by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER SIX:
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“Melancholia is the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction, which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”
Sigmund Freud
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“Psychoneurosis must be understood… as the sufferings of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of a soul and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation or spiritual sterility”.
Carl Jung
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No Longer a ‘Life Denier’
When Desire had left him, Gotama continued to sit, but it was as if all his constellations were realigned. Self-denial had taken him as far as it was going to. He understood and felt, now, that his own body was critical. His life was going to require a degree of physical conditioning and strength.
His practice of austerities had resulted in a mastery of self-submergence, a proportionate development of spirituality, and even of supernatural powers; but along with this had come also a refinement in his capacity for experiencing pain. All this sitting… and a too great and prolonged preoccupation with concepts and procedures had damaged, not only his muscles, but also his instincts. He had been depressed.
As surely as a change had occurred in him when he had left the comfort and wealth of his home and family to seek, through ascetic practice, somehow, a release from the dukka which his consciousness continually perceived and experienced, again, Gotama was reborn.
He began to laugh out loud. At laughter’s sound he smiled more deeply, then still more deeply at what had made him laugh in the first place, then again. He was feeling release and relief.
When she had given him the bowl of rice milk, it was as if Desire had handed him a new perspective. Reflecting upon the significance of this change, he composed, for himself, two thousand years before the birth of Zen, the first koan;
“Spring does not become Summer,
Blossoms do not become Fruit;
How can one come to a new point of view?”
At age thirty-five, feeling like a butterfly (or rather, a larva) about to emerge from its cocoon, the emaciated hermit was ready to return to a more natural life. With his mind opening, expanding towards composure, he set out to breathe the open air and to exercise his new strengths. Gotama became a wanderer, walking freely and responding to nature. His atrophied muscles responded, launching as if in applause, ripples of well being within him. Gradually he became cheerful. The weariness of spirit, which had settled upon him, vanished as his old center of gravity returned. His good nature, full of loving kindness and humor and with it the desire for expression long repressed began to assert itself.
In his belly a fresh smile was born: an uncommon smile, inviting imitation but difficult to reproduce (not even alluded to in Darwin’s “Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”)… this smile… which would later flourish to warm all he encountered.
In his belly, a fresh smile was born.
Meanwhile, the five bhikkus who had been practicing austerities with Gotama were at a loss. Realizing that he had quit the grove for good, and learning that he was walking about in the villages, eating ordinary food, talking with others and so on, they took up their bowls and robes and left the grove themselves, setting out for Isipatana, called the ‘Deer Park’, an ancient site sacred to Brahmanism, and currently a gathering place for the growing class of wandering ascetics.