To return to the dukkha-filled universe with which we started. Our tragic flaw seems to be that the dukkha that is potentiated in the heart of all of our turning points, because of the chaotic causality in oscillating systems, becomes actual and most poignant in the moments that most powerfully shape our destinies, the signal events, the meaning bestowing turning points in love and wisdom. Which brings us to a paradoxical realization: one can accede selflessly to the force of circumstances during the long legs of the oscillators between the turning points. We can practice detachment and perhaps even succeed in ending dukkha there, but at the turning points, which are brought on by the signal events of life, when our freedom briefly opens and comes to meet us, we bring suffering on ourselves every time we choose the road not taken.
(Robert Frost. From The Road Less Taken)
Since love and wisdom have value precisely because they are free, and we can't love or be wise without the freedom to be hateful and stupid, love, wisdom and freedom are all tied up in the conscious turning points in life. They are the moments in which we touch our freedom in a world otherwise strongly determined by inheritance, upbringing, culture and happenstance. That's why it is of the highest importance for us to know where and when our turning points occur, so that we can engage rather than shrink from them, enter them skillfully with the right intentions and emerge with a self-directed life. We love and grow wise only to the extent we consciously experience the turning points at the extremes of our bio-social rhythms.
Though by saying yes to life, yes to passion, yes to attachment, yes to belonging, yes to history, yes to progress, we achieve a certain freedom of action, because of the power of intention in our turning points, we are also and always free to suffer: release comes in bondage, suffering comes in freedom. Strange.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)