“When it is impossible for anger to arise within you, you find no outside enemies anywhere. An outside enemy exists only if there is anger inside.” ~ Lama Zopa Rinpoche
June 24, 2008
This reminds me one of the recommendations in “The 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva” which states, “If outer foes are destroyed while not subduing the enemy of one’s own hatred, enemies will only increase. Therefore, subduing one’s own mind with the army of love and compassion is the bodhisattva’s practice.”
And these both carry over to lojong practice – a series of ‘slogans’ in mind training attributed to Arisha, an early teacher, and compiled by Jamgon Kongtrul.
The slogan that seems to walk along side these two is, “When misfortune fills the world and its inhabitants, make adversity the path of awakening.”
When I talk about Buddhism with people, one of the first items to come up is this notion of ‘doing away with negative emotion.’ Most Westerners have a great deal of attachment to their passions, especially that of anger – a particularly difficult emotion to release but equally difficult to own willingly.
Our anger is born from our reaction to outer influences – some real and some completely concocted by our minds. Granted, there are happenstances in the world that seem designed to awaken moral outrage – I’m not going to list them as I’m certain you have your favorites. To sit and stew in the juices of that outrage is an exercise in futility when the way to put out that flame is to do whatever you can to relieve suffering in this world.
You may say, quite honestly, “I’m outraged that a certain government will not allow foreign aid into their country to relieve the suffering of people who have been displaced by a natural disaster,” and you’d be quite right to feel compassion for the victims of that disaster – but your anger toward the government in question is energy misplaced. Instead, call upon the sense of compassion and see where that leads you.
You may also think, in the same scenario, “Well, there’s nothing one person can do and that country is on the other side of the world.” This may also be true (although I disagree with the idea that one person is powerless), however, you could turn your attention and compassion to those around you who are suffering in a similar manner.
And, just as easily, you could smile and say, “Hullo,” to every stranger you meet.
The idea is that the things outside you that seem to generate certain emotions serve as the objects for what is already within you. Anger did not arrive inside of you because a teacher berated you. The anger was already within, ready to flare up, to awaken, to come to life. Similarly, too, jealousy didn’t knock on the door on the day your neighbor got a new car. Your own feelings of need and seeing possessions as valuable were seeds awaiting the water of covetousness.
As to how we can prevent anger and other negative emotions from arising is to notice their arrival and follow them back to the source – one’s own view of the world – and soothe the feelings with compassion and loving kindness. That is not to say that you justify your anger or your jealousy, but that you find these emotions arise out of feelings of neglect, low self-esteem, earlier injury and other factors. Find the root cause, forgive yourself, forgive others you might see as contributors to your unhappiness, allow yourself the time to put that seed back to sleep – and move on.
We are able to generate compassion for others, compassionate responses to situations only by flexing this muscle within ourselves. The meditation place is where we practice but the world is the place where we put that practice into practice!
There’s quite a bit of advertising out there about the benefits of meditation, what we ‘get’ out of it on the way of bliss, but the real goals of sitting are to get a footing in four important qualities, features that can enable us, when used wisely, to free ourselves and others from suffering and fear and to increase happiness and balance. These are steadfastness, clear-seeing, experiencing our emotional distress and attention to the present moment.
Our first reaction, when confronted by something painful and/or scary, is to either run or do battle. Mostly we don’t act aggressively in the moment, but later, in reflection, we come up with a full-blown scenario of what we might have done (which is just another way to beat ourselves up).
In other words, we nurse our wounds in our typical neurotic habituated patterns.
When we meditate, however, and honor our commitment to sit, keeping our attention on our posture and breath, we begin to see our patterns. When combined with the other three qualities, our ability to ‘stay present’ with ourselves increases – and we find our ability to go the distance in other ways is also enhanced.
After a month or so of sitting meditation, we may find our ability to concentrate at work increases. We are better able to complete projects. We are able to tend to the minutia of life without impatience and irritation. We take our time and become more deliberate in our actions because we are able to appreciate what Thich Nhat Hanh refers to as “wonderful moment,” loving NOW for what it is.
As we continue to sit, our clarity is also augmented and we are able to garner a more compassionate understanding of the habituated patterns that eat up our lives.
One of the best techniques to add to practice is that of relaxing into our bodies by bringing our concentrated awareness to every part, reconnecting and breathing into places that hurt or are holding tension. When you find your attention wavering during meditation, doing a body scan is a good way to relieve physical distractions in order to get back to the business of mindfulness.
And you can use that technique at any point in your life. If you are at work and are handed an emergency project (while in the middle of another emergency project), stop and do a body scan. Kids driving you crazy? Stop and do a body scan (and perhaps teach them the same technique). Stuck in rush hour traffic – in your car, the subway, the train? Do a body scan. In line at the grocery store? Do a body scan.
I’ve said to people, in line at the grocery store, “Oh, I don’t mind. I see it as an opportunity to meditate.”
People laugh but they don’t realize I’m telling the truth.
Pema says, “We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.”
And “settling down” is truly the main purpose when you are beginning to do sitting meditation. Granted, there are other methods and styles to try later on, but first you owe it to yourself to commit to sit for fifteen minutes per day, clearing your mind, bringing your attention to the moment – and after a month, see what has happened, what changes have manifested, no matter how slight and incidental they may appear to be.
And remember to go easy on yourself. Pema relates this to training a dog. When you use fear techniques, you may have a very obedient dog, but she also might be demonstrating neurotic and confused behavior. When you train with kindness, the dog is more flexible and confident. We aren’t much different than dogs when it comes to our knee-jerk responses. We react with the same upset, the same selfishly self-absorbed conduct day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, lifetime after lifetime.
For me, it was such a relief to find a technique that was so simple, yet so completely life-changing.
When I find myself bowing to my habitual pattern of behavior, I literally stop myself in my tracks and do a mind scan, asking myself what I fear, where my suffering is located and who am I blaming for the cause.
It takes all of ten seconds because that’s how lightning-quick our responses are.
You know how you can develop a daydream or a fantasy about having a million bucks? Give it a try. Think about what you’d do if you had a million dollars and time yourself. You will probably find yourself bored within a minute, your mind ready to go think about something else – like what you’ll have for dinner.
Sitting still also gives a very clear demonstration of how quickly your mind moves from one thing to another. Our brains are amazing in their ability to process and store information. And we barely use their potential. Another added benefit to sitting is to be able to discipline your mind to do its job – thinking – in ways that benefit you and others.
Steadfastness can also be related to ‘Right Diligence’ when examining it in the context of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism so you can see, when combined with the notion of ‘Right Concentration,’ how we couple and group the spokes of the Wheel that are those paths.
Clear-seeing is the next benefit of disciplined and mindful meditation. What happens at first is that our ‘negative’ experiences, behaviors and actions come quickly to our awareness, for the most part because we are seeing ourselves more clearly, are more in touch with our neurotic patterns of behavior, our knee-jerk responses.
Pema mentions that Jack Kerouac had decided to pull himself away from the world for a bit, to hopefully catch some bliss and he said, “… but instead I’d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful… Me.”
We stabilize, we begin to see – and we don’t often like what we see. Again, returning to the analogy of dog-training, do we want to be fearful of being punished for our human foibles or do we want to be free of the fear and guilt?
If your very best friend, the person you love most in the world, came to you to confess sins, errors in judgment, mistakes, blunders and inconsistencies in her behavior, what would your reaction be?
You have several.
You could store this information away in order to use it against her at a later date. You could run and tell all the rest of your mutual friends how she’s screwed up, what she’s done wrong – all for your own self-aggrandizement.
You could make nice but be secretly outraged and hold on to this resentment for the rest of your life, poisoning your relationship and effectively killing the love between you.
You could also be compassionate and generous, making it very clear that whatever ‘crimes’ have been committed against you are completely forgiven – forgotten – and that you will do your best to support your friend in stepping forward into a new life, a life freed from debilitating fear and hopelessness. Forgiveness is the ability to accept a person the way they are, the way they are not, holding that confession as a sacred trust between you.
Applying this directly to your relationship with yourself, as these negatives come popping up, become your own beloved by forgiving yourself completely and promising to do whatever is possible to help yourself re-forge behaviors that impact in a positive and beneficial manner to yourself and to those around you.
The diligence of clear-seeing helps us to see our defenses, the walls we put up to protect ourselves from others. Using compassion to stabilize our minds – steadfastness – assists us in examining our beliefs, desires and expectations in a more realistic manner.
Pema says that “we also see our bravery, our bravery, our wisdom.”
As we move more deeply into this process, we experience emotional distress. The closer we examine our situations and the motivations and actions that helped bring them into existence, the more liable we are to make ourselves wrong, beat ourselves up, become hopeless and helpless. By building that foundation of stability in our practice and by being more merciful due to our clarity, we can begin to act to diminish these less-than-positive reactions to our past and plan a future free of these restraints.
In realizing that the barriers we’ve constructed to hide from others have also hidden us from our true nature. Their apparent safety and comfort are truly restrictions preventing us from experiencing the present moment – the present moment being the only place in which we can truly exist.
When we start to use meditation as a means of ‘achieving bliss’ in order to avoid or escape our difficult emotions, it is of critical importance to use our steadfastness and compassion – born of Right Diligence and Right View – to bring our minds back to the work at hand – that of moving toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
In his book on anger, Thich Nhat Hanh compares anger to a crying infant. By pretending the child isn’t there, we are actively not solving the problem. We have already tried all of the usual means of drowning out that sobbing, screeching voice – drugs, sex, alcohol, rock-and-roll, art and creativity, television, movies and books, hanging out with our friends – and yet it remains. In order to still the sound of that voice, we need to turn off all of the distractions and embrace that pain – and to embrace it as a way of moving ourselves from a reactive bundle of neurotic actions to that of responsive and compassionate love in motion.
As we continue strengthening and stabilizing ourselves, freeing our minds from the entrapment of egocentric thought and self-absorption, not only do we see ourselves more clearly, we are far more aware of others as they truly are, not as we perceive them to be – or even how they see themselves! This helps to liberate our relationships and move them to new levels without having to do much more than to demonstrate our understanding and compassion.
And the voice of the reactive mind, that crying child, starts to become curious with the changes as we rope it in and drag it back to the aware mind. This gives us more cognitive stamina that also bodes well for success as a human being.
At some point, the inevitable happens. We find that below our ‘thinking’ something else remains – a vital and living pulse – our own ground of being. This is the time we begin to ask, “Who am I without these thoughts? What am I beyond the confines of ego? When I shut down my attachment to my story and my history, what remains?”
Now we are free to abide with this energy. Done with acting out and repression, attachment and revulsion, it is time to move deeper yet further out, extending our energy to work on the work in new ways based upon an even greater understanding of the nature of reality, choosing our actions and responses.
Pema tells us, “When we struggle against our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear seeing wisdom. Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it’s free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles.”
We accomplish this by dropping whatever story we tell ourselves, leaning into the emotions and the fear. When the reactions engage we can enter into the game of ‘touch and go,’ noticing each emotion and thought as it arises, to touch them softly, acknowledge them as thought and emotion and let them go. In this way, we relax our struggle.
We can watch the internal movie that is our life and see it for what it is, no longer sucked into the drama and pathos. We have developed control over the active mind, finding less need to reel it and sit it down. We think our thinks and have our feelings without being chained to them.
Not that we are apathetic or unfeeling but, in the words of Pema Chodren, “We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world.”
We continue to soften up, using maitri as our guide, maitri being an unconditional and non-judging openness. Nothing is blocked as we touch and let go, allowing each moment its own tenderness as our responses become more wholesome and fresh.
In this way we begin to embrace our truest self, our truest nature, awakening into that which is basic and inherent – bodhicitta.
Chapter Four, “Learning to Stay”
I’ve heard it said by many teachers that sitting meditation and sitting in a group (as a member of a sangha – one either private and tightly-knit with vows and such or loosely-knit and open to the public) is just about the most revolutionary and possibly craziest thing a human being can do.
“What did you do last night?”
“Oh yeh. I sat with the sangha over at the meditation center for two hours. It was a pretty neat evening.”
“You just sat?”
“Well, I sat and tried to meditate. I think that, out of the two hours, I might have actually meditated for fifteen minutes, but I’m just beginning.”
If the person doesn’t walk off, shaking her head, perhaps you could invite them to come along the next time!
We have a low tolerance for discomfort of any kind (unless you are a masochist). We don’t like physical pain (see previous sentence). We don’t like to be denied even the simplest wish – such as not having to stand in line at Starbucks. If it is sunny out, we complain about the heat. If it’s snowing, we complain about the cold. If it’s raining, we complain about that and worry about flooding. If it isn’t raining, we worry about our gardens and possible drought conditions.
Unlike Goldilocks, we never find what is “just right” and eat it all up, satisfied and happy. We might have a few moments of “just right” but they don’t last. We are immediately off to find the next thing to help us feel better when, truth told, life isn’t about gratification or feeling better.
What is it all about?
Well, unless we’re talking about my collection of fabric and beads, it’s about the spaces between our actions and incidents, not the actions and incidents themselves.
Why sit?
Good question.
For the most part, sitting meditation (not sadhana or ritual practice, but sitting, standing or walking meditation) is designed to support us in learning about our ‘natural seat’ – our inner nature of bodhicitta, our mindfulness. By connecting with our genuine unconditional friendliness to ourselves, we can begin to start to examine that ‘curtain of indifference’ enabling us to ignore the suffering of others. We start to notice the gaps in the internal dialogue and raise a healthy inquisitiveness about those spaces – the bardo moments.
In examining these pauses, by shaking hands with these gaps, we start to develop a rather simple and direct, uncluttered relationship with life itself. We may start to meditate in order to find the justification that will help us reinforce our false beliefs, but that fades rather quickly. We may be seeking protection from discomfort, only to find that our discomfort increases. Meditation will not fix us in any mundane manner, neither will it fulfill our hopes and dreams or remove our fears.
At least not right away.
People who come to basic sitting meditation may be disheartened immediately. Looking for a consistent state of bliss, they find instead a person – a regular person right off of the street! – who tells them to try to keep their posture a certain way. They are also instructed to label thoughts as thoughts and to attempt to bring their active mind back to a certain state of awareness – almost like giving a dog a gentle tug on the leash.
Seeking bells and whistles, transcendental experience and the answer to all of the questions of the universe, initial meditation is going to seem boring and possibly insane.
And it might be.
But then again….
Pema says that we are like the beggar who sifts through the garbage, looking for food and finds instead a jewel buried in a heap of trash.
“Right here, in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of bodhicitta.”
And, by continuing this practice, we find a place of clarity embedded in our fantasy world, at the core of our thoughts, in the middle of our goals and promises. If we can, without moralizing, without harshness, and without deception, face the freshness that is our true nature, we can gladly relinquish our old, worn out, habituated patterns of behavior. It is our innate goodness – maitri – that continually refreshes us. Without it, we are only continuing to beat ourselves up, put ourselves down, stifling our ability to flow with the condition of life.
By sitting, by remaining in place for a certain amount of time, committed to watching the dance of the mind as we learn to stay put, we develop the four qualities which support the appearance of boddhicitta, encouraging and strengthening our connection to the flowing water of loving kindness.
This crazy practice of sitting and doing nothing can become the most outrageous act of freedom a person can commit. The four qualities empowered by meditation are steadfastness, clear seeing, an ability to truly experience our emotional distress, and attention to the present moment. Each is linked to the other and, together, they provide a foundation supporting the natural seat – our true nature.
Chapter Three – “The Facts of Life”
“If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new.” ~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
The Dharma teaches us that the nature of reality is contained in three things – impermanence, egolessness and suffering.
For many of us, the impermanence itself is the greatest form of misery, seeking as we do a place that is permanently locked in time, in frozen moments, seemingly safe and beyond harm. We notice that nothing remains the same, even though we try to pin it down like butterflies on display.
A very wise man, Abdul-Baha, once said that human beings battle for ground and territory but the only real ground we can ever own is the grave where our bodies are put to rest. This struggle to achieve something consistent is the same – we struggle to earn the right to die never realizing that we have never truly lived.
Life is a journey and a process, a masterpiece in the making, not a goal or an end result.
If you have ever gone rafting you find out pretty quickly that the best ride takes you around the stones, not thru them. The same is true of body-surfing in the ocean – it is only possible to do it successfully if you allow yourself to move with the wave, with the force and direction of the water.
Life is the same way. By seeking the boulders, we are stopped by them, stymied, unable to move, as frozen as a glacier, growing only in tiny increments while our true potential languishes. When we can relax and flow with life, accepting what is, as well as what is not, we find a greater sense of peace and serenity while still dealing successfully with whatever the circumstances are.
We master content by mastering context.
Pema writes, “Acknowledging this truth doesn’t mean that we’re looking on the dark side. What it means is that we begin to understand that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together. We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.”
Our clinging to a fixed idea of what life should be like, what we should be like, how other people should be, is a neurotic and crippling point of view. It limits us in every way possible and we wind up as paupers in the true banquet of life.
These notions of separateness are our truest pain, leaving us alienated, fearful and in an animal state of suffering without knowing why, without being able to find our way thru to the other side.
By engendering bodhicitta, we nurture what is flexible (and thus enduring) in our minds. This happens because, as we immerse ourselves in the intellectual notion of oneness, of lack of separation, a nullification of the belief in duality, we start to see how the world around us is composed of things that come together, remain that way for a time, then dissipate. It is by following our thoughts that this moves from the plane of intellectual exercise to a revealed and heartfelt truth.
If we can begin to see events and circumstances as ceaselessly changeable, as consistently illusory, as something born of nothing that seems to exist, then not exist, when we apply this to our own fixed ideas about ego and personality, those begin to break down too. Ego and personality are conceived and birthed out of our storyline, our belief in our individual and individuated nature. If, however, we begin to perceive ego as a mask we can wear or discard, the whole notion of the storyline changes.
Who has these experiences? Who owns this story? What’s it all about, Alfie?
If, instead, we are as fluid as time, we can relax our need to know what comes next and just let it be, allow the experiences to come, allow the circumstances to be what they are without changing our essentially changeless ground of being.
Now, with these ideas of changing circumstances and the notion of a dynamic and fluid being, when we approach the concepts of suffering and dissatisfaction, we can ask, “Who suffers? What circumstance causes this suffering?”
“It is a changeless ground of reality that offers itself as a screen upon which the storyline of a life is played out.”
That idea scares many people.
To others, it is freedom – because we have the experience of having practiced thru many sets of chains of events, some agreeable and pleasant, some painful and nightmarish, and we are still here, practicing, developing bodhicitta as we are able, expressing what Pema refers to as our dynamic, changing nature.
“First, we expect that what is always changing should be graspable and predictable…. Second, we proceed as if we were separate from everything else, as if we were a fixed identity…. Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places.”
“In terms of how we seek happiness, we are all like the alcoholic who drinks to stop the depression that escalates with every drink, or the junkie who shoots up in order to get relief from the suffering that increases with every fix.”
If you are an addict of any sort (and we are all initially addicted to our point of view), then the above picture of addictive behavior should strike home with sharpness of a finely honed blade.
We consistently seek happiness outside ourselves - the plasma wide screen theater in your home, the one that seats twelve with your own popcorn machine – it’s another of those short-term fixes that continues to hold a dysfunctional pattern in place.
Habituated patterns. Remember them?
I shop for beads and fabric and shoes. I’d say that my online shopping is part of my addictive behavior. I pride myself on getting a pair of $100 shoes for $20, shipping included. True, I do need the shoes to cover my feet and I need shoes that help strengthen my legs and feet since I have a physical condition that pains my lower extremities. I haven’t bought 15 pairs of Earth Shoes online – yet – but I am very proud of the fact that I’ve been able to grab such bargains on eBay.
Will I ever use up all that fabric? Well, I’ve given quite a bit of it away but I’ve winnowed it down to what I think I’ll use and I only have – oh – maybe ten more patterns to buy before I’ll be satisfied that my Folkwear pattern collection is all that it should be.
Beads? Beads? Who can have too many beads?
Do you see this? I do.
My rationale is that I’ll use both the beads and the fabric to make things for me to wear, to make things for my website for folks to buy.
Logical? Sure is. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so happily smug about my beads and fabric.
Dysfunctional pattern?
Oh yeh. It smacks of OCD but at least the collection is labeled. That’s what REALLY matters!
It is part of my habit of reaching for something, it helps to alleviate the feeling that something bad is going to happen. My head tells me that my cancer and that of my son were The Bad Things but then the very recent rift with my daughter (a rift based on our old, shared habit of miscommunication – another habituated pattern we both proudly uphold) brought my dysfunctions very clearly up to the surface. Rather than shopping it away (I kept shopping, knowing it wouldn’t it wouldn’t fix anything), I sat with the pain, having had some real “AHHA” moments, moments I wouldn’t trade for all the eBay sellers in the world.
I began looking at what I reach for – mostly my anger and my arrogance, my need to be right. My attempt to make life predictable meshed firmly with my soap-opera-situation-comedy-teevee attitude that, sooner or later, everyone would follow the script, the one I wrote, would act out the parts I’d auditioned them for – AND WE’D ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
Samsara.
Pema says Trungpa Rinpoche told her, “There is no cure for hot and cold.” There isn’t. There is no balm in Gilead. There is no pot of gold. There is no wise and friendly dad who will right all wrongs within a half an hour (less commercials). Mom is not going to emerge from the kitchen with freshly baked cookies and hot chocolate, smiling, as the theme music is cued up and the credits roll.
What is going to happen is the nature of reality – and that has to be enough.
Right?
Chapter Two, “Tapping into the Spring”
Three of the methods we use to blind ourselves to the true nature of realty and our ground of being are called “The Lords of Materialism” – Form, Speech and Mind.
The first, Form, is how we look to externals to feel better, to escape the shaky ground of insecurity – and there are a whole lot of pretty, shiny objects out there to keep us blissfully (or not-so-blissfully) unconscious. As Pema says, “Some of these methods are dangerous, some are humorous, some are quite benign. The point is that we can misuse any substance or activity to run away from insecurity.”
I have a few methods I use. Relationships of a romantic or intimate nature – we can even call it sexual addiction if you like – tended to be my first drug of choice. What I have noticed in my nearly-six years of celibacy and abstinence is, first and foremost, how jealous I have been of people who seem to have found the way to make a long-term, marital type relationship work. And it does seem like many of them (I’m talking 20-plus years) have found a way to make it work and are still smiling, with all their limbs intact. I am becoming less and less jealous, more and more happy to be able to participate in this sympathetic joy and the added honor of being considered a friend to these relationships.
Talking into the wee hours of the morning with a very delightful friend, we discussed the reality of ‘not-being-in-a-relationship.’ Comparing notes we found that we both entered into situations with controlling people – often people with severe alcohol-and-drug addictions, addictions to sex, etc – making us both on the high end of the co-dependent wheel.
The whole co-dependent schtick is highly manipulative and very sanctimonious. I know. I have the teeshirt, the keyring, the coffee mug and the welcome mat.
My reasons for doing so have been relatively sound, in a very sick way.
“This poor broken thing really needs me, needs my wisdom and knowledge and deep spiritual nature to show him or her how to be happy forever. I am so good and he or she is so bad; I am so very right and he or she is so very wrong. I’ll just wave my magic wand around – for five or six years – all the while ignoring my real friends, my children, and my own needs.”
Not really much of a saint, was I? And do I know it.
I admitted, there and then in the relatively public but very late at night pizzeria, that I felt that no one had ever really loved me in a romantic way – but then again, I’m not certain I’ve ever really loved anyone in that way myself.
She added, my friend did, nodding her head, that perhaps we had never learned to love ourselves.
So true, so very true.
Again, seeking an external in order to make the achy breaky heart go away.
But it doesn’t, it won’t and, when we dive in a bit more deeply to this book, we can begin to look, together, at the idea of this sad heart being our source of strength and not a sign of weakness.
As a past-perfect-trying-to-awaken disciple of the Lord of Form, I am also pretty good at diverting my attention with really good shows on television (including Yankee baseball and “The Dog Whisperer), answering email, writing of all kinds, talking on the phone to my twin-cousin, surfing the net, playing games online and shopping – all of which sound pretty benign, don’t they?
Shopping. Now, since most of my shopping seems to be for ‘spiritual toys’ and fabric, it’s of the pretty benign variety, as are most of my Lord of Form diversions. And, since I couple this with practice and willingly observe my patterns – stopping myself when I am walking the danger line of not having any money in the bank. I see my rationalizations and excuses and lately I find I am more than willing to say, “You’re treading the line here. Time to take a look at what you are hiding from.”
Invariably I am hiding from some fear, some pain, some issue needing my attention.
The big difference is in knowing I’m using an external to avoid working on the internal.
Then again, there’s the creative stuff I do that seems to really allow for some space in my chest. When I’m writing or beading or sewing or – fill in the blanks – I can be creative! – I find myself in a place that seems to be beyond time and place, free and open, as wide as the sky.
And I even sometimes don’t even feel guilty about feeling so good.
Talk about externalizing!
But when I find myself doing forms and externals, I can ask myself if I am doing this in order to avoid boredom, to pretend that the ache isn’t there. Since I’ve been exploring the ache in a beneficent manner, I know that it might do me some good, some real good, to go sit for fifteen minutes, whether I think I need it or not.
Fifteen minutes of tonglen, loving-kindness practice, contemplating the Four Immeasurables, generating merit and giving it away to my enemies, meditating on disintegration and impermanence – there’s really a long list of practices! – and some of these can be used as a way to avoid just sitting mindfully for fifteen minutes.
Chapter Two: “Tapping into the Spring”
She begins this chapter with a quote from Albert Einstein that is certainly worth the read.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
I underlined the phrase, “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness,” because it struck me that this is the quandary we face as humans – our blindness to our true nature, to the gifts we are born possessing, the tremendous capacity of our innate wisdom – all hidden under a bushel basket, as we are reminded in the Old Testament.
In this chapter, she takes us to our core by starting off with a story about how, when digging the foundation for Gampo Abbey, they struck bedrock, causing a crack to appear. Soon after, water began to drip out. Within an hour, the water was flowing more strongly and the crack had widened.
She likens that to the discovery of the basic goodness of bodhicitta. We tap into our deepest selves, finding a well of sorrow within, accessing the pain of the human condition we carry inside, we typically pull away, using every trick of self-deception in the book to pretend we are not sensing what we sense, are not knowing what we know. We are so wrapped up in the pretense of ‘being okay’ that we will do anything we can to support this optical delusion of the heart.
However, this tender place within – as insecure as it might be – offers us a place where we have been ‘waiting to exhale,’ to heave a great sigh of relief that may very well release a barrage of tears, all of those feelings of loving kindness and compassion we hide away.
Various songs are rolling around in my head right now.
“Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away.” The Beatles were starting to move away from their ‘lost love’ theme, into their various spiritual journeys – trails that would end in a ‘divorce’ of the group itself – which was not a ‘bad’ thing when you consider the music coming out of their individual voices after the split.
But there you have it, part of the fear of connection to this place within, this quality called bodhicitta.
“Oh no. This gives the appearance of changing everything.”
Sure does. Not only does it give the appearance of changing everything, it may just point out that everything is in constant change and always has been. It is us, in our need to find something solid and consistent in life, who have labeled change as ‘bad,’ spending our waking and sleeping moments in a vainglorious attempt to get back to a place we labeled as ‘good’ some time ago. Not only does that place in time not exist, what we perceived as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ no longer exists.
We chase after ghosts, shadows and mirrors, rather than sitting – utterly bored to near-death – to face the challenge of facing the truth nature of our lives.
We fear death, yet we face it every day – but unconsciously. We don’t think that our building may be hit by an airplane, that our commuter train is the one that will be chosen by a gun-wielding madman, that a small weakness in the wall of a main artery will burst open and kill us before an ambulance arrives, that an infinitesimal cell in our body possessing no death-clock-turn-off-switch of its own is getting ready to reproduce itself into a cancerous tumor in our brains.
Or do we? Do we all - beneath the smiles, new cars, bigger houses, better spouses, more trips to unknown lands, abundant paychecks, new babies, professional landscaping, empty conversations and vapid activities – do we know that we are wasting a precious opportunity? Is that what really keeps us up at night? We may think our sleeplessness is worry and anxiety over ways to keep our list of bright, shiny things – but I know that my insomnia was a fear of death. I might close my eyes for a moment – and die.
I know. I’m not real fond of the idea my own self.
Okay. So we have this thing called ‘the Dharma’ and we have the various dharma of many schools of philosophy and religion, most of them telling us that, in order to be happy, we have to have what we do here and now match our idea of what is divine or what is innately sacred or good or pure – or just fill in the blanks here. And it’s all true. By following a moral compass that points toward the effort of the one for the many as a practice that will bring great joy and completion in addition to relieving suffering, we can use that to fulfill our days and nights.
Better that than drinking and clubbing until we fall down, eh? And that may seem like a judgment but it’s not.
“Whatever gets you through the night.”
What you do to get to dharma-activity is exactly what you need to get you there. Some people get there by sitting on a cushion. Others get there by sitting in a church. Or a grove. Or a temple. Or a school. Or a bus. Some of us get there by sitting on death row.
Either way, as it is written, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
We got ourselves born. We did whatever it took to take on human life, our precious existence. Hopefully whatever seeds we’re planting now will keep us returning to being human so that we can continue to cultivate these bodhicitta seeds.
Here we are, at this crossroads. We can never truly go back to sleep, waiting for death. We can no longer stumble along, feigning ignorance. We can never really embrace our anger in the manner in which we used to, believing ourselves utterly justified in our hatred. We have lost the right to our arrogance and pride in our willingness to witness the suffering of others.
OH NO!
We may have contemplation, but we no longer possess complacency.
We may have finally found the willing courage to face our fears, to see our egoic self-clinging for the delusion it is. Now what?
What now is that facing fear, accepting our true nature, feeding ourselves with compassion, fueling our innate wisdom in order to open up the barriers to true self-knowledge (which is also knowledge of ‘the other’). By accepting the shakiness and inconsistency of living, our aversions and desires and our suffering are items we can examine and discard while we polish the mirror of true wisdom.
It is important, as she writes, to familiarize ourselves with our attachment to our story, to examine what we like and dislike, what we approach and what we avoid, just noticing them for what they are – optical delusions, the tricks and defenses we have built up over the years.
And there are practices that support us in these endeavors, but first it might be of importance to know what we’re up against, to get to know our fears as intimately as possible, using sitting meditation, contemplation, awareness and courage as our tools.
Chapter One, “The Excellence of Bodhicitta”
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This quote from “The Little Prince” is how Pema Chödrön starts the first chapter. “The Little Prince,” a very tiny yet infinitely wise book , full of the original acumen of every religion possessing a wisdom path, remains a fine and lasting example of the human condition. Alone on a tiny planet, devoid of color, light and life, this Little Prince comes to discover what is essential by using his mind’s eye to view the truth.
Bodhicitta is the essential truth of human nature. It goes against nearly everything we have been taught by Western culture and the path of the consumption-driven industrial society. While trying to remain numb to our individual agonies, we view the suffering of the of the world, throw our hands to the sky and say, “It’s all too much.” Then we change the channel and pour another martini.
Or some equivalent of the same.
Then along comes someone who says, “Our essential nature is that of compassion, loving-kindness, joy and a balanced approach to both the suffering and the happiness of life,” describing us as loving warriors for truth, as beings who are joyfully willing to do whatever is necessary to transform the hearts of all beings.
What magical, mystical power can do this? What can heal? What is the Balm of Gilead? The Grail?
She writes, “If we were to ask the Buddha, ‘What is bodhicitta?’ he might tell us that this word is easier to understand than it is to translate…He might tantalize us by adding that it is only bodhicitta that heals, that bodhicitta is capable of transforming the hardest of hearts and the most prejudiced and fearful of minds.”
Sounds like a pretty tall order for one word, doesn’t it?
“Bodhi” means awake, enlightened and completely open. “Chitta” means mind, as well as heart and attitude. So this quality is that of openness, an attitude of approachability, the capacity to stand and deliver as well as sit and receive. The essential feature of bodhicitta is the broken heart, vulnerable and sensitive. This is an open wound that can bring pain with every touch, yet the peaceful warrior knows this to be the essence of love.
“But fortunately for us, the soft spot – our innate ability to love and to care about things – is like a crack in these walls we erect.”
Although this is the pain we try to avoid at all costs – including the price of our own aliveness – eventually, for each of us, there is some element or incident in life that will cause the hidden crack to break wide open revealing to us the universal broken-heartedness, the true sorrow and grief we all possess. In that moment, when we connect with our own bodhicitta, we are joined to all who have ever suffered.
We are only a keyboard or a remote control away from being able to view the suffering of humanity. We have televisions and computers that can take us, in an augenbli