Dear Nirvair:

I thought this morning that my reply to you yesterday was not adequate, not in my mind. So I re-read all that you posted on this thread. First, I will rewrite some of what you shared (not in order), with quotes. Second, I will add my input to it, this very morning.

You wrote that you had the Buddha figurine for eleven years, that you prefer to have it in the window. “I prefer to have it facing outward seeing as that’s the view I’d prefer if I was a figurine”. But as you look outward yourself, “No matter where I turn my eyes, there’s vandalism, destruction, hate, racism and people hurting each other.. It’s quite overwhelming… It’s heartbreaking to see life this way”

It is important to you to not pretend “like everything is fine”, to not turn “a blind eye to the real problem”. It is important to you, for one, to point out the truth, that you “suffer from heavy depression, not because of an illness, but rather because I was abused as a child, my father would take out his aggressions on me”.

You are in a “very stressful relationship… a broken relationship for sure” with a person who “can’t seem to be honest with me. It’s like I have to constantly force the truth out.. she doesn’t want to see her own flaws, and as such she can’t begin to work on them”. She accuses you of being controlling. This relationship causes you “a lot of anxiety, stress, heartache”.

You wrote that every time you moved to a new place, the first morning you would hear “a huge rumble, followed by a blinding light. I walk up to the window and look out and there’s a huuuuge explosion in the distance that’s quickly coming closer“. In your recent post you wrote the problems you see (homelessness, immigration politics, greedy property owners charging extremely high rents, students in debt lifetime, etc.) “is only getting worse by the day“.

You wrote: “With all the negativity and evil that seems to overwhelm the world right now, I had given up. I’ve not left my home for 2 years”.

“I am very anxious, about my future in this world. I like certainty, and life only offers you one certainty”.

You asked about the figurine: “Is it possible that the figurine sensed a negative presence in the room and calmed it?”

My input: you highly value Truth. In my understanding of the Buddha, at least in its image in the Western World, its place in modern psychotherapy and literature, it is about Truth, about stripping all make-believe, all pretense, all convenient thinking from what we see, so that we can see the bare Truth underneath.

For a person who holds Truth in such a high regard, your relationship is damaging to you, it is you compromising with what you value the most, the Truth. I am not referring to the truth of the spiritual -kind. I am referring to the practical truth of every day  life, specifically of the very relationship you are engaged in.

I don’t think you are able to compromise with the truth, and the “negative presence” you referred to when asking if the Buddha figurine sensed it, is any compromise you are currently making with the truth, any pretense you are engaged in, in the context of your relationship, singular or plural.

This is my main point to you today. A lesser important one is regarding the troubles in the world that you listed, and concluding that “life is getting worse by the day”. It is not true. Life was bad throughout history, injustice, cruelty.. it was always bad. It is not getting more bad. Life always offered just one certainty, never more.

anita