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

“Whatever I know I’ve left it as theory;

it’s no use to me now.

Whatever I’ve done I’ve spent on this life;

it’s no use to me now.

Whatever I’ve thought was all just delusion;

it’s no use to me now.

Now the time has come to do what’s truly

Useful—recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When I was a little girl, I wanted to run away. It’s not that things were horrible at home, but it was just a house. Cinderella lived in a real castle, and she wore glass slippers. She was married to a prince, and she wore pretty clothes all the time. And if I couldn’t make it to the castle, maybe I could stop by Heaven and walk on those streets of gold. If I got there on a good day, I might see lions lying down with lambs. I wanted to pet a lion and see what all that hair around its head felt like.

As a little girl, I was exposed to fairy tales and biblical stories at the same time. My cousin would read to me from my fairy tale collection just about whenever I asked. My uncle, who’d just converted to being Seventh Day Adventist, would read to me fanatically from The Bible. He had one of those bibles that had gorgeous color plates of what I later learned were great works of art. To me, they were very pretty pictures. There was no difference in my five-year old mind between fairies and angels. I thought angels were grown up fairies. I thought God was a king who lived in Heaven, his kingdom, and if I knew how to get there, I could go visit. I didn’t understand the idea of ‘fiction’.

We tend to believe that we outgrow such naïve styles of thinking. Yet we find ourselves constantly caught up in the stories of our own lives. We constantly seek happiness based on what we think we see around us. We look for the next job, the next spouse, the next house, the next car—always chasing the elusive goal of ‘happiness’. We end most of our days exhausted and horribly dissatisfied, but with the hope that tomorrow we’ll find true happiness.

We live our lives in a state of utter delusion, imprisoned inside a mind that is incapable of perceiving reality. We believe our thoughts as surely as I believed I could hitchhike to Cinderella’s castle. Dilgo Khyentse puts it like this, “Myriads of thoughts have run through our minds, each one giving birth to many more, but all they have done is to increase our confusion and dissatisfaction.”

We are like children, constantly disappointed that no fairy godmother has come to rescue us from the mundane suffering of our lives.

***

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

“I’ll be dead tomorrow, so it doesn’t matter.” For years, I lived with that thought. I had elaborate plans of suicide. Back then I didn’t have access to pharmaceutical exit plans, but when you live a scant ten minute drive from the ocean, you don’t need pharmaceutical assistance. I wanted to die (and honestly the method wasn’t important to me), because my mind had created a world that was so insufferable. I was convinced that death was the only alternative.

I was in a relationship that has the politically correct (and woefully understated) designation of “Domestic Abuse”; sounds so much nicer than it is to live it day in and day out. It was a sojourn through Hell. I’m here to tell you, Hell is state of mind, not a place with bubbling lakes of brimstone. In the final two years of that relationship, I craved death the way an addict craves their next fix. The one thing that stopped me was that I was afraid I’d get it wrong.

For a long time, I wholly believed my mind’s take on the situation. No religious zealot ever believed their creed more fervently than I believed the thoughts arising in my confused mind. Death, mind would whisper to me, a long peaceful sleep.

In the end of things, it was constant threats of death that finally drove me to leave. Toward the end, I was told constantly that if I left, I’d be killed. I thought—you’ll kill me? Really? Sweet. I’m outta here. It wasn’t quite so easy as I make it sound, but my preference for death over the life I was living was the final impetus that drove me to leave.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice how mind zoomed in on death until it seemed like the only way out. Had I been able to take even a baby-step back from the Greek tragedy of my life, I may have noticed that there is never only one anything. Had I done that, I may have noticed that death’s appeal came mainly from my fear that whatever lay ahead, beyond the gates of Hell, was just too terrifying to face. Had I been able to notice this, I might have seen that death’s looming stature in my thoughts was like a ten foot shadow of an ant, cast by the blaring spotlight of my confused mind. Having seen this, I may have ended the suffering of both my partner and myself a whole lot sooner.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life is that the company I work for is being sold to Interplanetary Title, Inc.  This has been a smorgasbord of fear and anxiety for mind. When this was first announced on April 11, there was this plummeting feeling in my stomach. Not only was I falling, my parachute wouldn’t open.

Mind went right to work, zooming in on all the things that could go wrong. Oddly enough, my sojourn in Hell has been pretty helpful. I’m on to mind; not all ten foot shadows are giants.

Since April 11, I’ve had countless opportunities to work with anxiety. The one thing that all anxiety thoughts have in common is mind’s peculiar ability to zoom in, narrow a view until it simply blots out everything else.  I’m noticing that mind can only do this by ascribing a single cause and magnifying it beyond all meaningful proportion.

With the situation at work, there are days when mind insists that it’s all an elaborate ruse, and that on May 31^st (the day the deal is signed), we’ll all be fired and ineligible for unemployment. This is just one scenario. Mind plays these fictions out hourly, with more variations than Bach could have ever dreamed up.

But thanks to my Dharma study, there are many times when I’m able to experience these thoughts as activities of mind, wholly unrelated to any reality, let alone ultimate reality. Thanks to this event arising at this time on my spiritual path, I am able to observe mind at work busily manufacturing what my Dharma friend Tashi calls ‘fictional truth’. Most of the time, I am able to see correct fictional truth—I know mind is deluded and confused and is offering up a skewed set of perceptions based on limited input.

I vigorously practice mantra now, but with a different emphasis. I no longer ask to be free of anxiety. When I recite mantra now, I understand that my true self is free of anxiety. I use mantra to establish a resonance with that true self. This dissolves the illusion of reality that can arise from the confused mind.

This does not take away the anxiety or fear, but it does give a comfortable distance from it. In practicing this way, I realize the power of mantra to free any of us at any time, no matter how entangled we are in the delusions of the confused mind.

***

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

In about an hour, I’ll be on my way to work. Before I began studying the Dharma, getting ready for work in these days leading up to May 31 would have been drama worthy of Shakespeare. I would have desperately hoped that the anxiety wouldn’t be too unbearable and that I could grit my teeth and bear it.

Today, no need to wear my teeth to nubs. You know what? The truth is, anxiety is already arising at the thought of going to work. And that’s okay. It isn’t pleasant. It isn’t fun, and it certainly isn’t my first choice for how to start my day.

Although there is nothing magical about the Dharma, for me it has a certain miraculous quality. This quality is what my Dharma friend Tashi calls “Serene Trust” or “Serene Confidence”. With training my mind, and with reliance on the Dharma, I am able to simply rest in the arising deluded confusion that I label ‘anxiety’. This doesn’t sound like a big deal. But for someone who’s ended up in the emergency room because of an anxiety attack so bad I couldn’t breathe, it’s pretty awesome.

Before, I used to try and ‘fix’ anxiety, try to make it go away. Now, I work with letting it arise, then resting with whatever arises. Today, when anxiety arises, I will recite mantra, and understand that what I am experiencing is a phenomenon in the deluded mind. I will remember that all phenomena are impermanent, dependent, and insubstantial. I will give impermanence a chance to prove itself. In this way, I will resonate with my true self. I will resonate with my Buddha Nature of true bliss, true permanence, true self, true purity.

Each time I do this during the day, I will turn my attention outward and know that every being I lay eyes on has the same Buddha Nature, and they are suffering far more than I am. I will work throughout my day, with compassion, to ease their fears, which are no different than mine. If I can bring a genuine smile to just one person’s face today, it will have been a day well spent.

 

PS: Thanks to my Dharma friend Elizabet for the awesome woman on the swing image…