June 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.