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 line of verse 23 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Whatever I know I’ve left it as theory;

it’s no use to me now.

Whatever I’ve done I’ve spent on this life;

it’s no use to me now.

Whatever I’ve thought was all just delusion;

it’s no use to me now.

Now the time has come to do what’s truly

Useful—recite the six-syllable mantra.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When I was a little girl, my favorite game was ‘When I Grow Up’. As a child, I understood growing up to mean getting bigger—taller—and escaping the carping tyranny of my mother. I never told anyone this. It was an imaginary game I played in my mind. In those games, I had a house with a pretty garden of roses and ‘yellow flowers’ (maybe they were daisies), and everything in the house was exactly as I wanted it. Back then this meant my dolls were my blessedly silent and always smiling companions. We enjoyed tea from my tea set. Of course I didn’t go to work or pay bills. I had only the dimmest understanding of why my parents left me with a babysitter all day long except for two days a week. I had no concept of bills at all.

This comforting dream became my Secret Fairy Tale; a place to retreat when the outside world became intolerable. Then of course, I really did grow up, and eventually found the whole business of being an adult to be a complete let down. Houses came with thirty-year mortgages, lawns to be mowed, and a bizarrely endless list of repairs to be done.

For the most part when we grow up, we convince ourselves that we’ve let go of whatever our Secret Fairy Tale was. But if we take an honest look at our lives, we’ll notice that the underlying drive of our lives is a vain attempt to make some aspect of our Secret Fairy Tale come true.

All of our dreams of what we want, what we yearn for, amount to one thing: I want to be happy. And not just for a day. We want Happily Ever After. In writing we call this the HEA ending. If we’re honest with ourselves, isn’t that what we’re always going after?

We spend decades upon decades fruitlessly going after our idea of the perfect HEA, but like sand in a dream, it slips through our grasp, and heartbreakingly dissolves to nothing. Dilgo Khyentse puts it like this, “Like waves, all the activities of this life have rolled endlessly on, one after the other, yet have left us empty handed.” The answer to this dilemma of searching and never finding is “to do what’s truly useful—recite the six-syllable mantra.”

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

If I think back, my very first sojourn through Hell was sixth grade. My parents divorced the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I was shipped off ‘for my own good’ to live with an aunt in upstate New York. That year was my first time away from home. I felt abandoned, angry, resentful, and utterly disillusioned. I had neither the emotional vocabulary nor the verbal vocabulary to express any of these things, so for a while I withdrew, only talking when I had to.

It was a year of heartbreak and grief. Like most children of divorce, I thought I’d somehow caused this cataclysm.

Fast forward about twenty-five years to my second sojourn through Hell with my companion on the ride, My Favorite Sociopath. Looking back I can see how the ghost of the heartbroken sixth-grader haunted that relationship. She was always there, a writhing mass of confused, overwhelming emotions, determined to get it right this time.

When I look at the two ‘me’s’ who participated in that relationship, I can notice how neither could have what they wanted. The sixth-grader wanted unending happiness. The thirty-something wanted the Perfect Relationship. Had I been able to take a step back and pause in my chase after the end of the rainbow, I  may have noticed that I’d been searching for the same HEA since I was five years old—over thirty years—and still hadn’t found it. Had I noticed this, I could have breathed and done mantra and allowed a moment of peace and clarity to arise in the confusion of my mind. If I’d been able to do this, I may have noticed that my search for happiness had been fruitless because I was looking to other people to give me happiness. Having seen this, I may have turned my search inward, and begun to look at the causes of unhappiness that I was daily bringing into my life. 

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life is the company I work for shutting down in twenty-seven days. It’s been bought by a company I’m going to call Interplanetary Title, Inc. No one’s calling it a shut down; everyone goes around talking about ‘transition’. As I live through these days, anxiety is very much with me. Insomnia has started, but nothing like it used to be. I can sleep through most of the night.

In the last few days something’s happened that’s made me put this whole transition thing in perspective. I won’t write here about what’s happened, but I will say that it’s given me a long range outlook. When I first heard the announcement of the company being sold to Interplanetary Title, Inc., I just about freaked out.

Since then, I’ve taken every chance I can to work with anxiety, even when it’s keeping me up at two in the morning. Just lately though, I’ve been thinking about the final transition we’ll all make out of this life. I guess death is the ultimate lay-off. As I go through this transition at work, I’ve begun to think about my own death, and what that transition will be like.

It will be frightening, certainly. Beyond that, I don’t know. No one does. Even if I could raise a zombie from the dead, all they could tell me would be their experience of death. This has made me consider my daily life in terms of Patrul Rinpoche’s words, “Now the time has come to do what’s truly useful…”. So far I’ve spent five decades in this lifetime, and it’s only the last two or three years, since I’ve been studying the Dharma, that feel useful.

As I watch myself go through this transition, I constantly ask myself—how can I bring this to the path? I am not always successful in doing that, but I am mindful that I must find a way to do it. Our death is certain, but the hour is unknown. As I go through this transition, I remind myself that with every heartbeat, every breath, I am transitioning from life to death.

On June 1^st, after the sale contract is executed, I’ll have a different employee name on my electronic pay stub; transition complete. All that I will truly take with me through the transition are the tendencies and habits I practice up through and during the transition. The same is true of death. At the moment of our death, all that we will have are the habits and tendencies of a lifetime. Knowing this, shouldn’t we live our lives as though each moment were the time to “do what’s truly useful—recite the six-syllable mantra”?

***

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

At work, as the transition date draws closer, rumors fly, tempers flare, anxiety permeates the air like mild mustard gas. I make a conscious effort not to participate in the rumor-driven gossip. I know this would only lead to more agitation in my mind. When I see tempers flare, or when I’m targeted by a flaring temper, I take a step back until I can at least marginally include that being in my compassion. When anxiety hangs heavily in the air, I offer an upbeat word or two.

As I go to work tomorrow, I will continue my work with mantra. Doing mantra silently every hour at work helps to my keep my mind from becoming more and more agitated as the day goes on. Since I’m less agitated, I’m not adding to the atmosphere of anxiety. Since I’m not adding to the atmosphere of anxiety, I’m able to offer words of comfort to others.

The very act of pausing to do mantra in the constant whirl of the corporate workplace seems to give mind a resting place. It feels like the cool refreshing waters of a desert oasis. There will be times tomorrow when I feel like…No. Not now. I’m too busy. Tomorrow I’ll be especially sure to stop at those times and do mantra.

When I do silent mantra at work, there is a moment of perfect peace, perfect rest, perfect clarity. Of course, as soon as I stop, all the stress and anxiety rushes right back in. That’s all right, because they don’t seem so solid after that moment of rest. Tomorrow as I practice, I will remember that anything I build or accomplish in samsara is only part of the endlessly rolling wave of my life, and it will ultimately leave me empty handed. I will remind myself that the most important activity we can do in this precious birth is to study the Dharma.

At the moment of our death, I will remember, we take nothing with us but our karma. Understanding this, what could be more important than using mantra to purify our mind, purify our karma? At the end of this lifetime, don’t we want to know that we’ve done all we can to avoid harm, do good, and purify our mind?