nNo idea what made me write that song — oh yes I do, it was John Bailey’s book about Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina<\/em>. Bailey says something like, “Anna Karenina<\/em> is one of the few great novels of which it can be said, it has a simple moral, like a fable. The moral is, ‘Getting what you want doesn’t make you happy.'” At the time I was a typical 20th century American pseudo-educated person and all I could think was, “Wow, that’s the exact opposite of what Sigmund Freud says!” Being a typical 20th century American pseudo-educated person, I knew Freud but not Buddha. I didn’t know that Tolstoy was only saying what Buddha had said, and what many other of the wisest humans in our whole history had said. <\/p>\n
But despite my ignorance I recognized that Bailey’s remark was very profound and still remember it 40 years later. But how did I get from there to the fact that the objects of our desire aren’t voluntarily chosen? I must have thought about this stuff a great deal. That was probably one of the things that pushed me toward spiritual things.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been pretty sick lately. Due partly to arthritis, partly to two chronic sleep disorders, partly to who knows what else, I haven’t been in deep sleep in about two months. As a result I have migraines nearly every minute of the day and can barely function. My mind is like a boat in fog. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-zu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2200"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2213,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions\/2213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}