The Consolation of No Exit

On finding heaven in the middle of hell

Dear Living Dark reader,

My focus here has always been double, encompassing both creativity and the daemon muse on the one hand and nonduality and self-realization on the other, with a theme of cosmic dread or horror winding its way through. Today’s post is, on the surface, located wholly within the spiritual wing. But I think it also includes the others, even if only implicitly. I say this simply to set the tone.

I was reading a recent essay by the spiritual/nondual writer and teacher

Joan Tollifson

in her wonderful newsletter Right Now, Just As It Is, and it was about the question of why bad things happen, and she was saying typically insightful things like:

We lack the sensitivity, awareness, insight or ability to do any better than we are doing in any given moment. As we become more sensitive and aware, and as we learn more about ourselves and the world at large, more possibilities open up. The person who is running a factory farm and who cannot yet see that the animals being tortured there are sentient beings, or the person who is compulsively driven to commit serial rape or murder, or to get drunk every night and fly into violent rages and beat their wife or their dog, such a person is not yet able to do otherwise. But at some point, perhaps this will change. That possibility is there in humans. Whether the conditions will arise in which such a change might happen, we don’t know. But the potential is there.

And she was also saying things like:

In recognizing that everything is a movement of an indivisible and seamless whole that cannot in this moment be otherwise than it is, perhaps we can get beyond blame and guilt and see the whole picture with greater understanding and compassion. Otherwise we just perpetuate the cycle of violence, conflict, blame and retribution.

The awakened perspective doesn’t mean doing nothing about the serial killer, the child abuser or the genocidal dictator, but the response will be very different if the choiceless nature of their actions is understood. We will still do everything we can to stop them from harming people, but it won’t come from the mistaken idea that they acted out of free will or that they are evil.

She concluded with three quotations, one from the meditation/Zen teacher Toni Packer, another from Leonard Cohen, and another from Zen teacher Norman Fischer. And the latter two, in combination with Tollifson’s astute and sensitive handling of her topic, blew some doors open in my mind and elicited some vivid memories from my youth, when the secret of suffering and its self-generated nature—the way we ourselves create it, and also abolish it—was seeded in me through some serendipitous encounters with books at an age of heightened susceptibility.

This trip down memory lane was abetted by my urge to track down the source of these quotes. I investigated the one from Cohen and found it’s from a 1994 interview in Shambhala Sun—the Buddhist magazine later renamed Lion’s Roar—titled “Leonard Cohen: The Other Side of Waiting.” Here is the portion Tollifson quoted, in which Cohen described what he called “the wisdom of no exit,” a perspective of critical importance at times when life’s pain, complications, and difficulties seem amplified to the point of being intolerable:

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.

“The consolation of no exit.” That really rang my bell.

The Fischer quote, for its part, emphasized that pain and difficulty really are pain and difficulty, and that meditative or spiritual practice is not about escaping them through some kind of transcendence, but about acknowledging them, accepting them, and even embracing them:

Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent.  It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty.  So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.”  It is pain.  You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.”  It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty … we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.

I tracked this down and found that it represents words Fischer spoke in a 2006 dharma seminar on the Genjokoan, the famous essay on spiritual practice and realization by the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen. The transcript also shows Fischer saying evocative and beautiful things like this:

We return to the human world as it really is, with all of its strife and suffering, and our own human problems, as they really are. We don’t think that somehow our spiritual practice is going to make us immune and transcendent and above it all. We’re right down there with what we have to deal with, and we know that it's sad and tragic and difficult. Blossoms fall. They don't last forever. But when blossoms fall, it’s beautiful. And weeds grow. They get in the way. They choke off the other plants. But weeds are life; weeds are beautiful.

And it was really all of this together, Fischer’s words, plus Cohen’s, plus Tollifson’s, plus my browsing through the source texts of the first two, that blew open those inner doors and sent a flood of memories and associations cascading through my mind.

The consolation of no exit is a perspective of critical importance at times when life’s pain, complications, and difficulties seem amplified to the point of being intolerable.

In one of them, I am sitting at one of the reading tables in the high school library in my rural hometown in the Missouri Ozarks. The year is 1988, and I am 17 years old, a high school senior who is looking directly ahead, life-wise, at the major transitional experience of graduating and leaving home for the first time. At the moment, on that particular school day, I am in between classes and stopping by the library—always my favorite part of the school (or of any building, neighborhood, town, or city)—to catch a moment’s peace amid the beloved shelves of books with their delicious atmosphere of whispered wisdom and pleasure, which they seem to all but emit from their covers and pages like an invisible mist of tantalizing promise and comforting presence. A month or so earlier, I had read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull in my modern literature class, taught by Mrs. Ellis, who teaches all of the school’s college-prep English classes. That one quite exhilarated me with its fast-moving tale of a singularly motivated seagull and his quest for perfection of flight that unexpectedly edges over into a quest for enlightenment. Now, during this stolen moment in the library in the middle of my daily class schedule, I am reading the paperback edition of Bach’s follow-up book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, and am finding it even more exhilarating than the other. Maybe it helps, maybe the effect is heightened, by the fact that I am reading this one at a doubly liminal moment, suspended not only between classes but between entire life eras, momentarily parked at the threshold between youth and adulthood, and filled with a mingled emotion of excitement and anxiety that infuses my experience of Bach’s book with a deeply personal quality and becomes effectively inseparable from it.

And right there on the page before my eyes, in the middle of the book’s lovely, absorbing, semi-autobiographical, highly fictionalized and fantasized story of Bach’s encounter in the American Midwest of the 1970s with an authentic spiritual master, someone who knows how reality works and can therefore perform miracles, the following words leap out and grab me, as Bach’s messiah, a charismatic loner named Don Shimoda, explains how the lives we think we lead are essentially illusions, like movies, and that our suffering is ultimately unreal: