Looney Tunes

by

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

by

Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 4

entertainment3June 11, 2014

Day 8

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

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

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

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

Or did it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bugs bunny

 

by

Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 3

 

entertainment3

 

June 5, 2014

Day 4

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

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

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

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

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

not empty of the inseparable, unsurpassable qualities:

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

bugs bunny

Looney Tunes, Episode 2

by

Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 2

entertainment3

 

 

 

 

June 2, 2014

Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a third possibility I’m missing?

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

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

bugs bunny

by

Looney Tunes…The New Adventure, Episode 1

entertainment3

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 1, 2014

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

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

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

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

Hope you can catch the show…

As the wheel follows the ox that pulls the cart,

all my thoughts, words and deeds have consequences.

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

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

bugs bunny