Month: June 2014

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On a shimmer of water…

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

This is my contemplation on verse 29 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“Purifying the obscurations, initiating the practice

of the path and actualizing the four kayas,

The essence of the four empowerments is the

teacher Chenrezi;

If you recognize your own mind as the teacher,

all four empowerments are complete;

Receiving innate empowerment by yourself,

recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

Full disclosure:

I found the whole idea of empowerment nearly impossible to work with. So today’s writing is about impressions I got from working with the verse as a whole, combined with Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary and Tashi’s Dharma talk. I invite you to think of this as a Monet Dharma painting.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

monetMy mind gets in the way a lot. It really does. This morning for instance, my mind’s take on this stanza is…who needs all this empowerment stuff? That’s a Tibetan thing, isn’t it? How about that new chocolate chip cookie recipe? It’s just begging for some coconut and walnuts.

Mind is like that, isn’t it? You schedule time, you get all ready, get all the tools, and your mind decides it’s a good time to catalog all the stuff you put off doing over the weekend. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this frustrates us. The other one percent, we just give in and do what mind wants.

If we could take a step back from the afflicted emotions which cause us to so strongly identify with our mind, we would see the deluded nature of our lives. We are not our mind or our thoughts. If we are able to take that step back, we can begin to recognize the inherent quality of our mind as empty and luminous. How does this help us in samsara?

Patrul Rinpoche says, “Primordial purity really is the true state of all phenomena, and our usual impure perceptions are totally false, delusions without the slightest grain of truth—like mistaking a piece of rope for a snake or thinking a mirage is really a shimmer of water in the distance.”

Think about this: according to the latest studies, the average person has fifty thousand thoughts a day. Imagine having a teacher who was inseparable from you, and who had fifty thousand nuggets of wisdom to share with you each and every day of your life. Welcome to your mind without the obscurations of wrong view and afflicted emotions.

I think my mind has way too much of a western bent to completely understand the idea of receiving empowerments, but I understand this much. Our Buddha Nature is inherent in us. It is primordial, perfect, unchanging. Once we come to fully understand this, we will begin to see that our mind could not possibly be any other than the mind of the teacher Chenrezi. When we come to recognize this, can we merge our mind with that of the teacher? I don’t think so. Not right away. But we can begin to see with clarity that it can be done—one thought, one moment at a time.

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

I like to read. A lot. A whole lot. I had an account on Goodreads and every year I’d take the Reading Challenge and my goal would be sixty books. That’s five books a month for a year. I’d hit my goal every year, but…I would read some real honest to god who-did-you-pay-to-publish-this trash. It was bad, but hey, it was number forty-seven in the challenge and I had to move on.library

This year, I’ve decided to do things differently. I have a brand new account. My challenge this year? One book. That’s right—one. I’m currently at 800%. I’ve read eight out of one books according to Goodreads. Whew! No more challenge. Now I’m exploring genres, meeting new authors, and reading for the sheer pleasure of it, not to ‘make the list’. I took this radical step because the whole sixty books a year thing made me take a look at my life.

I was kind of approaching spiritual cultivation the same way. Well, I’d think, I’ve done the Mind Training prayers—check it off the list. What’s next? If I’d been able to take a step back from my life sooner, I would have seen that I was like a farmer tossing seeds into dirt, then never coming back to the field. [I know it’s not really called ‘dirt’. Sorry. City girl thing.]

I may have noticed that rather than initiating any kind of practice or cultivation that might have made those seeds take root, I was simply leaving them on the surface of my mind, where they quickly blew away. Having noticed this, I may have thought about what it means to have a spiritual practice. I may have let go of the list of things to be learned and turned to my own mind. In doing this, I may have recognized my ordinary mind—everyone’s mind—for what it is: a set of patterns of habitual delusion. Having recognized this, I may have begun to seek a spiritual practice that would gradually dissolve the obscurations veiling the mind’s true luminous nature.

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

The biggest thing going on in my life right now is learning a new method to bake bread. I noticed over the weekend that one of my bread machines is making a funny noise. A couple of weeks ago, I would have been cringing at the thought of investing in another machine. But when I heard that strange little noise, I thought…better learn this Ken Forkish thing faster.

With the Ken  Forkish method, I don’t need the bread machine. In fact, with that method, the baker is so in touch with the dough that the only machine that needs to be really fine-tuned is the mind. After baking just twice with this method, I’m coming to completely understand how important it is to get to know your dough.Saturday White Bread 06 21 14

In working with the spiritual path, I find that the ‘dough’ of spirituality is the mind. If we are to cultivate spirituality, we have to come to know the nature of our mind intimately. We have to recognize that our mind constantly creates a world of delusion which we accept without question. But, if you “recognize your own mind as the teacher”, then you realize that enlightenment isn’t some hidden treasure to be unearthed in some distant foreign place. No. It’s right here, right now. It’s what you truly are. Your mind is no different than that of Chenrezi or any of the Buddhas. You are working with the same primordial ‘dough’ so to speak.

A couple of times when I’ve been baking a Ken Forkish loaf, and working with the dough, I’ve thought to myself…he must be working with something different in those pictures. This dough is impossible to work with! Then I remind myself that I’m working with flour, water, salt, and yeast—just like Ken Forkish does. The only difference is he’s got decades of practice, and I’ve only put in two weeks’ worth so far.

Just so on the spiritual path. We all have Buddha Nature. We all have moments when our compassion shines through. In working with recognizing our mind as no different than that of the teacher, we are practicing to resonate with our inherent qualities of true purity, true bliss, true permanence, true self.

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

Sitting here, in the early dawn solitude of my air-conditioned apartment, birdsong and the mellow sounds of slow traffic just past my window, the possibilities for bringing this into my life seem endless. But soon, I’ll get up from here, I’ll take a shower, I’ll step out into the heat of late June in Dallas, and I’ll drive to work in my un-air conditioned car. Then I’ll get to work and…well…the possibilities won’t seem so endless.

One of the wonderful things about spiritual cultivation on the Buddhist path is that you can travel light. It’s even better than baking! The only tools you need are your mind and the Dharma. You know what’s really awesome about that? Wherever you are, they’re always with you. We can’t go anywhere without our mind tagging along. And since the Dharma is reality as it truly is without elaboration, we can never step beyond it or outside of it.

Lately at work, I’ve been extraordinarily…what? Restless, I think. The problem is it’s been very slow, so there’s been plenty of time for me to reflect on how many other things I want to do with my life, but how unwilling I am to risk being homeless and hungry.

Today will be no different. I can depend on mind to be restless and vaguely dissatisfied. Except…it will be different. Today, even though I’ll be starting out with the same ingredients of mind and Dharma, I’m going to try a new recipe. Today at work I will try seeing how all that arises in mind is inseparable from the empty luminosity of mind. I will try seeing that my suffering is my path to the union of wisdom and compassion, through compassion. I will try seeing that when we recognize our mind as the teacher, all the conflict and suffering and drama of mind becomes a beautiful friction* that is constantly scrubbing away our obscurations.

monk and catI don’t know if I can do this, but just the thought that I could makes me feel one step closer to recovering the naturally splendid all-ground of who I truly am, who we all truly are.

 

 

 

* Thank you to my Dharma friend Rinchen for the idea of a beautiful friction.

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On the sun of compassion…

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

This is my contemplation on the first two lines of verse 28 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“The noble teacher has the nature of all Buddhas,

And of all Buddhas, it is he who is the kindest.

Seeing the teacher as inseparable from Chenrezi,

With fervent devotion, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Explain to someone else (making it my own)

I work with a teacher who’s more than five thousand years old. Well, I haven’t actually met him, but I’m pretty sure about the five thousand years. We’ve been making bread, as a source of food, for at least that long. Although he’s new to me, Ken Forkish, the author of Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza, is part of the lineage of baking that stretches way back to when bread was unleavened flour and water.water flour salt yeast

The wonderful thing about studying with someone who’s part of a disciplic succession is that, once you begin learning from them, you’re now practicing a technique that’s a few thousand years old. Now, you’re part of the lineage, and it will pass through you to others. For me right now, being part of the lineage means folks I know get homemade bread, and muffins, and the occasional scone.

When it comes to baking, it’s easy to realize that there’s no way you’re going to buy a book and invest in tools and equipment if the author’s introduction says something like, “I’ve never studied with anyone. I baked my first loaf yesterday. It came out good, and now I’m writing a book.” In our ordinary life we recognize the need for a lineage. Madison Avenue uses this in advertising with catch phrases like, “Trusted to Deliver Since 1919”. In the west, time equals lineage, which equals trust, which equals consuming whatever is being delivered.

Yet there is a part of our lives where we rarely think of lineage or its importance. When it comes to spirituality, we give our afflicted emotions credence and go with “what feels good”. Well gosh, isn’t that how we ended up in samsara, lifetime after lifetime—by going with what feels good? Wouldn’t it be better to rely on and become part of a lineage whose foundation is primordial?

Patrul Rinpoche tells us we can do this by devoting ourselves to the noble teacher. The noble teacher is one through whom the unbroken disciplic succession of the teachings of the Buddhas flows. When we devote ourselves to such a teacher, we are becoming part of that lineage, and it will eventually flow through us to others.

In my mind, the noble teacher is a necessary companion on the path to becoming a bodhisattva. If it’s my aspiration to bake the perfect artisan bread, then I rely on a teacher who’s part of a lineage that goes back five thousand years. If it’s my aspiration to become a bodhisattva, then doesn’t it make sense to rely on a teacher whose lineage goes back to the primordial Buddhas who exist before beginningless time?

Dilgo Khyentse says of the noble teacher, “Practice in accordance with his instructions, and, as all the clouds of doubt and hesitation are cleared away, the sun of his compassion will shine through, warming you with happiness.” When we rely on a noble teacher as a companion on our path, we are relying on a lineage, on all the Buddhas who came before him, and ultimately, we are relying on our own Buddha Nature, of which the noble teacher is a reflection.

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

I began baking bread sometime in the nineties. I think the first Breadman bread machine had just come out. A bread machine can make either bread or dough. On the dough cycle, you take out the dough, and finish baking it in the oven. When I got my first bread machine all those years ago, I wouldn’t even look at the dough cycle recipes that came with the recipe booklet.

breadmanBut the funny thing was, I’d look at the pictures of breads made outside the machine all the time. I had lots of reasons for sticking with my bullet-shaped, soft-crust bread. It was easy: measure carefully, press a couple buttons, come back four hours later and voila! Bread. I didn’t need special equipment to bake in the machine. It even came with its own measuring cup. The biggest reason though, was fear. If I used the dough cycle, what the heck would I do with that glob of flour, water, salt, and yeast? It would NEVER come out looking like the pretty pictures. I baked for years in that machine, never venturing beyond the constricting boundaries of the machine’s pan, and always mildly dissatisfied with even the most perfect loaf.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice that the source of my fear was that I’d have to venture beyond the boundaries of the Breadman alone. That was terrifying. It was pretty much this thought that kept me locked in my Breadman prison.

Had I been able to take a step back from my fear, I may have noticed that the library had a plethora of books on baking. I could have noticed that rather than venturing out into the dark unknown alone and unprepared, I had the opportunity to get to know a lineage that went back thousands of years. Had I been able to notice this, it may have taken me less than two decades to begin the adventure of baking outside my machine.

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

I took about fifteen years off from baking bread. Then, I bought a Cuisinart bread machine. Then, about six months ago, I took my first steps outside my Cuisinart. They were tottering, uncertain steps, but by then, I’d become part of a lineage. I had a wonderful bread machine cookbook that included recipes for dough to be baked outside the machine, and which I dutifully ignored.

In the beginning, the bread machine recipes in that book were enough. But then I got tired of all my breads having the same uninteresting shape, and pretty much the same uninteresting crust. I wanted more control over how my bread looked and tasted. Gradually—and it was a very gradual process—I stepped outside of the constricting boundaries of the machine. I was only able to do that because the baking world has a wealth of teachers whose lineage goes back thousands of years, and who selflessly share what they know.burned

I think we come to the Dharma for pretty much the same reasons I started my journey toward baking artisan bread. We begin to become sick of the sameness of our suffering. We begin to chafe against the perceived boundaries of our lives. We begin to think…there’s got to be a better way.

Happily the Dharma offers a much better way than the constrictions of samsara, the infinitely churning machine of birth, age, disease, and death. We find this in a noble teacher through whom will flow the unbroken disciplic succession of the teachings of the Buddhas. When we find such a companion on the path, their kindness, their compassion will begin to resonate with our own compassion. Before studying the Dharma, I believed a ‘good teacher’ was someone with volumes of knowledge on their given subject—Shakespeare, quantum physics, artificial intelligence—whatever.

But now, studying the Dharma, I’m coming to see that the only kind of teacher worth studying with is the noble teacher. Pema Chodron says that the idea of a teacher isn’t that they’re a burning log, and you get really close so that you can get a little warmth. The idea is that the teacher’s flame will inspire you to burn as well. In my own experience, I find this to be true. The noble teacher will inspire those devoted to them. Inspiration isn’t imitation. Inspiration is awakening to the inherent wisdom we all have, finding your own fire, to use Pema Chodron’s metaphor. The noble teacher is able to inspire others with their teachings, their lives, and their incredible act of compassion in pointing you to your path to awakening.

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

Bake #1 June 15Last weekend I made my first Ken Forkish loaves. With his recipes you make a BIG dough, then bake two loaves. The recipe I chose went so wrong that I ended up with a splat of very sticky dough on my kitchen floor. When I was baking the loaves in the oven, I was so anxious I wanted to cry. The loaf was getting too dark! I never go that dark! That’s two days of work in there!

This weekend, I’ll be making the same loaf. I know I’ll have the same fears but they’ll be far less gripping this weekend. Why? Because I’ve tasted my ‘disaster’ bread. It sure is good bread, and its got those pretty holes I’ve always wanted in my bread.

Until now, my bread machine has been a part of my baking process. I’ve always let the machine make the dough. But now, that’s not enough. I don’t like the dough being locked away in that machine for two hours until it beeps, then I get what I get. In choosing Ken Forkish, I purposely chose a technique that lets me make the dough myself.

Making dough is messy. You get flour everywhere. You have to get your hands into that sticky mass and stretch and fold, and all the time you’re thinking…no way will this sticky gloopy mess ever be a loaf of bread. But I’ve chosen the Ken Forkish technique because I believe that after diligent practice, I will be free to use Baker’s Percentages to create my own formulae (recipes), and introduce the world to my interpretation of artisan bread. I can only do this because I am relying on a lineage of bakers who have shared their knowledge, their passion, and their mistakes.

The Dharma is no different. We come into this and we’re thinking…there’s no way I’ll ever get enlightened…not with the mess I’ve made of my life. We’re so very wrong about that. There are eighty four thousand gates to the Dharma. The Dharma is reality as it truly is, without elaboration. Sooner or later, our own Buddha Nature will grow tired of the illusions of samsara and we will be drawn to one of those gates. I used to think of the gates of the Dharma as entrances. But now I’m starting to see them as exits. In the same way that I left behind the confines of my Breadman, we can leave behind the confines of birth, disease, age, and death by stepping through a gate of the Dharma. I believe that when we do this wholeheartedly, there will always be a noble teacher there welcoming us, ready to shine the sun of their compassion on our path.

teacher

 

 

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Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 4

entertainment3June 11, 2014

Day 8

Day 8 with Interplanetary Title and I find that nothing has significantly changed except the new electronic time clock which documents our time to the second. No one likes it. It makes our status as slaves on the corporate plantation more apparent than ever.

Today I find myself committed to 52 Loaves. I’ve been baking bread outside my bread machine for a little more than 6 months now. In a craft where five years is considered a good beginning, I’m a total newbie. I’ve decided to get Ken Forkish’s book Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza, and commit to his method of artisan bread making for 52 Loaves.

This morning before work, I ordered the book, and a couple of tools from Amazon. During the day at work, I started to get super-excited about beginning a new adventure in my baking craft, making a 52 Loaves commitment, getting to know a new teacher and . . . then I remembered something my Dharma friend Tashi said in his Dharma talk just this past Sunday…if you want your emotions to even out, begin with controlling the highs.

Wow. I didn’t want to control all that excitement. It felt really good.

Or did it?

Something else Tashi said, and that we see in our ordinary lives all the time came to me then…for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Who hasn’t heard that? What goes up must come down. The higher the high, the lower the low. If you find Heaven, you’ll surely find Hell.

I had a sudden hundred and eighty degree change in attitude because…well…I was getting really excited about my 52 Loaves commitment. And all my life, I’ve gone with those strong feelings. Let’s just say that the last time I was completely enraptured and swept away by my emotions, I ended up in a ten year relationship with an honest to God I’ll-kill-you-if-you-ever-leave-me-bitch sociopath. Not good.

So now, I was totally motivated to work with controlling the high. But I was stuck. I had no idea how.

Then I remembered something else Tashi said: Peace is the only emotion worth cultivating.

Right. Sounded good. Peace. I’d start with that. So I tried to be peaceful.

Didn’t work. I started getting excited that I’d made a choice to be peaceful and not go with the tug of my afflicted emotions.

I was ready to throw up my hands. But then I had a thought, no fanfare, no epiphany, just a thought…I see you, Mara.

That was pretty incredible. It was as though I had stopped ‘me’ in her tracks. Suddenly, I could experience the so-called ‘happiness’ and ‘excitement’ in a neutral space in my mind. In a flash I realized that it didn’t feel good at all. The actual energy lurking behind the labels had the same taste as anxiety, and fear, and hope. Without the saccharine sweetness of ‘excited’, I could taste how I was poisoning myself.

I silently did mantra (om mani peme hum), ten times. Doing mantra felt like uncovering something shining and clear and whole. Then I had the thought…peace has no components. To me that means that when you strip away, even for an instant, all the ‘pieces’ of your afflicted emotions, peace naturally arises.

It takes much longer to describe it than it did to experience it. This all happened in less than a minute, but it had the clarity of a sudden burst of unspeakably intense light going off in my mind.

My takeaway from this experience of working with my high is that peace is the only emotion worth cultivating because the main quality of peace seems to be an undeniable wholeness. Experiencing that wholeness, even for just a moment, gives us a glimpse of our true nature: true bliss, true purity, true self, true permanence.

Like dew on grass, the delights of the three worlds by their very nature evaporate in an instant. To strive for the supreme level of liberation that never changes is the practice of a Bodhisattva.

bugs bunny

 

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Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 3

 

entertainment3

 

June 5, 2014

Day 4

Reflecting on this day, I find myself thinking of those who screamed. It’s said that when the  Buddha gave one of his teachings…on emptiness, I think…some of his disciples covered their ears, screamed, ran away, and never came back.

This evening on the way home, stuck at a traffic light, I contemplated the sky, as my Dharma friend Tashi suggests in his post. Oddly enough, I found myself thinking of Those Who Screamed. They took on an identity in my mind, like some kind of lost tribe. Contemplating the sky, I heard birds crying out to each other, heard cars rolling heavily over the road, and felt the close heat of a June evening in Texas. For just a fraction of a heartbeat, I fully realized that the sky and the clouds and the traffic and the birds and the heat would one day leave my cold, dead body behind. There would come a day when they would go on, and I would not.

Did I almost scream? I think I might have, but the light turned green and I was once again coddled in my sense of me, safely taking refuge in my half-believed ideas of my own mortality.

These brief moments of reflection…are they open to me because it’s my fourth day at Interplanetary Title, a time of great transition in my life? Or is it because when it comes to death, we are all of the lost tribe of Those Who Screamed?

Buddha Nature is perfect–empty of the separable, the fleeting stains;

not empty of the inseparable, unsurpassable qualities:

true purity, true self, true bliss, true permanence.

bugs bunny

Looney Tunes, Episode 2

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On writing our own ticket…

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

This is my contemplation on the first two lines of verse 26 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“Wandering in samsara from beginningless time until now,

Whatever you’ve done was wrong and will lead to further wandering.

From your heart acknowledge all wrongdoing and downfalls, and, confessing them,

With the four powers complete, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

I bake a lot, at least five or six projects a week. When I began baking regularly, I learned to keep a notebook and record what I’d done in each recipe. Baking is essentially about two things: precise measurements and precise timing. If there’s too much water in your dough, your bread will fall. If you mix your muffins for too long, they’ll come out like tough little paperweights. If you let your dough rise too long, it will drop in the oven.

writing in kitchenIn the kitchen, at any given moment, you’re caught up in the actual doing of the recipe, focused on getting your timing, measurements, and ingredients right. When you take that nice looking bread out of the oven, then cool it and cut into it only to find that it’s rock hard and bone dry, that’s bad. Not being able to back track and see where you probably went wrong is far, far worse because you’re bound to repeat the same mistake. That’s why I keep a notebook in the kitchen. When a recipe goes wrong, I can easily go back and retrace my steps and at the very least, do it differently next time. If I want to do better next time, I certainly have to acknowledge that, since I don’t want my bread to be dense enough to be a doorstop, I did something wrong somewhere along the way.

I think all of us would benefit from keeping a notebook of the recipes (we call them ‘habits’) we use to run our lives. Or should I say ruin our lives? This way, if we kept a notebook, whenever something went wrong, we could pull it out, see the note from two years ago that said, “Bloody axe under bed”. This might clue us in to how we ended up married to an axe murderer.

Most of the time our mistakes in our lives are not this dramatic, but they are repetitive. And unless we have some way of seeing how our habitual actions led us to where we are in our lives, we are doomed to go on repeating the same habitual patterns. At some point, we have to take a step back and say to ourselves…Hey, what I’m doing isn’t working. If I want happiness in my life, I need to start doing things differently.

Just a moment of taking responsibility this way frees us to begin changing our habitual patterns. Dilgo Khyentse says, “…as the Buddha said, there can be no fault so serious that it cannot be purified…”. Isn’t that great news?

***

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

The Titanic was a great ship, but notice how there’s never been another one? I’ve never heard of a Princess Ocean Liner Titanic. And we never will. You know why? Because everyone acknowledges it was a mistake, and we don’t want it to happen again. Yeah. Sure. There was an iceberg involved, but it was the ship, not the iceberg that was billed as ‘unsinkable.’

A funny thing about my life is that I had an all-expenses paid ticket for my personal Titanic, and no matter how often it sank, I’d dredge it up and get right back on. My Titanic was losing weight. For most of my life I’ve been overweight. For periods of my life I was downright obese, topping out at just under three hundred pounds. I have tried diet pills, speed, low-carb diets, high-meat diets, diet cookies, two hundred dollar a week diet food plans, starvation, and water diets, just to name a few. For decades, if it was a diet, I tried it.titanic ticket

I always lost weight. And I always gained back more than I’d lost. It was miserable. I couldn’t keep weight off no matter what I did. And honestly, I tried really hard, but I’d always gravitate back to that chocolate cake, those potato chips, those seasoned fries, and there I’d be, stepping onto the Titanic again.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice how my mind was extremely agitated twenty-four hours a day. It was like living inside a snow globe trapped on a paint-shaker machine. It never stopped. There was a lot of pain coming from my extremely afflicted emotions. There was a lot of loneliness because I believed I need to find my One True Love. The outcome of all this was that I ate to escape the pain of my life. After all, the Titanic didn’t sink right way. That first slice of chocolate cake was paradise.

If I’d been able to breathe and take a step back from the constant agitation of my life, I may have noticed that eating wasn’t actually the issue. The real issue was that I wanted to eat so I could escape feeling lonely, feeling trapped in my life, feeling like a failure.

Had I been able to notice this, I may have noticed that in order to lose weight and keep it off, I had to take responsibility for the habitual patterns of blame and guilt (and so many others) that were leading to unskillful choices about eating. Had I been able to do this, I may have been able to let the Titanic sail by and throw my ticket after it.

***

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

I started a new job yesterday. More accurately, the company I work for has been sold to a new company—Interplanetary Title, Inc. I find myself in an ideal situation to work with these two lines. On every job that I have begun (until now), the habitual pattern has been the same. I start out like an Olympic sprinter from the starting block. I’m going to be the best! I’m going to get it all right! I’m going to love this job! Talk about leading to disappointment. I wasn’t the best, I didn’t get it all right, and do I really have to say I didn’t love the job?

you are hereThis time, I have a chance to do a conscious rebirth. What I’ve done so far, wandering from job to job, hasn’t worked. In the past, I’ve gone to jobs seeking happiness, as though it were outside of me waiting to be discovered. Not so this time. With Interplanetary, I know what I’ve done in the past didn’t work. I have the incredible opportunity to see where I am and begin from there.

So, where am I? I’m in the autumn of my life. I surely have less years to live than I’ve already lived. I am a student of the Dharma who has already learned that taking responsibility for my actions is the only way to change the consequences (karma) that arise in my life.

Understanding this, I can use Interplanetary Title as an exercise in cause and effect. That sounds basic, maybe even a little obvious, but it’s embarrassing to even say how long it took me to realize I needed to have a notebook in the kitchen if I didn’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes. At this new workplace, I have the chance to consciously put in place consequences that I believe will lead to positive outcomes. I have the chance to observe myself and honestly ask myself…that didn’t have a positive outcome. What could I have done differently?

And while doing this, I will keep in mind that my ultimate goal is enlightenment—to gain the capacity to free myself and limitless sentient beings from wandering in samsara.

***

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

As I study the Dharma more and more, I begin to feel an incredible yearning to be free of samsara. At first I thought it was new. But gradually I’m realizing that this yearning has been there all my life, maybe for all my lifetimes.

This transition to Interplanetary Title has made me reflect a lot on my eventual transition into death. At first this really scared me. I thought I was suicidal. Again. But that’s not it. It isn’t that I want to die so much as I want to be prepared for that transition when it comes, as it inevitably must. If I’m not ready for it, I am doomed to return to samsara and continue wandering, lifetime after lifetime.

To that end, today when I go to work, I want to do just one thing that prepares me to continue the process of transition that began with my birth. I have no idea what that one thing will be, but my experience with the Dharma has taught me that if I look, I’ll find it.

I’m looking at things this way. Since the moment of my birth, I’ve been in transition from life to death. In between there’s disease and old age. I boarded the Samsara Titanic five decades ago when I was born. The wonderful thing about these two lines from Patrul Rinpoche is his encouragement for us all to acknowledge that we bought and paid for our own tickets for this doomed voyage. And if our actions in previous lifetimes wrote our tickets for the Samsara Titanic, then surely our actions in this very lifetime can write our ticket for enlightenment. Today I’ll be writing a new ticket, both at Interplanetary Title, and on my path. Today, it’s my prayer that we may all begin to see that we can give up our berth on the Titanic.

birds over ocean

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Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 2

entertainment3

 

 

 

 

June 2, 2014

Day 1

There was no Uncle Fester today. But that doesn’t mean he’s not in some back corner of Interplanetary’s basement. I didn’t have to prick my finger or burn a saint, but it’s early days yet. The truth is today was more of a hassle than anything else. No one (including our managers) knew how to use the new fancy computerized time card. Interplanetary kept sending emails about ‘prizes’ they’d given away to welcome us to the Family, and…I don’t know. After all the theater and angst mind put on, today was honestly a letdown.

In November 2012, the bank I formerly worked for had a massive layoff. I mean huge. About every three in four cubicles was emptied. It felt like being in London in the plague years. After that there was so much fear about what would come next. And now…here it is.

A little less than two years later, and I’ve joined a new Family. I may not work for Don Corleone, and I didn’t have to prick my finger and swear an oath, but I signed enough Non-Disclosure Agreements and I don’t know what all to make War and Peace look like a short story.

So, after Day One, all I can really say is…I’m not unemployed yet.

Reflecting on this day has really made me wonder about the transition we call death. There’s all this angst and fear and theater and then…what? I think in the end it comes down to a simple “zero”, “one” kind of thing. After death, either we’ve purified our karma enough to free ourselves of samsara or…we haven’t.

Is there a third possibility I’m missing?

If I squander my time in secondary practices, death will find me unsettled.

Bless me to live with the mind of enlightenment and die with the Holy Name!

bugs bunny

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Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 1

entertainment3

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 1, 2014

Tomorrow I start a new job with Interplanetary Title, Inc.

On most jobs in the corporate world, they give you a ninety day trial period.

I’ve decided I’m going to have my own trial period. I’ll give them a generous ninety days to show me what kind of family I’ve been recruited into. I hope they have an Uncle Fester in the basement, because he’ll be the most interesting person on board.

During these next ninety days, I’ll blog about my new Family…Interplanetary Title, Inc.

Hope you can catch the show…

As the wheel follows the ox that pulls the cart,

all my thoughts, words and deeds have consequences.

Bless me to keep my view as high as a white-tailed eagle’s,

and my conduct as careful as a blind man’s step on a steep mountain trail!

bugs bunny

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On the body, speech, and mind of compassion…

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 25 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“The basis of the Mahayana path is the thought of enlightenment;

This sublime thought is the one path trodden by all the Buddhas.

Never leaving this noble path of the thought of enlightenment,

With compassion for all beings, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Before I began to practice and learn about compassion, I’d look at some people and I’d think, Hell was built for a reason. I hope they’re stoking those fires and keeping them good and hot for you. It’s taken me quite a while, but gradually, I’m coming to see the futility of such thoughts.

poison bottleAfter I began to practice and I became more sensitized to my afflicted emotions, a funny thing happened. I began to notice how my afflicted emotions made me suffer. I saw how anger actually hurt in the body; how frustration made me tense up and get a headache; how resentment gave me indigestion. But the absolute worst was when I vented one of those poisons on another person. For a few short seconds, it felt so good, but then regret, guilt and resentment for feeling regret and guilt would set in, eating into me like a psychic cancer. It was a horrible, seemingly inescapable cycle.

Now that I’ve practiced for a couple of years, and taken Bodhisattva vows, I’m beginning to see that I was utterly blinded by my afflicted emotions. All I could see in my world was my own anger, frustration, and resentment reflected back at me. Today, things are different. I would like to be able to say that I go through my days in an ecstasy of compassion for all beings that I encounter. But that’s not even a shadow of the truth.

The truth is that these days, I feel far more compassion than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I’m not sure if it’s because I experience compassion more often or if I just recognize the incredible suffering of afflicted emotions. But whatever the cause, I’m now able to recognize the poisonous nature of afflicted emotions when they arise, as they still do. I no longer feel righteously angry or frustrated, or justly resentful. It’s more like…oh no…not with this again. And the moment I feel poisoned, I recognize my own power to let go of the emotion. Even when I can’t let go of the afflicted emotion, I recognize that letting go would be the most compassionate thing I could do for myself and all sentient beings.

Dilgo Khyentse says, “When your body, speech, and mind are completely saturated with the wish to help all sentient beings…even the smallest action…will swiftly and surely bring the fulfillment of your goal.” Although I have not yet found myself saturated with compassion, I have found that when my intent is to benefit other sentient beings, things just have a way of working out. I have found, to my utter delight, that compassion in action is pretty unstoppable. It may be the closest thing we have to perpetual motion in the manifest world.

***

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

In my past, I used to consign so many people to Hell, I probably kept Infernal Imp construction crews busy for decades. All the woes in my life were someone else’s fault, and if they’d just stop messing with my life—then it would all be good, and the perfection of which I was so richly deserving would descend upon me like manna from Heaven. And it better not fall on any of those Hell-bound ones either because it was my perfection.

When I first came to Texas, I was fleeing a situation of domestic violence. Imagine that. Here I was, hundreds of miles away from my former Special One, totally free, and what was I doing? Oh. My. Gosh. I was pouring almost every waking instant of my energy into wishing my former beloved to the very lowest depths of Hell where they keep the flames extra hot and a brisk day of torture begins with impalement on a red hot skewer. Such were my thoughts. And as surely as I created a vivid Hell of suffering for the other, I was right there with them, enduring every imagined torment.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice how even after I broke free of the prison of Domestic Abuse, I was stillprison guard brutally imprisoned by own my thoughts of vengeance. I can notice that I’d lugged my prison with me, embellished it lovingly, expanded upon it, and then taken up residence in it.

Perhaps if I could have taken a step back from my rage, and breathed just a half breath, I may have noticed that I was utterly free. I’d always been free. The prison had always been in my mind. I may have noticed that the person I was most angry with was me. Having noticed this, I may have begun my circle of compassion with myself.

Had I been able to do this in my early days here in Texas, I may have freed myself of my self-made prison much sooner. I may have realized that while it’s true that a sociopath I once shared my life with may one day show up and blow off my head, it’s also true that right up until the moment of my death, I can live a life of compassion with the intent to benefit all sentient beings. 

***

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

Friday May 30th was my last day of employment with the bank that employed me for nearly eleven years. Technically speaking, this weekend I’m unemployed, in freefall, in limbo. My first actual day of employment with Interplanetary Title, Inc. (the company that bought the division of the bank I formerly worked for) is tomorrow, June 2nd.

On Friday, it was as though agitation stalked among people, and believe me, its name was Legion. I had so many uncharitable thoughts. I wanted so badly to tell them to SHUT UP already. There was a desperate, brittle quality to the ongoing chatter. They were as noisy as a second grade class with a substitute teacher. Or maybe as noisy as a man’s thoughts the moment he’s laid down on a table to die, and he feels cool metal slide into his vein.

esmereldaOne person in particular, let’s call her Esmerelda, was the most agitated of all. She has the peculiar gift of spreading her agitation and stirring others into a fear-driven, agitated frenzy. What was interesting about Friday is that I was very in touch with the level of agitation in my own mind. I experienced it as a sea caught in the grip of a hurricane. Ten foot waves crashed constantly against the shores of mind. In a strange way, it felt good, almost exhilarating. I really experienced, up close and personal, that so-called ‘agitation’ is totally neutral. It’s just energy arising. It’s no more charged than the water that makes ten foot waves boom against a sandy shore. It’s our thoughts that give the energy a positive or negative charge. I really learned that on Friday.

The instant I realized this, I was able to feel compassion for my co-workers. They were feeling the same thing, probably worse, but they were totally identifying with it. For them, as it used to be with me, they were the agitation, and it was driving them to nervous chatter punctuated with hysterical laughter.

I was really busy at work on Friday. I didn’t know what I could do for my co-workers. Except, I did know. I could give them the gift of not being caught up in extreme agitation. I could do hourly silent mantra and prayer with the intent that we would all benefit. This changed what could have been a pretty hellish day into the perfect practice ground for compassion. Every time I silently chanted mantra, I wanted us all to be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.

In between mantras, frustration would arise in mind—shut up, shut up, shut up…for the love of God…SHUT UP!  That was what my Dharma friend Tashi would probably call the Off Ramp.  But then my hourly reminder would pop up on my computer, and I’d do my hourly silent mantra and prayer, and there I’d be, walking the On Ramp to compassion, one breath, one mantra, one prayer, one step at a time.

***

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

Tomorrow Interplanetary Title has a welcome party planned for us to—ready for this?—welcome us to the Interplanetary family. I swear to you. That’s their phrase, not mine. All I did was change the name to protect the nefarious.

family manI have to give full disclosure here. I’ve seen way too many mafia movies and read way too many books about The Family to approach tomorrow with anything but trepidation and a healthy dose of cynicism. I might be a Bodhisattva in training and all, but if they ask me to prick my finger and burn a saint, I’m outta there!

Actually, Interplanetary has games planned. Breakfast is on offer, and they’ll be giving away branded office finery like mugs and mouse pads. The makeshift conference room that will be the swirling center stage of this high drama is literally in front of my desk. I’ll have the best seat in the house to watch the drama play out.

Tomorrow, while I’m becoming part of the Interplanetary family, I will make it my constant occupation to keep my feet firmly planted on the noble path of the thought of enlightenment. This sounds a little impossible, but I’ve done it before on a much smaller scale. Before coming across this text, if I had a meeting where I knew there was a potential for strong afflicted emotions to arise, I would write in the notebook that I use to take notes, What is the state of my mind?  Every time I felt like opening my mouth and firmly lodging my foot in it, I’d make myself look at that question. If the answer was not so good, then I’d keep my mouth shut.

Tomorrow I won’t have a notebook with me. But the truly wonderful thing about the Dharma is that you can carry around reams of prayers with just one tiny little six-syllable mantra. It’s like Dharma Kindle, only better! Tomorrow, in all of the Corleone-like festivities of welcoming me to the Family, I will recite the six-syllable mantra (om mani peme hum or om amideva rhih) and remind myself.

I will remind myself that compassion is the only way to live a worthwhile life. I will remind myself that the people who worked to make the transition happen are wonderfully positioned for when they awaken to the Dharma. They are hard workers, excellent problem solvers, and tenacious obstacle-movers. When the time comes, someone will be very glad to have them in their sangha. I will remind myself that I am surrounded by brilliantly budding Buddhas, each of whom is more than worthy of my compassion and my hard work toward enlightenment for us all.

In doing this, it is my prayer that I will begin to see my cynicism for what it is: the fear of letting go a phase of my life where was I the Freed Prisoner. It is my prayer that in setting my feet on the noble path of enlightenment tomorrow, I may be the lamp that reminds those around me, if only for a moment, of their own brilliantly radiant light of true self, true purity, true bliss, true permanence.

Will mind turn to uncharitable thoughts of waking up beside decapitated horse heads? I’m sure it will. But that’s okay, because as my Dharma friend Tashi said, if there’s an Off Ramp, there’s got to be an On laughing boysRamp. When those thoughts arise, I will set my feet on the Compassion On Ramp with the six-syllable mantra—om mani peme hum.