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

“To recognize as deity whatever forms appear is the crucial point of the development stage;

Clinging to appearance as beautiful or ugly is liberated into its own nature.

Free of clinging, mind as it appears is the body of Supreme Chenrezi;

In the self-liberation of visual experiences, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

This is my first contemplation written entirely on my laptop.

This is my first time thinking of thoughts as ‘appearances’.

Written Sunday, November 2, 5:45AM

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite fairytales was Rumpelstiltskin. I was intrigued that this little man from another world could spin straw into gold. I was too young to know how spinning was really supposed to work, so I didn’t understand that straw couldn’t actually be spun into anything. I’d never seen a spinning wheel, so that wasn’t the ‘wow’ in the fairytale for me. That came from being able to change something into another thing that it wasn’t.

After Rumpelstiltskin came into my life, I watched my mother cook with different eyes. I wondered if her making dead bloody meat into something dark brown with gravy that we could eat was like spinning straw into gold? Or was it when a grown up put wood into the fireplace, and then hours later, only ashes were left? Most of all, I wondered if somewhere, hidden in some secret place, in some secret castle, was there a spinning wheel that could turn straw into gold? And if there wasn’t, why not? What was it about this world (outside the fairytale) that made things so…stuck-feeling?

After hearing that story, the world felt stuck to me, like a still-frame of a movie, as though there should be change, but something was working hard to keep it still. As a six year old, I didn’t have the vocabulary to say any of that, it was just a vague certainty that the fairytale was right somehow, and it was our world, where straw couldn’t be turned to gold, where something was very wrong.

Lo these many decades later, reading Patrul Rinpoche, I can put into words that vague certainty. Indeed, the world is not fixed in concrete. In fact, just a year later when I was introduced to the story of a man going up to the top of a mountain where a god wrote on a stone tablet, I was perfectly ready to believe it. I mean, why not? That’s how things should be. The world is not fixed, except in our own perception of it. Even in my seven year old mind I knew that sounded more right than my actual experience of things.

The mind, as imperceptible as space, is an almost magical sense organ that paints the world in literally any colors we can imagine. There is phenomena. There is mind. Everything else arises from our eons- old karmic formations that run in deep riverbeds (and millions of tributaries) of attachment, aversion, and indifference. These distortions shape all that we see. Don’t believe me? Try looking at a flower and simply perceiving it. Bet you can’t. Bet you start thinking something like…that’s a nice shade of yellow…wouldn’t put it on my walls or anything, and I sure wouldn’t wear it, but it makes a nice flower. Didn’t Mary Sue have that color roses at her funeral? Who sends yellow roses to a funeral?…oh yeah…it was her crazy aunt, the one who thought she could make shredded ice in the food processor and…

 And on and on. This is an exaggeration of elaboration, but it’s how our minds work. In fact, all phenomena is empty of true permanence and true self, and is utterly dependent on the perceiver for its existence. About this emptiness, or voidness, Dilgo Khyentse says, “The truth of voidness is the truth of everything …. everything, the whole universe and all sentient beings, is primordially void. Phenomena are neither spoiled by the idea of impurity nor improved by the idea of purity. The true nature is, simply, always itself.”

I think that for 99.5% of people on the face of the world, it’s impossible to simply perceive phenomena. We’ve come to rely too heavily on our elaborations to help us identify and shape our reality. But, what if started where we are? What if we started simply by remembering that all we see in the world is a direct result of what we believe and feel and what we’ve already experienced? If we could do that, we might be on our way to realizing the emptiness nature of all things. We might be on our way to recognizing that all we see is a shimmery reflection, like moonlight on water,  of some aspect of our Buddha Nature, our true self.

***

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

The mind is very seductive. I’m not sure if that’s part of what mind does, or if that’s a result of our need to believe our constant, ever-present distortion of what is. My mind has a peculiar ability that I wouldn’t dare impute to anyone else, so I’ll write this as though I’m the only person in the world, in the history of mankind that this has ever happened to. If you happen to know a ‘friend’ who’s had a similar experience, so much the better.

My mind’s peculiar ability is that it can make me believe anything. In the past this was one hundred percent true. These days, I’m not such a zealot. I question the One Truth of Mind a bit closely these days. But in my past, I was a total Zealot of the Mind. If mind put it out there, I believed it. Now, think about this. Recent studies show that we have approximately 50,000 thoughts on any given day. Sure, some of those are what I call ‘throwaways’ like…what’s for dinner? Should I do laundry tonight, or can I put it off one more day? I should really stop and get gas, but I’m too tired.

But then there are those thoughts that can really set us buzzing like …my god…I’m 35, and what have I done with my life? I should have married my high school sweetheart. He would have made me so happy. If we could just pay off the mortgage, everything would be great. If we got a smaller car, we’d spend less on gas, and I could go back to school and make more money, and we’d be happy. If I work two more fifty hour weeks, I’ll get that promotion and I’ll be so happy. These thoughts, depending on how often they repeat, can be like tornadoes or hurricanes in the mind, and they will drive us into probably foolish and definitely unsatisfying actions.

In my past, when I was a Zealot of the Mind, my One Truth of Mind was …if I could just fall in love, find someone to love me, I’d be happy. I’ll leave it at saying that I was so wrong, I could have predicted an ice storm inside an erupting volcano and been more right. In my past, I have been such a true Zealot of the Mind that my life became an unending series of actions that led only to unhappiness, dissatisfaction, guilt, and eventually a strong aversion to people. At one point, I believed my unhappiness was the fault of people, no one in particular, just people in general; and if they’d all leave me alone, I’d be happy.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice that mind’s seduction was so effective with me because I was so desperately unhappy. I was willing to cling to anything, believe anything that promised a way out of that misery. If I could have taken a step back, I might have noticed that mind was simply doing what mind does: seducing me into believing what I wanted to believe. Once I’d noticed that the seduction relied on me acting based on my emotions, I may have been able to see through the appearance of the seduction, and see what mind was actually saying. Looking back now I can see that mind’s actual message was…this isn’t working. You need to do something else. At the time, that was absolutely true. If I’d been able to notice that, I may have been able to begin putting in place causes for happiness in my life, rather than causes for suffering.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is my job. For weeks now, I’ve been planning to get a new job. In fact, I had accepted a new job. I’d made all sorts of preparations to drastically reduce my income. Weeks of preparation, everything was set, then it came down to one email: the email to my manager letting her know that I would be resigning in three weeks. I sent the email.

I got back the expected, “can we talk about this?” request. Sure, I thought. You talk. I’ll listen. I’m done here. That phone call changed my life. I’ve been with the same company for just about twelve years. When you’re part of something for that long, you mold yourself to it. You come to believe that you have so much on the line. You come to believe there are things you simply can’t say, simply can’t do. You box yourself in. And after a very, very long while, that box starts to feel like a cage, and you come to wholly believe in its reality.

Talking to my manager on the phone, I completely realized all of this. The mind is so very fast. It took maybe two heartbeats for all of that to go through my mind. But the moment it did, my whole world shifted. It was so quick, it was almost disorienting. There was an actual physical sensation of the room tilting, then righting itself. In those few off-kilter seconds, I saw that I was free. I, in fact, had nothing at risk. I told her everything, all the reasons I was leaving. No it wasn’t the fact that I hadn’t gotten a raise in two years (that actually made me laugh), no it wasn’t that I wanted more advancement. It wasn’t any of that. It was the fact that I was working with someone who is wholly unqualified to do her job.

In that moment of utter freedom, I told my manager that nothing had to change, because the only one unhappy with how things were was me, which meant I was the one who had to go. In the end, my manager said she would make changes, and asked that I would stay and give her a chance to do that. That was the last thing I’d expected. My world tilted again. Stay? No. That wasn’t part of the plan. But in this brave new world I’d entered, what exactly was the plan? And suddenly, for just a second, I had an instance of what I call ‘meditation mind’. In that instant, I realized that going or staying didn’t actually matter. This was karma. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I had to live my karma.

I wish I could explain how realizing that made it the right decision to stay, but I can’t. It was a realization that came from a place beyond language, beyond perception.

I’ve been working with this verse all week. And I think one of the things I’m coming to see is that when we can realize that appearances are exactly that…appearances…mind will look for another way to display phenomena. What eventually happened for me, was that mind sort of ‘clicked’ back into conventional reality. But in those moments when mind was looking for another way to display phenomena, my experience was a gap, an experience of phenomena that was in some sense ‘pure’, free of attachment, aversion, or indifference. I think, in the conversation with my manager, this happened because what she said so shattered my perception of what I believed to be ‘reality’. It was a feeling of complete freedom, no restrictions, no limitations.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that I experienced the deity in the forms arising in my perception, but I definitely experienced the inherent unreality of my reality. The falling away of the incredible heaviness of all my imputations resulted in an actual feeling of being lighter, less tied down, like an air balloon that’s been unmoored.

I’m not sure, but I believe that we can learn to have these gaps in experience simply by reminding ourselves that what we take for ‘real’ is actually a host of appearances. I think the more often the mind is forced to look for another way to display appearances, the more often we’ll be able to ‘see’ through the gap. And again, I’m not sure, but I think that gap may widen from a sliver of a moment, to longer and longer moments in which we realize the nature of our true selves and the true nature of all that is.

***

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

In the past three weeks, my manager has made incredible changes to the way things work. She’s kept every promise she made on the phone when we talked. My conversation with her has resulted in radical changes to both departments that she runs. For the most part, people seem very satisfied with these changes. Except for Salem, because now there’s no way for her to cover up her incompetence.

Even though I get up each day and drive to the same place and do the same job, nothing is the same. The work place no longer feels like a prison for me. I no longer feel like a prisoner entering a dungeon. I no longer feel like a coward who knows what must be done but who lacks the courage to do it. Now when I go to work, I’m aware that no matter how ‘real’ a perception seems when it arises there, it’s just an appearance. I experienced that thoroughly in my conversation with my manager.

Dilgo Khyentse says, when we’re working with this, and something actually happens, don’t think too much of it, “When this experience arises, be careful not to hold on to it or feel proud of it. This vast purity is not the product of our meditation; it is the true nature of things.” Well, that deflated my bubble. I was feeling like I was all that.

This experience with the workplace has been incredibly powerful for me. The very nature of my job has changed, literally and figuratively. The type of product has changed, due to the takeover. But more importantly, I’m coming to see the workplace as a sliver of emptiness in my apprehension of reality. In that one place in my life, I have utter confidence that everything I see arising there is an appearance. All that I see there has no more substance than a shadow in sunlight, a  reflection on a mirror. All the beings there want to be happy. All the beings there want to avoid suffering. All the beings there are worthy of compassion.

As I go to work this coming week, I want to continue to work with this because so far, the workplace is the only place where I can clearly see appearances as appearances. The rest of my life seems pretty darn real! My intent is that by working with my experience in the workplace, I can make that sliver of emptiness bigger and bigger, so that it spreads into more and more of my life.

Seeking to exit this job has made me truly realize, beyond an intellectual level that I will one day be exiting samsara, exiting my body. To that end, I’ve begun to look at my life differently. If I had to say the greatest benefit that has come to me out of this experience with the workplace it is my realization of why I’m here, why we’re all here. We’re in samsara to become enlightened so that we may enlighten all those who suffer. If we can’t do that in this lifetime, then let us live this lifetime with grace. Let us do all within our capacity to ease the suffering we see around us.

Let us ask ourselves a question my Dharma friend Tashi brought up last week. All day, every day, let us ask ourselves…what can I do that will make a difference? I can’t be sure if living this way will ultimately lead to enlightenment, but I can be sure that it will lead to a graceful exit from samsara.