Genie's Revenge

As a child I considered my self a connoisseur of cartoons, a Rex Reed of the animated, so to speak. I didn’t care for the Flintstones and I felt that the animation techniques of Hanna Barbera were just wrong. But I did enjoy some of the Warner Brothers classic cartoons, specifically those featuring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. How about you? Did you enjoy those two?

Could you recall the episode, where our heroes took a wrong turn and wound up mistaking the Sahara desert for Pismo Beach? I loved that episode! How about you? Yes, Bugs Bunny discovered Aladdin’s lamp, released the Genie and endured all sorts of zany misadventures. By the end of the cartoon old, Daffy Duck was quite feed-up and deeply annoyed; oh like we haven’t seen that before! Any way, when it’s Daffy’s turn to rediscover the lamp and he accidentally released the genie, he wanted nothing to do with it and actually tried to stuff the genie back into the lamp. Enraged, in a booming voice the genie announced, “You have desecrated he genie of the lamp!” And then he promptly punished our friend, Daffy.

It has been pondered by some that the authentic existential dilemma is that although we want to be as cool as Bugs Bunny we are each as absurd as Daffy Duck, in our own unique way. Each of us has felt blue. How many times have we made the mistake of attempting to stuff the emotion of sadness back into the genie’s lamp of our heart? How well did that work? What are some of the ways trying to repress sadness could have simply made matters worse? Stuffed sadness can feed our anger, which can feed our fear, which can feed our sadness even further and in no time at all we can find ourselves very far from love, peace, insight and happiness.

I don’t want to be far from love, peace, insight and happiness, how about you? I don’t want to sink deeper into the bog of sadness, anger and fear. What can we do to prevent this? We can apply Buddha’s techniques to tame our afflictive emotions. We could courageously gaze unflinchingly at the affliction at hand, and so progress upon Buddha’s path of concentration. We could explore the non-graspable nature of what we feel and advance upon the path of insight. We could turn our heart to all others who may be suffering just as we are and as such grow on Buddha’s path of compassion. What could you do this week to connect with a Lama or Monk who could teach you the specific processes to practice the taming and harnessing of your sufferings?

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