Month: July 2014

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Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 5

entertainment3

July 22, 2014

Day 35

I suffer a lot at work. I mean seriously, there are some days when I think, couldn’t I be driving a snow plough on the Alaskan tundra? Wouldn’t that be better than one more freaking email? Okay, maybe the Alaskan tundra is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much, believe me.

Yesterday, I realized how I create my own suffering of suffering at work. On Sunday, my Dharma friend Tashi talked about pain, and how it could be worked with in the body. He said one approach was to look for the pain. He went on to explain that if you did that for long enough, using a technique that sounded like analysis to me, you would eventually realize that the ‘pain’ was in the mind. He went even further to say that it would become apparent that the pain wasn’t real.

Hmmm….my skeptic mind kicked in. I had to try this for myself. I don’t have much pain in my body, but work…that’s another story. I decided to try this technique with the pain of being at work. I felt like Sherlock Holmes on the trail. The game was afoot!

I asked myself—which part of my job causes me to suffer? Mind, accommodating as always, had many answers: driving in traffic with no a/c in my car, the emails, the not-comfortable-enough chair, the production quota, and on and on.  Okay. Good. Now I had a trail of clues.

I experimented with methodically removing all of the aspects of my job that were supposedly causing my suffering. My hypothesis was, (Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of me), if I could remove all the aspects of my job that caused the suffering, then the suffering would go away. Fair enough, right?

What I found shocked me. After methodically using my mind to remove all of the elements of suffering from my job, I found one very simple desire was left, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. What it really comes down to with the suffering of being at work is simply this: I want to be somewhere else.

Great. Now the trail of clues was narrowed down to just one.

l looked at that desire to be somewhere else. Where would I want to be? My first choice was to be at home baking. Then came other things that I find pleasurable, like going to a thrift shop or reading at home, or working on a writing project. All right. So far so good. How, I asked myself, are those things different than being at work?

That’s when it hit me. What actually makes me suffer at work is the wrong view that instead of being there, I could be in a place where there is no suffering. In samsara, that’s impossible. No matter where we find ourselves in this realm, we are subject to birth, aging, disease, and death. But based on this wrong view of being able to escape the suffering of work, and go to a perfect place, I created the suffering of my own suffering.

Becoming aware of this was incredibly powerful. Until that realization, I had always felt victimized by the suffering of being at work. It always felt like something bigger than myself, an inevitable cycle of suffering that I’m subject to unless I want to be homeless and hungry. But seeing it this way, and understanding in a very visceral way that the suffering isn’t real because I’m the one creating it, was like discovering the key to my own prison.

Now when that particular suffering arises, I know what to say…I see you, Mara.

Having solved this mystery, I thought about a teaching I’ve heard many times now. We have no experience of a state where there is no suffering. If that’s so, why do we yearn for a state of perfection? How do we even know there can be a place without suffering? In going through this experiment with pain and the suffering of suffering, I saw our yearnings for perfection in a different light. I saw our constant yearnings for a permanent and lasting release from suffering as near-perfect expressions of our Buddha Nature, the part of us which only knows the perfection of true purity, true self, true bliss, true permanence.

This new adventure with Interplanetary Title, Inc. so far has been an interesting walk on the path.

The all-ground is untainted,

Incidentally covered but naturally splendid.

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

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On a path of separation…

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

heart treasure

“

“Recitations, sadhanas, and powerful spells are just complications;

The all-inclusive six-syllable mantra is the very sound of the Dharma.

All sounds have never been other than the speech of Sublime Chenrezi;

Recognizing them as mantra, resounding yet void, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

 Full Disclosure:

This was a hard one! I’ve never thought of separation this way.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite TV shows was Bewitched. I was intrigued by the idea of spells and witchcraft, and that just one twitch of the nose could get you what you wanted. Or for the really big jobs, you could cast a spell.

BewitchedWhat I didn’t notice back then is that instantaneous satisfaction of desires only led to more and more complications. In fact, there were a few seasons’ worth of problems that instant gratification and long range spells couldn’t solve. These problems kept screenplay writers in jobs for years.

In going about our lives, we treat spirituality the same way, I think. Since I’ve come to Buddhism, my thinking has shifted from, ‘If I act right, God will be pleased and I’ll get what I want’ to a subtle form of, ‘If I meditate and practice and do recitations, then my karma will be purified, and I’ll get what I want.’

As an embodied being, as a former Christian in recovery, it’s extremely difficult to resist seeing spirituality as a kind of Super Discount Mall. Although it’s subtle, I sometimes catch myself thinking things along the lines of, When my karma’s purified, I’ll…Essentially, I’m thinking that when I get to the stage of being “Good”, then I’ll go shopping at the Super Discount Mall of spirituality and see what all that credit (merit) I’ve accumulated will get me.

However, as I work on my path, I’m beginning to learn the value of separation. I am beginning to think of a spiritual path less as something I find with Buddha-GPS and then follow to the very end to some ultimate goal of ecstatic enlightenment, complete with levitation and rays of light emanating from my widely opened, All Seeing Third Eye. Now I’m beginning to see the path more as a recovery of what already is.

When I lived in Fort Lauderdale, I saw the aftermath of many hurricanes. Sometimes there was so much debris, the roads were indistinguishable beneath the fallen trees, the shattered homes, the overturned cars. It was just one epic landscape of confusion, a massively entangled pile of wreckage that completely denied the very existence of a road of any kind. But little by little, crews would come by and drag things away, and then it would seem miraculous that under all that debris, the road was still there, unchanged. hurricane

I’m beginning to see the spiritual path this way, as a clearing away, a separation from debris left from lifetimes of storms of afflicted emotions and wrong views that have left the path utterly obscured. I no longer feel that I’m looking uncertainly for a path that may possibly be there and may possibly lead in the right direction. Rather, I feel more and more that the only spiritual path that will lead to enlightenment is the one which we diligently recover by patiently removing lifetimes worth of debris left behind by afflicted emotions and wrong views. As we do this, the path, which has been there all along, and whose very existence we have forgotten, will gradually reveal itself. I think the experience of recovering our Buddha Nature is an experience of separation.

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

clayWhen I first came to Texas, I was intent on ‘rebuilding my life’. Very well-meaning therapists kept telling me that I needed to ‘reclaim my life’. To my credit (and theirs), after much hard work, I did indeed rebuild and reclaim my life. Unfortunately, I built an exact replica of the life that had led to an unskillful relationship. And so my newly reclaimed, rebuilt life came complete with an extraordinarily unskillful relationship that nearly culminated in suicide.

From my perspective now, I can look back and notice that what I did when I moved to Texas was rebuild an exact replica of my life right up to the point where I met my previous Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde partner. Naturally, when I built my replica life—complete with unskillful habits and tendencies—Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dutifully came onto the stage of my life.

Had I been able to take a step back from my desperate need to have a ‘normal’ life, I might have noticed that I was cultivating the exact habits that had previously led to unspeakable misery. Rather than separating myself from my past, I was building a monument to it, preserving it. Having noticed this, I may have noticed that what I needed to do was work with my mind.

I may have noticed that rather than a job of rebuilding a fiction that had proven itself useless, I had a job of recovering who I truly was. Under all the debris of my past, there was something that called to me even then. Had I been able to pay more attention to that, I might have been able to begin working with the fossilized wreckage of my wrong views and afflicted emotions. I might have noticed that even though it felt good to rebuild on what was familiar, sooner or later the stench of building on rotting refuse would begin to permeate anything I built on such a foundation, and eventually it would sink under its own weight of illusion.

***

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

My work with silence in my life continues. In working with silence, it occurred to me this week after listening to my Dharma friend Tashi’s Dharma talk that what I’m working with doing is separating myself from random sounds coming into the mind. This separation has been very difficult. I feel like an addict in recovery. This past weekend, I put in a movie I’ve seen at least a thousand times, just to hear something.

But a funny thing happened. After the movie was over, I realized I liked the silence better. That realization has made me disneytake a look at this path of separation that I’ve stumbled across. The mind is a very noisy place. I mean really noisy. Think Disney World at peak season, or around Christmas: rides wooshing along, people talking, kids laughing and screaming, music, parades, fireworks, arguing parents. And that’s on a calm day.

Once you actually hear your own mind, you sort of wonder that it doesn’t drive us insane to live with that noise day in and day out.

What I’m learning on this path of separation from unnecessary noise is that most of what we say or hear are complications, unnecessary elaborations. I’m beginning to experience what’s always said—emptiness isn’t nothing. Silence isn’t the absence of sound. I’m beginning to experience silence as the possibility, the potential for all sounds to arise. In the silence I’ve found some very good habits arising, and some very unskillful ones are being revealed.

But gradually, I believe I’m beginning to hear the sound of the Dharma. I experience it as moments when there is no sound at all, inside or ‘outside’, but simultaneously there are all sounds. I don’t know how this paradox can be, but I think this experience may describe undistorted reality.

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

Tonight when I get home, I will want to do a thousand things.  This is one of the effects of being able to hear my mind more clearly in the silence. Believe me, my mind’s got plans. Tonight, I will want to: mix up a cookie recipe so the dough can rest until Thursday night; meditate & journal; do my blog; pay bills online; catch up on reading; do some prep reading for a Dharma writing project; review notes and a draft for a John Rain novella I’m working on, and oh—start thinking about weekend baking. Time for a new muffin recipe? Maybe.

To be clear about this, because of what time I get home, and how early I choose to wake up, I have a little less than two hours after work to eat, do whatever, then go to sleep. This week in working with this verse, I can see how these plans are elaborations, complications that needlessly arise from an agitated mind. I think in some way ruminating on the Crazy List is my personal mantra I use to escape the suffering of being at work.

If I pursue a path of separation today, it will be relatively easy to whittle down the list. I’m thinking that separation always begins with a question. Even in our ordinary lives, we have to ask ourselves, do I want to turn left and get greasy fries for dinner or do I want to turn right and go home and make a healthy salad?

I think on the spiritual path, the question is relatively easy. There are things I believe I want to do. Which of these things will be a step on my path to enlightenment? As soon as I shift my perspective with this question, the complications fall away. I am able to see with clarity the best way to spend the limited time I have after work. I’ve never done this before. The question I usually ask is…what activity will benefit the most people? Then I prioritize my list that way.

But I like better slimming down the list by focusing on separating myself (and my activities) from that which will not lead to my own enlightenment with the intent of liberating limitless sentient beings.

I don’t know what will happen tonight when I try this. But, just thinking of doing it this way gives rise to some clarity in the mind.
monk lighting candlesA little separation goes a long way.

 

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On meditating on one…

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

This is my contemplation on the second line of verse 31 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“The mind cannot cope with all the many visualization practices;

To meditate on one Sugata is to meditate on them all.

Whatever appears, appearances are the form of the Great Compassionate One;

In the realm of the deity’s body, apparent yet void, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

I found this verse very obscure to work with. Typically in my contemplations, the line or lines I want to write about will become apparent to me after I read over my notes from Tashi’s Dharma talk and then read Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary. But today was a little different. None of the lines spoke to me, so I started writing until one of them did. Watch out ahead for flying mind debris!

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Sometimes when I study the Dharma, I feel like a girl exploring her grandmother’s attic, stuffed to the walls with really atticcool-looking stuff and I can’t imagine what it all used to be for. Then I take my newly discovered Alien Artifact downstairs only to have my grandmother tell me it’s an old-fashioned waffle iron, and it makes far better waffles than that wretched Martha Stewart junk pile fodder you can order off the TV. And then I start remembering those amazing waffles grandma used to make when I was a kid.

Studying the Dharma is like that for me sometimes. When I learn a new teaching, there’s a feeling of rediscovering something wonderful that I knew a long time ago, but I’ve since forgotten. Today’s line, “To meditate on one Sugata is to meditate on them all” is like that.

We spend so much time and energy trying to solve all our problems, running from one problem to the next like actors in some never ending melodrama. In truth, we have only two problems: afflicted emotions and wrong views. If we would stop chasing after the shadow puppets the mind throws up against the seemingly solid walls of our delusions, we would see this clearly.

When we think of the Buddhas, our wrong view of duality makes us see many Buddhas. But this is not so. It’s more like there’s Buddha-ment (to coin a word) emanating through samsara at every moment. No matter which emanation we meditate on, we are meditating on all of them. The fragmentation is an illusion.

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

When I was in college, I wanted to be out, done. When I was done, I wanted to run my own business. When I started my own business, I wanted to be a court reporter. When I was a year into being a court reporter, I wanted to be a writer. When I couldn’t write the next Great American Novel in a couple of months, I wanted to get married.

For years, my life went on and on like that: always being dissatisfied with what I had, then being even more dissatisfied with what I’d get. In a sense, the Relationship From Hell helped with this issue because I eventually became so focused on my own survival that there wasn’t room for much else in my mind.

wrecking ballHad I been able to take a step back from the mad dash through my life that eventually culminated in smashing into the shatteringly tough wall of surviving nearly ten years of a sociopath’s tender embrace, I may have noticed a few things.

What I thought I wanted was something I could settle into, something that would quell my restlessness. But what I actually needed to do was to spend some time working with my afflicted emotions and wrong views. They emanated through every imaginable aspect of my life. Had I been able to take a step back and just work with one (probably my afflicted emotions), I would have been able to make more skillful decisions about who to spend my life with. If I had been able to realize that the restless bustling of mind was like cloud cover against a clear blue sky, I may have begun to recover my Buddha Nature that much sooner.

***

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

When you first sit down to meditate, especially if the mind is agitated, the first thing you hear is noise. It’s a rush of thoughts that makes me think of New York’s Penn Station at 5:10 PM on a Friday afternoon: frantic, echoing chaos. In the new silence that I’m bringing into my life, mind seems suddenly very loud. By comparison, those first few minutes of meditation actually feel quieter.penn station

I never realized how much I relied on noise to mask whatever unpleasantness was going on in my mind. After an agitated day at work, I’d come home and turn on tinkling “meditation bells” or ocean sounds. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to draw attention away from mind’s discomfort and complaining after work.

Now, in the new silence that I’m cultivating, mind is much more apparent to me. I am beginning to see that, far from ‘complaining’ after work, mind is more like a freely flowing river that’s been dammed for most of the day. After that initial rush of thoughts and emotions (which I never used to allow), mind begins to settle into its own natural rhythms, which I find quite soothing. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to wonder if that rhythm isn’t just mind making its own white noise ‘music’. But that’s for another time.

Before I began cultivating silence in my life, it didn’t occur to me that by working with one thing in our lives, we are working with all things our lives. Maybe that’s why this line really resonates with me this morning. I’m beginning to understand that if we truly meditate on—I actually prefer the word ‘cultivate’ here—any one aspect of the Dharma, we are cultivating all of the Dharma and bringing all of it into our lives.

Since separation is a wrong view, any attempt we make, no matter how small is a little bit like looking at the sun through a prism. Even if you only see a single ray of light, it doesn’t matter because you’re getting to know the idea of ‘light’. Sooner or later you’ll realize the prism is just a skillful means to make sunlight visible. Once you know that, you’ll be able to perceive the incredible brilliance of the sun. Just so with our Buddha Nature. Even if we think we’re only cultivating one aspect of our Buddha Nature, to work with one aspect is to work with the entirety of the empty luminosity of who we truly are.

***

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

As I work with cultivating silence in my life, there suddenly seems to be more space. I mean literally. Not only does my mind feel more spacious, but physical spaces feel bigger too. When I bake, my kitchen feels bigger. When I’m reading or writing, my living room or bedroom feels bigger somehow. It’s as though all the noise I was adding (to an already noisy world) was actually making my world smaller. Is that possible? I don’t know. I can only go by my experience.

I am beginning to notice, in this new cultivation of silence, a feeling of less separation in my world, less fragmentation. In my afflicted emotions this means that the sharply edged divide between “good” and “bad” emotions is wearing away. In the way I see people, this means I’m somehow able to see their suffering with more precision. In response compassion spontaneously arises and many times it leads to a precise kind of wisdom of how to best relieve the suffering I see, or at the very least, how to not add to it.

Cultivating silence has led to so much unexpected light in previously dark corners of my mind and of my life. Honestly, I don’t know what to expect next, or even what to plan on working with next in all the new space. But I do know one thing for certain. It has been absolutely true in my experience with silence that “To meditate on one sugata is to meditate on them all.”

monk with candlesI thought I was taking silence for a test drive. But the experience is turning out to be that my Buddha Nature, through the vehicle of silence, is taking me for a test drive through my life. And what a ride it’s been so far. It’s like an all-inclusive tour through a life I’ve never taken the time to explore and now there are vistas of unknown hinterlands laid out before me.

So I think when I go to work today, I want to take this day to pay attention to how silence manifests in the workplace. Is the mind’s tendency to wander the known (and unknown) universe impacted? How? Am I able to see my Buddha Nature more clearly? What does that look like? And most importantly, I think, what is arising in all that new space, and what does it tell me about what my afflicted emotions and wrong views have been obscuring all this time?

 

Post Script:

I wrote this contemplation this morning, roughly twelve hours ago. During my day, I paid attention to the silence. What I noticed is something I’ve studied in the Dharma and heard about in teachings, but never really paid close attention to.

Yes. The world we experience is an internal representation. I thought I understood that. But I always thought this meant our world was defined by action, by what we do and what the perceived ‘other’ does. Today, for the first time, I was able to see that simply being still (silence) is the biggest ‘engine’ of making our world. This engine is infinite, unfathomable, and underlies every heartbeat, every breath, every moment. 

When I shared my contemplation with my Dharma friend Tashi, he put it much more simply: “Silence = Emptiness = Space = All possibilities.”

Yes, indeed.

 

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On a single atom…

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 line of verse 30 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“Samsara is nothing other than how things appear to you;

If you recognize everything as the deity, the good of others is consummated.

Seeing the purity of everything confers the four empowerments on all beings at once;

Dredging the depths of samsara, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

When I began this contemplation, it was my intent to do the first two lines. But as I started writing, I realized how much of our lives is dominated by appearances, so the contemplation turned out to be only on the first line. 

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When I was in my twenties, reality became wholly unconvincing. Something happened in my mind, some indefinable shift that made this world seem utterly insubstantial. It was an awareness that if I walked in front of a speeding car, it would surely hit me, but it shouldn’t because neither me nor the car were anything more than insubstantial ghosts.

morpheusBack then, living with this certainty day to day was pretty harrowing. I was afraid to tell anyone because it sounded so crazy. But crazy or not, I knew that the way I was perceiving things—insubstantial, ghostly apparitions—was how things truly were. After months of living with it, I finally had to ‘teach’ myself to believe and behave as though reality had a substantiality I knew it lacked. It didn’t really take. I never saw reality as completely solid ever again.

When I discovered (re-discovered?) Buddhism, it was a great relief. I didn’t have to pretend anymore. I’d been right all along. Samsara is a realm of continually generated reality that we have been generating for innumerable lifetimes. It may be the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons game. The only drawback is we’ve been playing the game for so many eons, we’ve forgotten it’s a game. We’ve forgotten we’re the Dungeon Masters.

Patrul Rinpoche puts it like this, “…not even a single atom has a verifiable existence….nothing that arises from causes and conditions has any true existence whatsoever….to see things otherwise, as truly existing, is the deluded perception underlying samsara…”. As we go through our ordinary lives, we accept reality without question. We accept that what we see is how things really are, and then we try to make things better. This is like a child building an elaborate sand castle on the sea shore. The tides are inevitable. They will come and wash away all that has been built. The tides of samsara—birth, age, disease, death—are no less inevitable. Anything we build here in samsara will soon be washed away by the unrelenting tides of this realm.

***

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

I think I was born a perfectionist. It’s certainly a karmic formation I came into this lifetime with. Until very recently in my life, I always wanted things to be…just so. It encompassed everything in my life, from my body to academics to relationships.

It was in the area of relationships that my drive for perfection caused the most suffering for me and those around me. Simply put, I wanted the perfect mother. I wanted Caroline from Little House on the Prairie. I wanted the mom on the Waltons. I wanted the mom on the Hallmark greeting cards, the one in all those sentimental paintings with such a look of beatific compassion, a faint halo practically shined over her head.mother

To put it succinctly, I never quite found the perfect relationship with my mother. After all these years, I’m finally coming to see that what I wanted, the relationship I thought would be ‘perfect’ was only an appearance in my mind. And even worse, it was someone else’s appearance, absorbed from screenplay writers and Hallmark hacks.

If I could have taken a step back from my angsty emotions around my mother, taken a few breaths to let peace and clarity arise, I might have noticed a few things. I may have noticed that the woman I always thought of as ‘my mother’ wasn’t my anything. She was a woman who’d given birth to the body my karmic formations were drawn into for this lifetime. If I could have noticed just that much, then my suffering would have decreased by orders of magnitude. I would have been able to see that my mother’s actions (or lack thereof) had absolutely nothing to do with me. She was hopelessly caught in the bindings of her own karmic formations, struggling to free herself, but only managing to become more and more entangled.

Having noticed this, I may have seen that the best thing for both of us would be to let go the appearances of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’, and let go the incredible suffering it brought to hold on to appearances with a death grip.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is silence. I know. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? A couple of weeks ago in his Dharma talk, my Dharma friend Tashi brought up silence and how we always have something on in the background. I immediately thought…yes, but it’s only Mozart or Beethoven. Someone else present brought up what I’d been thinking, and Tashi’s response really struck me. He said something like, “Yes. But silence is better.”

No, I thought to myself. That’s silly. That can’t be. But then I started really thinking about how little silence there was in my life. So I decided to take silence for a test drive through my life.
Wow! I lived in a noisy world. The first thing I used to do when I got home from work was turn on ocean sounds or tinkling silencebells or an audio book. At work, I’d listen to music with lyrics. At night while I slept, ocean sounds had to be playing. Although I hadn’t done it in a while, I used to like ‘immersion reading’, meaning I’d listen to an audio book and read along. When I’d bake all day on Saturday, there would be a movie playing or a book or a Dharma talk.

So, these last two weeks I’ve experimented with silence. In that short time I’ve noticed so much in my life that I was doing based on appearances from almost a decade ago when I first got to Texas. Back then, I couldn’t bear to hear my own thoughts. There always had to be something drowning them out. I used New Age music, ocean sounds—whatever—anything so that I didn’t have to pay attention to my thoughts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I dreaded cleaning. I’d always turn on music or a book, to make it go by fast. But these last two weeks, I’ve discovered that I enjoy cleaning. I enjoy bringing order to my apartment. I especially enjoy cleaning the kitchen, and getting ready for weekend baking. There have been so many things in my life like that.

What I’m finding is that in the silence, the appearances of samsara take on a certain transparence. It’s not that things appear ‘ghostly’ like what happened when I was in my twenties, it’s just that things don’t appear wholly, convincingly solid. In a sense, all this silence lets me hear the churning gears of the clockwork of mind as it busily generates the appearances of samsara.

This has led to tangible changes in my life. I ended my subscription to Rhapsody, a digital music service. I suspended my Audible account. I have, in short, eliminated the two biggest noise engines in my life. As I continue this journey into silence, it feels like a fog is lifting from my mind and continually revealing, little by little, a perfect clarity that’s been there all along.

***

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

Yesterday at work Interplanetary Title laid off three people. It turns out they have their own people who play with numbers, and so those three people had become suddenly expendable.

Ever since Interplanetary revealed their plan of conquest, their watchwords have been ‘growth’ and ‘expansion’. Without ever saying it, they implied that after years of surviving layoffs with the bank, our jobs were safe. Then this.

Yesterday at work there was a feeling of betrayal in the air. Although I didn’t hear anyone say it, I’m sure we were all, one way or another, thinking, “So…this is your idea of growth and expansion. Liars.” At work, as I thought about it back at my desk after the ‘re-organization meeting’, I experienced something that I’ve been taught again and again as I study the path. In samsara whenever you try to put your fears to rest based on phenomena, like a corporate takeover, you’re setting yourself up for suffering. It’s one thing to hear the teaching, but as always, another thing entirely to experience it in your life with clarity and attention.

I thought I had it all together with this whole transition thing. It’s samsara, I told myself, things won’t get better. They’ll for sure get worse. But ‘getting worse’ didn’t include not having a job. How could it after all that talk of growth and expansion? So, yesterday I experienced a sense of betrayal, of being lied to. I didn’t really start working with it until resentment began to creep in. I know how damaging that can be, so I started mantra, and I looked right at Mara until she slowly dissolved. It took hours of doing it again and again.

Today when I go to work, I will work with being a child of illusion. I will work with vigilantly reminding myself that whatever reality I encounter at work today is of my own making. Will there be desks and chairs and emails and a/c set to Arctic? Of course there will be. But more and more I’m coming to view those things as props on a stage. The play, the appearance that arises on the stage is entirely my choice. After all, it’s arising in my mind, created and given life by my karmic formations.

Today, I can choose to decrease my own suffering and that of others by not contributing to the fearful conversations that will come up. I can choose to act from a place of compassion rather than from a place of fear or resentment or anger.

boys on the stepsI’m not sure what that looks like exactly, but I know that, just like me, every single being I encounter today will have Buddha Nature. And just like me, when someone resonates with who they truly are, the suffering will fall away, if only for a moment. So today I’ll go to the workplace looking for the light that shines in all sentient beings. In most, I probably won’t find it. We’re so good at hiding it, aren’t we? But I’ll sure have some interesting times looking for it.