Hong’s Stories: The Myth of Freedom Stage 2 — Nothing is always pleasurable
“We have gone through the four stages tonight discussing “The myth of freedom”. The first one is what is know as impermanence, which teaches us to realize nothing is eternal; the second one teaches us that nothing is always pleasurable, which begins to help us to realize that we can’t hang on to purely pleasure alone; the third one begins to teach us the notion of emptiness, which allows us to realize that we don’t actually have to construct things for our own sake; and the fourth one which teaches us egolessness, that there is nothing to hang onto, which only comes from a sense of sympathy and a sense of appreciation of ourselves, a sense of friendliness to ourselves.”
Chogyam Trungpa
Amituofu friends! The Buddhist lineage going back to and before Buddha himself constitutes an ongoing study of the human condition. The timeless power of Buddhism comes from its grounding in the understanding that enlightenment is achieved through embracing and engaging our daily, hourly, minutely, secondly life.
As we become more skilled in our real-world interactions, our personal path arises organically. By learning to quiet our mind, we learn to see life as it is and correctly interpret the constant stream of personal messages it sends us, good and bad.
The second stage of the “myth of freedom” points out a common and particularly American dilemma. Nothing is always pleasurable can be boiled down to the fact that while we can go around choosing what we want to do based on pleasure, after we have stuffed our face in the candy store called material life, what then. At some point, if we keep eating candy we end with a stomach ache, get diabetes and, if even then we keep eating, we will die.
I spent twenty years on Wall Street trying to buy up the candy store, convinced that once I was rich I would have whatever I wanted and finally be free to fulfill my heart’s deferred dreams. My epic “American Dream” quest put me on a seemingly inevitable if long-in-coming collision course with realizing the second stage, that nothing is always pleasurable.
In 2013 in the course of one July month-end weekend, my partners suddenly shut down my investment business leaving me millions in debt, and I went from living in an upper east side high rise while fully supporting two ex-wives and five children in private school to being a homeless couch-surfer trying to sell all of my possessions to raise cash. By the end of the year, I had been forced to file for bankruptcy.
In the meantime, I tried to find a new version of my old Wall Street job. I polled my Wall Street “friends” and contacts for opportunities, and it seemed to work, as I was invited to multiple big Wall Street job interviews. But in every case, I would make it through several rounds of interviews only to see things suddenly shut down without explanation. I eventually realized that as my credit check came through the process would stop. Bankruptcy had made it seemingly impossible to get my old high-stakes job back.
I had to find a new career and started chasing consulting business with companies I had been invested in. But by the beginning of 2014, my financial crisis was full-blown. Along with navigating bankruptcy proceedings, I had to let go of my divorce lawyer and was now pro-se (self-represented) in nasty ongoing proceedings with my second wife.
When I failed to quickly get another hedge fund job, my divorce case ended up in civil court, lawyers claiming I was not trying and that the bankruptcy was a fraud. I spent the summer of 2014 in court, and you can guess the outcome. Completely overwhelmed and stressed, I got smoked.
The civil judge ruled against me across the board, stating that I had not sufficiently tried to get by old job back and that my bankruptcy was a fraud. The divorce judge later tacked on a $150,000 penalty and gave me one month to pay, which was added to my debt. Ironically, almost immediately after the ruling, the IRS accepted my bankruptcy filing, and at least that part was thrown out. My bankruptcy was real.
In the meantime, I was supposed to be making $25,000 monthly (yes, that’s right) support and alimony payments to my first wife. Instead of going to court to ask for a downward modification, I agreed to continue to rack up debt to her as long as she agreed to leave me alone. For better or worse at that moment I just couldn’t fathom adding another trial.
Sitting at the bottom of my crisis, with two broken families, jobless, homeless, and over a million dollars in high-interest debt, I stared at a TIMES SQUARE BILLBOARD sized message. Out of the blazing lights of my crisis, one thing became clear. I could not go back to my old life for the solution, not only because it was not available to me, but because that way of being had, in fact, brought me here, to begin with.
Seeking pleasure as my guide in life had led me to a samsaric (suffering) rat wheel of failure, or success that quickly faded leaving me to jump back on the wheel and start over again. At forty-eight years old I finally understood the second stage of the myth of freedom, nothing is always pleasurable.
I needed to find another way.
