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

This is my contemplation on the third line of verse 20 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Expecting a lot from people, you do a lot of smiling;

Needing many things for yourself, you have many needs to meet;

Making plans to do first this, then that, your mind’s full of hopes and fears—

From now on, come what may, don’t be like that.”

 

 

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” That’s the question most of us in the west first learn to answer as we move toward maturity. When we’re grown up and we go for a job interview, the question becomes, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” And then, let’s say your five year plan for world domination is well under way, the question becomes, “What are your plans for retirement?” Then, after you’ve conquered the world and you’ve retired, the question is, “Have you planned to provide for your loved ones when you pass on?” Essentially this question is, “What are your plans after you die?”

From birth, literally up through death, we are taught to put long-range, long-term plans in place. Where does this get us? What exactly is a plan? It’s disguised hope, isn’t it? If I plan to be Vice President of Corporate Central in five years, then I better hope I don’t make any enemies who are more powerful than me. I better hope I make every deadline. I better hope my family doesn’t mind me working 55 hour weeks. I better hope I don’t die.

That’s a lot of hoping. What’s the flipside of hope? Fear. What my five year plan really says is, I’m afraid I won’t be Vice President in five years. I’m afraid I’ll make a powerful enemy. I’m afraid my husband (wife) will leave me. I’m afraid I’ll die before I’m Vice President.

That’s a lot of fear to live with. Fear in the mind is like the agitator in a washing machine. It churns our thoughts constantly, uselessly. It saps our energy. It mires us in the quicksand of the suffering of samsara.

What is the way out of the cycle of hope and fear? The answer is deceptively simple. Our only ambition, the only thing worth doing, should be to do the right thing. When we do the right thing, we put causes for happiness and peace and clarity into our karma stream. Our five year plan should be to take Dilgo Khyentse’s advice to heart and stop exhausting ourselves uselessly with five year plans “…like a child running to find the end of the rainbow…”.

***

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

I wanted to write a bestseller. I don’t just mean I wanted to write a good book. I mean I wanted to write a bestseller that would make Twilight look like a flash in the pan; a bestseller that would put Harry Potter in the shade of my brilliance.

Writing a bestseller is different than writing a mere book. For one thing, you have to read until you’re cross-eyed, so you can see what the competition is doing. You have to write to a trend. Got your own story to tell? Too bad. You’ve got a bestseller to write. But most important of all, you have to have The Plan. It’s so important, it gets capital letters.

The Plan consists of your daily writing schedule, your daily reading schedule, your daily writing exercise, and your daily review of where you are on The Plan. I was so caught up in writing a bestseller that my entire life was one long cycle of hope and fear. I’d wake some mornings entirely convinced I’d hit on the right story. And I’d hope that feeling would last, because I knew what came next. A few weeks later, I’d up convinced I’d wasted the last year of my life, and that I needed a new Plan because all the trends said the market was glutted with vampire paranormal romance.

I spent nearly a year and a half of my life like that. As it turned out, I finished the book, sold it, and…it’s not a bestseller. So much for The Plan.

Looking back on that situation, I might have noticed that I could have freed myself of the suffering of hope/fear at any time simply by breathing and taking a step back from my life. If I’d done that, I might have noticed that I spent more time dreading the prospect of writing than I did enjoying it. I might have noticed that I’d become a slave to the tyranny of The Plan. I might have noticed that I was using The Plan to cling to something that no longer spoke to my interests in life.

Had I done this, I might have noticed that letting go of The Plan was the right thing to do.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is the Pilgrimage of 62. When I began the pilgrimage, I like to think I didn’t have any grandiose plans. I like to think I wanted to do it in the ongoing quest to be a more skilled practitioner, to develop my skillful means.

But now, sixteen days into it, I think maybe there was a plan. Actually, I’m sure of it. My unspoken plan was to become ‘more holy’. This is a hard thing to describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with peace or clarity or skillful means, or even decreasing my suffering in samsara.

I grew up Christian. I’ve been reading about pilgrimages since I was a little girl. I thought it was amazing that Jesus went on his pilgrimage way out into the desert all by himself, and he got to talk to Lucifer in person. Sure he was a fallen angel, but he was an angel. How cool was that? Of course, back then, I didn’t dare say I thought talking to the Devil in person was cool.

Now, lo these many decades later, taking my own pilgrimage, I’m starting to think my unspoken plan was to meet my dark angel. It’s difficult to escape the Christian idea of epiphany. I keep vaguely thinking that if I pray enough and meditate enough, the true source of the error of my ways will be revealed unto me. When that happens (according to my plan), I’ll be completely free of afflicted emotions. I won’t be enlightened, but I won’t get angry anymore, or resentful, or envious, or frustrated, or anxious.

What’s actually happening on the pilgrimage is that I can see my afflicted emotions with far more clarity than I ever have. Many of them are not pleasant, but—and this was so unexpected—they’re not frightening either.

From this I’m experiencing how it feels when we do the right thing. I began the idea of the pilgrimage because I felt it was the right time in my life to do something like this. The unspoken plan came later. What I’m experiencing is that when we do the right thing in our lives, we have more clarity, therefore we’re able to do more of the right thing which leads to more clarity. This has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with the Dharma.

When we do the right thing, we gain the clarity to see the utter futility of the five year plan in the chaos of samsara. We begin to develop a mind of renunciation toward hope/fear. We begin to have the capacity to free ourselves of the suffering of the cycle of hope/fear.

***

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

Currently I’m working on a writing project that is a collaboration with a Dharma friend. I’ve resisted writing non-fiction for a while now. There are few things more intimidating to a fiction writer than stepping into the world of writing non-fiction. I took on the project with much fear and trembling, not to mention trepidation. A month or so ago, when I sat down to begin, I thought—What am I doing? I don’t know how to do this.

What actually happened was, not only did I know how to do it, it’s like rekindling a romance. Writing is like anything else in our lives. It’s a relationship. For me, it was a relationship that had gone bad. I was the injured, betrayed party. Now, working on this project, it’s like rediscovering the romance I once had with writing. Even more than that, it feels that it’s what I’ve been waiting all my life to write. It’s an incredible feeling of freedom to write without a Plan. That’s one thing I hadn’t counted on.

Another thing I hadn’t counted on happening is this almost irresistible urge to put a Plan in place. As I move forward with this project, it is my intent to keep it as free from a Plan as it’s possible to keep any writing project. Right now, when I sit down to write, there’s such an incredible feeling of doing the right thing. It is my intent as this project continues to let that be the working plan: do the right thing.

This project is really teaching me the difference between skillful means and futile planning. My skillful means is to work with 500 words of the source text at a time. My plan is…do the right thing.

Post Script:

When I shared this contemplation with my Dharma friend Tashi, he offered this about my take on Lucifer and meeting my ‘dark angel’:

What if ‘Jesus speaking face to face with Lucifer’ is a way of saying that he saw his afflicted emotions (more) clearly?

 When the Buddha says “Mara, I see you”, that is what he/you is saying.

This has really helped to see my ‘dark angel’ from a different perspective.