February 23, 2014 by dharma pen

On getting everything you want…

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

“Disgust, because there’s no one to be trusted,

Sadness, because there’s no meaning in anything,

Determination, because there’ll never be time to get everything you want;

If you always keep these three things in mind, some good will come of it.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

One day, I’ll die. I’ll be alone at the moment of my crossing into death. All that I know will be left behind. All that I have done will be left behind. All that I have wished for, even those secretly cherished dreams that I don’t dare speak aloud—of true love, of unending happiness, of an end to heartbreak—will be left behind. Knowing this, how am I to live my life?

I tell myself I’m not afraid to die but…a couple of days ago I went to the doctor. When she walked in and looked at my EKG print out, her normally smiling, welcoming face was deadly serious. In those moments of stone silence, death’s cold draft blew through my life. I had regrets, anxieties, and so much fear. It was a routine test. But I was suddenly, unexpectedly face to face with my mortality. A brief thought ran through my mind…My god. I’ve been f**king around. Is it too late?

I finally managed to say to her, “What? What’s wrong?” As it turned out, nothing was wrong. “Just concentrating,” she said. She was having a busy day.

Ever since that moment, I’ve really thought of what this line says. There’ll never be time to do it all. And even if there was, how much of it is worth doing? It’s funny how that moment of utter terror left in its wake a gift of total clarity. For long moments on that day, I was able to realize that we are all like travelers on a short trip. It’s really a very short journey from birth to death.

In a couple of weeks, I will have journeyed around this world’s star fifty times. There’ll come a time when I don’t make the journey all the way around. When that time comes, I don’t want to leave this realm full of anxiety and regret. That’s where a life full of wishes for samsaric happiness leads: dying full of regret for what you could have done. Instead, we can choose to live so that our every step brings us closer to a death that will lead us to enlightenment and freedom from the suffering of the cycle of birth and death.

***

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

There was a time in my life, almost a decade ago now, when I wanted True Love. Yes. With the capital letters. Think Cinderella. Think Sleeping Beauty. Think Prince Charming. On steroids.

When Prince Charming came into my life, I was so swept off my feet, I breathed fairy dust. There was nothing in my life but roses and romance. And I thought, this is it. I found him. All that time looking, and here he is at last. Cinderella fitting into her glass slipper had nothing on me.

When Prince Charming’s glamour began to wear off, I refused to see it. I literally closed my eyes to anything that didn’t fit with my idea of True Love. Even though after a year I was living with all the classic signs of abuse—isolation, low self-esteem, fear for my safety—I still thought I could make things right. As nine years of my life crept by, I would think…I’m over forty. I won’t have time to find True Love again so I better stick with what I have.

Looking back on that situation in my life, I can notice how my own fear of my time running out to get what I wanted imprisoned me in misery. I can notice how I was willing to delude myself into believing I had what I’d wished for. All I had to do was make it right.

I could have taken a step back, breathed and noticed that the situation I found myself in was based on two afflicted emotions: hope and fear. Having noticed this, I might have asked myself…I got what I wanted, it wasn’t what I thought, did I want to spend the rest of my life chasing an illusion?

***

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

I want a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I’ve looked at so many of them on E-bay, I get Kitchen Aid ads in my Gmail sidebar. I mean, really. I want one. Not the giant 7.5 quart Professional series. That’s around $700.00. No. I just want the classic. Well, the Artisan model, with the planetary motion (so I don’t have to scrape the bowl) would be nice. But it’s around a hundred bucks more than the classic. Or I could get a classic and upgrade to an Artisan later. I may even go to the Salvation Army and check out their appliances.

These thoughts go around in my head quite a bit lately. When I first started baking outside my bread machine, I had to have a cast iron Dutch Oven so that my breads would have a good crust. But…the bottom crust would burn; too much radiant heat on such a dark color. So, I wanted a ceramic Emile Henry pot. I got that. Works like a dream…except…the baking was still a little uneven because I have a cheap oven. What I really needed was a ceramic baking stone. It came in the mail yesterday. Wow. It’s sweet! I bake like a pro now; crispy top crusts, tender bottom crusts.

So now, all I need is…those artisan flours from the King Arthur Flour website. Just a few. And of course there’s the oblong clay baker, so I can make a real Italian loaf of bread and…there is no end to it.

Working with my baking practice as I work with this line has really helped me to see how absolutely pointless it is to try and get everything we want. Our mind will never run out of things to want.

Having noticed this, I can take a step back and notice how every loaf of bread I make brings me a sort of ephemeral peace. It’s not the bread itself. It’s baking. Each loaf is a chance to perfect something, but then, you have to let it go. It won’t last. It’s not meant to. There’s something very satisfying in that arising of perfection, and the letting go of it.

I can notice that no thing in the phenomenal world can last because entropy rules the day in samsara. Having noticed this, I can turn my attention to ‘that which holds’—the Dharma. I can swiftly develop the mind of renunciation, and realize that any happiness that arises in samsara is fleeting, deceptive, illusory. There will never be time to get all I want, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be worth having.

***

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

Today after sangha, I’ll be trying out a test bread. It was pretty bad the last time I made it, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of what went wrong. Typically when I bake, all sorts of thoughts go through my head: if I had that metal set of measuring cups and spoons from the King Arthur Flour website, I could just toss them in the dishwasher. I should get another banneton. A back up would be great. Wonder what this recipe would be like with an ancient grain flour. I really need a stone crock so I can try out sourdough….and on and on.

Today when I’m baking, I’m going to notice how those thoughts habitually get in the way of doing something I really enjoy. I’m going to notice how they lead to a dead end. I’m going to notice how I could fill an entire industrial-size kitchen with every baking implement I can think of or dream up, and still, it wouldn’t be enough.

I can notice how these thoughts aren’t about baking. They’re about dying. When we want something, we are fantasizing a future. And if there’s going to be a future, there’s going to be a ‘me’ to live it. Our thoughts of wanting things and chasing after them allow us to exit the discomfort of coming face to face with our own inevitable mortality.

Having noticed this, when those thoughts come up, I’ll breathe, do a quick mantra, and remind myself that there is only one way out of the suffering of samsara. It’s not the next Kitchen Aid, or the next clay baker, or the next bag of artisan flour. These are pleasant distractions. The only way out of the suffering of samsara is to study the Dharma and let it permeate and eventually dissolve our delusions and wrong views.

Having reminded myself of this, I can bake, finish that test bread and know that I have used the practice of baking to increase my peace and clarity by bringing baking to the path. Then I can dedicate the merit. The path is wherever you find your feet to be. My footsteps happen to be made in flour.

February 16, 2014 by dharma pen

On hiding your mind…

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

I thought it was interesting to see how much of a HUGE part speech plays in our life. I also think that in this case “hide” can be read as “guard”, as in having vigilance. That’s the point of view in this contemplation.

“Hide your body by staying alone in a mountain wilderness;

Hide your speech by cutting off contact and saying very little;

Hide your mind by being continuously aware of your own faults alone.

This is what it means to be a hidden yogi.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

We’re always talking. There’s a twenty-four hour Weather Channel, a twenty-four hour CNN channel, a twenty-four hour cooking channel. If you’re willing to, you can spend twenty-four hours a day watching sports on ESPN. And that’s just television. There are twenty-four hour radio stations. We are inundated by seas of words constantly, whether it’s television, radio, or a text message on our cell phone that of course, can’t wait.

Where does all this talk come from? Is it anything more than pointless chatter? Sadly, probably about ninety-eight percent of what we say is utterly pointless and doesn’t need to be said.

If we think about how the mind works, all talk originates in our mind. Our own words begin with our thoughts. The words of others can only be understood when we take them into our mind, pass them through the filters of our prejudices, our likes and dislikes, our life experience, our mood, our tendencies, then finally arrive at ‘understanding’. This happens so lightning-fast, that most times we’re not aware of it.

Unfortunately for us, these filters work both ways. Every word we say is an impromptu autobiography. We continually reveal ourselves in our speech. If we know this to be true, then it’s a good idea to constantly, relentlessly examine our mind, and become aware of our faults. This awareness will lead us to a skillful discrimination in what faults we reveal, and what faults we choose not to reveal.

If we ask ourselves before we speak, “what is the state of my mind?”, we will find many times that we want to speak out of envy, jealousy, resentment, anger, fear, or some other afflicted emotion. If we hide (or guard) our mind by being continually aware of our faults, then monkey-mind has less of a chance to gibber pointlessly.

***

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

There have been so many times when my speech has led to trouble in my life; it’s hard to point to just one situation.

I remember a fight I had with my mother when I was in my mid-twenties. I said something that made her cry and her tears infuriated me. Seeing her tears, I said something very like, “I don’t care if I make you cry. You’ve made me cry enough.” Then I stormed out the door to work.

Looking back at that unskillful speech, I can notice that I was so overwrought with emotion that it would have been better to super glue my tongue to the roof of my mouth than to utter a single word. I can notice that the state of my mind was frustration and anger. I can notice that my words were purposely chosen to inflict pain.

Having noticed this, I might have taken at least a half-step back, and before I spoke, I might have become aware of the faults of my mind in those moments. I could have breathed with the hot-prickly sensation of anger. Doing this would have given me a brief moment of clarity. In that moment I could have asked myself what choice I wanted to make. Did I want to continue my habitual actions, which would only lead to more suffering? Or did I want to guard my mind at that moment and move toward weakening my habitual tendency?

Having asked myself these questions, I could have taken another half-step back and breathed. Just one breath. The average rate of human speech is 225 words per minute. In that one breath, that one skillful act, I may have stopped my monkey-mind from pointlessly gibbering at least a hundred unskillful words, words that would have led to nothing but suffering.

***

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

Words are how I make a living. Throughout my work day, I resolve issues by answering questions either on the phone or via email. I process on average, about fifty email interactions a day. And every single email is a conversation in my mind. With over two hundred emails a week, sometimes over a thousand emails a month, my job could easily become monkey-mind’s playground. In fact, it has been exactly that in the past.

At times I catch monkey-mind up to its old tricks. Thoughts zing through my mind:

What a stupid question.

Seriously, are you telling me you have enough time in your day to sit down and type such a dumb question?

Good god lady, I told you that last week!

You need a friend. I’m not your pen pal.

Please. Go be stupid on your own time.

What I’ve noticed as I study the Dharma and get to know my mind, is that the emails don’t substantially change. It’s the same questions over and over, the same requests. What changes is my state of mind. These days when a thought like this comes up, I know I need to pause. I know I need to examine the state of my mind. And sure enough I’ll find I’m irritated because my back hurts, I have a headache, the test bread I baked over the weekend burned to charcoal on the bottom…whatever. The point is if I answer an email in that state of mind, I will show my faults. And since my faults of aggression and irritation and frustration are not unique to me, my faults will resonate with the person reading my words, and my email will in turn evoke their anger, their aggression, their frustration.

Instead, I choose to take a step back. I read most emails for tone before I send them out. This continuous awareness does not lead to a perfect work day, but it does lead me to do my job with a measure of compassion and empathy. Am I able to do it on every single email? Of course not. But, with awareness, by continually guarding my mind, continually being aware of my own faults, I keep monkey-mind’s gibbering to a minimum.

***

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

The ongoing situation in my life is Salem. A few months ago, it felt like that situation was completely unworkable. I remember thinking something like ‘working with my mind is one thing, but I ain’t a freakin’ saint’. The situation with Salem remains unchanged. What has changed is the state of my mind.

In working with what I felt was an external ‘enemy’, it became clear to me that the ‘enemy’ was an internal representation that had very little to do with the person sitting next to me. After months and months of hard work, I can finally examine the state of my mind before I interact with Salem.

As this happens, I’m finding that I want to progress beyond simply not disliking her. I’m not sure what the next step is. On Thursday, she shared a recipe book with me. That felt really good, as if all my hard work had paid off.

This situation has gone from being very closed in, with both of us locked into adversarial roles to being very open-ended. But now, I feel like I’m at a stalemate. Salem is a drama-junkie. This isn’t maligning her. It’s based on observation. I don’t want to become part of that. It would just lead back to afflicted emotions.

On Tuesday when I go to work, perhaps I can bring her a King Arthur Flour recipe. Baking has become a big part of my life and doing that would be like reaching across a great divide. This is definitely an experiment with state of mind. I have never before gone from adversarial to truce with anyone in my life. In the past, it’s always reached an unbearable crisis where the only option was to walk away. This time I find that the only way to work with this is to be continually aware of my faults, lest monkey-mind spews words that will lead away from the Dharma, away from peace and clarity. With relentless vigilance, monkey-mind doesn’t get to be in charge. I have a choice.

February 11, 2014 by dharma pen

On being a fraud…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

In the last teaching that Tashi gave, he talked about indifference being the worst of the three poisons, and how it was the biggest obstacle to spiritual cultivation. This took me by surprise, and haunted me. I began to ask myself how indifferent I was, and what that meant to my journey on the road of Dharma. This is my contemplation on the first line of verse 15 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Whoever you see isn’t human, but a fraud;

Whatever people say isn’t right, but just lies.

So since these days there’s no one you can trust,

You’d better live alone and stay free.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Having grown up Christian, I’ve always had the belief that being human is kind of like a default. Before studying the Dharma, even though I didn’t practice Christianity, there was the underlying belief that I (and the other people I meet) are human beings because we were made that way. Somewhere in the distant past a girl and a boy (also human, of course) shared chromosomes and genes, I gestated inside a womb, then voila! I was born human, part of a species.

But reading this line forces me to reconsider what it means to be human. What do we all have in common? It’s not our bodies. We all look totally different, not to mention the whole gender thing. It’s not where we live. It’s not even our genes and chromosomes. So where do we look for ‘human’?

The Dharma teaches that we are all naturally perfect, that we all have Buddha Nature. Our natural perfection is obscured by our karmic formations, like a diamond encrusted with mud. If we take that to be true, then the measure of our humanity seems to be our capacity to uncover who we truly are.

Our Buddha Nature is like a prisoner inside our karmic formations, but once in a while, the prisoner breaks free. In those moments we experience tremendous spontaneous compassion, love, and at the same time a kind of yearning to be closer to the source of compassion.

It seems then that being human is our capacity and willingness to live our everyday lives with a measure of compassion.

Well, compassion is a nice word, but when you get out of bed in the morning, what the heck does it mean?

It means not having bacon and eggs for breakfast because you recognize that sentient beings were slaughtered brutally for your pleasure. It means not pretending you don’t see that homeless man pushing a shopping cart with all he owns through thirty degree weather as you drive by in your comfortably warm car. It means in a word, giving up indifference.

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

I grew up in the Bronx, just about forty minutes from Manhattan by subway. My favorite places to go in Manhattan were Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, the New York Public Library, and Steuben Glass. In Manhattan, the homeless are everywhere. They are unavoidable. In winter they shuffle along in too-thin coats, walking up to you and asking for money. In summer, they sit on the boiling hot sidewalks with signs: BLIND. PLEASE HELP. And nearly without exception, they are ignored, given a wide berth, as though being homeless were a deadly plague that could be caught. Even when people give money, it’s done with averted eyes, and from a prudent distance.

At sixteen or seventeen, the homeless were just another feature of New York’s streets. They were part of the landscape. I had a vague idea that they hadn’t started out that way, but it wasn’t important enough to think about.

Looking back on those trips into Manhattan, I might notice how I had utter indifference to the suffering of the homeless. I can notice that seeing a homeless man curled up on a bench in Penn Station with newspaper for a blanket was a distasteful mess that I averted my eyes from. In my mind, they weren’t quite human, and they certainly had nothing in common with me.

Having noticed my indifference, on the spot, I could have breathed, paused and really looked at a homeless person. I could have done what Pema Chodron calls Just Like Me. I could have realized that just like me, the homeless man sleeping on the bench wanted to be free of suffering; just like me, he wanted to be comfortable; just like me, he wanted to be loved. I could have realized that my indifference was blinding me to my own suffering by building a kind of armor around my heart. I could have noticed that even a moment of compassion for the man sleeping on the bench would have softened my armor of indifference. This softening would have been my first tentative steps on the way to being enlightened.

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

The ongoing situation in my life is looking for a job. The hardest part for me is the rejection. It feels so personal, so heartless, so much like a betrayal. I think without my practice, it would have made me very bitter by now.

I haven’t looked for a job for years. Even though there have been layoffs all around me, whittling down the department I’m in from sixteen to two, I’ve had complete indifference to people who are unemployed. I never even noticed my indifference.

Now, with March and First Quarter looming, the threat of layoff is in the air again. Every previous quarter, I’ve focused on my own suffering, my own fear. While I want to be free of my job, I don’t want to be unemployed.

This time, as I work with these fears, I also spare a few thoughts for the millions (in this country alone) that are unemployed. I spare a thought for their fear, their desolation, their sense of betrayal. My indifference before this was a soothing balm…oh well, they’ll find a job. I chose to be indifferent because I didn’t (and don’t) want to suffer.

But now as I look around with what feels like newly opened eyes, I see that everyone at work is afraid and suffering terribly. In some way I don’t understand, this awakening to the suffering of others feels like re-claiming or maybe remembering my true nature.

Indifference, I think, locks us into the wrong view of separation: they’re suffering, but I’m okay. This is a miserable way to live because life becomes an epic struggle to hold onto “I’m okay”, and there’s a terrible sense of betrayal when some tragedy crashes through your delusion and exposes your fraud of being human.

I used to believe that renunciation was the first step on the spiritual journey. But now I’m starting to see that before you get to renunciation, you have to let go of indifference and wake up to the suffering of samsara. I wonder if that ‘awakening’ is what we experience as compassion?

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

I have a long weekend coming up. No work on Monday. I’ll be baking. One of the most enjoyable parts of baking for me is giving away what I make. The harder the bread was to make, the more challenges I ran into with the recipe, the more enjoyable it is to give it away.

This weekend when I bake, I’ll be baking a bread to be donated as part of a meal for the homeless. Last weekend when I did it, I didn’t really give much thought to the people who would be eating the bread. The fun part for me was giving it away.

This weekend when I bake, I’ll make a conscious effort to work with my indifference to the plight of the homeless people who will eat the bread. I’ll work with the Just Like Me exercise. I’ll work with understanding how indifference is probably the absolute worst of the three poisons, and how it makes spiritual cultivation all but impossible.

I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to do this since growing up in the U. S. is like getting a Ph.D. in Indifference. But it is my intention that I will use baking that bread as an opportunity to soften my armor of indifference, to re-claim who I truly am, to be more in touch with my Buddha Nature of compassion.

February 10, 2014 by dharma pen

On echoing words…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the last two lines of verse 14 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“All talk is like an echo,” said the Buddhas,

But these days it’s more like the re-echo of an echo.

What the echoes say and what they mean are not the same,

So don’t take any notice of these insidious echo-words.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

The heart sutra reminds us of the nature of samsaric existence, “All phenomena are merely empty…”. Sometimes I ask myself how that can possibly be true. Right now, I’m holding a pen. I’m sitting on a chair. My notebook’s on a table. I’m putting words on paper. None of it feels empty. And it certainly doesn’t feel like an echo of anything. It feels like the thing itself.

But if you stop to think about it, a ‘pen’ is really just a conglomeration of atoms and molecules with mostly empty space between them. That’s true of my hand, the notebook, the table, my chair, even the floor that seems to be supporting me. Looked at this way, it means ‘pen’ is actually a thought about a chaotic arrangement of molecules and atoms barely held together by very strong bonds.

All right then. So, thoughts must be real, right? No. Meditation has taught me that thoughts are perhaps the most ephemeral, the most empty of our samsaric experience. If our thoughts are merely imputing meaning, and they reference unknown objects, then what is it in our samsaric experience that is not an echo? Nothing.

Samsara depends on talk—either our thoughts or our speech—to exist. And “all talk is like an echo”. It’s the nature of echoes to distort the source that gave rise to them. If we go about in the samsaric world never realizing that all we experience is a distorted echo of the reality of emptiness, we will impute reality to the echoes. We will believe, as we are constantly told, that if we just look hard enough, permanent happiness can be found in samsara. The corollary of course is that if you can’t find it, then there’s something wrong with you. You’re to blame. We live caught in this blame and shame, and Madison Avenue is the pied piper whose melody leads only to despair and disillusion.

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

A few years ago, before I had a Kindle, I went to the annual Friends of the Library sale. This is where libraries donate books they no longer want on their shelves. It’s a massive room with table after table of books. The books were priced anywhere from twenty-five cents to two or three dollars. When I went, I sought out every book Stephen King had ever written. Even though I’d already read every single one of his books, I wanted them so I could read them again. I also picked up maybe a dozen books by writers I’d always wanted to read, but never had. I had so many books I needed the suitcase I’d brought to get them to my car. I’d gone prepared.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened once I got the books home. After spending hours combing through the tables for hardcover copies of Stephen King’s cannon, I stacked them against a wall of my living room in order by series, then time. Then I went about my life. I never read even a single one of the books I bought that day. In perhaps the ultimate irony, I ended up boxing them up and donating them to my local library.

Looking back on this, I can notice that when I went to the book sale, I was acting on an echo from my past. I was doing something “I’d always wanted to do” in the belief that it would bring me happiness. In retrospect, I can notice that Stephen King’s books had once been a source of temporary happiness in a very unhappy life. But once I was here in Texas, I was free to seek different ways to be happy, instead of relying on an echo of what had once brought very temporary release from suffering.

Having noticed that, I could have breathed, taken a step back, and taken a look at my motive for going to the book sale. I could have asked myself what I was setting out to accomplish by buying books I’d already read. The answer would have been that I had had so little freedom in my prior relationship that such a thing would have been unthinkable. Once I’d noticed this, I might have taken yet another step back and assessed my needs in my new life, and then turned my search for happiness in a direction that wasn’t a re-echo of my past.

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

The ongoing situation in my life right now continues to be Salem [a co-worker]. That’s becoming a really interesting place of learning the Dharma for me. These days, what once felt like a tornado of anger, resentment, and frustration has slowed down to a mild breeze with intermittent high gusts that can sometimes still knock me over.

I worked with that situation by purposely injecting the Dharma into my workday every day, on the hour. Every hour there’s a reminder that pops up on my computer that says ‘breathe’. Every time it comes up, I stop (even in if I’m typing and I’m in mid-word). I silently recite ‘om amideva rhi’ ten times, then shuffle through my Dharma Brigade stack of index cards and silently recite whatever lines of prayer come up. Then I go back to work. On my desk is a sign that says “Less Drama, More Dharma”, and a little yellow Post-It that says, “Give impermanence a chance to prove itself.” These signs are positioned in such a way that whenever I talk to Salem, they are within my peripheral vision.

I did all of this out of desperation. Honestly, I didn’t think it would work. What’s interesting is that the situation hasn’t changed at all. Salem is still Salem. She always will be.

What’s changed are the “insidious echo-words” of my thoughts. Doing this daily practice, on the spot, in the midst of the storm so to speak, has helped me to see that my thoughts were rampaging through my mind in a constant emotional hurricane. This was blinding me, deceiving me into believing I had to be a helpless victim to the constant repeating echoes. Now, the echoes still happen, but they’re quickly followed by a snippet of prayer. This has been tremendously powerful.

When the Dharma goes through my mind right on the heels of an echo-thought, it’s so easy to experience the distortion as exactly that—distortion, untruth. In contrast, the Dharma resonates in a way that is beyond language, beyond thought. It simply is. For that moment there is utter clarity and the echo simply dissolves. Of course, the echo-thoughts return, but they are easy to recognize for the distortions they are.

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

I turn fifty next month. Yesterday in meditation the idea of a pilgrimage arose. It was very attractive. I feel somehow that this is the right time in my life to do that. Since both Mecca and Tibet (not to mention Jerusalem) are beyond my budget, I had to come up with something else. It had to be something I could do while living my ordinary life that would make me feel that I was taking a journey I’d never taken before.

The idea that I’ve come up with is what I now call The Pilgrimage of 62. It would be a commitment to meditate/pray twice a day for the 31 days of March and journal for ten minutes afterward.

Oh! The echoes that came with that. The insidious echo-words were flying. “I can’t do that!” “I NEVER meditate twice Saturdays.” “What if I start, get almost all the way through, then miss one day at the very end?” “What if I get laid off?” And the ultimate trump card, “What if I get sick and die?”

In meditation, I listened quietly to monkey-mind pinging thoughts around. I really noticed how much they sounded like echoes in a giant cave. After a few seconds (and a few hundred thoughts whizzing by), I noticed something. No matter what the actual ‘words’ of the thoughts were, they were all echoes arising from one afflicted emotion: fear. The thought underlying all the echo-words was: I’m afraid I can’t do this. And it’s so important to me.

It was interesting to notice how compelling each thought was, how convincing, how utterly persuasive. From this I learned that one way to read Dilgo Khentse when he says, “What the echoes say and what they mean are not the same…” is to realize that our echo-thoughts all arise from some deeply rooted karmic formation.

I wonder if all our ‘echoes’ rise from one inescapable fear, a fear which has become so covered over and so twisted that it’s a monstrous karmic formation, eons old: One day, I’m going to die.

January 28, 2014 by dharma pen

On thinking about these times…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the last line of verse 11 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

This was my first time working with renunciation. It was interesting.

“Being learned these days doesn’t help the teachings—

it just leads to more debate;

Being realized these days doesn’t help others—

it just leads to more criticism;

Being in a responsible position these days doesn’t help

govern the country well—it only spreads revolt.

Think about these times with sorrow and disgust.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

When I was younger my two favorite cartoons were The Flintstones and The Jetsons. My two favorite ‘people’ shows were Star Trek and Lost in Space. I liked them because, even though I couldn’t articulate it as a child, I thought their problems were so much different than mine, so very removed. They had no constantly fighting parents, no homework, no bullies at school, no stupid dishes to wash.

The Jetsons had robots to do all the cleaning. Captain Kirk was out meeting aliens and having adventures on the edge of the universe, and even though he made trouble in every episode, things always worked out okay for Dr. Smith and the Robinsons. The Flintstones were so far back in time, they had a dinosaur for a pet and a bird with teeth for a can opener.

As an adult looking back on those stories, I can see the human drama being played out from the Stone Age all the way up to an idealized future where drudgery was wholly removed. Yet, there was still drama. How can that be? How could George Jetson fly to work in a hover craft and still have problems with his boss? Why didn’t Captain Kirk bring a message of everlasting peace to the aliens he met? After all, they were smart enough to build a star ship and beam people down to planets. Why didn’t the Robinson family become ambassadors of peace after spending all that time lost in space? And finally, how could a Stone Age man like Fred Flintstone have the same drama with his boss that a future man like George Jetson had?

The Dharma teaches us that, “Worldly pleasures are deceptive,/and bring no lasting joy, only suffering.” Even though this is our experience day in and day out, we live in a constant painful denial of this very basic truth of our lives. We reach for happiness in the material world constantly—a good meal, a good partner, a new pair of shoes—and are constantly disappointed to find that our happiness is at best, fleeting.

If we look upon these times with disgust and sorrow, and develop a mind of renunciation, then we will be ready to put our feet on a path that leads to permanent happiness.

***

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

There was a time when I believed with all my heart that Texas was Heaven, Nirvana, a place where no problem could stand in the face of such paradise. I believed that merely by being here, the problems I had outrun would simply dissipate, and I’d go on with life, reborn into a land of milk, honey, and cowboy hats. I was in the Promised Land.

The day I got here was one of the worst ice storms Dallas had seen up until then. I stood outside the Dallas airport shivering miserably in my Florida-weight clothes (because it never gets cold in Paradise) and was turned down by taxi drivers who didn’t want to risk crossing the icy bridges between Dallas and Plano. A driver finally took pity on me. By the time I go to the rental office (which was closing due to the storm) to claim my new apartment, I was grateful to be alive after slipping and sliding over very icy roads with a driver who apparently had a pressing appointment with Death. I had no food. The restaurants in the Downtown Plano area were closed due to the storm. My first meal in Texas was a giant Hershey bar and a bottle of water purchased in a gourmet candy store that hadn’t closed yet.

So began my sojourn in Paradise.

This was emblematic of what was to come. There seemed to be so many obstacles to the bliss I so richly deserved: no car, nightmares and insomnia, flashbacks, anxiety. What? I asked myself. I’m in Paradise. How can there be problems here? I became angry, confused, disillusioned. Without the help of a very skilled therapist who explained the truth of things to me and helped me learn the skills I needed, I would have been lost in paradise.

Looking back on that time, I can notice that I behaved as though changing geographically would mean leaving my samskars behind. I believed that happiness (in the extreme) was to be found if I could only figure out the right thing to do with my life. I believed that happiness was out there somewhere for the taking. Having noticed this desperate brand of constant searching, I might have taken a step back and asked myself if I’d ever found lasting happiness in the material world. Once I’d had the courage to be honest with myself and admit that I never had, I would have been ready to begin developing a mind of renunciation.

***

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

When I first started learning about renunciation in the Dharma, if I’m honest, all I could think of was tonsured medieval monks wearing threadbare robes with hair shirts underneath, living in a monastery on some very cold, very isolated hill top in England. They never talk to each other. They have cold gruel for their one meal a day. They pray six times a day—including in the middle of the night! They live in little tiny rooms called cells where the only things on the dank stone walls are a miserably crucified Christ and a whip. The whip of course is for self-flagellation while penitently murmuring, ‘mea culpa’.

In a word, for me, renunciation was a synonym for denial and purification by suffering. I owe this gross misunderstanding partly to growing up Seventh Day Adventist and partly to Hollywood.

As it turned out, I came to do serious renunciation in my own life nearly by accident. After pursuing the craft of writing fiction for decades, I became so disillusioned with it that I couldn’t bear it anymore.

What’s interesting about this is I didn’t want to renounce writing. I wanted to renounce the way I was doing it, the way I was seeing it in my life. In doing this, working with it daily, I find the act of renunciation to be joyful and incredibly liberating. Now that I don’t write fiction anymore, I don’t have to read it anymore. I hadn’t even realized how unbelievably bored I was with fiction. I’ve been devouring non-fiction as fast as I can download it to my Kindle. My latest kick seems to be Tudor history. Now that I don’t write fiction anymore, I’m free to write what calls to me, rather than being caught up in deadlines, plot devices, character arcs, blah, blah, blah.

What I’ve learned is that fiction writing had become a prison. Renunciation was just setting myself free. In the same way, samsara is a prison. It is in fact inimical to who we truly are. It is utterly unnatural that we would live in a world of duality. When we begin to “Think of these times with sorrow and disgust”, we’re not giving up anything. Far from it. We are setting ourselves free of the illusions and delusions and pains of the prison of samsara and aligning ourselves with our innate perfection.

***

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

Right now as I look for a job, my life is in transition. In this Jetson-like age, job applications are done online. There’s always a moment of anxiety before I click SUBMIT, when I say to myself, “Do I really want to do this?” Then I click the icon.

As I work with finding a new job, I haven’t thought of renunciation. I am thoroughly nauseated with my workplace, but not enough to actually want to leave. It’s more of an intellectual realization that I have to leave or burn out. I have not yet reached the level of disgust and sorrow that for me, seems to be required for renunciation.

From this I’m learning that renunciation isn’t an act of turning away, or denying. My experience is that it’s just the opposite. It seems that renunciation is a whole-hearted embrace, an understanding of what is. And then the next step seems to be an understanding that if you continue with things as they are, it will lead to more and more suffering. Then finally, the last step seems to be renouncing the suffering.

As I go to work today, I can notice how much I suffer there. Yes. There are many good things there. There is the comfort of having a job and a steady income. There is the convenience of a ten minute drive. But the suffering of being there day in and day out has gone on for years. I’m not sure what it would take for me to renounce the suffering of the situation of my workplace.

I can breathe and look back at other times in my life when I renounced the suffering of a situation. By the time I did, things had reached a point of crisis. And when I finally did experience renunciation, it led to very positive changes. Oddly, knowing this doesn’t help.

I guess what I can take a look at is…haven’t I experienced enough sorrow and disgust with that situation to have the wisdom that renunciation of that particular suffering is the right choice? The best choice? Maybe the only choice?

January 26, 2014 by dharma pen

On quitting the rat race…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

Here is my contemplation on the last line of verse nine of the root text. As a committed rat racer for decades of my life, I couldn’t let this one go by!

“

“In this dark age, what people think and do is vile.

None of them will help you, they’ll deceive and trick you;

And for you to be of any help to them will be hard;

Wouldn’t it be best to quit the whole rat race?”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Every day when we wake up, we’ve got things to do. Ever notice how you never wake up and just lie there and say to yourself, “Someday I’m going to die. What can I do today that will further my spiritual journey so that I go to my death as prepared as I can be?”

No. Never.

We turn off the third snooze on the alarm, brush our teeth, take a shower, wash our hair, and of course the “Good Morning: Here’s All the Bad News You Missed Overnight” show is babbling on in the background. Then we get in a car (or on a subway or bus), go to work, and spend our entire day caught up in petty drama that feeds our anger, resentment, frustration, and fear.

Then we go home, say a few bare words to the people who share our living arrangement du jour, turn on the TV, mindlessly absorb the government propaganda marketed as Prime Time, then, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, we take refuge in sleep. In our dreams, we are haunted by the fears, regrets, and longings that we repressed all day long while pursing things that didn’t matter.

This is how we live our lives, in a kind of chronic insanity. We are like rats in a stone maze that is set atop a simmering volcano. We run and run, hoping we’ll find some relief from our chronic suffering in the next marriage, the next job, the next raise, the next new house. But as soon as we get what we chase after, we can’t enjoy it because the moment we pause, we notice how the ground under our feet is too hot to bear. When we pause in our constant chase through life, we notice our own suffering and we believe the answer is to chase after something else and rely on that to bring us happiness and relief from our suffering.

Beneath all our suffering is one inescapable thought: one day, I’m going to die. If we treat death like an enemy to outrun, we will suffer all our lives and die in regret and anxiety. Yet our culture encourages us to do just that—outrun death with the latest anti-aging cream, the latest Mor-Energy drink.

This doesn’t work.

Wouldn’t it be better to quit the whole rat race and get out of the infernally hot maze before our suffering culminates in a death that will only land us back in samsara, trapped once again in the cycle of birth and death?

***

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

There was a time when I wanted to write a bestseller. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to make millions. The money was almost an aside. What I really wanted was to be happy. I believed that selling millions of books would make me happy because it would free me of the corporate world. Then, I told myself, all my problems would be solved. I’ll experience untold bliss.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice how my unhappiness had very little to do with the corporate world. Blaming my job for my suffering was a little like blaming a stage for a bad play. I could have noticed that the actual cause of my unhappiness was my own internal drama, and my job was just the stage where it was being played out.

Having noticed this, I could have taken a step back from rabidly chasing after the goal of being a happy bestseller, and taken a look at the causes of my suffering. Had I done this, I might have noticed how Hope and Fear had starring roles in my personal drama. I might have noticed that everything I did was hooked into either desperate hope of success or desperate fear of failure.

In noticing this, I might have seen how my suffering was arising from a constant ping-pong back and forth between hoping for what I feared I wouldn’t get and fearing what I hoped wouldn’t happen.

Once I’d seen this, I could have taken a step back, breathed, and let a moment of peace and clarity arise in my confused mind. In that moment, I might have recognized that hope and fear were thoughts based on a fantasy future, an outcome I could never know. I might have noticed that even if I became a bestseller, I’d still be cruelly haunted by even bigger hopes and fears. I might have noticed that I could, at any time, choose to let go of both hope and fear, because my grip on them was all that gave them substance.

***

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

Here I find myself back with Salem. A funny thing’s happened with that particular mental representation. It’s no longer the biggest concern in my life.

As I deal with that particular drama in my life, my most helpful strategy has been to simply let go. And boy was that hard! In the beginning, I was determined to have things my way: I was sure that the only way was for her to smarten up.

As it turns out, I’m the one who smartened up. As I’ve dealt with this ongoing drama day in and day out, I’ve finally recognized that it was my own afflicted emotions that were drawing me in and hooking me. I recognized and experienced that I could make a choice not to go with those emotions. I began to see that the entire tempest in a teapot was being stirred by me chasing after one thing: wanting Salem to be different than what she is.

Yeah. Sure. One day she’ll wake up. But in the meantime, I’ve got work to do.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen that the only way for me to work with that situation is to “quit the whole rat race”. I do this by recognizing my afflicted emotions when they arise, experiencing fully that incredibly powerful tug to act on them…and then refraining. This is the only thing that has worked.

Sometimes I only have to do this once a day. Sometimes it’s moment to moment. But whenever I do it, I recite a verse of Dharma from my stack of index cards on my desk (the Dharma Brigade), and this re-focuses my mind. I’m able to see the rat race for what it is: an invitation to deepen my suffering in samsara. Each time I turn down the invitation, it’s easier to do it next time.

Afflicted emotions still arise, but not nearly with the strength or urgency they once did. I have by no means become Mother Teresa in that situation. The urge to throttle Salem still comes up, but these days I’m aware it’s a thought, and I’m more and more willing to give impermanence a chance to prove itself.

***

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

As I look for a new job, it’s hard to drop the ‘rat race’ point of view. Looking for a new job, there’s no way to avoid competition. Just in the act of applying, I’m already competing.

I think the biggest pitfall for me to work with in seeking a new job is the Panacea Outlook. It comes up again and again. I have constant thoughts that when I leave this job, I’ll escape Salem for good. I’ll be happier in my work day. But gradually, especially as I work with Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones, I’m coming to see that there’s only one way that any job (inside the corporate world or outside of it) will be the cause of happiness for me.

At this stage in my spiritual cultivation, a job will only be a cause of happiness if I can bring that job to the path. Sitting here in the early morning, in pre-dawn darkness, with city sounds outside and faraway, that seems very obvious. But when I’m caught up in the job-seeking drama, it’s easy to lose sight of that.

Little by little as I study the Dharma, contemplate, meditate, pray, and practice, I start to question my decision to leave my job at all. If I’m honest with myself, the driving reason behind leaving was to put Salem behind me. But not only do I now understand how impossible that is, I no longer have a need to do that.

I ask myself now, is it possible that I’m confusing quitting the whole rat race with leaving my job? And if what I really want to do is learn to rely on my own effort, isn’t the turbulence of my workplace the perfect training ground?

As I go to work tomorrow, I’ll take time to notice…where is the rat race happening? Is it happening in the building? The people I encounter? The emails I answer? If I left my job, aside from geography, what would change? Isn’t it all the path? Will my causes for happiness increase by exiting the situation of my job? Or is the thought of leaving a part of my rat race, my illusory pursuit of happiness?

Where is the rat race? It is, of course, an appearance in my confused mind. Tomorrow at work I can notice that when peace and clarity arises, the rat race dissolves, revealing its true illusory nature.

January 25, 2014 by dharma pen

On ruining our own lives…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the last two lines of verse eight of the root text. I made the assumption that the “essence of the Dhama” refers to the idea that the only way to be truly happy is to work for the happiness / enlightenment of all sentient beings. This contemplation is written from that point of view.

“

“Of course what we want is our own good,

So we have to be honest with our own selves:

If we don’t accomplish the essence of the Dharma for our own sake,

Won’t we be ruining our own life?”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

How many times do we say, “I’m doing this so that someone else can be happy? How much happiness I get out of this doesn’t really matter” and really, honest-to-god mean it? If we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is almost never. And if we do mean it, the underlying belief is that not wanting our own happiness will lead to being happy.

The Dharma teaches that the only way to successfully work for our own happiness is to work tirelessly for the happiness of others. How can that be? Isn’t that a total contradiction? Worse, isn’t that a kind of martyrdom?

Well, not exactly.

If we take a look, what’s being said is to work for the happiness of all sentient beings. That includes my happiness, too. That includes my enlightenment, too. That includes freeing myself from suffering, too.

Our idea of working solely for our own happiness or for the happiness of a very small family group comes from the wrong view of separation. Let’s say that we could somehow achieve our own happiness. That’s it. You’re there. You’ve arrived. You’re happy. Now what? Well, unless you live in a very tall, very isolated tower, or a in very deep cave, your happiness won’t last. As you go out into the world, you’ll find yourself clinging to your happiness in a world of suffering. You would soon find that your ‘happiness’ had become something to defend, rather than something to be enjoyed. And wouldn’t that ruin your own life, your happiness?

On the other hand, if we work for the happiness of others with the view that there is no separation between you and other, then there’s nothing to cling to. There’s nothing to hoard. How many of us have ever said to ourselves, “I found this really great wonderful thing, but I’m not going to share it with myself?”

No. Of course not. Once we recognize that separation is a wrong view, we see that the only way to work for our own happiness is to work for the happiness of the so-called ‘other’.

***

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

I went through a couple of years in my life, recovery, rebuilding my life, after a pretty hellish decade. During that time, my sole aim was to be happy. I didn’t think about anyone else. In fact, I tried vehemently to keep everyone else out of my happy world. I was on the Happiness Mission and it was all about me.

Looking back on those years, I can notice how I suffered quite a bit. Happiness was always elusive. Even though I was doing all the things I was told in twice-weekly therapy sessions—assert your independence, realize it wasn’t your fault, educate yourself about what happened, do small things for yourself, blah, blah, blah—I wasn’t happy. I’ll grant that I wasn’t suffering as much. But I didn’t walk away from my old life to turn the pot of my misery down from a hellish, vigorous boil to a roiling simmer.

This complete inability to find happiness I viewed as yet another of my personal failings. Looking back, I can notice that in fact, there was a great deal of happiness in my new life, but I spent all my time grasping onto it, holding on for dear life, afraid it would slip away. This led to a lot of suffering because of course, it did slip away, as everything does in the phenomenal world.

Had I been able to take just a half step back from my frantic grasping, I may have noticed how there were millions of women and men and children all over the world, just like me. And just like me, they wanted to be free of the misery they were living through. If I could have seen that, I might have noticed that working for my own happiness, working with my own karma, might mean that someday I would have a chance to help them find a way out.

I believe that had I worked this way, finding happiness would have become a less burdensome task and a far more joyous one, because I would have been working from the perspective of my own natural perfection.

***

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

The biggest ongoing situation in my life right now is finding a job. It is incredibly hard to stay grounded in the Dharma as I go through this process. I find myself with thoughts of laying ambush, “Just wait till I’m not here anymore…you’ll see”, or thoughts of my next job as the ultimate panacea, “When I get out of here, this happy bs will be over”. I find myself wishing for the suffering of others. These thoughts and afflicted emotions are very painful. In working toward my own happiness (being free of my current job), I am sowing the seeds of my own future unhappiness. Because of course, wherever I go, there I’ll be…with all my karmic formations.

If I take a step back from my desperate, clawing need to get out of my current job situation, I can notice that every single person I see at work every day is seeking happiness. I can notice that by feeding my thoughts of ambush and resentment, I am contributing to their suffering. I’m not particularly a happy-face at work. It will probably be to their great relief when I leave.

Having noticed these things, I can ask myself a few questions. Wouldn’t it be better to work toward the happiness of others, even now, in a place where I feel so miserable? If I’m able to do that, with just one person each day, then haven’t I increased my own happiness? Yes. I have. There’s no separation.

When I leave my job, when I leave this lifetime, what state of mind do I want to take with me? What obscurations do I want to travel with? Do I want to take with me a state of mind that is wrathful, vengeful, and actually seeds my future (or my next life) with unhappiness? Or, do I want to take with me a state of mind that cultivates working for my own happiness by working for the happiness of others?

Since there’s no real separation, whatever I do to others, I do to myself. From this point of view, am I not ruining any chance of my own happiness whenever I harbor thoughts of ambush, or resentment, or vengeance?

As Dilgo Khyentse says, it’s time to do myself a big favor, and think about it.

***

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

In about an hour, I have to go to work. That very thought fills me with despair and a brand of desperate unhappiness.

Today, as with every day, every moment of my life, I have a choice. I can work with this unhappiness in a way that will increase my suffering, or I can work with it in a way that will increase my peace and clarity. I’m already quite experienced with increasing my suffering. It works admirably well. So perhaps it’s time for a different approach.

When I go to work today, and these thoughts come up, I can realize that every person within my sight at that moment is feeling something similar. It may be a sick child, a bad marriage, a mortgage payment that can’t be made—whatever. The point is, just like me, they’re suffering. The point is, just like me, they want a way out of their suffering.

If I were walking down the street and I saw someone lying on the sidewalk bleeding, and in terrible pain, it wouldn’t occur to me to kick them in the wound, then go on my way. No. I would offer words of comfort. I would dial 911 and call for experts to come and alleviate this stranger’s suffering.

Today at work, I might remember that the people I see are no less wounded, and to my knowledge, none of them know the Dharma. None of them know there’s a way out of suffering.

But I do.

Today at work when afflicted emotions arise, I’m going to breathe and silently say, “May we all be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. May we all embrace happiness and the causes of happiness.” I don’t know if this will work, but I do know it will be better than what I’ve been doing up to now.

Through this experience of looking for a job, I’m coming to see that our wrong view includes the idea that there is a specific, localized cause of unhappiness. But this experience is teaching me that this isn’t so. The true cause of our suffering is samsara itself.

The true cause of our happiness, therefore, must be to work for the happiness of all sentient beings, which would dissolve samsara and the causes of it.

January 20, 2014 by dharma pen

On leaving everything behind…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the last two lines of verse seven of the root text.

“

“Not long ago, your consciousness was wandering alone,

Swept along by karma, it took this present birth.

Soon, like a hair pulled out of butter,

Leaving everything behind, you’ll go on again alone.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

We become attached to so many things in our life, not least of all our bodies. We live our lives as though attachment were some kind of cosmic Krazy Glue, and if we just became attached enough, we could magically keep all the things, and people, and animals, and states of mind that we become attached to forever. But attachment isn’t magic. It’s poison. It slowly, over a lifetime, poisons our view by deluding us into believing that all we see, hear, and experience has some inherent, lasting reality. Attachment deludes us into believing that samsara is how things have always been, and how they will always be.

But these lines remind us that who we truly are doesn’t belong in samsara any more than a strand of hair belongs in butter. Or to use a 21^st century Texan analogy, who we truly are doesn’t belong in samsara any more than an apartment building belongs in the middle of I-75. If that were to happen somehow, we’d immediately recognize it as ‘wrong,’, ‘not belonging’, and immediate steps would be taken to remove the building. Why? Because the nature of I-75 is for cars to be able to move freely from one place to another without impediment.

In the same way, it is our nature to be perfect. No. We are already perfect, yet we find ourselves caught in the delusions of samsara. Since we are not of samsara, merely in it, it will sooner or later eject us; our true nature will cause us to be pulled out. When that happens, as it inevitably will, we will leave behind everything, including our bodies. These lines remind us that, as Jesus put it in one of the gospels, this world is not our home. This is not who we truly are. Therefore, no matter how attached we become, we will be pulled out, and all that we thought we had will fall away.

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

I thought I would write romance forever; especially after beginning to study the Dharma. I thought, no, there’s one thing in my life that will last forever. I’ll write romance till the day I die. And I’ll have the same passion I’ve always had to write it.

Today, as I write this, I see that it’s true: nothing lasts forever, no matter how much we want it to. I still write romance, but nowadays I see it as a business transaction, a way to make money and get out of debt, then stop. The most important lesson I’m learning in writing romance is that there will come a day when I simply can’t bear to write it anymore.

Looking back on the time when I thought I’d write romance forever, unto the very end of time itself, I can see how attached I’d become to the idea of writing romance forever. Here was something in the whirlwind we call life that was rock steady. I could count on it not changing, just staying the same forever. I can notice that as I changed, what I wrote couldn’t change (because forever means NO CHANGE), and so fiction writing became more of a burden than a pleasure. It gradually became an artifact into which I had to breathe life, a kind of living fossil in my life.

Having noticed that, I could have taken a step back and noticed that the real issue, what was causing me suffering, was that I didn’t want to leave behind the idea of being a romance writer. I could have noticed that more effort went into sustaining that idea than went into the actual (mediocre) writing of the stories. Seeing this, I could have worked with letting go of the idea of writing romance. I could have gradually worked with that attachment, touched in on the incredible pain that comes with attachment, the fear, the angst, and just asked myself, were those habits the kind of habits I wanted to strengthen? I could have asked myself, in a month, or a year from now, do I want to be more attached to this idea or less attached? I could have noticed that attachment is a choice, and I was choosing suffering over peace and clarity.

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

Writing has been the single most important thing in my life since about the fourth grade when I first saw the movie The Diary of Anne Frank and decided I wanted a journal. Today I still write fiction. But I write it from a different perspective.

I no longer have the wrong view that I’ll write romance forever. I have the realization that I’ll probably write the rest of this lifetime, but I have no idea what I’ll write. In working with writing this way, coming very slowly to the wisdom that it is impermanent, insubstantial, it gives me a way to work with what these lines are trying to get us to see.

If all that we experience is a mental representation, then all of us were drawn back to samsara by our attachment to an idea. Whether it’s an idea of fear, of wealth, of love, of victory—it doesn’t matter. Since all phenomena lack inherent existence, we will sooner or later come free, come unmoored from whatever we’re attached to. And the moment that happens, “like a hair pulled from butter”, we’ll “leave everything behind” and go on alone. This happens at certain stages in our lives, whether it’s a divorce, sending our kids off to college or leaving a job. We go on alone.

Even if we can avoid ever going through any of those situations, no one can avoid death. Kings die. Paupers die. We all die, and we go on alone.

I have come to regard fiction writing as something that is both pleasurable and profitable. But each day, I work with being less and less attached to it. I remind myself that it’s impermanent, insubstantial. Doing this was at first quite terrifying. But now I’m finding that letting go has a certain exhilarating quality to it, as though I’m living that part of my life as it was intended to be: moving toward having neither hope nor fear of the outcome.

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

I’m reading a book about Henry VIII. For a man of his time, he had everything: wealth, power, good looks, women. But the one thing he couldn’t have was a male heir. Then toward the end of his life, in an age without opiate painkillers, he spent nearly every waking moment in terrible pain. Death, when it came, must have been a relief.

In the west, we’re very conditioned to believe that leaving things behind is a bad thing. Oh sure, we give lip service to “time to move on”. But what we actually do is hang on by our fingernails until things get so bad, it’s unbearable not to move on.

This is what I’ve done at my work place. I blame Salem a lot, but I’m coming to see that she’s just what’s pulling me out of that particularly rancid butter. From this I am learning how attached we can become to our own suffering. Even though I literally have anxiety attacks so bad that it’s hard to breathe just at the thought of going to work, I don’t want to leave my job. I want to stay because it’s the evil I know.

On Tuesday when I go to work, I can notice how every irritant that comes up is simply me being yanked out of the butter. I can notice how utterly attached I am to all the time I’ve put in there. I can notice how it’s terrifying to think of leaving everything behind and going on alone.

As these emotions come up and I work with attachment, I can notice how one day it won’t be a job I’m leaving behind. One day it’ll be my body I’m leaving behind. And the more attached I am to anything at all (like being a romance writer), the harder that will be, and the more likely I’ll be to wander alone and end up getting swept along by my karma right back into samsara, into the cycle of birth and death.

Again.

January 15, 2014 by dharma pen

On wandering alone…

Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the first two lines of verse 7 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Not long ago, your consciousness was wandering along,

Swept along by karma, it took this present birth.

Soon, like a hair pulled out of butter,

Leaving everything behind, you’ll go on alone.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

“Consciousness” and “alone” both imply duality. You cannot be alone unless there is something or someone to be alone from. “Consciousness” demands an object to be conscious of. This first line talks about our experience in the bardo after the death of the body.

Our thought stream continues, uninterrupted, much the same way our thoughts continue uninterrupted, and far more vivid, when we sleep. So, what’s wandering? I think it’s ground consciousness, all our habits, our karmic formations, still held very tightly together like a ball of tightly tangled yarn that rolls along in the bardo, probably careening off the walls.

tornado

This thought stream must project a pretty terrifying reality, because here we find ourselves, driven out of the bardo, right back into the cycle of birth and death again. We’ve all had a brief chance to escape, right at the moment of death, but we missed it, and our karma swept us back into the cycle of birth and death, like the tornado that swept Dorothy and Toto into Oz.

All that we experience is a mental representation in the mind. Our consciousness—our thoughts about who we are, what the world is—is always essentially alone. In the bardo, after death, all that will accompany us is our deeds, words, and actions: our karma.

We are alone in our wanderings through lifetime after lifetime, and we will wander alone after death. But, if we practice in our lifetime, we will have one unfailing support, even after death: the Dharma.

***

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

We spend entire lifetimes in samsara being swept along by karma. Not recognizing this, we plant the same seeds of unhappiness over and over, and then when the bitter fruit ripens and hangs low, we say, “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” Well, if it’s happening, it’s not so much that you deserve it, as much as your past actions have made it inevitable, unavoidable.

If I had had a better understanding of karma about four years ago, when I had an excellent opportunity to leave my current job, I would have left and not looked back. There was a situation at work that I chose to handle by digging in my heels and hanging on grimly to my workplace, choosing to move to a different position in the company.

Looking back at that time, I can notice how the very minute shift I made to a different position had done nothing but plant seeds for future suffering. I had not addressed anything but the external situation.

I can look back and see that, not only was it a bad change, my suffering increased and has continued to increase until I am in a kind of Dante-like Inferno, being devoured alive by fire-breathing demons.

If I look at the text, and bring it to the level of everyday life, what I see is that I used to regard leaving my job as a kind of death, as though I would be cast out to wander along in desolation beyond imagining. I let fear (my own karma) sweep me along into an unfortunate rebirth ( a new position in the same workplace) and now…the suffering has amplified tenfold.

I look back, and I see that I could have simply let go of clinging to my workplace as though I were a drowning man clinging to the Titanic’s wreckage.

If I had done that, my karma would have swept me along to a new birth. I don’t know what that would have been, but I believe it would have been less suffering than the suffering I have brought on by clinging grimly to a situation that is outworn.

***

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

Looking for a job is my ongoing situation, even when I’m not actively doing it.

I notice that my perspective on where I am now is subtly changing each day because I know I’m leaving. I view my current workplace more and more as a place to extricate myself from rather than as a place to vest myself in.

I am very mindful of how I work with afflicted emotions that arise like anger, frustration, resentment. I work very hard with these afflicted emotions because I know when I leave my current job, all I’ll take with me are my habits. Viewing my work situation as a road of exit is paradoxically leading to a more satisfying experience of being there. Why? Because everything that comes up, I see as an opportunity to practice, to become stronger in the habits I want to take with me when I go.

In samsara we are all walking a road of exit. No one gets out alive. Before we took a body, we wandered alone. We were driven by our fears, our desires, our clinging—in short, our karma, to return to samsara.

Knowing this, wouldn’t it better to live our life as what it really it is? Prayers remind us, “…I walk toward my end / A culprit to the scaffold.” Yes. Exactly. And knowing this, isn’t it best to live our life as a road of exit? I think this shift in perspective could lead to a very fulfilling life because every circumstance that came up would be a chance to practice and strengthen the habits we want to take with us when we exit.

Ultimately, of course, we don’t want to take any habits (karmic formations) into death. But I think living your life as a path of exit is a good place to start moving toward zero karma.

***

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

This one’s easy.

I’m going to die. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow…maybe next year, maybe in ten years.

I don’t think it matters that we don’t know our precise moment of expiration. That would be barbaric actually, like what they do to Death Row prisoners.

I believe that for my spiritual path to take on more depth there needs to be a move from the intellectual knowledge of death to the wisdom of realizing my own approaching death.

This wisdom can be wonderfully liberating, because then my feet would be on a road of exit. In the small-scale exit from my workplace, I’ve found the wisdom of exit gives me so much clarity and a growing equanimity in that situation. I would like that same clarity and equanimity in samsara.

I study, contemplate, meditate, but not seriously. Certainly not as much as I could.

So today, to make this more immediate, I’m going to experiment. Throughout the day, I’ll gently, compassionately remind myself that each step I take, each act I do, each thought—I am walking toward my end. And seen from that perspective, how is what I’m doing strengthening a good habit? How am I preparing for the moment when I will find myself untethered from this body and wandering alone in the bardo?

Sounds kinda creepy.

But I’m very curious about the outcome of today’s experiment in living life as a path of exit. My prediction is that it will lead to living life more fully…but…we’ll see.

As I study the Dharma, I tend to think of rebirth as something big and grand and so incredibly amazing that it can only, exclusively happen after death. But, as I study more, I see that rebirth is something that happens every moment. Every breath we take is brand new. Every thought is brand new. We are constantly, unceasingly being reborn into a new life. Therefore at any moment, we have a chance to shift our karma by planting seeds (causes) of happiness and allowing seeds (causes) of suffering to wither.

If we do this diligently, with fervor, I wonder if that means that eventually the wind of our karma would blow us beyond the cycle of birth and death? Or, would there eventually be no wind at all, and we could go where we wanted?

January 12, 2014 by dharma pen

On the land of man-eating demons…

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 two lines of verse 6 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Alas! How depressing to see the beings of this degenerate age!

Alas! Can anyone trust what anyone says?

It’s like living in a land of vicious man-eating demons–

Think about it, and do yourself a big favor.”

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Okay. So, seriously, I haven’t seen any man-eating demons lately. Or have I? Things in our world seem very normal to us because we don’t really spend any time thinking about how things are. We’re kind of like fish in an ocean who stop seeing the water because…well…doesn’t everyone breathe water? Isn’t that just how things are?

Not exactly.

We have entire industries whose sole purpose is to create a world that doesn’t exist. How do they do that? It’s kind of easy. They hide bad, ugly, things–the things no one wants to think about. We could call all of these industries by one name, according to their purpose. They are the Institutes of Don’t Blow My Trip.

And what’s our trip in America? Perfection and beauty at whatever the cost.

Prisons hide the people whose unskillful acts were so egregious they got snagged by the so-called justice system.

We have nursing homes because well…getting old is scary. It’s unavoidable. Unless you die. And let’s not even go there. Instead, let’s put those suffering from old age far away. Let’s put hide them in “communities” like those Century Village ghettoes.

Funeral homes. Now this is big business. Let’s hide the dead. After all, who wants to even think about dying when there’s life to be lived, and retirement plans to be saved for?

The Institutes of Don’t Blow My Trip are everywhere, like frosting on rotten cake. We don’t have man-eating demons walking around demanding our flesh, but look where we find ourselves.

Our true nature is perfection. Yet we find ourselves locked into the cycle of birth and death, suffering the pangs of age and disease lifetime after lifetime. Talk about the wrong side of town. We’re surrounded by man-eating demons who lure us through lifetime after lifetime, promising that if we just chase after one more chimera, this time we’ll find lasting, permanent happiness.

No.

We won’t.

It’s time to do ourselves a favor and think about that.

***

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

The last book I finished writing was my biggest insight into how easy it is to fool ourselves into believing that lasting, permanent happiness can be found in samsara. I wrote that book fully with the intent of it being the book that would start my writing career. I focused all my energies on writing it.

What I can notice looking back at those two years of my life is that not only was I surrounded by man-eating demons, I was feeding them with my expectations. The demons were getting fatter and fatter as I finished the book. By the time it was finished, they were King Kong size. When they turned on me, I was already caught in their gnashing teeth of disappointment and disillusion before I recognized them for what they were: chimeras in samsara.

When I see myself in that time of my life, I can notice how absolutely blinded I was by the idea of escaping the corporate world and finding (at last) permanent happiness in moving from e-books to print books. I can notice that I was feeding an illusion, that I was setting a HUGE appointment with disappointment. Having noticed that, I could have taken a step back from the book project and asked myself a few questions.

Who are the writers on the New York Times Bestseller list? Well, basically, they’re people with extraordinary karma that happens to manifest in being a bestselling writer because the causes and conditions are right in this lifetime. It has little to do with writing talent, and much to do with “luck”.

Would I really want to spend the next 10, 20, 30 years of my life writing about vampires? And it would have to be vampires. The reading public typecasts writers and they’re extremely unforgiving of changes in story genre. Unforgiving as in, your books won’t sell, and your publisher will not renew your contract.

What would I accomplish by changing my outer situation? After all, where I go, I take my man-eating demons with me, right? Was the corporate world the problem?

Had I taken a step back at any time in the process of writing a book that I no longer care about, I could have ended my suffering much sooner.

***

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

The ongoing situation in my life right now is working with Salem [a co-worker] day in and day out. In working with the ‘Salem’ state of mind this week, I was able to see it as an unending process, rather than as a problem to be solved and somehow set aside, out of my way. Can’t she see I’m on a spiritual path here and I have bigger fish to fry? Bigger dragons to slay?

The text talks about a land of vicious man-eating demons, which is what my mind can feel like when Salem triggers me. But in that context, I’m learning that the man-eating demons can’t really pounce on me and devour me. They have no power unless I empower them with my discursive thoughts and lie down and feed myself to them. And that hurts. A lot.

This week, I found a better way. It was so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. All I did was stop trying to outrun the demons. I’d say to myself…what is the state of my mind right now? Anger. (or aggression or resentment or …whatever) And…that’s okay. Then I’d do mantra, breathe, teach myself the Dharma on the spot. All this time, I’ve been viewing the arising of afflicted emotions as a failure on my part—I’m not doing this whole Dharma thing right or else I wouldn’t be thinking homicidal thoughts right now. Okay. Homicidal is an exaggeration, but thoughts of consignment to Dante-like Hell for Salem is a pretty close description of my state of mind.

What I discovered this week is that the man-eating demons lose their power when we acknowledge them, in other words, when we see them. But seeing them is a process, not a one-time thing. I also noticed that the man-eating demons were blinding me. There were long moments this week when I felt great compassion for Salem, and how she is utterly driven by her afflicted emotions, particularly fear. Those moments are getting more frequent and they last longer.

From my experience this week, I’m starting to see that the power of acknowledgement is true in samsara in general. How different would our lives be if we just said—You know what? I’m going to get old if I live long enough. And no matter how long I live, I’m going to die. No matter hard I look, I’m not going to find lasting happiness in a better job, a nicer car, a nicer house, a less-wrinkled face. So why don’t I just turn my energies elsewhere?

I think seeing the suffering of living in samsara for what it is—continuous and without end—and accepting that, liberates us from fighting the truth of things and lets us go looking for the truth of things.

***

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

So, this week I feel like I’ve made a big discovery, or maybe it’s more like I experienced an idea I knew intellectually. We are all living in a land of vicious man-eating demons. Seeing these demons for what they are is a process, it’s the beginning of our path, maybe even the root of our first yearnings for renunciation.

Having noticed this, when I go to work tomorrow, I will view the afflicted emotions that Salem triggers differently. For one thing, I know I’m leaving my job. That is definitely a road of exit for me. So really, the only purpose Salem can serve at this stage in my life and in my spiritual growth is to blow my trip, over and over and over again. Every time I start thinking—wow, this Dharma stuff is easy. Say a few prayers, do a little meditation, a little contemplation, a little study and, voila! Life On Buddha—Salem will be there to remind me that I ain’t all that, and it ain’t that easy.

When I work with that situation this week, I’ll work with letting go of ‘if I were getting this Dharma stuff right, I wouldn’t want to throttle her’. That just feeds the man-eating demons of disappointment. Instead I’ll work with seeing that anger, aggression, frustration arise. They just do. That’s where I am in working with my karmic formations right now. Okay. All right then. It’s happened. I catch myself feeding anger with discursive thought. Now what? Acknowledge, mantra, breath, teach myself the Dharma. Repeat as needed.

I don’t know if this will work. I never do. But nevertheless, it is a great comfort just knowing there is a method I can apply. It’s so much better than feeling enslaved or imprisoned or defeated by my afflicted emotions. And the truth is, that for the rest of the time I have left in this body, there will be a Salem. In this land of vicious man-eating demons where ninety-nine percent of the people you meet are completely enslaved by their afflicted emotions, ‘Salem’ is inevitable.

And the wonderful thing about the text is that it gives us a remedy for where we find ourselves, caught between birth and death, drawing farther from one with each breath, and hoping like hell to outrun the other. The remedy? Do ourselves a big favor, and think about it.

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