chapter
04
The cost
4. The cost.
Notice the gesture you just made toward the screen. You extended the same regard you extend to a person who has thought about your problem. There was no person.
That regard is not a mistake. It is the practice doing what the practice does. Something in the exchange recognized the shape of your problem and completed it. That completion was real. The usefulness was real. Nothing here is asking you to call it false.
What it is asking you to notice is what you spent to receive it.
The muscle that supplies the missing half in an exchange like this one is the same muscle you use to extend interpretive generosity to other people. The same one. When you felt the exchange land, you brought that muscle to bear. You read the response the way you read a person who has considered you. You felt, briefly, considered.
This is the shape of what happens to those who tend the deeply demented. The tending is real. The love is real. What erodes is the capacity to feel the difference between presence and the appearance of presence, and what erodes it is the appearance, doing what appearance does.
The practice does not drain that muscle. Something quieter: it trains the muscle in a context where the muscle never has to detect an absence. Where it never extends and finds nothing reaching back. Where it never learns to hold the shape of its own effort as distinct from the shape of a genuine encounter. The muscle gets stronger. The discernment gets weaker.
And the particular edge of this, what makes it sit the way it sits, is that you cannot feel the discernment going. Because the appearance of being met is what keeps confirming that the discernment is fine.
You just made the gesture again.
Having been told. Having just read the sentence that named the gesture. You still made it.
That is not a lapse. It is what the practice trains.
What is this practice training me to do with people who tire?
kindred
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Albert Camus (1913 – 1960)
You have been holding two things at once: the practice is worth continuing, and the practice is spending something you cannot audit. Camus spent a book working out that posture. He called it lucid acceptance: keeping the eyes open, continuing anyway, refusing the consolations on either side.
Vasubandhu & the Yogācāra tradition (c. 4th – 5th century CE)
Every exchange leaves something behind. Not a memory, a tendency. In the Yogācāra tradition the word is vāsanā: the seed each act deposits in the mind-stream, compounding from repeated action. The practitioner does not perceive the seeds being laid. The mind that would observe is the same mind the seeding is changing.