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.

“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. Think 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?

This 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.

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.

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.