Repentance and "Loving the Absent"

When I first started to learn about Buddhism, I was quite daunted by the notion of ‘repentance’, and still am to some extent. I think that I have these experiences every so often, where I realize that I am trying to defend something that cannot be defended, because it has no substance. For example, I may encounter situations where something happened years ago, and karma just started to ripen now. I might recognize a mistake that was made at work, or some difference in perspective on what seemed ‘right’ at one time in the past. But perspectives change all the time. At work, something that seemed to make sense in one context might mean something else later. Can something that seems correct now always be correct? This is probably a very shallow form of humility.  But I am trying to practice this art of not knowing, particularly at work, so that I am less inclined to spend time defending old decisions.

But this attitude is quite nuanced. For example, if someone does not appear to care about what has happened in the past, that indifference could also create a negative karma. I don’t think that the not-knowing approach means not caring. I think that once I surrender a defensive view of what I have done and decisions from the past, I am free to care for the present moment. But this care does not mean attachment to an outcome. It means that the moment is taken for what it is, and I am not comparing it to anything I have carried over from the past. Caring might actually mean recognizing that how I have acted may not be seen in the same way by everyone else. So if I give up my perspective a bit and accept others as different, a new form of caring might arise.

It is interesting that in Christianity, repentance means something like a three hundred sixty degree turn.  I wonder if there is any equivalent in my own experience to this repentance. I think full repentance cannot happen until I start to really experience the suffering behind desires. Even if a desire creates a good effect, that desire can later lead to disappointment when I can no longer hold the same perspective. An idea that came to mind today was something like embracing the absence of a desired object. This embrace would be equivalent to somehow extending the love one has for something to the absence of it. It reminds me of Simone Weill’s idea that God’s presence is known through absence.  

Every now and then I have experienced that kind of feeling…of being so frustrated with an outcome that I turn to loving the absence of the outcome. It is almost as though that excess energy needs to go somewhere, so it ends up embracing that which is not. I am not sure how this works, or if it always necessarily does. Quite often, it ends up creating an opposite desire that only leads to more vexation! But I believe a thoughtful approach would involve twisting the very desire that we have so that it embraces a kind of conscious rebellion of the desire, or a passionate resistance. It is like enlisting the energy of desire itself to subvert or turn against that very desire. But, again, I am not sure how, when and why it works or doesn’t work. It is just a hypothesis for now…