"Make No Comparisons" - Brugh Joy's Spiritual Lesson #1

Since my post of Feb. 20, I've been thinking about how I couldn't stop comparing myself to others, knowing that other people on chemo have a hard time, or an even harder time than I am. It brought to mind some spiritual lessons I keep learning over and over again. I know it's human to compare our experience to others, but it's not always that helpful.

When I was taking workshops with W. Brugh Joy, I read his book Joy's Way: A Map for the Transformational Journey. An Introduction to the Potentials for Healing with Body Energies. In the third chapter of the book, Brugh describes a cosmic experience of a woman who came to talk with him about her challenges in life. A few months earlier, she had been walking along a beach, saw an iridescent light, and heard a booming voice deliver three injunctions. She thought she was going mad. The voice said, slowly and repetitively, "'There are three injunctions for you. Pay attention to them. Make no comparisons; make no comparisons. Make no judgments; make no judgments. Delete your need to understand; delete your need to understand.'" (p. 59)

Today I want to share some of my thoughts about the first injunction: Make no comparisons. Like many spiritual lessons, I feel that I have been learning and relearning this lesson for decades. My comparing myself to others on chemotherapy is an example. I feel that the reality is that my task, my spiritual work right now, is to be present to my experience and to see what it has to teach me. I can empathize with the experience of others, but making comparisons is not useful (human, but not useful).

In his book, Brugh makes a few useful points about this injunction. He says "The tendency to live in ideas about reality isolates the mind from the true reality of the physical level . . . self is - the self is true, without question - but ideas about self may be true or false, . . . If the individual insists on holding on to ideas rather than harmonizing with what is, pain must follow." In these words, I hear him saying that believing things about ourselves, in comparison to others, isolates us from the truth about our self. I hope I'm not making this too ponderous, because it's a lesson that has really served me.

For some of us, perhaps many of us, this comparison comes in looking at our physical attributes and judging them as wanting in comparison to friends, family, societal ideals, etc. Brugh gives an example of this for himself in his book by talking about his dissatisfaction with his physical appearance for years. I was doing this in a small way when I felt overdressed for the weather on Feb. 20, and didn't like what I saw was the way others were seeing me. For much of my life, I have judged my physical body by cultural standards and found it wanting. Now that the calendar year says I will turn 60 if I live until my June birthday, I can get caught less in that, but it's still there. Last fall, I saw an old friend whom I hadn't seen in perhaps 20 years, and a mutual friend commented back to me that she thought I looked old. Well, we are the same age, but I have let my hair turn gray. I haven't completely accepted my aging body, but I do recognize that making comparisons with younger bodies accomplishes nothing. Aging is something we baby boomers don't always do gracefully, I fear.

On a spiritual level, making comparisons can mean seeing others as more spiritually evolved than we are, and feeling hopeless to achieve what someone else has achieved. For me, with my gallbladder cancer diagnosis, there is this desire not to be facing the challenges I have. I want to live a longer life, I want to see my kids grow up, I even want a less serious cancer if I have to have cancer. But none of that wishing changes the reality. Can I give up those comparisons to the life I wish I had to, to the life others have, to allow myself to benefit from the life I do have?

Toward the end of the section on this injunction, Brugh adds "It is especially important that one not interpret the injunction against making comparisons as an exhortation to live in a state of complacency, where everything that the outer mind sees is rationalized as being perfect or right, without need for change. Complacency is the way of the ignorant." I've never thought of this spiritual lesson as encouragement to accept everything the way it is, without question or concern, but I can see how it could be read that way.

Make no comparisons. Be true to oneself, and be willing to look under the rocks of consciousness to see what is hidden from awareness. Under those rocks lie the possibility of transformation, of true change that allows us to fully unfold into the person, the spiritual person, we were meant to be, we were created to be.

On another day, I'll add Brugh's thoughts - and my own - about the other two injunctions.

Today is a pretty good day for me in Chemo World, as I grade some papers, make up a midterm, and try to stay off my feet with their "hot spots." Three and a half days remaining in this cycle of chemo . . .

All in the Same Boat

I mentioned in my last post that cancer affects far more than the person diagnosed. Over the past four months (yesterday was the four month "anniversary" of my diagnosis), I have witnessed and heard about the impact on friends and family. I could see from the faces of friends who came to the hospital how worried they were about me, and I have felt supported and well loved by the reaching out in cards, letters, emails and phone calls of so many in my various communities of friends. Those who have been diagnosed with cancer, or had a close friend, family member or partner experience a cancer diagnosis and treatment have responded with a special empathy. Many of their responses are found in the "comment" section of this blog.

Sometimes, those who are friends but not otherwise or previously touched by a cancer diagnosis personally respond powerfully to the urgency of my diagnosis. One of those is a co-worker, colleague and friend, Julie Baker, who wrote movingly of her response to my diagnosis.

About our common mortality, Julie wrote: "When I think about life and death, I always think about how in reality, there's no secure or definite future for anyone. Any of us could drop dead at any moment for any reason, or for no reason at all. There are no promises or guarantees that we are going to wake up tomorrow, or next week or next year." Like me, Julie is a mother of a small child, her daughter. She shared with me how being a parent had brought her a powerful sense of her mortality. " . . . my greatest fear is that I will not be here for my daughter - selfishly, because I want to be here for every moment of her life, and unselfishly, because I always want her to have the enormous, unconditional love that I believe only I can give her."

About living in the present, Julie writes that "I have decided that even though intellectually, we all know that nothing is certain or guaranteed from one moment to the next, we suppress that thought because we have to in order to go about our day-to-day lives. Most of us would be immobilized - or think we would be - if we confronted the reality of the situation. But maybe that's exactly wrong. Maybe we should all acknowledge it, and not wait for an illness or an accident or a diagnosis to remind us. Because it's true for all of us, whether we've been brought to the consciousness of it (as you have) or not."

"Why am I telling you this? " Julie writes. "Because your blog got me thinking, for one thing. But also, because maybe I hope it will make you feel a little less separate or different. You're not. We really are all in the same boat. In one sense, bizarre as it sounds, you are ahead of the game - you have confronted the reality squarely (like it or not), and you can use that information to make better choices about how you live all the moments of your life. I try to do that, but I constantly fall victim to the crisis du jour, and suddenly it's a week later, or a month later, or a year later. I don't want to look back at some point and have to ask myself why I have wasted all this time. You know?"

Julie's thoughts reflect to me some of what I might have thought a year ago, before cancer. And I appreciate the empathy, the reaching out, the connecting her different experience with mine.

Also, with last week's good news and another two months of breathing space, I find myself losing some of my "edge" about my mortality. Maybe I'll beat this. Maybe I'll live not just one year or two, but twenty. Maybe my cancer took twenty years to get to the place that required surgery last May, and maybe additional surgery really can remove the rest. Since I've already confounded my doctor with my response in the last four months, why not go for more? But can I hope for more and still hold the lessons learned from these past months?

For many years, I attended annual workshops with W. Brugh Joy, whose perspective about life events is often radically different from the norm. He often said "The deep psyche loves contrast." My psyche has been blown away from the events of past months, contrasting powerfully with what preceded this time. Can I keep living in the moment and savoring each bit? Can I truly remember that we really all are in the same boat, living a life that could end at any moment, without notice? When we were traveling to the southwest this past June, to national parks full of ancient rocks (Zion National Park, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Grand Canyon, and others), I felt that I was in geologic time. A rock could fall and take my life at any time. I could live with that then. Now I just want to live.