I have been on vacation in New York, including but not limited to NYC, but also upstate NY, where I have partial ownership of some property. The view (and fung shui - 風水 is awesome). And yes, like a photo on Warner's blog, my photo is completely unretouched and un-Photoshopped. I have a place for walking meditation in NY.
During that time it appears that someone in my workplace may have been propagating some false information about some of the work I'm doing. I won't go into details here, but suffice to say, it is likely, to me, that the person doing this is doing it for reasons borne of their own prior experience much as the way Reverend Fisher describes the experience with an ex, or as Nathan writes about his own experiences. It also, I think, arose from the inherent instability in today's workplaces, but it also arose from the greed hatred and ignorance of the party doing this. Sometimes, when people feel their influence in an organization slipping they behave like certain countries did in World War I.
I had to sit with these feelings for over a week, and was not as happy a camper as I otherwise would have been on my vacation. I realized I had to accept that this situation would not change with me alone, that these feelings are here, inside me, and as physiologically important for me as other discomforts. This was where nirvana, and all transcendence from suffering would be dwelling. And it sucked. It sucked to think that there might be a person spreading falsehoods about me, and that some people with power in the organization might actually have believed them, facts be damned. On the other hand, with a view like the above, sometimes those feelings actually pass. I also took a day to sit for a while at the Chan center in NY, and afterwards had a dream with Red Pine in it, whom I've never met.
"The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of the bell?" said Yunmen. My answer today: my practice dwelling in the workplace is desperately needed.
And yesterday, however, again for reasons I can't get into, the situation acquired some clarity, so to speak.
Nathan wrote regarding romantic relationships:
Romantic relationships, with all their intensity, twists and turns, really defy explanations most of the time. And if they last awhile, they are bound to stir up a lot of shit, and create sometimes profound levels of instability. I'm not talking about psychological disorders (although this can happen too), when I say instability I mean a shaking, sometimes to the core, of what one's identity is. All the attachments to a certain image of one's self come to the forefront, get poked at, and/or directly challenged. This is part of the reason why humans struggle so much with these kind of relationships.
This can also be true of work relationships as well. Luckily though in work relationships, there is a way out of hell if there is a reasonably enlightened management (not in the 見性 sense but in the general sense of a management aware enough of the interests of the company to realize that it's not good business to screw over employees). I have tried to be very open in my general style of how I manage my project, and I am certain that within a few days this problem will have come to its denouement. It might even ultimately be good for me. But this must be checked, and the attendant emotions that are as Genghis Khan is reputed to have said in his native tongue:
The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.
This sort of emotion though is rather toxic in the workplace, and the workplace's enlightened managers will do what is in the interest of the company's interests to get done. The closure of this series of incidents will close to my benefit only if I check my own greed, hatred and ignorance. Just this.
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