This post is me being bare-to-the-bones honest. Sharing what I’m learning on this journey. You may remember the posts since last year have reflected my struggle with… well, straight to the point shall we?
Not all apartments are created equally, nor do all humans carry the same karmic imprints and tendencies in consciousness.
My inner question over many months involved knowing on deep levels that every irritating sound (or even smell; well, maybe especially smell) was illusion and my response of intense aversion to it was of course of my own making.
The sounds is ‘me’ and the smells are ‘me’ but at the same time in conventional reality obviously coming from the source of the downstairs neighbors. For months on end, I realized this and argue with self, “…but it is so real (the loud voices the curry/garlic stink),… so real for something that is an illusion!
How could this be me when everything that remains of me that is still sane indicates the opposite?
I knew the truth of it but the aversion was so strong that the reality of it increased in proportion and the whole thing kept feeding itself. By the way, since moving I’ve learned that the apartment building itself where this experienced hell-realm is located is cheap construction and the townhouse I’m in now has very good soundproofing. Our neighbor to the right (this is a 2-level townhouse) consists of 3 people and a dog and we never hear a word, nor do the 3 of us living in this townhouse even hear one another’s TV or words from room-to-room or from upper-to-lower level. So life is much more pleasant as far as that goes. Not all apartments and townhouses in this complex are equal.
The other apartment situation may have been karmic but it provided me the stimulus to ask more deeply about the nature of reality and the nature of mind. I would never, ever wish to repeat it but I do see how the experience benefited my evolution.
I knew deeply then as I always have in my core being that the external sounds, smell, appearances were empty and coming from the mind but the aversion was so strong… it was very confusing and I resisted it desperately causing myself compounded suffering.
The thing is when we look at something in meditation, we see the appearance of it in the mind. Sounds, smells, all senses are this way. The mind interprets everything and assigns meaning or judgment to it… “i.e. this is pleasant, this is horrible, etc.”
And when we try to find the consciousness that see’s and interprets the energy, when we try to find the visual consciousness or the auditory consciousness or the olfactory/sense of smell consciousness that is doing the looking or receiving the smell, we cannot find it. Mostly because it is constantly changing and in Buddhist terms it is “empty”.
Being a psychic this is known to me and seen in my work–energy is constantly changing and what we perceive is not the true nature of things, it is only our own perceptions which are deeply ingrained patterns (see last blog post)… latent karmic imprints.
I have to admit here that there is difficulty in explaining in this written word what I know and what am learning here now, post-aversion, in my continued reflection and further study of Tibetan Buddhism. It’s complicated on one hand and so simple on the other! All the Libra energy in me can hold the paradox but my Mercury in Scorpio feels it and has trouble with the words.
I realize even more clearly now that the sounds and smells [from my boisterous and cooking Indian downstairs neighbors and the guitar-singing neighbor who followed] were all simply energies which hit my senses that these sense consciousnesses had absolutely no opinion of those sounds or smells.
And further, and more importantly, I realize with more clarity that it was my mind that was giving it whatever meaning it had back then which was that of extreme aversion.
For another person with different karmic imprints, the situation would perhaps even been pleasant (although that’s hard to imagine) or at least the aversion may not have been as strong.
Why would it differ? All those latent karmic imprints and tendencies were awakened and it seemed very difficult to have control over my intense aversions. I am not making excuses, I’m demonstrating, hopefully, how something pleasant or unpleasant (attractions/aversions) may differ with person-to-person based on the karmic tendencies in ground consciousness [see last blog post].
Back then, I kept thinking [getting the thought]–this smell is ‘me’ and their yelling in Hindi is ‘me’ but (at the same time) how can that possibly be? Karmic habituation of interpreting certain energy a certain way is part of the answer.
I don’t have all the answers but it’s all getting clearer now that I am in a new setting where peaceful reflection is possible.
(I share this in the hope that it may serve or be helpful in some way to another out in cyber world who may be experiencing any type of difficulty or confusion. May we all be brought to clarity and contented happiness and freedom from all suffering and causes of suffering.)
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