Falling in Love: Part Thirty Six: Recovering Your Lost Self: Marc Gafni

In the Sorrow

With all of our focus on consciousness, we do not mean to say that the only life worth living is one that is totally healed. Indeed, no one is ever fully healed or fully conscious. Letting go of the need for full healing or full consciousness is perhaps the hardest letting go on the spiritual path. One of the oldest Bhuddish stories of Kigosataami.

Kigosataami suffers a great loss. Bereft with pain, she desperately seeks healing and can find none. Finally, she comes to the Buddha. “My daughter,” he says, “bring me a mustard seed from a house healed of pain and with that seed I will heal you.”

Kigosataami is enormously relieved, for she knows many such blessed houses. She knocks on the first door with her request for a mustard seed. “Kigosataami, you think we are without pain. Then surely you have not heard of how our son left for war and has not returned…” So Kigosataami listens to their story, and comforts them in their anguish. She then goes on to the next ‘blessed’ house in pursuit of her mustard seed. “But Kigosataami, you know nothing of what we have gone through in the past year.”

And again, she listens to this family’s misfortune. She stays to comfort and console them in their pain. With every house she visits, she is given not mustard seeds, but stories of sorrow. And every house she stays to comfort them, until that is how she fills her days, going from door to door, listening to the stories of anguish in the world and bringing comfort to their tellers. And so it was, Kigosataami goes on to become a great Buddhist saint. Though herself never fully healed, she is full of healing, full of compassion, and fully enlightened.

Illumination begins when we give up the futile quest for total healing.

Enlightenment is when we begin to trust our unconscious even as we reach for the highest levels of consciousness that are available to us in the present moment. It is perfectly possible, even desirable, to live a full life of depth, pleasure and joy and not be fully healed.

marc gafni
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