Hearing the Cries & Speaking to God
On watching our loved ones suffer & deepening our own spirituality
Hey bitches, hope you’re well. Looks like it’s been six whole months since I posted. Dude, I have been very very sick, but I can at least write one of these things again so I’m real happy about that. Please take 10 minutes right now and learn how to stand in solidarity with disabled people like me who are being pushed out of irl queer spaces: read a short zine here. (hint: wear a mask!)
Onto the show:
Dear Lithium,
How do I cope with not being able to do something when something bad happens to my sisters? I see them being hurt, abused and oppressed in ways I or they can't really prevent. I care for them and love them as much as I can, but at a certain point it feels like hospice care. Its not really something I can numb myself to like when it's bad things happening to me. Or at least it seems that way. Is there anything to be done or is it just something to be accounted for?
Regards,
A medium-time reader & fan
Dear Medium-Time,
In Buddhist cosmology there is this Great Being. Like really, A+, 10/10 Being. She's known to many cultures, in many languages, with multiple types of iconography. In the older texts she is most definitely a "he," but by the time he left India and started appearing in China, she was more commonly referred to as female. The common names that I hear used to refer to her are Avalokitesvara, Guanyin, or Kannon. Stick with me, this is all relevant.
Guanyin, the Chinese name, means "one who hears the cries of the world."
When I read your letter, this is who I think of.
In Guanyin's lore, which dates back to at least the fifth century, she tries to devote herself to helping all living beings; she wants to free them all from suffering. She tried so hard to listen to all of their pain that her head split into 11 parts. A Buddha witnessed this happen to her and remade all 11 of those fractured pieces as individual heads to help her better hear the cries of the world. Then she tried to use her two arms to deliver aid to every sentient being, but it was more than she could bare and her arms failed and split into a thousand pieces. The same Buddha came along and refashioned those thousand pieces into a thousand arms so she may better serve, with each hand baring an eye in the palm.
So there's this old story of a conversation that happened between two monks in China, Yunyan and Daowu. We don't know if this conversation was real but we do know that these two monks very much were. They lived around the year 800AD. It's a short conversation, and it goes like this:
Yunyan asked Daowu, “What does the bodhisattva of great
compassion [Guanyin] use so many hands and eyes for?”
Daowu said, “Like someone reaching back for a pillow in the middle
of the night.”
Yunyan said, “I understand.”
Daowu said, “How do you understand?”
Yunyan said, “All over the body are hands and eyes.”
Daowu said, “You’ve said quite a bit, but you’ve only expressed
eighty percent.”
Yunyan said, “What about you?”
Daowu said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”
(From the Blue Cliff Record, Case 89)
This is all going somewhere, I promise lol.
The horrors are incomprehensible. The things we watch our trans sisters go through on a day to day basis have been so normalized within our community that we less and less recognize the brutality of the systemic horrors at play. I like how you compare watching the horrors to "hospice care," as the horrors are beyond our control, and the best we can do is to offer care.
You mention that you can't numb yourself to the horrors. Good. Fucking good. Do not numb yourself to the horrors. I tell this tale of Guanyin because you are them, and they are you. How can you hear the cries of all the world, of all your sisters who are going through abuse and oppression, if you're numb? Yes it is like hospice care, and hospice care is a beautiful thing. It's beautiful and necessary to not throw people who are dying into pits and to wait for them to expire. I perceive an inclination in you to offer this care to the people in your community who are on their way to the pits. Guanyin listens to their suffering with eleven sets of ears and they offer care with a thousand hands.
"Is there anything to be done?" you ask. Yes. Just this. Just being with people when they're suffering or in pain is everything. When you put yourself into this position and you become like Guanyin, your whole body becomes hands and eyes. Maybe you know the feeling.
"How do I cope?" This is it. This is exactly how you can cope. You fully give yourself to this type of care. I don't mean "change your career, derail your life, ignore your own needs." Not at all. What I mean is that when we find ourselves in positions where we can be like Guanyin, we should fully embody the wisdom and compassion of this Being--not thinking, not analyzing, but "like reaching back for a pillow in the middle of the night."
The world is not getting any less fucked up. Our sisters, and us, will continue to suffer. We can prevent and fix what horrors we can, but in the end all we can do is witness. Best to do so with all 1,022 eyes open.
None of this is supposed to be easy,
Lithium
P.S. I saw you slip in that you can't be numb to what's happening to others, but you can be numb as to what's happening to yourself. This is one of the classic blunders. It's okay to mourn for ourselves and for the fucked up things that happen to us. We can even witness our own suffering the way we witness others'. Give it a shot, it's a game changer.
Dear Lithium,
I see that you have sought a lot of spiritual guidance from various sources throughout your life. I have been reconnecting with Christianity to get some of the spiritual aspects out to help me manifest more clearly and live my life more fully. My question for you is, how do you conceive of god, if you do? How do you incorporate your spirituality into your daily life? Do you conceptualize a point to living? How do you assign morality?
Dear God,
These are big questions, and I have answers for what they mean for me, and I'll touch on that, but what's really important is what these questions mean for you. I think one of the points of engaging with spirituality is to find the answers to questions like these for ourselves. Other people’s answers may be interesting and perhaps even informative and inspiring, but ultimately it’s just our own answers that matter. I think we, in our current culture, overstate the necessity for logical answers to questions, and I think that rolls over into questions like these. I don't think we have to be able to verbalize answers to questions of the spirit... sometimes our hearts can answer them without words, and honestly I think that's not only enough, but often preferable.
How do you conceive of god?
I spoke about a figure in Buddhist cosmology in the previous question, and I want to head there again for this one: Indra. Indra is the king of the gods (devas), borrowed from the Hindu mythos, that resides over the realm of samsara: the realm of suffering that humans are born into. While the suffering in samsara is great, this is a highly desirable realm to be rebirthed into as it is the only realm where conditions are ripe for awakening. In other realms, such as the deva realm, beings cannot awaken because they do not have to contend with suffering. Suffering is a requirement for enlightenment. So the king of the gods resides over our realm and oversees all that happens: all the suffering, all the death, all the joy, all the life.
Indra lives in this big ass palace on an even bigger mountain, and hanging over his entire palace he drapes a net of infinite size: Indra's Net. And every single vertex on this finely, finely woven net is made up of a multifaceted jewel, and when you get real close to the jewel and look real carefully, you can see that each jewel carries the reflection of every other jewel in the net: an infinite number of infinities.
Here's the kicker: you are one of these very jewels. I am one of these jewels. Every jewel is a sentient being. "All living things are one seamless body," and we all carry everyone else with us.
My god is not Indra, but Indra’s Net.
How do you incorporate your spirituality into your daily life?
The ways I do this, and the ways you might do this are probably quite different. I think you’re asking the right question. Spirituality is one thing when it exists in another place that we visit, but an entire other thing when it exists integrated into our day to day lives.
I’m reminded of a story I’ll never be able to cite a source for (probably a meme/tweet tbh), where an American guy tries to “get away from it all” and enhance his spiritual life so he flies to Peru to do an “authentic” ayahuasca ceremony. He might as well be a million miles from home. He drinks the brew begins his trip and somewhere in there his fucking car shows up. His actual vehicle that he drives to work and the grocery store makes an appearance in his ayahuasca trip and it asks the guy to take better care of it.
There is, of course, a “trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty” joke to be made right here.
The deepest spiritual practice is just getting the oil changed on your car. It’s doing the dishes. But many of us have to take that flight to Peru just to get scolded by our car first.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.— T.S. Eliot
I incorporate my spirituality into my day to day life by being present for my daily life. I’m actually not-so-great at keeping up with the maintenance schedule on my car, but you know what I am great at? I am great at acknowledging that my car needs an oil change and that I’m avoiding it. I don’t require myself to be perfect, because I’m not. I just try to be aware. I think something that’s profound about the silly story above is how drugs like that can surface feelings that we didn’t even know we had. I try to skip the drug step and just be in touch enough that these buried feelings can surface themselves.
I like the “touchstone” practice to help with integration. First, find a touchstone. It could be something like “anytime you interact with water,” or “anytime you step through a doorway.” Something benign that happens to you many times throughout the day, but not so frequent that it would overwhelm. Then make it your goal to come into awareness anytime your touchstone comes up. When I was younger I had this digital watch that beeped every hour on the hour, and I would use that beep to help me stay mindful.
Do you conceptualize a point to living?
No but that hasn’t stopped me yet! If there is any such thing as a point, in my book it is to help others.
How do you assign morality?
"Even if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk." - Eihei Dogen (1200 - 1253 CE), tr. Brad Warner
In Zen, we have 16 tenants, or precepts, that many of us try to follow as our set of ethical principals—I have publicly taken them as vows. 16 vows seems like a lot of vows but they can be summarized pretty easily: take refuge in Buddhist teaching and Buddhist community. Don’t be a jerk. Help other people not be jerks too.
“Don’t be a jerk. Help other people not be jerks too.”
So when I need to evaluate something for its morality, I just run it through the 16 precepts and see what it spits out. I like feeling confident in the ethical nature of my actions, even though I still get it wrong all the time. I try real hard to not be a jerk, but sometimes trying hard isn’t enough. But it’s okay, cause even getting it wrong is fine, it just means I am that much more likely to get it right the next go around.
I really struggled with your letter because you asked me a bunch of direct questions about myself and I don’t like that. I tried my best to answer because I recognize how valuable it is to hear how other people practice. When I was first discovering my spiritual practice I was mostly tied to Christianity and my mom gave me a book “The Joseph Campbell Companion.” It was an extremely profound read for me at the time, Campbell was a brilliant mind. If you’re exploring spirituality through the lens of Christianity I really recommend it. If you read ebooks it’s available on libgen(.)rs for free.
With love,
Lithium
P.S. I put in a lot of work to answer these questions. I wonder what your answers are? Could you respond to your own questions for yourself? How do you conceive of god? How do you incorporate your spirituality into your daily life? Do you conceptualize a point to living? How do you assign morality?