Sera Utse and the Forest Tribe

My ménage is comprised of individualists pretending to be a family. It is a fascinating simulation. Verbal support supplants actual enabling. Engrained entitlement assumes graces flow one way. Inherent selfishness obliterates the sacrifice of giving. A smugness of circumstances forbids stepping outside the comfort zone. And an I'm-All-Right-Jack bulwark defends this gamut of behavioral deficits and welds shut their door on all the requisite traits of authentic family.

There was always a lot of hurt from my ménage, hence my detachment and years of absence, and I thought I'd found composure - as a recluse, within the cocoon, 3,000 miles away, only talking to one of them once a month - all exemplifies just how well I'd dealt with it. So, of course, coming back for a few months to help my immobile mother has torqued open old keloids. I assumed it was all me, and by being serene and gentle and suppressing my frankness, we'd all get along fine. But the knotted scar tissue has been pried apart by my mother's thoughtlessness, a brother's temper, and my sister's distemper.

Their collective parochialism limits innovation - and anger, insult, and melodramatic distress are the truncheons they wield for enforcement. Just in their idle states, the matriarch's chronic fondness for leisure repels proactivity, my brother's aggressive compulsion for recreation thwarts enterprise, and my sister's desideratum for authority suppresses advancement. So long as I kowtowed to them, peace could have been maintained indefinitely and we'd all have floated along like angels. But only so long as I held a bowed posture. Unfortunately, it was inevitable that I stood up straight eventually because a human being cannot maintain such deportment without ruining their spine. And so I snapped erect and unwittingly staggered outside the lines. It summoned immediate trouble, which I instantly regretted. But the damage is set. There is now a mood of foreboding, as though one of the tribe (me) stepped off the trail onto forbidden soil and has incited the dudgeon of the forest spirits. And now that offending member needs to be banished or should leave of their own accord - banished, as it were, for the good of the rest.

Smart people can back up and think stupid, but stupid people are not yet smart; therefore, the onus is always on those who comprehend. Rational people need to understand, whereas irrational people simply need to win. Lazy people are deeply threatened by vigor but will all line up at the well once it's dug. These are the traits of juvenility we all eventually transcend, but we cannot fix childhood other than by growing up. We climb the spiritual ladder and leave behind the self-limiting instincts of soul-youth by evolving slowly over millennia, one painful life at a time. One day we become conscious, and probity is no longer an accident or dependent on our mood. Consciousness allows us to override our inner beast and process raw emotion into authentic nobility, but until then, we will reap much suffering along the way. Baby steps.

Once at Sera Utse Hermitage in Tibet, an old monk and I quietly observed the students engage in monastic debate. The standing student is the challenger, or questioner, testing logic, and the seated monk is the defender answering the philosophical claims. The challenger's loud slap - bringing the right hand of compassion down into the left hand of wisdom - cuts through ignorance. Stomping the foot symbolizes slamming the door to lower rebirths. It's fascinating and almost violent, a contradiction of stereotypes that challenges assumptions. Then the old monk leaned in close and whispered to me, "Never fight down, only fight up." I didn't understand in the moment, especially as it was customary to shout at your opponent seated down on the ground, so I later asked him exactly what he'd meant. He explained that "it is the duty of younger souls to get angry and rail against older souls, but elders must not fight with novices, in the same way we don't lose our temper with children." He was, of course, making loose reference to the debates but in a broader context, to life in general. "If we find ourselves astounded by naivety, unintelligence, or close-mindedness, then take a breath. You are doubtless standing before a young soul. We were, all of us, there once - wearing the same short pants and stupid expression - ranting at our elders, stamping our feet and demanding compliance. There are always older and younger souls around us, but when we fight with a younger soul, we risk regression." "Easier said than done," I replied. "Yes, but each day thoughtfully take another rung on the compassion and wisdom stair, and soon you'll see increasingly from a higher position."

Old monks can be annoying in the surgical precision of their wisdom. But he was right, and sometimes sage words get cached away until our spiritual hunger compels us to dig them up again and our degree of consciousness is such that it illuminates the meaning. Like old bones, we get to gnaw and suck out all that marrowy goodness and go "Aha!" I am there now, and it only took a couple of decades. And there on the scorched earth lies the chewed-up bone, and I did not choke on it. It speaks to me as an abstract scattering of divination sticks, an ancient rune that says "Love them anyway."