If this were my last year to live (and who knows, but it may be, and I may have passed the day and month, already), I would want to live this time with unconditional love as my light. I know that sounds too big an ask. Remember, though, this is about living and dying well, so that the King of Death doesn’t find me – whether living or dying. It’s not small stakes; so, that’s how it has to be, this year, and beyond.

Aware of this foam-like body,
Awake to its insubstantial  nature,
cutting the flowered spikes of Māra,
go where the Kind of Death can’t see.

– Dhammapada, verse 46. Translated Christopher J. Ash

Māra is not only the King of Death, but he is the King of Narcissism, the food of which is: rejecting-energy. The more rejecting we do in life, the more we rush into death’s arms. In love there is no death. As a six in the Enneagram, I think I’ve been a kind of rejection – sceptical of everything, opposing by habit, at every turn. However, the way of insight with compassion is liberating, and compassionate insight into the dynamics of rejecting-energy is freeing. Knowing the light and knowing the shadow, both.

In the Honeyball Sutta, a text in the Majjhima Nikāya, a practitioner asks the Buddha (the flourishing one), “Can you say more, Sir, about the kind of teaching where perceptions no longer obsess a noble person, and where one doesn’t conflict with anyone in this world?” The flourishing one gave a short statement: “Mendicant,” he said, “regarding the way perceptions and notions about multiplicity beset us: if nothing is found there, there will be nothing to delight in, nothing to welcome and hold to. This is the end of the underlying unwholesome tendencies – to lust, aversion, views, doubt, conceit, and so on. This is the end of the underlying tendency to desire ‘being’ and the end of our tendency to ignorance. That, then, is the end of the taking up of bars and blades, and of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, and false speech. That’s where these evil, unwholesome things cease completely.” (My translation).

I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes, from Isabella in Shakespeare’s  Measure for Measure (II.ii):

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d;
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.

The Buddhist version would be less poetic, but could run like this: 

Conceited humankind,
with its oh-so-brief life-span –
most ignorant of what is ever-present in them,
the luminous boundless heart –
acts more like an angry ape,
deceiving self and others into the ego-view,
and tearing at the fabric of this miracle,
the big life process.

I want to run that Honeyball sequence backwards: Conflict ends, with the ending of ignorance and the desire to be someone or some thing. These end with the relinquishment of lust and aversion, which goes with conceit and the view: ‘I am my personality.’ All this fades as we don’t grasp at, or feed on, experiences. (They can be freed into spaciousness, instead). That happens if we see through the delight and longing we have in things and situations which confirm our underlying wish to be nameable and with form. Then nothing will be found to be as it appears to our unclarified perception. Distorted perception no longer besets us. This is the end of conflict on all levels. All human conflict arises because of misperception. This is why the Nikāya Buddha says, in that sutta:

“The kind of doctrine, friend, where one does not keep arguing with everyone in this world with its devas, its Maras and Brahma, its contemplatives and priests, its royalty and common folk. I teach the sort of doctrine where perceptions no longer obsess the noble person who remains aloof from sensual pleasures, free from confusion, his uncertainty removed, who remains without any craving for becoming or not becoming. This is my doctrine, That is what I preach.”

Imagine that someone attacks you. The accusation itself is coming, of course, from a part in the other person which considers they are superior in their knowledge, their view of things, right? However, they are talking from their inner TV. Given all that presently-unconscious process that the Nikāya Buddha is talking about, they can’t actually see you in your brief, mysterious life. On the other hand, what the other person says can be helpful. I can’t imagine how many people throughout my life have delivered gratuitous assessments of my egoic functioning. Sometimes these views weren’t lovingly delivered, sure, but most of them proved useful, even if it was after some reflection on my part. After all, if I didn’t have some narcissistic inclinations, I wouldn’t be human – so there was bound to be some truth somewhere in their attack. This kind of thing is inevitable as we walk the path of transforming our false understanding of self into the presence of authenticity. To learn from our difficulties – that’s possible, with mindful awareness.

Develop a non-reactive mind. Praise and blame is the way of the world.*
So, guard against ill-will. Go about [learning] calmed, without conceit. 

– Verse 702, Sutta-Nipāta.  Translated by Christopher J. Ash

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* Literally, “in the village.”