silence

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On a path of separation…

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

heart treasure

“

“Recitations, sadhanas, and powerful spells are just complications;

The all-inclusive six-syllable mantra is the very sound of the Dharma.

All sounds have never been other than the speech of Sublime Chenrezi;

Recognizing them as mantra, resounding yet void, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

 Full Disclosure:

This was a hard one! I’ve never thought of separation this way.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite TV shows was Bewitched. I was intrigued by the idea of spells and witchcraft, and that just one twitch of the nose could get you what you wanted. Or for the really big jobs, you could cast a spell.

BewitchedWhat I didn’t notice back then is that instantaneous satisfaction of desires only led to more and more complications. In fact, there were a few seasons’ worth of problems that instant gratification and long range spells couldn’t solve. These problems kept screenplay writers in jobs for years.

In going about our lives, we treat spirituality the same way, I think. Since I’ve come to Buddhism, my thinking has shifted from, ‘If I act right, God will be pleased and I’ll get what I want’ to a subtle form of, ‘If I meditate and practice and do recitations, then my karma will be purified, and I’ll get what I want.’

As an embodied being, as a former Christian in recovery, it’s extremely difficult to resist seeing spirituality as a kind of Super Discount Mall. Although it’s subtle, I sometimes catch myself thinking things along the lines of, When my karma’s purified, I’ll…Essentially, I’m thinking that when I get to the stage of being “Good”, then I’ll go shopping at the Super Discount Mall of spirituality and see what all that credit (merit) I’ve accumulated will get me.

However, as I work on my path, I’m beginning to learn the value of separation. I am beginning to think of a spiritual path less as something I find with Buddha-GPS and then follow to the very end to some ultimate goal of ecstatic enlightenment, complete with levitation and rays of light emanating from my widely opened, All Seeing Third Eye. Now I’m beginning to see the path more as a recovery of what already is.

When I lived in Fort Lauderdale, I saw the aftermath of many hurricanes. Sometimes there was so much debris, the roads were indistinguishable beneath the fallen trees, the shattered homes, the overturned cars. It was just one epic landscape of confusion, a massively entangled pile of wreckage that completely denied the very existence of a road of any kind. But little by little, crews would come by and drag things away, and then it would seem miraculous that under all that debris, the road was still there, unchanged. hurricane

I’m beginning to see the spiritual path this way, as a clearing away, a separation from debris left from lifetimes of storms of afflicted emotions and wrong views that have left the path utterly obscured. I no longer feel that I’m looking uncertainly for a path that may possibly be there and may possibly lead in the right direction. Rather, I feel more and more that the only spiritual path that will lead to enlightenment is the one which we diligently recover by patiently removing lifetimes worth of debris left behind by afflicted emotions and wrong views. As we do this, the path, which has been there all along, and whose very existence we have forgotten, will gradually reveal itself. I think the experience of recovering our Buddha Nature is an experience of separation.

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

clayWhen I first came to Texas, I was intent on ‘rebuilding my life’. Very well-meaning therapists kept telling me that I needed to ‘reclaim my life’. To my credit (and theirs), after much hard work, I did indeed rebuild and reclaim my life. Unfortunately, I built an exact replica of the life that had led to an unskillful relationship. And so my newly reclaimed, rebuilt life came complete with an extraordinarily unskillful relationship that nearly culminated in suicide.

From my perspective now, I can look back and notice that what I did when I moved to Texas was rebuild an exact replica of my life right up to the point where I met my previous Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde partner. Naturally, when I built my replica life—complete with unskillful habits and tendencies—Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dutifully came onto the stage of my life.

Had I been able to take a step back from my desperate need to have a ‘normal’ life, I might have noticed that I was cultivating the exact habits that had previously led to unspeakable misery. Rather than separating myself from my past, I was building a monument to it, preserving it. Having noticed this, I may have noticed that what I needed to do was work with my mind.

I may have noticed that rather than a job of rebuilding a fiction that had proven itself useless, I had a job of recovering who I truly was. Under all the debris of my past, there was something that called to me even then. Had I been able to pay more attention to that, I might have been able to begin working with the fossilized wreckage of my wrong views and afflicted emotions. I might have noticed that even though it felt good to rebuild on what was familiar, sooner or later the stench of building on rotting refuse would begin to permeate anything I built on such a foundation, and eventually it would sink under its own weight of illusion.

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

My work with silence in my life continues. In working with silence, it occurred to me this week after listening to my Dharma friend Tashi’s Dharma talk that what I’m working with doing is separating myself from random sounds coming into the mind. This separation has been very difficult. I feel like an addict in recovery. This past weekend, I put in a movie I’ve seen at least a thousand times, just to hear something.

But a funny thing happened. After the movie was over, I realized I liked the silence better. That realization has made me disneytake a look at this path of separation that I’ve stumbled across. The mind is a very noisy place. I mean really noisy. Think Disney World at peak season, or around Christmas: rides wooshing along, people talking, kids laughing and screaming, music, parades, fireworks, arguing parents. And that’s on a calm day.

Once you actually hear your own mind, you sort of wonder that it doesn’t drive us insane to live with that noise day in and day out.

What I’m learning on this path of separation from unnecessary noise is that most of what we say or hear are complications, unnecessary elaborations. I’m beginning to experience what’s always said—emptiness isn’t nothing. Silence isn’t the absence of sound. I’m beginning to experience silence as the possibility, the potential for all sounds to arise. In the silence I’ve found some very good habits arising, and some very unskillful ones are being revealed.

But gradually, I believe I’m beginning to hear the sound of the Dharma. I experience it as moments when there is no sound at all, inside or ‘outside’, but simultaneously there are all sounds. I don’t know how this paradox can be, but I think this experience may describe undistorted reality.

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

Tonight when I get home, I will want to do a thousand things.  This is one of the effects of being able to hear my mind more clearly in the silence. Believe me, my mind’s got plans. Tonight, I will want to: mix up a cookie recipe so the dough can rest until Thursday night; meditate & journal; do my blog; pay bills online; catch up on reading; do some prep reading for a Dharma writing project; review notes and a draft for a John Rain novella I’m working on, and oh—start thinking about weekend baking. Time for a new muffin recipe? Maybe.

To be clear about this, because of what time I get home, and how early I choose to wake up, I have a little less than two hours after work to eat, do whatever, then go to sleep. This week in working with this verse, I can see how these plans are elaborations, complications that needlessly arise from an agitated mind. I think in some way ruminating on the Crazy List is my personal mantra I use to escape the suffering of being at work.

If I pursue a path of separation today, it will be relatively easy to whittle down the list. I’m thinking that separation always begins with a question. Even in our ordinary lives, we have to ask ourselves, do I want to turn left and get greasy fries for dinner or do I want to turn right and go home and make a healthy salad?

I think on the spiritual path, the question is relatively easy. There are things I believe I want to do. Which of these things will be a step on my path to enlightenment? As soon as I shift my perspective with this question, the complications fall away. I am able to see with clarity the best way to spend the limited time I have after work. I’ve never done this before. The question I usually ask is…what activity will benefit the most people? Then I prioritize my list that way.

But I like better slimming down the list by focusing on separating myself (and my activities) from that which will not lead to my own enlightenment with the intent of liberating limitless sentient beings.

I don’t know what will happen tonight when I try this. But, just thinking of doing it this way gives rise to some clarity in the mind.
monk lighting candlesA little separation goes a long way.

 

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On meditating on one…

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

heart treasure

“The mind cannot cope with all the many visualization practices;

To meditate on one Sugata is to meditate on them all.

Whatever appears, appearances are the form of the Great Compassionate One;

In the realm of the deity’s body, apparent yet void, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

I found this verse very obscure to work with. Typically in my contemplations, the line or lines I want to write about will become apparent to me after I read over my notes from Tashi’s Dharma talk and then read Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary. But today was a little different. None of the lines spoke to me, so I started writing until one of them did. Watch out ahead for flying mind debris!

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

Sometimes when I study the Dharma, I feel like a girl exploring her grandmother’s attic, stuffed to the walls with really atticcool-looking stuff and I can’t imagine what it all used to be for. Then I take my newly discovered Alien Artifact downstairs only to have my grandmother tell me it’s an old-fashioned waffle iron, and it makes far better waffles than that wretched Martha Stewart junk pile fodder you can order off the TV. And then I start remembering those amazing waffles grandma used to make when I was a kid.

Studying the Dharma is like that for me sometimes. When I learn a new teaching, there’s a feeling of rediscovering something wonderful that I knew a long time ago, but I’ve since forgotten. Today’s line, “To meditate on one Sugata is to meditate on them all” is like that.

We spend so much time and energy trying to solve all our problems, running from one problem to the next like actors in some never ending melodrama. In truth, we have only two problems: afflicted emotions and wrong views. If we would stop chasing after the shadow puppets the mind throws up against the seemingly solid walls of our delusions, we would see this clearly.

When we think of the Buddhas, our wrong view of duality makes us see many Buddhas. But this is not so. It’s more like there’s Buddha-ment (to coin a word) emanating through samsara at every moment. No matter which emanation we meditate on, we are meditating on all of them. The fragmentation is an illusion.

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

When I was in college, I wanted to be out, done. When I was done, I wanted to run my own business. When I started my own business, I wanted to be a court reporter. When I was a year into being a court reporter, I wanted to be a writer. When I couldn’t write the next Great American Novel in a couple of months, I wanted to get married.

For years, my life went on and on like that: always being dissatisfied with what I had, then being even more dissatisfied with what I’d get. In a sense, the Relationship From Hell helped with this issue because I eventually became so focused on my own survival that there wasn’t room for much else in my mind.

wrecking ballHad I been able to take a step back from the mad dash through my life that eventually culminated in smashing into the shatteringly tough wall of surviving nearly ten years of a sociopath’s tender embrace, I may have noticed a few things.

What I thought I wanted was something I could settle into, something that would quell my restlessness. But what I actually needed to do was to spend some time working with my afflicted emotions and wrong views. They emanated through every imaginable aspect of my life. Had I been able to take a step back and just work with one (probably my afflicted emotions), I would have been able to make more skillful decisions about who to spend my life with. If I had been able to realize that the restless bustling of mind was like cloud cover against a clear blue sky, I may have begun to recover my Buddha Nature that much sooner.

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

When you first sit down to meditate, especially if the mind is agitated, the first thing you hear is noise. It’s a rush of thoughts that makes me think of New York’s Penn Station at 5:10 PM on a Friday afternoon: frantic, echoing chaos. In the new silence that I’m bringing into my life, mind seems suddenly very loud. By comparison, those first few minutes of meditation actually feel quieter.penn station

I never realized how much I relied on noise to mask whatever unpleasantness was going on in my mind. After an agitated day at work, I’d come home and turn on tinkling “meditation bells” or ocean sounds. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to draw attention away from mind’s discomfort and complaining after work.

Now, in the new silence that I’m cultivating, mind is much more apparent to me. I am beginning to see that, far from ‘complaining’ after work, mind is more like a freely flowing river that’s been dammed for most of the day. After that initial rush of thoughts and emotions (which I never used to allow), mind begins to settle into its own natural rhythms, which I find quite soothing. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to wonder if that rhythm isn’t just mind making its own white noise ‘music’. But that’s for another time.

Before I began cultivating silence in my life, it didn’t occur to me that by working with one thing in our lives, we are working with all things our lives. Maybe that’s why this line really resonates with me this morning. I’m beginning to understand that if we truly meditate on—I actually prefer the word ‘cultivate’ here—any one aspect of the Dharma, we are cultivating all of the Dharma and bringing all of it into our lives.

Since separation is a wrong view, any attempt we make, no matter how small is a little bit like looking at the sun through a prism. Even if you only see a single ray of light, it doesn’t matter because you’re getting to know the idea of ‘light’. Sooner or later you’ll realize the prism is just a skillful means to make sunlight visible. Once you know that, you’ll be able to perceive the incredible brilliance of the sun. Just so with our Buddha Nature. Even if we think we’re only cultivating one aspect of our Buddha Nature, to work with one aspect is to work with the entirety of the empty luminosity of who we truly are.

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

As I work with cultivating silence in my life, there suddenly seems to be more space. I mean literally. Not only does my mind feel more spacious, but physical spaces feel bigger too. When I bake, my kitchen feels bigger. When I’m reading or writing, my living room or bedroom feels bigger somehow. It’s as though all the noise I was adding (to an already noisy world) was actually making my world smaller. Is that possible? I don’t know. I can only go by my experience.

I am beginning to notice, in this new cultivation of silence, a feeling of less separation in my world, less fragmentation. In my afflicted emotions this means that the sharply edged divide between “good” and “bad” emotions is wearing away. In the way I see people, this means I’m somehow able to see their suffering with more precision. In response compassion spontaneously arises and many times it leads to a precise kind of wisdom of how to best relieve the suffering I see, or at the very least, how to not add to it.

Cultivating silence has led to so much unexpected light in previously dark corners of my mind and of my life. Honestly, I don’t know what to expect next, or even what to plan on working with next in all the new space. But I do know one thing for certain. It has been absolutely true in my experience with silence that “To meditate on one sugata is to meditate on them all.”

monk with candlesI thought I was taking silence for a test drive. But the experience is turning out to be that my Buddha Nature, through the vehicle of silence, is taking me for a test drive through my life. And what a ride it’s been so far. It’s like an all-inclusive tour through a life I’ve never taken the time to explore and now there are vistas of unknown hinterlands laid out before me.

So I think when I go to work today, I want to take this day to pay attention to how silence manifests in the workplace. Is the mind’s tendency to wander the known (and unknown) universe impacted? How? Am I able to see my Buddha Nature more clearly? What does that look like? And most importantly, I think, what is arising in all that new space, and what does it tell me about what my afflicted emotions and wrong views have been obscuring all this time?

 

Post Script:

I wrote this contemplation this morning, roughly twelve hours ago. During my day, I paid attention to the silence. What I noticed is something I’ve studied in the Dharma and heard about in teachings, but never really paid close attention to.

Yes. The world we experience is an internal representation. I thought I understood that. But I always thought this meant our world was defined by action, by what we do and what the perceived ‘other’ does. Today, for the first time, I was able to see that simply being still (silence) is the biggest ‘engine’ of making our world. This engine is infinite, unfathomable, and underlies every heartbeat, every breath, every moment. 

When I shared my contemplation with my Dharma friend Tashi, he put it much more simply: “Silence = Emptiness = Space = All possibilities.”

Yes, indeed.