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

“Let stillness cut the momentum of moving thoughts;

Within movement see the very nature of stillness.

Where stillness and movement are one, maintain the natural mind;

In the experience of one-pointedness, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

Full Disclosure:

This is one of the toughest contemplations I’ve done in a long time.

Written Sunday, September 27th, 5:30 AM

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

I don’t like to gamble. Playing the lottery has no especial thrill for me. But I grew up in the Bronx and in New York state, the lottery drawing was done on TV. I’m not sure how they do it these days. But back then I’d sit spellbound in front of the television with absolutely no interest in what numbers actually popped out of the machine, fascinated by the process. It worked like this. There was a glass tank, somewhat like a fish tank. At the bottom were layers and layers of numbered balls. At first they just lay there. Then someone would switch on a tremendous flow of air and—wow! A ball storm ensued, with all the balls flying just as fast they could, knocking against the tank’s walls, smacking into each other, careening off glass.

In the midst of the storm, a lady would open a chute at the top of the tank and a numbered ball would be sucked up out of the chaos. This was the first number of that night’s winning lottery number. She’d open three (or four) more chutes and from the madness of the balls would be made a string of winning numbers.

Now, decades later, studying the teachings on the empty luminosity of the mind and the arising of thoughts, I’m very much reminded of that glass tank full of contained chaos. Aren’t our thoughts like that? Don’t they feel sometimes that they go madly careening about our mind? And then, based on our habits and tendencies, a few thoughts break through the surface of our awareness. These thoughts we experience as a continuous, unending flow. But this isn’t so. Our thoughts are contstantly new, constantly arising, and utterly fleeting. Our belief in their constancy, their permanence lies at the heart of our many sufferings in samsara.

Dilgo Khyentse puts it like this, “Just as what we call a rosary is in fact a string of single beads, so also what we usually call the mind is really a succession of momentary thoughts … But nevertheless, ignorant of the true nature of thoughts we maintain the habit of seeing them as being continuously linked, one after another; this is the root of delusion, and this is what allows us to be more and  more dominated by our thoughts and emotions, until total confusion reigns.” We can sometimes feel that we are desperately trying to push back an ever rising tidal wave of thoughts constantly threatening to drown us. If we could learn to see that there is no tidal wave, only thousands and thousands of raindrops, if we could learn to even glimpse the empty luminosity of the mind shining through the  myriad of furiously roiling thoughts, we could begin to free ourselves of the root of delusion.

***

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

My hero when I was a little girl was Dracula. I wanted to be like him. The whole sucking blood from people thing really grossed me out, but I figured, if I could have what he had, I’d find a better way. The essential nature of Dracula—dead—was unspeakably seductive to me. I’ve had suicidal thoughts from about the age of nine. There was sexual abuse at that age (from the proverbial family member) and I began to associate being free of my body with a kind of peace, a kind of darkness that would swallow me up, keep me safe, like Dracula’s coffin kept him safe from sunlight.

These thoughts persisted and became dangerous in my teens, when I made a couple of half-hearted attempts. Then again in my twenties when I made a couple more attempts. No one knew. They were truly half-hearted efforts. With death, I was a flirtatious, inconstant lover, always shrinking from a true, final embrace.

What I remember most from those attempts on my life is that, oddly enough, I didn’t want to die, per se. What I wanted was to escape the torment of the unceasing storm of thoughts that blew through my mind at hurricane gale strength. It never stopped. It felt unbearable. Death, I believed (wrongly), was the only permanent end to those thoughts. At the very least, I believed, if I died, wouldn’t have to get up in the morning and walk around pretending I was fine while the hurricane battered my mind. It was a terrifying time in my life. I could tell no one. I was too afraid they’d think I was crazy when I tried to explain about the hurricane. I was ashamed that I couldn’t handle the storm.

I lived like that for decades, teetering on the precipice of death, never certain if I should take that one last step. My biggest refuge was reading. It was an acceptable proxy for an irrevocable escape into death.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can see that my desire to die was simply a desire to slow down what seemed to be a constant rush of uncontrollable thoughts. My suffering came from believing in the content of those thoughts and wholly identifying with them. Much of my suffering came from believing I was a helpless victim of my thoughts. If, at any moment, I could have taken just a tiny step back, I may have noticed that the storm wasn’t me. I may have noticed, in even a brief moment of peace and clarity, that the thoughts that seemed so threatening were not some malign monolith of darkness rising from the depths of my mind to devour me. I may have noticed that my own fear was giving my thoughts the illusion of being solid and ‘real’. I may have noticed that, just as I was holding on grimly to each and every thought, I could let go…just let go and see within the rushing movement of my thoughts, the truth of emptiness and stillness.

***

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

In twenty business days, I will leave my present job. I’ve been with the current company for a little more than eleven years. I’m going to take a nosedive in income. This has caused a veritable tornado of thoughts to go rushing through my  mind, most of them powered by hope/fear. I hope it will go well, but I fear it won’t. Or,  more accurately, I should say the tornado was powered by hope and fear. Now, it’s something else…I’m not sure what.

This week I peeked through a keyhole. The person that I work with—Salem—is utterly incompetent to do the job. The way that position works is there’s a production log that tracks what you do in a day. In order to stay in good graces, you have to have a  monthly  production average of ninety percent or better. For just about a year now, I’ve known that Salem had to be lying on her production log because there’s no way she can work to the required production quota. She’s just too slow.

All of this time I have resolutely not snooped into her production log. But now that I’m leaving, I decided I had to know how she’s getting away with it. When I saw what was happening, my jaw just about dropped. Keep in mind, my soon to be former manager is someone who talks about integrity and honesty and team work the way a politician talks about doing the right thing. It’s constant and utterly sincere. So imagine my surprise when Salem’s production log showed that she wasn’t in fact getting away with anything. She’s padding out her numbers (up to three hours a day!) in a way so blatant that it’s impossible that the manager of the department has not given her consent and support to the fraud.

When I first saw that, I was furious. The first thing I did was go gossip. But even as I was doing that, I knew I was only increasing my suffering. When I got home that night, my  mind was positively swarming with nuclear thoughts of ambush, retribution, revenge. But I made myself stop and ask a few key questions.

If I lay an ambush, such as planning to confront the manager on my last day there, who would suffer? Me.

If I took revenge and reported the issue to the manager’s manager, an issue that doesn’t matter to me one way or the other now, and I did that solely out of vengeance, whose mind stream have future causes for suffering? Mine.

Salem has obviously been practicing the arts of lying and manipulation for lifetimes. She’s damn good at it. Knowing this, and knowing that my angry confrontation with her would only feed her drama of martyrdom, is it worth it to place causes for suffering in my stream, just to spew a few angry words at Salem—who would actually enjoy the martyrdom of her starring role? No.

Should I have been peeking through a keyhole at things that are none of my business? No.

Stopping to ask these questions was probably the hardest thing I’ve done since studying the Dharma and applying it to my life. Mind kept shouting at me, “But I’m right!” Perhaps. But what the intensity of the rage and fury allowed me to do was see the rising thoughts in stark relief against the backdrop of the mind’s empty luminosity. At work the rest of the week, the angry thoughts kept arising. They demanded attention. Sometimes I bowed to them and moved on. Sometimes I did nothing and they dissolved. Sometimes I got caught up in them. But because of their intensity and because of my growing awareness of the pleasant quality of the mind’s empty luminousness, I no longer enjoy the heat of righteous vengeance. It’s uncomfortable. In this way, daily working with this situation, I look to see the very nature of stillness within movement.

***

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

Twenty days seems like a long time to keep my mouth shut. In fact, it seems like an eternity. I know if I see it that way, there’s the very real possibility that I’ll let out a year’s pent up frustration and resentment in one moment of unskillful speech. I don’t want that to happen.

This week I’ve tried different techniques of working with this. The day after I found out about the fraud Salem and the manager are perpetrating, I went to work and did as little as I could. I surfed the internet, took long breaks, worked very slowly. But that night I felt awful, very sad. I knew it wasn’t right that I’d made the people on the other end of the emails in my box suffer because of my afflicted emotions.

The next day I went to work and worked at my usual pace. When thoughts of retribution (and believe me they were of biblical proportion) came up, I used mantra, or a silent recitation of a line of prayer or if I could, I just let it go.

I have ocean sounds that I play in my headphones. This lets me effectively retreat into silence and withdraw emotionally from the situation. In that silence, I can clearly see my thoughts of anger, resentment, frustration, vengeance, and ambush arising. Somehow, just seeing them makes it better. What helps the most, moment to moment is a line from one of my favorite mind training prayers, “…all my thoughts, words, and deeds have consequences.” Yep. This is a tremendous help because it lets me see that I have a choice. I can put causes in place for my own happiness or for my own suffering. Those are my choices. There is no Mystery Door Number Three.

Honestly, in these next twenty working days, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m so open to suggestions from the Dharma that I make the dim reaches of outer space look downright crowded. I do know this much: death is certain, but the hour of our death is unknown. This is an exit. One day, I’ll be exiting this life. When that happens, do I really want to have a karmic tendency of taking all the vengeance I can before I go? Or do I want to have a karmic tendency to look at the thoughts arising in my mind, and no matter the content, see the very nature of stillness within movement?

As I see it, those are my only two choices. I would like to say that I will choose to make a graceful exit, but in all honesty, all I can say is that I will make as graceful an exit as I can. I rely on the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha to support me in this. The Three Jewels never fail those they protect.

I rarely end a contemplation with a prayer, but this morning, this feels right…

My body, like a water bubble,

decays and dies so very quickly

–bless me to know:

I walk toward my end,

a culprit to the scaffold.

Photo Credit: Tadas Juras