Bookish Buddhadharma is papered with lists, from the tidy simplicity of The Four Noble Truths to the head-banging complexity of The Umpty-Million Concomitants of Consciousness. I have read and forgotten yards of such lists. But I have always remembered a particularly simple trio: the unenlightened personality traits of greed, aversion, and delusion.
The charts and pyramids and circles and pentagrams and enneagrams of modern psychology turn to dust in the clear air of the Buddhadharma. Nuts to the experts with their degrees, chairs, and polysyllabic pontifications: skinny bald guys in orange sheets got there first. Monks didn’t shave off their brains along with their eyebrows; they understood that each of us displays all three traits in varying degrees, and that practice aids in transforming each afflictive trait into a complementary enlightened mindstate.
And that’s it for the Buddhadharma lesson. Today I’m talking confession.
Hi, my name is Scott, and I’m an aversive. (Hi, Scott!)
Gawdalmighty am I an aversive. I’ve lost count of the decisions I have made from not wanting rather than wanting. I have traced out a zigzag pattern of avoidance, like a contrarian ant who frets about getting his feet gooey while his comrades swarm blissfully over the half-melted chocolate mint on the floor. Those careless slobs might get stuck in the goo, only to be scraped up and die ignominiously in a ten-gallon Glad Bag plopped down on the edge of the driveway. But not this ant, chocolate mint be damned.
Aversion probably saved my life back in the early 1980s. Many of my friends were digging the bawdy high life of San Francisco, out every night at the bars and baths and parks and clubs and wherevers, screwing themselves silly in nonstop hormonal indulgence. I envied their unabashed hedonism. But I noticed that they were always sick. They had sniffles and colds and flu and strep throat. They wrestled with herpes and shingles and hepatitis. They got penicillin shots for syphilis and gonorrhea. They knew all about treating crabs and scabies.
Routine to them, but not to me. Determined to have none of it, I stayed home. Because I had smeared lamb’s blood on my lintel, HIV passed me by when it wafted into our midst and starting issuing death warrants. I would have contracted AIDS only via divine intervention. I went to a lot of funerals.
My protective withdrawal could be attributed to insecurity, cowardice, or common sense trumping testosterone rather than aversion. Yet I bulge with pet peeves and pushable buttons. Latecomers drive me bats. I over-react by showing up comically early, driven by the whispers of an imp who assures me that personal disaster will befall should I be a millisecond tardy. My students know my litany: if you can be here at 9:10, you can be here at 9:00, dammit. I am unmoved by the counter-aversive response: ten minutes is but a blip in the time-space continuum, so lighten up, dammit.
I am an aversive. I do not lighten up.
I’m not particularly rattled by cell-phone-addicted strangers who yap incessantly in public, but I’m bothered by the usual sonic irritants—car alarms, sirens, helicopters, all obnoxious and universally irritating. I will not patronize a restaurant that plays loud music. I am resolutely antagonistic to rap, hip-hop, and heavy metal. I tried to get over my fingernails-on-blackboard cringing at the music of Webern, later Schoenberg, and the whole academic serialist enchilada, but no soap. I still can’t stand the stuff.
A pamphlet from the Buddhist Publication Society tells me that aversives “tend to be particular, hard on themselves, and indignant when others do not live up to their expectations of how people should behave.” The BPS sure has my number. If I subjected my students to the nasty criticism I dish out to myself, they’d all be camped out in the Dean’s office with piles of complaints and petitions. And nothing ruffles my fur more than the indigents who line San Francisco sidewalks, except for the hapless pols who have granted those boozers, winos, and junkies immunity from civic responsibility. Straighten up and fly right, ya bums.
I can spend hours contemplating a few words in a sentence or the precise significance of a single fifth-progression in a midground analysis. Back in my regular performing days, I saw nothing obsessive about practicing a tricky passage at reduced tempo every day for six months. Critics sometimes accused me of getting all the details but missing the point. They were right about that. But with age I became just as obsessive about getting the point. Aversion is a big tent.
Carefree? No. Intense? Yes. Also committed, reliable, responsible, thorough, exacting, comprehensive, passionate.
And picky. Picky above all. Intolerably picky, insufferably picky, flagrantly picky, picky beyond reason, picky beyond sensibility.
That’s life as an aversive. The BPS assures me, however, that “the alchemy of practice can transform the aversive pattern into wisdom, clear seeing, and kindness” and that we aversives are “quickest to enlightenment.” How lovely. I just wish enlightenment weren’t such a dimly flickering beacon on the far horizon. From where I sit, my vision is woefully muddled and wisdom remains a long way off.
Or maybe I’m just being picky.