mind

On peace. . .
by

On peace. . .

May all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all embrace happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all abide in peace, free from self grasping
May all attain the union of wisdom and compassion.

What does this mean to me?

Who doesn’t want a little more peace in their life? Imagine someone came up to you and said, “here’s a recipe for peace”. What would be in that recipe? Would it be “listen to more opera” or “get more sleep” or maybe even “watch the news more”? That last one’s a joke, of course.

My local friendly AI tells me that peace is, among other things, “a state of tranquility and quiet.” That’s a good hint. Peace is a state of mind. So how does this peace arise in the mind? What are the causes and conditions?

The truth is, the mind is always at peace, like a clear storm-free sky. Hard to believe, right? Emotions, thoughts, desires are all like clouds in that clear blue sky. Peace isn’t imported from outside, it’s inherent. It’s always there. We don’t have to go anywhere special to abide in peace. We can abide in peace by freeing our minds of two pretty big, dark clouds: wrong views and afflicted emotions.

How would I explain this to someone else?

If you had to clean a mahogany floor that had decades of grit and dirt and stains ground into it, what’s the first thing you’d do? We may think the first step should be to get cleaning supplies. But there’s a step before that. The very first thing we have to do is realize that under all that dirt and grime, there is a clean wooden floor. If not, why bother cleaning? We have this realization without thinking about it. We know very well there’s a clean wooden floor there. All we’re doing is uncovering it.

In the same way, the mind is peaceful. The mind is not our turbulent thoughts or our afflicted emotions. When we work with the mind, we call our cleaning stuff prayers, meditation, aspirations, perseverance, and many other names. This prayer tells us that when we are “free from self-grasping”, we abide in peace.

What’s this self-grasping stuff? Can you really grasp yourself so tightly that you have no peace? We sure can. It’s things both big and small.

There are countless ways to grasp onto the self. Perhaps the self-grasping that causes the most suffering, is the distorted concept of “me” and “mine”. This is the biggest departure from peace. It gives us the strong desire to change reality.

This happens all the time at work. I get a lot of emails throughout the day. Sooner or later the thought comes, “I wish they’d stop emailing me!” The truth is that clients are emailing the company I work for. They could care less who responds, as long as it’s from the company I work for. At work, the email deluge isn’t happening to me, it’s just happening.

Clinging to the mistaken concepts of “me” and “mine”, we want to change reality. A more helpful thought would be, “How can I best respond so that clients don’t have to email again?” or “How can I document my files so that people have less causes to email the company?”

Self-grasping is the idea that when reality is not to our liking, we must take drastic, definitive action to change reality. This leads to a great deal of suffering. And of course, peace and suffering cannot coexist. It is the stormy conditions of the mind that need to be changed, not reality.

How would I use this in my daily life?

In my day to day life, I try to abide in peace. But honestly, it’s hard work. As soon as reality becomes inconvenient, I have the nearly irresistible urge to change it. I work with this by breathing and mentally taking a few steps back. I ask myself the question, “How much do I want to suffer?”

As we walk the path, how do we abide in more peace, with less self-grasping? A good start is working with the mind. If I want to suffer lots, I can continue on my futile path to trying to change reality. If I want to suffer less, I can work with changing conditions in my mind. As Pema Chodron puts it, “sounds easy, is not”.

The mind in its natural state is free from self-grasping. The more we learn to recognize the mind free of the stains of wrong views and afflicted emotions, the more we can resonate with our true state through prayers, meditation, or perhaps even smelling a flower. The more often we resonate with the mind’s natural state, the closer we come to abiding in peace, free from self-grasping.

What are your thoughts?

by

On the root of delusion…

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.

heart treasure

“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)

lottery ballsI 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.dracula coffin

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.

keyholeThis 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.

bell and book

Photo Credit: Tadas Juras

by

On the turbulent vortex…

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

heart treasure

“

“As thoughts and the two obscurations are pacified,

Experience and realization increase;

As your perceptions come under control, enemies and

Obstructing influences are subjugated.

It is Chenrezi who bestows in this very life the supreme

And common siddhis;

As the four activities are accomplished by themselves,

Recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

 Full Disclosure:

I found it hard to contemplate something that doesn’t actually exist without slipping into treating it and speaking of it as though it does exist.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

mad scientistWhen I think of controlling the mind, the first thought that comes up is a man strapped into a chair wearing a metal helmet with lots of wires coming out of it going to huge machines with blinking lights on them, like in a 1950’s sci-fi movie complete with spooky music, and a Vincent Price mad scientist type saying, “…I now control your mind, Mr. Smith, your very mind! You will do as I command…”

In real life, it’s not that easy. The ‘machine’ we have for controlling our minds is Mind Training. No blinking lights. No mad scientist. But you can supply your own spooky music if you want. When I first started mind training, I thought…how hard can this be? Memorize a few prayers, learn a few remedies and—voila!—a well-trained mind. Now, some two years into it, I’m starting to realize a few hard truths.

First among them and perhaps most startling is that the ‘mind’ as such doesn’t exist. Except that it does. But it doesn’t. And once you realize space and time are merely concepts made up by the mind, which itself doesn’t exist, you come to see that the ‘mind’ can both exist and not exist in the same moment. At first, this confused the heck out of me. I mean, come on, we live in a world of zeroes and ones, don’t we? The question is always is you is, or is you ain’t, isn’t it? It’s either a zero or a one, right? It’s got to be negative or positive, doesn’t it? It can’t be both, can it?

The answer is yes…and no. Dilgo Khyentse describes mind like this, “What we normally call the mind is the deluded mind, a turbulent vortex of thoughts whipped up by attachment, anger, and ignorance.” Well, that made me feel all kinds of better. When I think my mind exists, I’m deluded. But then I thought about it. That’s how things really are, isn’t it? Our eyes merely transmit information. They don’t ‘see’ anything. We see the world through our mind. And our mind is a little bit like that hundred years storm on Jupiter. Myriads of thoughts spin through our mind all the time, and anything we ‘see’ or perceive is being seen through the distorting and constant storm of afflicted emotions.

For something that doesn’t exist, the mind is pretty powerful, isn’t it? Or is it? What if we could calm that storm? What if we could recognize the absolute emptiness of all thought? Where would that leave us? I think it would leave us completely awakened, like a sleeper who wakes from a nightmare.

***

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

Is romance an emotion? I don’t think so. I think it’s a whole lot of emotions packaged into a single concept, and attachment is the glue that holds it all together. After all, who wants a thirty day romance? How about ninety days? No. It’s more like my sister used to say, “I mate for life. His or mine. He leaves me, he’s a dead man.” She was only half-joking.

vampireAs I went about life in my past, I was constantly seeking that ‘Forever Romance’. Of course, it never even occurred to me to question what kind of person would offer a guarantee of forever. I wanted that Forever Romance because I labored under the delusion that having it would make me ‘happy’. By happiness, I meant I wanted to stop the constant spinning tornadoes of thought that whirled ceaselessly through my mind. What ended up happening was the tornadoes I’d carried around up until then were absolutely blown away by the hurricane of emotions that comes with living with a sociopath.

Boy, howdy. It wasn’t no joke.

Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice that I had so little control over my perceptions, I didn’t even realize they were perceptions. I wholly believed whatever my mind spewed out. Whatever the delusion, I bought into it. And all the time, I was miserable because happiness constantly eluded me.

If I could have stopped for just a moment, and breathed, and had just a moment of peace and clarity, I would have seen that I was on the Titanic and the iceberg was dead ahead. If I could have noticed that much, even for just a moment, I might have been able to change the course of my life. Or at the very least, I may have noticed that I was the only one who could change the course of my life. I might have noticed that there were lifeboats all around. All I had to do was jump.

***

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

The biggest thing going on in my life right now is anxiety.

Our lives go through cycles. There are good times and…not so good times, right? The cycles in my life are very pronounced. I’m not sure why that is. It could be because I’ve always been an introspective, introverted person. Most of the time, my anxiety is there and I don’t really care that much. It’s like an annoying, buzzing fluorescent light—just loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to really bother about. With pharmaceutical assistance, the buzz has gotten even softer.

But then there are times like the past couple of weeks. How to explain anxiety at this level?

Okay. Imagine this.

You’re a time traveler. You know exactly what’s going to happen on the Titanic. And in some magical way you time travel back to the Titanic’s last night on the sea. You’re on board, and you know that in five minutes, the ship is going to hit the iceberg. Five minutes. There’s nothing you can do. You may survive the icy water, you may not. How would you know? You’re a time traveler, not a fortune teller. Five minutes to a watery death in frigid waters. Would you be anxious, or what?

That’s what it’s like for me to live with anxiety when it cycles up, like it is now. There’s this constant feeling of OH MY GOD! DOOM! DOOM! Imagine those last five minutes on the Titanic stretched out over days and days on end. Welcome to my world.

In dealing with anxiety at this heightened level, my practice is invaluable. It is such a tremendous sense of power to realize that just because it took me four hours to get out of bed (talk about not being a morning person!), the thought that I’m going to have a disaster of a day is exactly that—a thought.

In working with the latest cycle of anxiety, it’s a great relief to remind myself over and over of the emptiness of thoughts. In fact, the thoughts are so outrageously exaggerated, that it’s easy to see their emptiness. When I get caught up in the storms of anxiety, it’s easy to use mind training to clearly see that the obscurations arising are coming from my own mind.

In a sense, heightened levels of anxiety make it easy to experience perceptions as perceptions because my world becomes sofunhouse mirror distorted. Before I began studying the Dharma, the distortions were frightening. With the help of mind training and practice, I see the distortions as manifestations of what I’m learning about the mind. It’s kind of cool, because sometimes I feel like…will you look at that crazy thought? At those moments, I am entirely aware of the emptiness nature of thoughts in a way that’s impossible when my thoughts are more ‘normal’.

In a very real way, the anxiety-fueled storms that rage through my mind make the workings of mind nearly transparent to me. That transparency makes it easy to remember that I’m a child of illusion. It makes it easy to watch Tsunamis of emotion rise and fall, and feel them crash down around me. Does it still feel like I get knocked over and drown in all that emotion? You bet. But there’s something very powerful in being knocked over by a make-believe Tsunami. When you know it’s make-believe, you can’t drown in it. Once you’ve seen the transparency of thought, you can bring your perceptions under control and ride waves of anxiety on the surf board of the Dharma. And if you wipe out, so what? You’re not gonna drown. You just get right back on and ride the waves.

***

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

Yesterday, one of my dental bridges came out. If you’ve never had a bridge, imagine removing a Band Aid from a deep cut that’s almost healed. The skin’s real tender to the touch. My mouth feels like that where the bridge was. It’s not horrific pain, but it’s uncomfortable.

I made an appointment with the dentist, who can’t see me for another week and half. Don’t chew on that side, the dentist’s office told me, you could crack off the tooth that’s left, then you’d need an implant. Imagine hearing that in my Five Minutes on the Titanic state of mind.

I emailed my manager and let her know what day I needed to go to the dentist and why. She emails back and asks if I can push the appointment out further past September 2 because she’s going to be out, and Salem’s going to be out.

I read that and I wanted to throttle her. Seriously. I really did. Before I could stop myself, I emailed an unskillful response about it being an emergency appointment. Then I sent a second (more skillful) email saying that I’d check with the dentist for a new appointment.

I’ve already called and pushed the appointment back to early September. But this whole thing pissed me off. Staffing issues are not my problem. They made a decision to have a department with two people in it, but they don’t want to live with the consequences of a very unskillful decision.

I was able to get enough distance between me and my afflicted emotions to realize that what’s manifesting as irritation and resentment has nothing to do with Salem, the manager of that department, or my too-soon departed dental bridge. It has to do with me, and how much I truly, truly suffer each and every day at work.

So, having realized that, I know what to expect when I go to work in just a little bit. As soon as I pull into the garage I’ll experience aggression, resentment, and frustration. I’ll more likely than not feel like spitting on the manager if she gets within spitting distance.

When these afflicted emotions arise, I will remind myself that I am perceiving the world through the distorted lens of my afflicted emotions. I will make every effort to be aware of the afflicted emotions arising, instead of just getting caught up in them. I will be aware that what I’m experiencing is agitation in the mind. I will be aware that the ‘enemies’ I perceive are my own thoughts.

I will also be very quiet. Being in silence brings a tremendous amount of clarity. And since it’s quite uncomfortable to talk (cool air on exposed gum—not good), I’ll have the perfect reason to withdraw into silence. I will own my perceptions without buying into them.

As always with any mind training technique, I can’t know if this will work. But I do know that the Dharma is ever-constant and never-failing…even on the Titanic.

boy monk jumping