This human predicament

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen, himself a Buddhist practitioner, is pointing toward the recognition that there is no solid foundation beneath our experience, no ultimate ground to rest on. What can explain our imperfect world? This theme has been popping up a lot for me lately - the groundlessness of the ground.

Some react to this with a kind of formless panic, as Peter McEwan put it in a recent podcast, a feeling of vertigo from gazing into the abyss. Why is the ground groundless? Why would panic be a natural reaction? Because the mind desperately wants something to grasp, some final truth or foundation. You’d think that mystical experience would resolve this, yielding some kind of fundamental truth about the nature of reality. It certainly seems that way from within that experience. And yet it is a mistake to reify it or slip into fundamentalism or create a new dogma.

It’s true that Buddhism might be better seen as a method than a statement of truth, but it’s also true that the method works by using a “view” - a perspective on reality that is accepted and internalized and possibly co-created by meditation practice. The Buddhist view posits reality is a certain way - that it is mind constructed (i.e. “empty”). Of course mind construction is also a mental construction (i.e. emptiness is empty)! In other words, the view is that there is an unresolvable uncertainty at the heart of existence. To be a Buddha is to let go of being a Buddhist.

And yet, when one holds that view, in contrast to the panic, reality can also disclose itself as sacred and loving. How mysterious and wonderful!