Month: May 2024

On dying . . .
by

On dying . . .

All notions of subject and object, self and selves, phenomena and characteristics are mere transformations of consciousness.

By this truth may I know that all appearances are vanity;

may I know that I dream while dreaming; may I know that I die while dying.

i. What does this mean to me?

The first time I heard this prayer, this line hit me pretty hard. ‘No,’ I wanted to argue, ‘I’m not dying. I’m fine.’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, wait.’ And the truth of it hit me. With every breath, every heartbeat, every tick of the clock, I am dying. I’d like to say that I straightened up, meditated and prayed everyday, and went out of my way to perform acts of kindness and generosity. But that didn’t happen.

The mind is funny that way. I fell back into my usual day-to-day complacence. It’s only as I got older – into my fifties – that I began to appreciate this line. Samsara is full of distractions that hide many truths. One of the things samsara hides best is the undeniable fact of our mortality. There are no TV shows called, Dying Well or How to Have a Good Death. Just the opposite in fact. If we go by samsara’s fictions, everyone will remain at best middle-aged and healthy forever, and they will somehow find that elusive dream. And live happily ever after.

Fortunately, we have the Dharma  to keep us informed of the truth even in the midst of samsara’s distractions. In samsara, there are lots of pretty, shiny things to chase after. Samsara is seductive and very addicting. But in this realm of struggle and desire, we will never have enough bright, shiny things. We will always be chasing after something empty and meaningless if we get sucked into samsara.

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

I’d start with an exercise my teacher, the Venerable Tashi Nyima did with us years ago. It went something like this. Make a list of the top five things you want or want to get done. Now, what if you only had a year to live, how would the list be different? What if you had one week?

We came back with our carefully thought out lists. Our teacher’s comment, after listening to us for a while, was that all the lists should be the same. That’s how much samsara sucks us in. We assume that, at any given time, we know how far we have to go before death catches up to us. But the truth is that a one year old and an eighty year old have the same mortality. Either one could die at any moment.

Samsara seduces us into believing otherwise with thirty year mortgages, five year plans and retirement. At my age of sixty, retirement planning should be practically a hobby, with all the media, virtual and printed that I get inundated with. Many strangers invite me to sumptuous lunches at very nice places to talk about how to plan for retirement.

This is what samsara does. We are lulled into a false sense of complacency about death. Instead of being urged to live with a sense of urgency, we’re encouraged to make plans – mortgages, investments, five year plans – it goes on and on.

This is not the truth. Death stalks us in every heartbeat, every breath. Our prayer says, “…may I know that I die while dying…”. Why is this important? It’s not just doom and gloom and woe is me. In fact, the Dharma teaches us, it’s just the opposite.

With this clear view of reality, we are encouraged to live our lives with a sense of urgency. The shiny baubles in samsara are ultimately empty. They are “…mere transformations of consciousness…”. Knowing and understanding this, how do we proceed? With great clarity. When we realize at a deep level that every moment draws us closer to death, our ‘I Have To’ or ‘I Want’ list becomes much shorter. Some items fall off altogether. This line of the prayer is not to sadden us, but rather to wake us up from the stupor of samsara and point out the Path as the only thing worthy of being on any list.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

I’ve only recently turned sixty. It gives me a new perspective on life. Things that seemed important just five or six years ago no longer matter. I left off studying the Dharma for some years. I say that, but I never really did. I left off formally studying the Dharma and attending sangha. But I saw the Dharma everywhere. Samsara felt so empty and uninspiring. There was nothing that gave me any sense of meaning. In a sense, samsara drove me back to studying the Dharma. It’s the only thing in samsara that holds any meaning for me.

With the knowledge at a very fundamental level, that I’m closer to death with every breath, I have a certain urgency in my life. I heed the warnings of the Dharma. The Dharma is repeatedly warning us of the illusory, dreamlike quality of samsara. We are urged in every prayer, every teaching to look to the Dharma as a guide to how we live our lives. Be kind. Be generous. Avoid attachment, aversion and indifference. Get out of the burning house of samsara where we will only find suffering.

The Buddha told us that there is cessation of suffering and a path to the cessation of suffering. The Dharma doesn’t direct us to be perfect. It urges us to move through samsara with compassion and kindness. The Dharma assures us that there is true purity, true bliss, true permanence and true being.

When I pray “…may I know I die while dying…”, I am praying that my own Buddha Nature helps me see through the illusions of samsara. I am praying that in my journey on the path, I may come to truly see that there is freedom from the cycle of birth, disease, aging, and death. In doing this I bring a sense of urgency to my steps on the path. The blessing of this prayer is to remind us that all in samsara is insubstantial, impermanent and dependent on causes and conditions.

Once we realize the truth of this line of prayer, samsara’s illusions fall away. We can come to understand that there is only one way out of samsara: the Path. For me, this is comforting and reassuring. Am I still afraid of death? For sure. But with the Dharma awakening me to my own Buddha Nature, I know that I can be free of the cycle of death and rebirth. I can one day return to samsara of my own will with the intent to liberate all those who suffer.

On dreaming. . .
by

On dreaming. . .

All notions of subject and object, self and selves, phenomena and characteristics are mere transformations of consciousness.

By this truth may I know that all appearances are vanity;

may I know that I dream while dreaming; may I know that I die while dying.

i. What does this mean to me?

Dreams can be so weird. I’m a Type 2 Diabetic, so there are lots and lots of foods I can’t eat. I have this constantly recurring dream of a buffet so big, it’s the size of a mall. You have to ride a bicycle from one end to the other. And it smells amazing. And it’s all vegan. But in my dream, I never get to eat. I’ve had this dream so often, that many times I know it’s a dream.

Our local friendly AI tells us that a dream is, “a series of thoughts, feelings, or images that the mind creates. . .”. Despite that, they seem so real, don’t they? Samsara is no different. Everything we experience – thoughts, feelings, encounters with objects or other people – are all mental representations. They are transformations of our own consciousness.

It’s very hard to realize the dreamlike quality of samsara. Most of us go through our entire lives never once questioning the so-called ‘reality’ we experience. What does our prayer mean when it says “may I know that I dream while dreaming”? To me it means to remember that in samsara the struggle may seem real, but it’s not. Nothing is ‘real’ as we experience it. That is not to say that we’re all dreaming samsara into being. There is an Absolute Truth, but with our limited senses, we’re not able to perceive it.

Why pray to know we’re dreaming while dreaming? Although I have nightmares at times, most of my dreams are like the buffet. They’re tantalizing to my senses. They seem to satisfy some longed for wish. Dreams are seductive and to a degree hypnotic. And they’re all-encompassing. That seductive quality draws us in deeper and deeper. We never question the dream. I never question who would build a buffet the size of a mall. I simply accept it as what is.

In samsara, we behave the same way. If we buy into the dream of constant unending struggle and desire, we suffer. We lose track of who we truly are. The Dharma is always there to remind us of the dreamlike quality of samsara. It keeps us from investing ourselves entirely in a dream that will never satisfy. Samsara covers up who we truly are. The Dharma uncovers who we truly are and helps us discover our own Buddha Nature in the midst of the nightmare that is samsara.

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

I’d start by asking them to name one thing that has remained the same throughout the years of their life. I don’t know of anyone who can give an honest answer to that question.

After all, what has stayed the same for any of us? Certainly not our bodies, not our dreams and aspirations, not even our perception of reality remains the same. The cool thing about the Dharma is that it is unchanging. The Dharma is that which holds. It underlies and supports all that we experience. When we have those vague feelings of dissatisfaction with a life that feels empty, this is the Dharma peeking through the dream of samsara. All in samsara is impermanent, insubstantial and dependent on causes and conditions.

We bear witness to this everyday in even the simplest of things. The sun shines in the day, but at night it’s gone from our skies. We’re born tiny babies, but we grow up, grow old and eventually die. Nothing in samsara is unchanging.

In samsara, we are drunk on distraction. Our cravings know no bounds, and this drives us to struggle ever harder, and we suffer. Then we seek distraction from our suffering and a new craving arises and on and on. This is the vicious cycle of samsara. We can free ourselves by studying the Dharma. Nothing else can free us from the nightmare of samsara. The blessing of the Dharma is that in the midst of the nightmare of samsara, it shows us what truly is and frees us of the cycle of struggle and desire.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

When food is used on TV such as a Thanksgiving ad, the turkey is not cooked. A blow torch is used to ‘brown’ the outside, toilet paper is stuffed in the cavity to give it a nice plump appearance, shoe polish is used to get that perfect brown look. Back when I ate meat, I would have totally tried to eat that raw shoe polish covered turkey. And it would have poisoned me.

Just so in samsara. Nothing is what it seems to be, yet most of us gorge on seductive dreams that poison us with greed, envy, or craving for things we can’t have. When I began to study the Dharma, I gradually lost ‘faith’ in the illusions of samsara.

I bring this into my life by reciting prayers, by practicing, by reminding myself throughout the day that nothing is as it seems. This may seem pretty basic, but here’s the thing. When I’m on the cushion meditating, I totally understand and even experience the dreamlike quality of samsara. But my mind still gets caught up in samsara. I still forget sometimes that nothing is as it seems. When afflictive emotions arise, it’s tempting sometimes to let myself get sucked in by them.

When these things happen, I take a step back, breathe and recite mantra. Or I pick up my prayer beads and do mantra for a couple of minutes. For me, it still takes effort to live in samsara and not be sucked in by it. Despite that, my Buddha Nature is always trying to break through.

I’d like to say that once I feel my Buddha Nature peeking through, samsara falls away and dissolves like the dream that it is. That’s not what happens. But samsara does lose a lot of its grip on me. It becomes more transparent and less substantial. This is something we can all do. Buddha Nature is always there, shining through samsara, trying to give us liberation, if only for a few moments at a time.

On vanity . . .
by

On vanity . . .

All notions of subject and object, self and selves, phenomena and characteristics are mere transformations of consciousness.

By this truth may I know that all appearances are vanity.

i. What does this mean to me?

I’m not sure what I expect from our prayers when I sit down to write a contemplation. At first I thought the simplicity of the words hid some grand esoteric, deeply philosophical truth. But no. I find that the prayers form mostly a “How To” guide for living in samsara without becoming lost in the illusion.

The line of the prayer before this one tells us that all we see and experience is “mere transformation of consciousness only.” Last time we talked about how there are two kinds of truth when watching a magic show. There’s the ‘truth’ that your eyes see. And there’s the underlying process of what the magician is actually doing.

Well, that’s nice to know, we might think, but – so what? Of course there’s no such thing as magic. We all know that. And with something as obvious as a magic show, it’s easy to understand that no one is really being sawed in half. Not so in samsara.

This line of our prayer reminds us of the nature of samsara. Our local friendly AI tells us that one of the meanings of vanity is “the quality of being worthless or futile.” Samsara is a realm of struggle and desire. We desire something, we get it, we move on to wanting something else, and then we go struggle until we get it. That cycle is exhausting and it’s only halted by death.

So what is our prayer telling us about living in samsara? It’s telling us that the appearances we experience do not have the qualities we assign to them. Another way to say appearance is to talk about the “outward form” of something.

This takes us back to the magic show. The appearance is magic. But magic in and of itself  is a worthless understanding of how things are. We know the magician is doing something, but we don’t know what he’s actually doing.

In the same way, samsara is all appearance. This is not to say that we dream reality into existence. Rather it’s to point out that what we experience in samsara is merely the outer form. Like the magic show, there is an underlying truth, but in our limited minds and bodies, we don’t have access to that Absolute Truth.

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

I’d start by saying ‘the devil is in the details’. The line of the prayer before this one tells us that all we experience is mere transformation of consciousness. That is to say there is an underlying truth in samsara, but our experiences in samsara arise in the mind.

Once we accept this as true, then it becomes fairly obvious that all the appearances we experience couldn’t possibly live up to the qualities we assign to them. If I have two clear glasses, and I fill one with green liquid and the other with blue liquid, are the glasses themselves now green and blue? No. But the appearance is that we now have two different color glasses. Is it wrong to assign the glasses the colors of blue and green? Not exactly. But it’s futile to proceed as if the glasses are now green and blue. That would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what is.

In samsara, we do this all the time with just about everything. We absolutely and unquestionably believe that there are two glasses of different color. To the degree that we live our lives believing in fundamental untruths, we suffer. The source of our suffering comes from trying to work with or shift a ‘reality’ that we believe. In this realm of struggle and desire, there is no satisfaction, no peace, no end to suffering. The Dharma teaches us that the glasses are clear and furthermore, the glasses themselves are merely the outward form that arises in the mind of some Absolute Truth.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

Before I began studying the Dharma, no matter what I did, there was this horrible feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life. Materially, I was fine, but I couldn’t escape those feelings. Only when I began studying the Dharma did those feelings subside. Once I began to understand about the illusory qualities of samsara, I no longer desperately searched for ‘happiness’ in samsara.

I try to remind myself of this prayer when samsara starts getting to me. ‘No,’ I say to myself, ‘what I’m experiencing right now is not what it appears to be.’ My job can be very frustrating at times because I feel like I’m not getting enough stuff done that has to be done. Then I take a step back, breathe and remind myself that there is no point in fighting against how things are. My experience of reality, I remind myself is exactly that, an experience. This helps me to refocus my attention on what is, rather than what I want it to be.

This can be very liberating. There is simply no amount of emails that I can answer that will be satisfying. Not in samsara. This is where the Dharma and our prayers become important guides to living in samsara. The more we realize that nothing in samsara is substantial, or permanent or independent, the more we free ourselves of the pangs of living in samsara.

With this prayer reminding us that “all appearances are vanity”, we have the freedom to rely on our own Buddha Nature. It is complete and whole, nothing missing, nothing to add. In this way, we can live in samsara with compassion, wisdom and open hearts.

On transformations of consciousness . . .
by

On transformations of consciousness . . .

All notions of subject and object, self and selves, phenomena and characteristics are mere transformations of consciousness.

i.   What does this mean to me?

When I was in high school we went on a field trip to Manhattan, to Broadway in particular. We went to see a matinee magic show. I was thrilled with the performance. At some points I found myself asking, “How’d he do that?”

Now that I look back on it, it was a strange experience to participate in the show. I say ‘participate’ on purpose because magic shows really need audience participation. Even if only for a few seconds at a time, the audience has to believe what they’re seeing is ‘true’. So, while watching the show I experienced two realities almost simultaneously. “Oh no! There’s a lady on stage being sawed in half.” And at nearly the same second I’d be thinking, “That’s impossible. He’d be in big trouble for murder.” And other thoughts like, “where’s the blood”? Why isn’t she screaming?” And so on. The point is I believed what my eyes told me was happening but at the same time I knew it couldn’t be true.

This line of today’s prayer is very much telling us that samsara is like a magic show. The big difference is that it’s as though most of us live our lives on the magician’s stage, and never question the ‘magic’.

This line of the prayer begins with “All notions of subject and object . . . are mere transformations of consciousness.” What could this mean? Is it saying that there’s no reality out there? Is it saying that we live on the magician’s stage and there is no theater beyond, just an empty void? Far from it. After all, how do we perceive the world? Our eyes see light bouncing off an object of a certain size and configuration, and instantly the image of a table arises in the mind. Could you fit a whole table inside your head? Of course not. But an image fits in the mind just fine.

Let’s take a look at consciousness. Our local friendly AI tells us that, among other things, consciousness is, “…the state of being aware of yourself and the world around you…”. Notice that nothing is said about perception. The definition says “…being aware of. . . “. This means that consciousness demands at least two things: a seer and that which is being seen. But oddly our prayer says this isn’t so. According to our prayer, any idea that the seer and that which is seen are two separate things is an incorrect understanding. Rather, both are “mere transformations of consciousness only.” And if we look more closely at transformation, it means, “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.”

When I first learned this prayer, I was like – what do you mean ‘mere transformation of consciousness’? Are we dreaming the world into life? No. Nothing like that. Let’s go back to the magic show. When we watch, we are witnessing two kinds of ‘truth’. The first and easiest truth is that the magician is doing magic. The underlying truth is years and years of practice that allow the magician to trick the eye and the mind.

Even still, we could question if the magic show is even there. The answer is yes. There is some underlying truth there but with our limited senses, we can’t know what it is.

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

As long as we are conscious, we are aware of what’s around us. The mind builds meticulous images for us even if it’s based on just a sound. When we hear a police siren, we immediately have an image of a car speeding along with flashing lights. But where did that car come from? It comes from our own experiences. In other words, it comes from our own consciousness arising in the mind as a transformation of our already existing consciousness that is there every second of everyday. So we can see that there are not two “things”. There is a sound (also inside the mind), and there’s your image of the police car. Both exist within your consciousness. There is only one consciousness at work here: yours. The ‘experiences’ we believe we have are all transformations of that consciousness.

You know how when you wake up from a bad dream, you’re really relieved to find yourself safe in bed? When we talk about the dream, we don’t say things like, “Last night I went to visit this strange place where everyone has three eyes and a mouthful of razor sharp teeth, and one of them kept saying my name and I was running.” No. We say something like, “I had a really weird dream last night.” What does this actually mean? It means that our whole experience of the dream was merely a transformation of our own consciousness. The underlying truth in this case is the so-called ‘reality’ that we wake up to. But even this reality is a transformation of consciousness at every turn.

This does not mean that everything is a dream. What it does mean is that our way of experiencing the world works much the same way as a dream. Which is to say, we experience transformations of our own consciousness in our day to day lives.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

When I first learned this, it was a difficult teaching for me. I couldn’t escape the nihilistic idea that the teaching was saying there is no reality. This is all a dream.

It was only gradually that I began to see the usefulness and liberating quality of this teaching. For me it began with negative emotions. I found that if I could just take a step back, I could recognize that the anger or frustration or whatever, was nothing new. That same energy is always there. It’s my own thoughts that are causing me to experience that particular transformation of consciousness as negative or hurtful. And guess what? Our thoughts are also transformations of consciousness.

As I live with this teaching, I find myself coming back to how to know when something is ‘real’ in samsara. Is it substantial? Is it permanent? Is it dependent on various causes and conditions? When I combine this with the teaching that all we experience is mere transformation of consciousness, it feels very liberating.

It makes me realize that all in samsara (including me) is subject to aging, disease and death. With this in mind, I can navigate my life and walk the path with deliberation. It doesn’t mean that I can call up utility providers and let them know I won’t be paying anymore because all of this is just a transformation of consciousness. If I did that, I would experience a transformation to homelessness. No. I can’t do that. But this prayer offers liberation from samsara. I trust that the Dharma is that which holds. I trust that Buddha Nature is whole, complete and not subject to birth, aging, disease and death.

Knowing and understanding this, I am free to operate as though I’m watching that magic show. “Yes,” I say to myself, “this is what I see – a magic trick. And in conventional reality I will participate in the show.” The blessing of this teaching is that it allows the freedom of choosing which parts of the magic show I’m going to participate in. I don’t have to rush through life addicted to rocket fuel strength coffee just to reach some goal that I absolutely believe will satisfy me. In samsara, nothing satisfies.

Am I going to be compassionate and have a loving heart for all sentient beings? Yes. Despite the dream-like quality of samsara, I have a duty to ease the suffering of sentient beings caught up in the nightmare of samsara. This teaching allows me to participate in conventional reality while at the same time acknowledging that all that I experience is a transformation of my own consciousness. There is no one being cut in half. I can choose to understand that and live my life in accordance with the Dharma and my own Buddha Nature.