Month: August 2014

by

On ending well…

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

heart treasure

“Cremate that old corpse of clinging to things as real in the fire of nonattachment;

Conduct the weekly funeral ceremonies of ordinary life by practicing the essence of Dharma;

As the smoke-offering to provide for the departed, dedicate your accumulated merit for all their future lives.

Consummating all positive actions done for the sake of the dead, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

Really? I couldn’t resist a chance to write on a verse that talks about cremating old corpses!

Written Thursday, August 28th, 7 AM

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Ever watch a disaster movie? If you’re old enough, you remember the airport movies and the earthquake movies. If you’re not, they were actually billed as exactly that, “disaster movie”. Believe me, when you walked into the theater, bought your popcorn, and settled down in the dark, you did not expect a happy ending. You knew that right after the opening credits, everyone onscreen was about to have a very, very bad day; a day so bad in fact, they’d wish they could crawl back between the sheets and take refuge in their worst nightmare.

When I was younger, maybe in about sixth or seventh grade, I used to love those movies. I’d sit in front of the screen spellbound, watching strangers work through disasters born in some (very warped) writer’s mind. Then I grew up. And honestly, I think for a while, my life outdid even the most warped among Hollywood’s writers.

Unfortunately for all of us in samsara, we’re living the ultimate disaster movie. If I had to give it a title, I’d borrow from my Dharma friend Tashi and call it, It Doesn’t End Well. Pessimistic? No. Realistic? Yes. alienThink about it. At least in Earthquake, or Towering Inferno, or The Titanic someone gets out alive. Not so in samsara. This realm is the perfect storm. Remember how the tag line for the movie Alien was ‘in space, no one can hear you scream’?  Well, the tag line for It Doesn’t End Well would be, ‘no one gets out alive’.

This realm has a one hundred percent mortality rate. The moment of your birth inevitably and relentlessly leads to the hour of your death. Isn’t that great news? Now that you know how the movie ends, no need to stress over it or obsess about it. In the end, you’re going to die. That’s a certainty. Knowing that, we can get on with the business of living a life that will lead to enlightenment, and the end of our encore performances on the stage of samsara.

Think of it. Here we are, caught in the ultimate disaster movie, and we’ve been in reruns for eons. Talk about your long lasting shows! But in this very lifetime we have a chance to escape the beginningless cycle of birth and death. How do we do that? It’s one of those things that’s hard and easy at the same time. Dilgo Khyentse puts it like this, “The tree of samsara is rooted in the belief that there is a self, in clinging to things as real, in ego-clinging; once this clinging is consumed by the fire of wisdom, the whole tree and all its branches of delusion, luxuriant with the foliage of attachment and hatred, are bound to be burned up too.”

In other words, the only way out of samsara is to give up or ‘renounce’ our habit of clinging to phenomena as though it were substantial, permanent, and independent. It is not. The sooner we can bring ourselves to this path of renunciation, the sooner we can cremate the old corpses of our attachment to samsara’s delusions, the sooner we will stop suffering, the sooner we will bring down the final curtain.

***

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

About three years ago, I really wanted to quit my job. I mean really. I would come home some days and cry. Weekends were nightmarish because I knew that, come Monday, I’d have
to go back to the deepest circle of Hell, and I’d be trapped there for hour upon hour. It felt no different than a gulag to me: imprisoned, tortured, longing for freedom. Every time I thought of leaving, there were a thousand reasons I couldn’t. I needed the money. I didn’t want a long commute. What if I couldn’t do the new job?

in prisonThis cycle stretched into my personal life, leading me to unwholesome pursuits and the cultivation of unskillful habits of over spending, overeating, and other ways of overindulging; anyting to try and escape the dismal suffering of life as a prisoner in the Bank of America gulag. No nightmare was ever so unrelievedly full of dismay, melancholy, or despair. It was a very dark , very bleak time in my life. It was then that I ‘accidentally’ heard the Dharma for the first time: Pema Chodron’s “Getting Unstuck”. The Dharma showed me the path (which had been there all along) out of Hell.

Looking back on that time in my life, I could have taken a step back from my constantly overwrought emotions. I could have breathed. I could have done mantra. If I had been able to do that, I may have noticed that all of my suffering, every single moment, came from one thing: attachment. I was attached to ‘my’ job. I was attached to ‘my’ lifestyle. I was attached to ‘my’ reputation for being good at what I did. I was attached to ‘my’ short commute. I was even attached to hating ‘my’ boss and being right about him being a bully.

Had I been able to notice that all of my suffering had just one cause, I may have been able to work with a remedy to ease my extreme attachment. I believe if I had been able to work with my attachment, I would have decreased my suffering much sooner.

***

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

Fast forward about four years, five or six layoffs (I’ve lost count), and the sale of the company I formerly worked for to Interplanetary Title, Inc. During that time, I was desperate to hold on to my job. Then, with each layoff, when I wasn’t the one being walked out, I was ‘happy’, or least not morose.

With the shrinking of the department I work in from sixteen people to just two people, things changed. I had to train Salem, possibly the most untrainable sentient being on the face of the world. She is for certain (in my most humble opinion) the most self-pitying sentient being on the face of the world.

Here’s a funny thing about this job. Ever since I began studying the Dharma, I could feel more and more acutely the suffering of the work situation. I don’t know enough about
the Dharma to know if karma actually works like this, but since the beginning of this year in particular, it feels like karma is a strong wind at my back, blowing me out of this job, urging me on. I have been staunchly resisting. I’ve turned down three job offers since January. And with each offer that I turned down, the situation at work grew worse and worse. The suffering kicked up just enough to go from tenable to just shy of unbearable. I’ve had to hang on more and more grimly simply to have the patience to walk in there each day and avoid harm, do good, and purify my mind. That last bit has been quite the challenge just lately.girl on rope underwater

Now, today, I fully realize that the true source of my suffering isn’t Salem. Sure. She’s an irritant. If she were inside an oyster, it could make a pearl the size of Jupiter. The actual source of my suffering is my attachment. I’m attached to being right. I’m attached to the idea that someone (please god, anyone) will realize how incredibly incompetent Salem is and replace her with someone who (a) has critical thinking skills, (b) has written communication skills, and (c) actually does their job instead of coming up with wholly implausible excuses for not doing it. I’m attached to my ten minute commute. I’m attached to going on the King Arthur website and buying something just because I want it. I’m attached to the idea that I am right, Salem is wrong, and she needs to go.

No. Working with this verse the last few days has shown me beyond a doubt that I need to go. I have seen my attachment these last couple of days. My attachment is like a parasite, feeding on my afflicted emotions, paralyzing me with the delusions of fear and impotence. It’s time to purge these delusions and . . . let go.

***

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

This morning, in about an hour, I have a telephone interview with Big Sky, Inc. It’s a HUGE company. It’s building new national headquarters about five minutes from where I live. It’s a telephone representative position. Far from being a Mickey Mouse Wannabe, their benefits package is absolutely stellar. All I would have to give up to work there is twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of attachment. My salary would drop by that much.

Even knowing this, that wind of karma blows warmly and insistently at my back. At this point, I would say that the urge to move on from where I am now has become an irresistible compulsion. I’ve done the math. I can do it financially, but my lifestyle will be totally different—to the tune of twenty-two thousand dollars different.

I’ve known about this morning’s upcoming phone call since Sunday afternoon. All week I’ve worked with looking at Mara, at my attachment. Each day, as I’ve gone to work, I’ve observed my attachment in action. It’s a feeling of desperate clinging, as though I’d jumped off the sinking Titanic into icy waters and I were clinging to drifting debris, madly treading water just to stay afloat.

These past few days I’ve realized something that really hit me hard. That desperate feeling of clinging isn’t going to go away until I leave that job. I’ve made so many accommodations, worked with so much of the Dharma, but it’s as though the flames of a burning house were licking at me hotter and hotter. It’s literally become impossible to stay there. The very last straw was my manager’s decision to make me wait more than three weeks to go to the dentist for an ‘emergency’ appointment. I can’t bear anymore.

Today, when I have the phone interview, I will accept the job if it’s offered. I won’t do this because I think a job at Big Sky, Inc. will land me in nirvana. I’ll do it because the only thing keeping me at my current job is my attachment. Nothing—absolutely nothing—else keeps me there. With that being the only reason to stay, it surely cannot end well.

I will accept any offer made by Big Sky, Inc. because it’s my fervent desire that in moving my life toward nonattachment, toward renunciation, I will begin to truly see that only one thing keeps us on the “It Doesn’t End Well” movie set: attachment. In seeing this, and acting on it, my feet will be more firmly set on the path of renouncing suffering.

It doesn’t end well. No, not at all. We can’t get out alive. But what we can do, without a doubt, in this very lifetime is stop the reruns.

grace in sunlight

Postscript:

When I shared this contemplation with my Dharma friend Tashi, he called the situation at work, “the unbearable comfort of the known”. This is brilliant…yes…that’s exactly what it feels like.

 I’ve had the phone call. I’ve accepted a provisional job offer. After that, I had to find a way to pay bills on twenty-two thousand dollars less a year than I make now. I went to my bank, and it took me a little more than an hour to get a loan that will consolidate my bills into one low monthly payment. This will let me barely squeeze by on my new salary. As an aside, the loan officer who assisted me ‘just happened’ to be a home baker. We exchanged baking stories. It’s incredible how easy karma makes things when you sail with the wind, instead of trying to go against it. As my Dharma friend Tashi says quite a bit, if you support the Dharma, it will support you.

by

On a bountiful harvest…

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

This is my contemplation on the third line of verse 35 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

heart treasure

“Overcome your enemy, hatred, with the weapon of love;

Protect your family, the beings of the six realms, with

the skillful means of compassion;

Harvest from the field of devotion the crop of experience

and realization.

Consummating your life’s work, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

Mind has been extremely agitated these last few days. Doing this contemplation felt like trying to see through mud smeared two-inch thick glasses. 

Written Thursday, August 21st, 5 AM

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

I grew up a city girl. When I was very young, I didn’t know grass had to be planted. I thought it was just the green stuff that grew where there was no sidewalk or road. Then my aunt moved to upstate New York, and I went to spend summers with her.

She had a little garden in back of her house. There were tomatoes, peas, and other stuff I can’t remember anymore. Each morning I’d see my aunt out there watering, picking off leaves, and doing weird stuff like making the little sticks stand up straight for the tomatoes. After work she’d be out there again doing the same routine. I didn’t get it. Did the vegetables need help to grow?

One day I asked her what she was doing out there and why didn’t she pick them if they were ready. She told me if she didn’t do that each day, they’d never be ready. She said if they were ever going to be ready, she had to take care of them. After that, I’d sort of sit and look at the growing tomatoes (the easiest to see) and watch…to see if I could spot them growing. Of course, I couldn’t.

Then came the day they were ready to harvest. My aunt let me help pick them, and then I got to shell the peas. Was I surprised or what to find out that peas grew inside something, not just in the ground by themselves in the dirt. That night when we had dinner, those were the sweetest peas I’d ever had.

tending fieldsAs we go through our lives and practice the Dharma, we are constantly tending the fields of our devotion. There is not a word, or an act, or a thought that is not planted in the vastly infinite fields of our experience. At every moment, we have a choice of what seeds of word, thought, or deed to drop into the fallow soil of our lives. It’s easy to forget that whatever seed we drop, that is what we shall harvest. Dilgo Khyentse puts it this way, “There is no better or more bountiful harvest than the one you sow in the soil of your faith and endeavor so that it ripens into the richness of merit and wisdom.”

Knowing that we will reap what we sow, knowing that Dharma is a practice not a theoretical debate, knowing that we must free ourselves of the cycle of birth and death or be doomed to repeat it, what must we do? We must live our lives in the knowledge that with each precious human birth, we are given all that we need for a bountiful harvest. When our harvest is complete, and we break open the pods of our experience, if we are able to see past the obscurations of wrong view and afflicted emotion, we will see that we have harvested our own enlightenment.

***

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

Sometimes we can have the biggest realizations about the Dharma while we’re doing the most mundane things. I do a lot of baking. I have a lot of tools for baking: cast iron pots, an enamel pot, a clay baker, a Kitchen Aid, a baking stone, a scale, measuring spoons, knives, thermometers—a whole gaggle of stuff. So when I started learning a new technique for baking bread, I thought I was totally ready.

I’m learning how to make bread in a new way, using a stretch and fold technique that lets you work with a wetter dough, so you can get nice big holes in your finished loaf. When I began this technique, I made a sort of mini-vow that I would do fifty-two bakes before I decided if I liked the technique or not.

So off I went. Ken Forkish, the author of the book I’m learning from, suggests starting with a low hydration (73%) bread recipe. But no. I skipped ahead to a 78% hydration recipe. When I mixed my dough, it was a watery soup of flour and water that I couldn’t handle or manage. I certainly couldn’t shape loaves out of it. I had to add more flour, which defeated the whole purpose of learning to make ‘artisan’ bread. I almost put the book away and went back to my old ways. But…there was the 52 bakes mini-vow, so I kept at it.

When I was reading Ken Forkish’s book and I wasn’t actually in the kitchen, I thought all my tools and all my experience doughwere enough. Seventy-eight percent? Sure. Why not?

In practicing the Ken Forkish method of baking bread, I learned almost overnight that a recipe is just a theory until you’re in the kitchen and wrist-deep in a mixture of flour and water that sticks to you like Crazy Glue. At that point, you have to let go theory, and start practicing. In other words, you have to do it.

The practice of the Dharma is so much like this. We read a prayer or we read about harvesting from “the field of devotion the crop of experience and realization” and we think…yeah, okay. I’ve got that.

No. We don’t have it. Until we bring the Dharma into our everyday mundane experience (like baking bread), we think we have all the tools and we think we’re understanding, but all we’re really doing is reading theory.

If I could have done this Ken Forkish experience differently, I would have started with the ‘beginner’ bread. I would have reminded myself that reading a recipe is worlds apart from doing a recipe. Had I done this sooner, I may have noticed that reading a recipe, even in a well-equipped kitchen, only gives you a starting point. I may have noticed that the baking didn’t actually begin until I felt the warm mix of flour, water, salt, and yeast squeezing between my fingers.

***

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

If I had to pick one thing in my life going on right now, it would be working with giving up a harmful habit. I’ve had this particular habit for about twenty years. As I study the Dharma, the habit becomes more and more distasteful, but I still want to do it. It’s a form of intoxication that poisons the mind but not the body. In the last ten days, I’ve really taken the approach that I want to be free of this habit in this very lifetime. Believe me, this habit is far too ingrained to be only from this lifetime. The biggest help has been to cultivate a higher taste, something I learned about in one of Tashi’s Dharma talks.

devotionIn working with this habit (which feels so much like an addiction), I am very much working with paying attention to what I devote my time to. I’ve also begun to pay very close attention to what devotion means. I’m finding that we can be devoted to absolutely anything. Although this sounds self-evident, I am coming to see very clearly that devotion is simply a matter of attention. Where your attention is–that’s what you’re devoted to. From this follows that whatever you are devoted to, you will harvest experience and have realizations in line with your devotion.

Here’s the trick. If you devote yourself to something that habitually agitates the mind, then your realizations will be distorted by afflicted emotion and wrong view. After just ten days of working with this habit, I already feel more peace and clarity arising in the mind. But the habitual tug to return to the habit is quite strong.

Working with this line has helped tremendously because I am able to see clearly the crop I harvest when I cultivate a higher taste.

From this I’ve observed the following sequence. When we are devoted to something, we give it our attention. The more of our attention we give, the more our experience will show us the world in terms of our object of devotion. When we shift our devotion to the Dharma, our experience shifts, and our realizations become clearer and clearer as peace and clarity arise in the mind.

***

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

Tonight when I get home, I will want to indulge in my habit. That’s a given. I keep waiting for that desire to pass. It has subsided, but it doesn’t feel like it will ever pass. I have quit this habit in the past, when I first started studying the Dharma. But back then I was holding my breath, struggling with it…and it lasted only eight months.

Vows don’t work. Struggle doesn’t work. Holding my breath doesn’t work.

Tonight after work, when the habitual desire arises, I will look at Mara, as I have been doing. I will recognize that I have a choice about where I put my attention, my devotion.

Tonight I can do a devotion to Mara. She’s very welcoming, but it’s the strangling, poisonous embrace of a viper. I will recognize that if I choose to devote my evening to Mara, the experience I harvest will be one of fleeting happiness, followed by a happiness hangover of feeling defeated and impotent.

If I choose to devote my evening to the Dharma, the Buddhas will welcome me, as they always do. The experience I will harvest from my devotion to the Buddhas will be permanent happiness, a glimpse of my Buddha Nature. I will also experience far more peace and clarity in an evening spent in the presence of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

Sitting here writing this in the pre-dawn stillness of my little neighborhood, the choice seems self-evident. Of course the choice to make is not to embrace the viper, right? But…didn’t Alice drink from the bottle marked ‘Poison’?

After work tonight, when I’m exhausted from anxiety running through me all day like high voltage current, the choice won’t be so clear. Mara will look awfully good, scales, fangs and all.

Knowing that is a great advantage. Knowing that my mind will be presenting a very distorted view to me as to what will lead to happiness will help me not to get caught up in the delusion.

I harvestwill remember, even in that state of mind, that wherever I put my devotion, that is the crop I will harvest.

As we go about our lives, let us remember this; let us remember that our bountiful harvest is always our choice in every moment, with every heartbeat, with every breath.

 

 

 

by

On molding the clay…

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

heart treasure

“

“Offer the torma of whatever arises to the guests of immediate liberations;

Mold the clay of whatever appears into the tsa-tsa of void appearance;

Offer the prostration of nonduality to the Lord of Mind Nature.

Consummating these Dharma activities, recite the six syllable.”

 Full Disclosure:

In writing this contemplation, and working with this verse this week, I had an odd feeling of eavesdropping on my own mind, as though I’d ventured into a basement work room marked PRIVATE: DO NOT ENTER. I’m glad I ignored the sign.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

There’s a lot of talk these days about unemployment rates and how the economy’s recovering. Honestly, who cares? Unless there’s a job that gets you out of the burning house of samsara, every job is the same job. Wanna see a politician’s perfectly coifed hair stand on end? Tell them this: At this time (Madam Prime Minister, Mr. President…whoever), there is 99.99% unemployment, worldwide. After he or she runs screaming into the night in search of their spin doctor cavalry, think about this.

We are here in samsara to do one job and one job only: recover our Buddha Nature. Everything else is just, as my Dharma friend Tashi likes to say, entertainment. Patrul Rinpoche puts it like this: “Between meditation periods, make sure that everything you do is in harmony with the Dharma….whenever you have the free time…do only what is truly meaningful.” How many of us do that? Right, about .01%, which is why the worldwide unemployment rate is 99.99%.

Now, honestly, I don’t carry Play Dough around in my purse. Everything else it seems, but not that. I don’t have time in my life to mold little clay statues (tsa-tsas) as offerings. But there’s no need for that. We all have the ultimate clay molding mega machine with us wherever we go. We could go into the bowels of the earth or way out past where the Hubble telescope can see, and we’d still have that amazing fantastic mega molding machine right there with us. And it travels light, very light.

Our experience of reality is an internal representation created by the mega molding machine of the mind. All that we see, all that we experience is the “clay of whatever appears”. Given this, we could spend our entire lifetime molding whatever arises in our lives along the elegantly shaped lines of the Dharma. How do we do this? It’s simple, really. As we go through our experience, we remind ourselves that all is impermanent, insubstantial, and completely dependent on our karmic formations.

Lest we think this is too difficult asculptor task, let us remember that at each and every moment we are master sculptors who shape into being a delusional reality that is convincingly permanent, substantial, and independent.

Isn’t it time we employed that incredible talent for molding the clay of whatever arises to work for us instead of against us?

***

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

Tsa-tsas are traditionally made of clay, usually mixed with the relics (ashes) of a Buddha who’s left their body. When I first heard that this past Sunday, I thought—how brilliant is that? In creating an offering, the thing we fear most—death—is actually made part of the offering itself.

I’ve thought about that all week and how, growing up Christian, offerings were made on pretty white cloths on beautifully pristine altars. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to put a dead saint’s ashes on all that pretty white cloth. Particulary since Seventh Day Adventists don’t hold with all that ‘Saint’ stuff. This goes with the Christian theme of sin being something to apologize to God for and to make every effort to scrub it away from your filthy, undeserving soul.

Imagine offering sin to the Christian God? He’d probably smite you into the middle of next week.

So this way of seeing offering was totally different to me. Looking back over my life, I think the situation that I could have molded into void appearance was the relationship with my mother. That caused me no end of heartache from about the time I was five years old until a little more than a year ago. I wanted desperately to be the perfect daughter. I wanted her to love me as I was—not the perfect daughter she wanted to make me into. I wanted to stop being the fat, stupid little girl (to use her well-turned Patois phrase: you no have no sense!) she always saw me as and treated me as.

If I look back on my life at that time, I can notice that both my mother and myself were caught up, embroiled igladiatorn afflicted emotions. We were like flint rocks that struck sparks of pain and anger off each other on contact. If I could have taken a step back, breathed, done a quick mantra, I might have noticed how I had nothing to do with how my mother was. It wasn’t personal. She resented having children. Any child could have stood in my place and would have been subject to the same treatment.

Having noticed this, I could have taken yet another step back and noticed that all that was arising in my experience with the woman I called ‘mother’ was insubstantial, impermanent, and wholly dependent on my karmic formations that went back for eons.

Once I’d noticed that, I may have sensed the ancient feel of the conflict, and instead of seeing it as a battle to be won over an external entity, I might have seen my afflicted emotions as markers showing me what karmic formations I need to work with to recover my Buddha Nature.

Having realized the emptiness nature of the ‘external’ conflict, I would have been free to mold each encounter into a welcome chance to work with dissolving the underlying karmic formation that all the conflict was pointing to.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is my missing dental bridge. This week the dentist’s office called me with the cost. I promise you, here in Texas, I could make a down payment on a really nice house for the cost to replace this bridge. In the meantime, there’s lots of discomfort, especially when I talk. There’s the risk I could accidentally rip out the little filed down stub of tooth that was anchoring the bridge. Then I’d need an implant. And that would probably cost the down payment on a McMansion—in Frisco.

As this week has progressed, I’ve really worked with this whole bridge thing, and wondered what the heck kind of tsa-tsa this would make. At one point when the little stub was really hurting, I thought—hey, if it falls out, all I need is some clay to  mold around it and I’m good to go!

In my more serious moments, I watched mind at work. Mind was playing the blame game. The truth is the dentist told me a year ago that this bridge would have to come out. I had really good dental insurance. He had a treatment plan. I didn’t go.

This year before the company I work for was sold and I got moved to this Mickey Mouse Wannabe dental insurance, Interplanetary Title, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, warned that we should get any procedures that we needed done before we moved to the new insurance. I didn’t go to the dentist.

blame 2After all that, mind has the unmitigated gall to blame my pain and discomfort on my manager (who won’t give me time off) and Salem (who’s the reason I can’t have time off until Sept. 4). This has been an amazing opportunity to watch my mind at work. Because it hurts to talk, I spend ninety percent of my time at work in silence. And in this silence I am able to observe mind hard at work molding and assigning blame. But never to me; no, never that.

Using this stanza, this line in particular, when those thought of assigning blame arise, I repeatedly ask myself: Is this substantial? Is this permanent? Is this independent? Is this the right view? What am I missing in this picture? (Thank you to Tashi for these questions)

At first mind was stubbornly silent. Then, grudgingly, like a sulky child, I’d get answers: no, no, no, no, and “missing lots”. After repeatedly asking the same questions for days, I’m not really sure what happened. I didn’t have a feeling of molding anything, but there’s far more distance between me and those thoughts of blame now than there was last week. When the thoughts of blame arise now, I don’t get caught up in them. I don’t buy into them. They are exactly like clouds passing in a vast sky.

I’m not sure, but I think the questions allowed me to recognize the “void appearance” of those emotionally charged thoughts. Once that happened, I was able to see through them, past them, and back to the causes of suffering that I put in place for myself.

As I write this, I realize that when we acknowledge illusion as our parents, and realize we are a child of illusion, the experience of our perceptions becomes very much like soft clay. We can’t mold a masterpiece out of our lives, not here in samsara. But we are after all master sculptors with eons of experience and skill. We can certainly mold whatever arises into a shape that acknowledges and bows to the emptiness nature of all experience. In this way, we begin to free ourselves of our delusions.

***

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

It’s twenty days until I go to the dentist. Twenty days of sore gums. Twenty days of living in fear that I’ll break off that little stub of a tooth. Twenty days of eating foods I don’t like but am forced to eat because they’re soft.

Of course, it’s also twenty days to work with mind, but more importantly, to watch mind at work. I have pinking shears. They’re a special kind of scissors with curved teeth instead of straight blades. No matter what kind of paper you cut, you get pretty sculpted edges.

In these twenty days, it’s my intent to use this line as pinking shears for the mind. In just the last four days, I’ve made tremendous headway in working with blame, aggression, resentment, and frustration just by asking myself a few simple questions.

Even more unbelievably, instead of dreading going to the dentist I’m counting the days until I can lie back in that chair,dentist under that super-bright light, and have a very nice man insert an overabundance of needles, drills and all manner of sharp metal objects into my mouth. If that isn’t molding my experience, I don’t know what is.

As I go through these twenty days, it’s my intent to notice how incredibly malleable our experience really is. If anyone had ever told me that I would one day look forward to a dentist’s appointment, I’d honestly have thought them quite mad. But going through this experience, I see how all that arises in our lives is like clay that can be molded, is in fact molded at every moment, with every heartbeat, with every breath.

As I wait out these twenty days, it feels that I’ve discovered some wonderful new talent that I never knew I had. I will move through these twenty days with keen attention to what arises and view my experience with a sculptor’s eye, an eye that sees past the illusions of substantial, permanent, independent existence. With that sharp finely tuned view, I will move through these days with the intent to sculpt whatever arises into an offering to my parents, an acknowledgement that I am a child of illusion.

I will labor as hard as any artist ever has to call forth the essence of the Buddha I truly am, the Buddha we all truly are.

monks with lying down Buddha

 

by

On the turbulent vortex…

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

heart treasure

“

“As thoughts and the two obscurations are pacified,

Experience and realization increase;

As your perceptions come under control, enemies and

Obstructing influences are subjugated.

It is Chenrezi who bestows in this very life the supreme

And common siddhis;

As the four activities are accomplished by themselves,

Recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

 Full Disclosure:

I found it hard to contemplate something that doesn’t actually exist without slipping into treating it and speaking of it as though it does exist.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

mad scientistWhen I think of controlling the mind, the first thought that comes up is a man strapped into a chair wearing a metal helmet with lots of wires coming out of it going to huge machines with blinking lights on them, like in a 1950’s sci-fi movie complete with spooky music, and a Vincent Price mad scientist type saying, “…I now control your mind, Mr. Smith, your very mind! You will do as I command…”

In real life, it’s not that easy. The ‘machine’ we have for controlling our minds is Mind Training. No blinking lights. No mad scientist. But you can supply your own spooky music if you want. When I first started mind training, I thought…how hard can this be? Memorize a few prayers, learn a few remedies and—voila!—a well-trained mind. Now, some two years into it, I’m starting to realize a few hard truths.

First among them and perhaps most startling is that the ‘mind’ as such doesn’t exist. Except that it does. But it doesn’t. And once you realize space and time are merely concepts made up by the mind, which itself doesn’t exist, you come to see that the ‘mind’ can both exist and not exist in the same moment. At first, this confused the heck out of me. I mean, come on, we live in a world of zeroes and ones, don’t we? The question is always is you is, or is you ain’t, isn’t it? It’s either a zero or a one, right? It’s got to be negative or positive, doesn’t it? It can’t be both, can it?

The answer is yes…and no. Dilgo Khyentse describes mind like this, “What we normally call the mind is the deluded mind, a turbulent vortex of thoughts whipped up by attachment, anger, and ignorance.” Well, that made me feel all kinds of better. When I think my mind exists, I’m deluded. But then I thought about it. That’s how things really are, isn’t it? Our eyes merely transmit information. They don’t ‘see’ anything. We see the world through our mind. And our mind is a little bit like that hundred years storm on Jupiter. Myriads of thoughts spin through our mind all the time, and anything we ‘see’ or perceive is being seen through the distorting and constant storm of afflicted emotions.

For something that doesn’t exist, the mind is pretty powerful, isn’t it? Or is it? What if we could calm that storm? What if we could recognize the absolute emptiness of all thought? Where would that leave us? I think it would leave us completely awakened, like a sleeper who wakes from a nightmare.

***

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

Is romance an emotion? I don’t think so. I think it’s a whole lot of emotions packaged into a single concept, and attachment is the glue that holds it all together. After all, who wants a thirty day romance? How about ninety days? No. It’s more like my sister used to say, “I mate for life. His or mine. He leaves me, he’s a dead man.” She was only half-joking.

vampireAs I went about life in my past, I was constantly seeking that ‘Forever Romance’. Of course, it never even occurred to me to question what kind of person would offer a guarantee of forever. I wanted that Forever Romance because I labored under the delusion that having it would make me ‘happy’. By happiness, I meant I wanted to stop the constant spinning tornadoes of thought that whirled ceaselessly through my mind. What ended up happening was the tornadoes I’d carried around up until then were absolutely blown away by the hurricane of emotions that comes with living with a sociopath.

Boy, howdy. It wasn’t no joke.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice that I had so little control over my perceptions, I didn’t even realize they were perceptions. I wholly believed whatever my mind spewed out. Whatever the delusion, I bought into it. And all the time, I was miserable because happiness constantly eluded me.

If I could have stopped for just a moment, and breathed, and had just a moment of peace and clarity, I would have seen that I was on the Titanic and the iceberg was dead ahead. If I could have noticed that much, even for just a moment, I might have been able to change the course of my life. Or at the very least, I may have noticed that I was the only one who could change the course of my life. I might have noticed that there were lifeboats all around. All I had to do was jump.

***

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

The biggest thing going on in my life right now is anxiety.

Our lives go through cycles. There are good times and…not so good times, right? The cycles in my life are very pronounced. I’m not sure why that is. It could be because I’ve always been an introspective, introverted person. Most of the time, my anxiety is there and I don’t really care that much. It’s like an annoying, buzzing fluorescent light—just loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to really bother about. With pharmaceutical assistance, the buzz has gotten even softer.

But then there are times like the past couple of weeks. How to explain anxiety at this level?

Okay. Imagine this.

You’re a time traveler. You know exactly what’s going to happen on the Titanic. And in some magical way you time travel back to the Titanic’s last night on the sea. You’re on board, and you know that in five minutes, the ship is going to hit the iceberg. Five minutes. There’s nothing you can do. You may survive the icy water, you may not. How would you know? You’re a time traveler, not a fortune teller. Five minutes to a watery death in frigid waters. Would you be anxious, or what?

That’s what it’s like for me to live with anxiety when it cycles up, like it is now. There’s this constant feeling of OH MY GOD! DOOM! DOOM! Imagine those last five minutes on the Titanic stretched out over days and days on end. Welcome to my world.

In dealing with anxiety at this heightened level, my practice is invaluable. It is such a tremendous sense of power to realize that just because it took me four hours to get out of bed (talk about not being a morning person!), the thought that I’m going to have a disaster of a day is exactly that—a thought.

In working with the latest cycle of anxiety, it’s a great relief to remind myself over and over of the emptiness of thoughts. In fact, the thoughts are so outrageously exaggerated, that it’s easy to see their emptiness. When I get caught up in the storms of anxiety, it’s easy to use mind training to clearly see that the obscurations arising are coming from my own mind.

In a sense, heightened levels of anxiety make it easy to experience perceptions as perceptions because my world becomes sofunhouse mirror distorted. Before I began studying the Dharma, the distortions were frightening. With the help of mind training and practice, I see the distortions as manifestations of what I’m learning about the mind. It’s kind of cool, because sometimes I feel like…will you look at that crazy thought? At those moments, I am entirely aware of the emptiness nature of thoughts in a way that’s impossible when my thoughts are more ‘normal’.

In a very real way, the anxiety-fueled storms that rage through my mind make the workings of mind nearly transparent to me. That transparency makes it easy to remember that I’m a child of illusion. It makes it easy to watch Tsunamis of emotion rise and fall, and feel them crash down around me. Does it still feel like I get knocked over and drown in all that emotion? You bet. But there’s something very powerful in being knocked over by a make-believe Tsunami. When you know it’s make-believe, you can’t drown in it. Once you’ve seen the transparency of thought, you can bring your perceptions under control and ride waves of anxiety on the surf board of the Dharma. And if you wipe out, so what? You’re not gonna drown. You just get right back on and ride the waves.

***

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

Yesterday, one of my dental bridges came out. If you’ve never had a bridge, imagine removing a Band Aid from a deep cut that’s almost healed. The skin’s real tender to the touch. My mouth feels like that where the bridge was. It’s not horrific pain, but it’s uncomfortable.

I made an appointment with the dentist, who can’t see me for another week and half. Don’t chew on that side, the dentist’s office told me, you could crack off the tooth that’s left, then you’d need an implant. Imagine hearing that in my Five Minutes on the Titanic state of mind.

I emailed my manager and let her know what day I needed to go to the dentist and why. She emails back and asks if I can push the appointment out further past September 2 because she’s going to be out, and Salem’s going to be out.

I read that and I wanted to throttle her. Seriously. I really did. Before I could stop myself, I emailed an unskillful response about it being an emergency appointment. Then I sent a second (more skillful) email saying that I’d check with the dentist for a new appointment.

I’ve already called and pushed the appointment back to early September. But this whole thing pissed me off. Staffing issues are not my problem. They made a decision to have a department with two people in it, but they don’t want to live with the consequences of a very unskillful decision.

I was able to get enough distance between me and my afflicted emotions to realize that what’s manifesting as irritation and resentment has nothing to do with Salem, the manager of that department, or my too-soon departed dental bridge. It has to do with me, and how much I truly, truly suffer each and every day at work.

So, having realized that, I know what to expect when I go to work in just a little bit. As soon as I pull into the garage I’ll experience aggression, resentment, and frustration. I’ll more likely than not feel like spitting on the manager if she gets within spitting distance.

When these afflicted emotions arise, I will remind myself that I am perceiving the world through the distorted lens of my afflicted emotions. I will make every effort to be aware of the afflicted emotions arising, instead of just getting caught up in them. I will be aware that what I’m experiencing is agitation in the mind. I will be aware that the ‘enemies’ I perceive are my own thoughts.

I will also be very quiet. Being in silence brings a tremendous amount of clarity. And since it’s quite uncomfortable to talk (cool air on exposed gum—not good), I’ll have the perfect reason to withdraw into silence. I will own my perceptions without buying into them.

As always with any mind training technique, I can’t know if this will work. But I do know that the Dharma is ever-constant and never-failing…even on the Titanic.

boy monk jumping