Buddha as a Garbage Man

The story of your life is encoded in the shit that you refuse to open up and allow to move through you. Every time you are afraid, you are a clogged pipe refusing to open because it doesn’t know what will happen when it changes its size. Allowing/receiving/surrendering – all of these words mean only one thing. Let the shit move through you. Open up to it, stop resisting it, and shit it out.

We as a society have become much more focused on the earlier half of the samsaric cycle: we only care about creation and not graceful discreation. All phenomenal forms, once created, are now in the process of decaying. We care so much more about the hit of something coming into existence than about taking care of how it disintegrates.

As much as we are a creation consciousness, we are also a waste management consciousness. One of the primary descriptions of the Buddha is “he who has ended all effluents”. He no longer creates waste, he allows everything to move through him. It is friction that leads to chipping away and creation of new forms. He who is without effluents is without friction, and thus without karma. In every moment, he is one who comes back to the complete zero point where creation is fully and honourably disintegrated back to the void. Whenever you do this, you are the Buddha.

Our refusal to be waste management professionals within ourselves is obviously reflected in the way that we are conducting ourselves on this planet, in this country. “My effluents are someone else’s problem”, and the effluents are not just our garbage, human waste, etc. but includes the side-effects of the attitude with which we conduct ourselves and treat each other. Every caustic interaction, uncaring “deal with this, it’s your job”, every refusal to make someone’s job easier by being the ox who chooses to pull the load without passing it forward adds up and the great pacific garbage heap is the artform that manifests when we don’t deal even slightly with that pang inside telling us to reconsider what our egos are telling us to do.

Fixing the way your shit moves through you - The attention you pay to that is the story of your life.

Are you resistant, rejecting, disgusted by the smell of it? Or do you accept that you made this one way or another; that in being a little tremble of life, you have always been the one creating all the shit.

So let it move through you. Love everything that you can’t admit about yourself, can’t bear to look at in the world. That’s just your large intestine deciding I’m only going to push out 30% of the shit, that’s the only part I can bear to process. Do we see what happens to our bodies when we let 70% clog the pipes?

No mud, no lotus. Aversion to this responsibility only transfers the work to someone else who will be forced to deal with it. Why don’t we use the mess to experience the magic that lies in our ability to clean it up – how creatively we clean it up?

Afterword from Nanditha:

The thing about all these “ugly” things - waste, fear, unaddressed hurt, is that the more you ignore it, the uglier, smellier, scarier it will get. By facing these unpleasant parts of our existence, we give ourselves the chance to change things as they happen. Have you ever tried running away from a nightmare? You find that the more you shirk away from it, the more you crouch behind your blanket and dig into corners, the bigger they get. Turn around and face it, and you’ll find it was never as scary as your mind made you believe it was. Eventually, ghosts disappear and are replaced by scarier things like loss of autonomy, disrespect, rejection, and pain. Here too, its best to face reality and meet your fears head on.