Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the final two lines of verse 5 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“

“Alas for people in this age of residues!

The mind’s wholesome core of truth has withered, and people live deceitfully,

So their thoughts are warped, their speech is twisted.

They cunningly mislead others—who can trust them?”

 

 

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When we’re sleeping and we dream, then we wake up, some dreams make us shake our head and go, “Wow! What the heck was I thinking about to dream that?” When it comes to dreams at night, we never even pause to question whether or not our night worlds are dramas played out by our thoughts. There’s even a New Age cottage industry devoted to having “good thoughts” before sleep so that our dream worlds will be pleasant.

But oddly enough, when it comes to the dramas of our day world, the so-called ‘waking world’, we accept ‘reality’ as though it were out there, somewhere independent and apart from our minds.

But wait.

If our mind dreams at night, what’s it doing in the daytime when we’re ‘awake’?

The prayer of Absolute Enlightenment of the Mind reminds us that we have only one mind. Therefore, when we think of our mind’s fabulous capacity to conjure the worlds of our night time dreams, we must keep in mind that, “This same mind views the world by day…”

Wow.

So, does that mean that if we “live deceitfully”, it has an influence on our thoughts? I think it’s rather the opposite. Living deceitfully begins in the mind.

In the same way that our thoughts create and build spectacular dream worlds, our thoughts create, support, and inform our so-called ‘waking world’.

Our thoughts have become warped, our speech twisted so that we now cast onto the screen of the world an ongoing horror show of war, hunger, disregard for the lives of sentient beings, an unending relentless chase after wealth in which we brutally overrun any hint of compassion for ourselves or others.

Are our thoughts truly warped? Is our speech truly twisted? The proof is all around us in the very fabric of our waking world. We live on a planet that we have turned poisonous. We go about our lives as if all that we see will last forever. We confine spirituality to giant glass and steel edifices to be visited once weekly for a few hours.

Ask yourself, if you dreamed this world, and then woke from the dream, wouldn’t you say that you had dreamed of a place where all was madness?

***

Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?)

Much of the time when we talk, it’s to get our way. Even if we ask a question, we have an answer in mind.

There was a situation in my past where reality wasn’t what I thought it should be. I thought if I got enough help and wrote enough letters to enough managers, I could change that.

Talk about warped thoughts and twisted speech. I all but tried to bludgeon reality into the shape I wanted it to be. In the end, it turned out that the manager not only had a bigger bludgeon (the Super Deluxe version), she utterly misled me and completely betrayed the trust I thought she deserved.

That situation did not change until I put down the bludgeon, and turned to my thoughts. In fact, some of the players in that particular drama are still present, but my thoughts about them have changed. In point of fact, that situation, terribly painful at the time, was the catalyst for me “accidentally” finding Pema Chodron’s “Getting Unstuck” Dharma talk on Audible, and coming to the Dharma.

Looking back at that situation, I could have noticed that my afflicted emotions were warping my thoughts, twisting my speech. I could have noticed that I was a zealot, cunningly misleading myself to believe that I was RIGHT, and in the name of that, using warped thoughts and twisted speech to inflict damage on others. Of course, I was the one most damaged as those thoughts tormented me with aggression day in and day out.

Having noticed that the situation was arising from my warped thoughts, elaborations of my afflicted emotions, I could have redirected my energy to working with my thoughts sooner, recognized them as ephemeral, impermanent, and most of all, a distorting lens on what was actually happening. Had I noticed that sooner than I did, I would have disentangled myself from the situation much, much sooner, and ended my (useless) suffering much sooner.

***

Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The biggest situation in my life as I write this is looking for a new job. I haven’t done that in over ten years. What I’m noticing is that each day is a mini-battle on a battleground especially constructed by mind. It’s very much like those civil war re-enactments where everyone gets in the right costumes, gets the right antique guns, and fights the very same battle that was fought over two centuries ago.

My warped thoughts, elaborations of afflicted emotions, array themselves on the Battleground of Vacillation and, armed with weapons of naked aggression, fear, resentment, frustration, they go to daily war.

Contemplating these lines, it helps me to see that our minds are extraordinarily powerful in twisting our thoughts by elaborating on afflicted emotions. The more afflicted the emotion, the more warped the thought can become, as though the mind were a nuclear furnace that could mutate a straightforward thought exponentially until it seemed as terrifying as an acid-blooded alien who wants to devour you from the inside out.

From this, I have noticed that the greatest power we give thoughts is our belief, our faith. In the past few weeks, I have been able to use the Dharam Brigade [a stack of index cards on my desk with prayer verses written on them] and mantra and breathing to detoxify my thoughts. I have been able to see through their cunning attempts to mislead me to rash decisions.

It has been a blessing to witness this furiously raging battle up close and see how the only action necessary (maybe the only effective action) is to work with our warped thoughts, just as they are. From doing that work, I come back to the lines of the text and see that it is just so with our world.

Our age of residue in which we live deceitfully and cunningly mislead ourselves and others has arisen, like a nightmare, from our warped thoughts. And this in turn gives rise to our twisted speech. It is only when we see this unflinchingly that we can begin to work with the world by working with our own minds.

***

Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

Tomorrow I expect a phone call about a job offer. If not tomorrow, then this week. Whatever happens, I know that warped thoughts will arise: ‘say yes, just say yes! Anything to be out of my workplace. Drive 40 minutes each way instead of ten minutes. Spend two or three times more on gas. Yes. Say yes. Anything to get away from Salem…And anyway, don’t they just deserve that?

Having worked with this text today, I have the capacity to clearly recognize that my own warped thoughts are creating a false view of the situation at work. To be sure, it is an uncomfortable, untenable situation. But to be misled by my warped thoughts arising from my afflicted emotions of aggression and resentment can have only one outcome: any action I take based on those thoughts will lead to more suffering than what I’m enduring now.

Having noticed that, and having understood that my warped thoughts want to give rise to twisted speech, not to mention misleading actions, when that phone call comes, I can breathe, I can do mantra, I can in this way call forth my Buddha Nature. I have one hundred percent certainty that my Buddha Nature is perfectly established, is perfectly wise, is perfectly abiding.

In working with these lines I see that our wrong view of separation gives birth in some way to our warped thoughts, our twisted speech, our deceitful living. But at the same time, paradoxically, it is clear that our Buddha Nature remains pristine, untouched.

I’m not sure how that seeming paradox plays out in our lives. But the text does help me see that unless we can see the stains, we cannot recognize our natural perfection when it shines through. Is that because we are manifest in a world that hinges on duality, and we can only indirectly know perfection by knowing its opposite?