Random Ramblings

This chapter is on the 6 paramitas, but I'm only going to do a few. Paramita means "going to the other shore," so they are transcendent actions that she says are kind of trainings for bodhisattva-hood. Before talking about them, she talks about how an important thing in such training is not to hold too much to fixed ideas, and gives the example of her own teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, who would spend months teaching a specific ritual precisely and then change things completely, to teach people not to get too attached to fixed ideas.

The 6 paramitas are generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and prajna (wisdom).

Starting with generosity: “When we feel inadequate and unworthy, we hoard things. We are so afraid afraid of losing, afraid of feeling even more poverty stricken than we already do. This stinginess is extremely sad. We could look into it and shed a tear that we grasp and cling so fearfully. This holding on causes us to suffer greatly. We wish her comfort, but instead we reinforce aversion, the sense of sin, and feeling that we are a hopeless case.

“The causes of aggression and fear begin to dissolve by themselves when we move past the poverty of holding back. So the basic idea of generosity is to train and thinking figure, to do ourselves the world's biggest favor and stop cultivating our own scheme. The more we experience fundamental richness, the more we can loosen our grip.

“This fundamental richness is available in each moment. The key is to relax: relax to a cloud in the sky, relax to a tiny bird with Gray wings, relax to the sound of the telephone ringing. We can see the simplicity in things as they are ... The journey of generosity is one of connecting with this wealth, cherishing it so profoundly that we are willing to begin to give away whatever blocks it... When one takes a formal bodhisattva vow, one percents a gift to the teacher as a focal point of the ceremony. The guidelines are to give something that's precious, something one finds difficult to part with period I once spent an entire day with a friend who was trying to decide what to give. As soon as he thought of something, his attachment for it would become intense period after a while, he was a nervous wreck. Just the thought of losing even one of his belongings was more than he could bear....

“Giving material goods can help people. If food is needed and we can give it, we do that. If shelter is needed, or books and medicine are needed, and we can give them, we do that. As best we can we can care for whoever needs our care. Nevertheless, the real transformation takes place when we let go of our attachments and give away what we think we can't.

“To dissolve the causes of aggression takes discipline, gentle yet precise discipline. Without the parameter of discipline, we simply don't have the support we need to evolve.... What we discipline is not our badness or our wrongness. What we discipline is any form of potential escape from reality. In other words discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment.... at the outer level, we could think of discipline as a structure, like a 30 minute meditation. Or a two hour class on the Dharma. Probably the best example is the meditation technique. We sit down in a certain position in an Rs faithful to that technique as possible. We Simply put light attention on the out breath over and over through mood swings, through memories, through dramas and boredom. This simple repetitive practice is like inviting our basic richness into our lives. So we follow the instruction just as centuries of meditators have done before.... discipline provides the support to slow down enough and be present enough so that we can live our lives without making a big mess.

“The power of the parameter of patients is that it is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path. By patience, we do not mean enduring- grin and bear it. In any situation, instead of reacting suddenly, we could chew it, smell it, look at it, and open ourselves to seeing what's there. The opposite of patience is aggression- the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what's happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.... One of the ways to practice patience is to do tonglen. When we want to make a sudden move, when we start to speed through life, when we feel we must have resolution, when someone yells at us and we feel insulted, we want to yell back or get even. We want to put out our poison. Instead we can connect with basic human restlessness, basic human aggression, by practicing tonglen for all beings.”

“The practice of tonglen- sending and receiving- is designed to awaken bodhichitta, to put us in touch with genuine noble heart. It is a practice of taking in pain and sending out pleasure and therefore completely turns around our well established habit of doing just the opposite.

“Tonglen is a practice of creating space, ventilating the atmosphere lives so people can breathe freely and relax. Whenever we encounter suffering in any form, the tone line instruction is to breathe it in with the wish that everyone could be free of pain. Whenever we encounter happiness in any form, the instruction is to breathe it out, send it out, with the wish that everyone could feel joy. It's a practice that allows people to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions.

“Bo and Sita Lozoff have been helping people in prison for over 20 years. They teach meditation, they gift talks, and in books and newsletters they give earthy and inspiring spiritual advice. Every day their mailbox is packed with letters from people doing time period every day the answer as many as they can. Sita told me that sometimes those letters would be so filled with misery that she would feel overwhelmed. Then, without ever having heard of tonglen, she just naturally began breathing in all the pain in those letters and sending out relief period....

“Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind-are drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented animals and friends. They're suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.

“In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It's as if the mountain pointed towards the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we moved toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions and awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”

This chapter is all about finding the dharma in the self, through meditative awareness on the nature of the self. She talks about the necessity of looking at yourself clearly.

“However, when we sit down to meditate and take an honest look at our minds, there is a tendency for it to become a rather morbid and depressing project. We can lose all sense of humor and sit with the grim determination to get to the bottom of this thinking mess. After a while when people have been practicing that way, they begin to feel so much guilt and distress that they just break down and they might say to someone they trust, where's the joy in all of this?

“So along with clear seeing, there's another important element, and that's kindness. It seems that without clarity and honesty we don't progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like you've been sucking on lemons. We become so caught up in introspection that we lose any contentment or gratitude we might have had. That's why there's so much emphasis on kindness.... learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important period the reason it's important is that fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we realize that everything and everyone is Buddha. We discover that everything is awake and everyone is awake. Everything is equally precious and whole and good and everyone is equally precious and whole and good. When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that's how we perceive the universe.”

Back to Pema Chodron, talking about the four maras.

The chapter talks about the buddha’s temptations by Mara while he's sitting to attain enlightenment. “The story goes that they shot swords and arrows at him, and that their weapons turned into flowers.”

What does this story mean? My understanding of it is that what we habitually regard as obstacles are not really our enemies, but rather our friends. What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us when we're stuck. What may appear to be an arrow or a sword we can actually experience as a flower. Whether we experience what happens to us as an obstacle and enemy or as a teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality. It depends on our relationship with ourselves.... Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it is taught us what we need to know. If we run 100 miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.”

Then she talks about the four maras. The first is pleasure seeking; The second is how we always try to recreate ourselves or gain ground back to be who we think we are. The third is how we use our emotions to keep ourselves dumb or asleep. The 4th is the fear of death. To expand on the first one, pleasure seeking works like this: “ when we feel embarrassed or awkward, when pain presents us itself to us in any form whatsoever, we run like crazy to try to become comfortable. Any obstacle we encounter has the power to completely pull the rug out, to completely pop the bubble of reality that we have come to regard as secure and certain. When we are threatened that way, we can't stand to feel the pain, the edginess, the anxiety, the queasiness in our stomach, the heat of anger rising, the bitter taste of resentment. Therefore we try to grasp something pleasant. We react with this tragically human habit of seeking pleasure and trying to avoid pain.”

“Instead of trying to avoid our uneasiness in off centeredness by running away at, we could begin to open our hearts to the human dilemma that causes so much misery in this world. We could realize that the way to turn this devaputra arrow into a flower is to open our hearts and look at how we try to escape. With enormous gentleness and clarity, we could look at how weak we are. In this way we can discover that what seems to be ugly is in fact a source of wisdom and is a way for us to reconnect with our basic wisdom mind.”

“The next Mara is how we react quote when the rug is pulled out from under us. We feel that we have lost everything that's good. We've been thrown out of the nest. We sail through space without a clue as to what's to happen next . We're in no man's land: we had it all together, working nicely, when suddenly the atomic bomb dropped and shattered our world into a million pieces. We don't know what's going to happen next or even where we are. Then we recreate ourselves. We return to solid ground of our self concept as quickly as possible. Trungpa Rinpoche used to call this nostalgia for samsara.

“Our whole world falls apart, and we've been given this great opportunity. However, we don't trust our basic wisdom mind enough to let it stay like that. Our habitual reaction is to want to get back to ourselves- even our anger, resentment, fear, or bewilderment. So we recreate our solid immovable personality as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble. Instead of tragedy or melodrama, this Mara is more like a situation comedy. Just as we are on the verge of really understanding something, allowing our heart to truly open, just as we have the opportunity to see clearly, we put on a Groucho Marx mask with fluffy eyebrows and a big nose. Then we refused to laugh or let go, because we might might discover-- who knows what. Again, this process does not have to be considered an obstacle or a problem. Even though it feels like an arrow or a sword, if we use it as an opportunity to become aware of how we try to recreate ourselves over and over again. It turns into a flower. We can allow ourselves to be inquisitive. If we're open about what has just happened and what will happen next, instead of struggling to reclaim our consciousness of who we are, we can touch into that mind of simply not knowing, which is basic wisdom mind.”

Three characteristics of existence
This chapter talks about the three truths of our existence: impermanence, suffering, and egolessness. Even though they accurately described the rock bottom qualities of our existence, these words sound threatening. It's easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there's nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful.

“Impermanence is the goodness of reality. Just as The Four Seasons are in continual flux, winter changing to spring to summer to autumn; Just as day becomes night, light becoming dark becoming light again- in the same way, everything is constantly evolving. In permanence is the essence of everything. It is babies becoming children, then teenagers, then adults, then old people, and somewhere along the way dropping dead. Impermanence is meeting and parting. It's falling in love and falling out of love. Impermanence is a bittersweet, like buying a new shirt and years later finding it as part of a patchwork quilt.

“People have respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; In fact we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We tried to resist it by making things that will last- forever we say- things that we don't have to wash, things that we don't have to iron. Somehow in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things....

“But what about suffering? Why would we celebrate suffering? Doesn't that sound masochistic? Our suffering is based so much on our fear of impermanence. Our pain is so rooted in our one sided, lopsided view of reality. Whoever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It's promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; They are inseparable. They can be celebrated. They are ordinary. Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; Pleasure is not a reward.”

It turns out that the rest of The Miracle of Mindfulness is just excerpts from Buddhist sutras, so I went back to Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart.

This chapter is on the 8 worldly dharmas, 4 pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, gain and loss. It is becoming entrapped in these 4 pairs of opposites that keeps us stuck in samsara. She points out, though, that our emotional reactions to certain things are all subjective; if someone says you are old, we might feel good if we are in a space where we want it to feel old, or we might feel bad if we've recently noticed wrinkles and Gray hair. “If we look closely at our mood swings, we'll notice that something always sets them off. We carry around a subjective reality that is continually triggering our emotional reactions.... the irony is that we make up the 8 worldly dharmas. We make them up in reaction to what happens to us in this world. They are nothing concrete in themselves.... we might feel that somehow we should try to eradicate these feelings of pleasure and pain, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace. A more practical approach would be to get to know them, see how they hook us, see how they aren't all that solid. Then the 8 worldly dharmas become the means for growing wiser as well as kinder and more content.”

She talks about paying attention to our emotions when we get caught up in drama and when we feel that energy, “to do our best to let thoughts dissolve and give ourselves a break. Beyond all that fuss and bother is a Big Sky. Right there in the middle of The Tempest, we can drop it and relax... Instead of automatically falling into habitual patterns, we can begin to notice how we react when someone praises us. When someone blames us how do we react? When we've lost something how do we react? When we feel we've gained something how do we react?... When we become inquisitive about these things, look into them, see who we are and what we do, with the curiosity of a young child, what might seem like a problem becomes a source of wisdom. Oddly enough, this curiosity begins to undercut what we call ego pain or self-centeredness, and we see more clearly. Usually we're just swept along by the pleasant or painful feelings. We’re swept away by them in both directions; We spin off in our habitual style, and we don't even notice what's happening. Before we know it, we've composed a novel on why someone is so wrong, or why we are so right, or why we must get such and such. When we begin to understand the whole process, it begins to lighten up considerably....
“This letting things go is sometimes called non attachment, but not with the cool, remote quality often associated with that word. This nonattachment has more kindness and more intimacy than that. It's actually a desire to know, like the questions of a three-year old. We want to know our pain so we can stop endlessly running. We want to know our pleasure so we can stop endlessly grasping. Then somehow our questions get bigger and our inquisitiveness more vast. We want to know about loss so we might understand other people when their lives are falling apart. We want to know about games so we might understand other people when they are delighted or when they get arrogant and puffed up and carried away.

“When we become more insightful and compassionate about how we ourselves get hooked, we spontaneously feel more tenderness for the human race. Knowing our own confusion, we're more willing and able to get our hands dirty and try to alleviate the confusion of others. If we don't look into hope and fear, seeing the thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows- if we don't train in sitting with that energy without getting snared by the drama, then we're always going to be afraid.”

I think I said I found the last chapter a little bit boring? Well, this chapter on hopelessness has so much stuff in it that I might have to break it up over several days to talk about. It's really interesting and quite challenging and I'm gonna quote a lot of it because I think it's pretty profound and interesting stuff.

“Turning your mind toward the Dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the Dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns towards the Dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.”
But for Pema Chodron, hopelessness isn’t a bad thing! It is in fact “the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope- that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be- we will never relax with where we are or who we are.... To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic period to seek for some lasting security is futile period to undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that there's someone out there is to blame for our pain- one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that those anywhere to hide.”

OK, this is pretty basic Buddhist stuff; the first noble truth of suffering, right? And yet it feels like it's taking it a step further by really embracing hopelessness as a starting point. “Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. We may still want to hold our trip together. We longed to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we've tried 1000 ways to hide and 1000 ways to tie up all the loose ends, and the ground just keeps moving under us. Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can't be done. Turning our minds towards the Dharma speeds up the process of discovery period at every turn we realize once again that it's completely hopeless- we can't get any ground under our feet.”

So once again, this seems like basic Buddhism, though put in a really stark way. Embracing hopelessness just seems, well, like despair. But then she gets really interesting in the next bit:

“The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including Buddhists and non Buddhists. Theism is a deep seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there's always going to be a babysitter available when we need one period we are all inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Non theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.

We sometimes think that Dharma is something outside of ourselves- something to believe in, something to measure up to. However, Dharma isn't a belief; It isn't dogma. It is total appreciation of impermanence and change period the teachings disintegrate when we try to grasp them. We have to experience them without hope. Many brave and compassionate people have experienced them and taught them. The message is fearless; Dharma was never meant to be a belief that we blindly follow. Dharma gives us nothing to hold on to at all. Nontheism is finally realizing that there's no babysitter that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone. Nontheism is realizing that it's not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth and the truth is inconvenient. New line new line for those who want something to hold on to you, life is even more inconvenient. From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope- hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their eat is not a very compassionate place.”

Dude. Dude. This is some pretty heavy stuff. Like, I get the point. Seeking security is part of the cause of suffering. But wow. Wow. This just seems such a stark way to put it. I mean in a sense, this teaching is still compatible with certain forms of theism that say God does not for example perform miracles. I feel like in a certain way this would be compatible with kushner's theism for example, but even he would say God is about giving hope, so maybe not.

At this particular moment, when I'm looking anywhere for hope given the current political situation, I don't know that this is a teaching I can embrace, but it is a really interesting way of finding hope in hopelessness, I guess?

I'm back to Pema Chodron. Today's chapters were about meditation techniques (posture, focusing on breath) and on maitri (loving-kindness to oneself and the world) and what that means in the context of meditation. She said that her teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, initially didn't give a lot of specific advice on meditation techniques, though the main thing was to use the out-breath as a focus, and whenever the mind wandered away (to anger, rage, fear, or other distractions), just label that "thoughts" and return to breathing. She says it's a form of maitri to oneself: not judging, not reacting, just observing and returning.

Reading Pema Chodron, I am struck by how her style is so very different than that of Thich Nhat Hanh. He seems in many ways like he’s trying to send you calm and peace, where she is trying to shake you up.

A couple quotes from the chapter entitled “when things fall apart “

“when things fall apart, and we’re on the verge of what we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that break and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings, as long as we believe that things last-that they don’t disintegrate. That they can be counted onto to satisfy our hunger for security. From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rugs been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep. Right now, in the very instant of groundlessness-is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness. “

“Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sounds itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off center, in between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught, and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, non-aggressive, open ended state of affairs.

To stay with that shaking us-to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge-that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately, catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves, one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteousness, indignation-harden in anyway, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect and ask ourselves, am I going to add the aggression in the world? Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, and am I going to practice peace or am I going to war?

I finished Start Where you Are today. I do have another work of Pema Chodron, but I think I'm going to take a break and next time move on to Thich Nhat Hanh, who I usually find inspiring.

Most of the chapters I read today were about practicing in the real world, where the reality of our experiences of other people and ourselves often clashes with our spiritual ideals, and the need to use that "squeeze" to improve our practice. She told a funny story about a hermit meditating in a cave for 20 years on patience who lost his patience almost immediately when he had a visitor--the point being that only in encounters with real people can we learn patience. The obstacles become our teachers.

She also mentioned the teaching of thinking that all living beings had once been our mothers, and how that never really resonated for her. I get that, because even though I have a good relationship with my mom, many people have narcissistic mothers, or abusive mothers, etc., so it's not a meditation that works for everyone.

I liked this quotation that came towards the very end of the book: "We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and "get it," but actually the truth sinks in like rain into very hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soften at our own speed. But when that happens, something has fundamentally changed in us. That hard earth has softened. It doesn't seem to happen by trying to get it or capture it. It happens by letting go; it happens by relaxing your mind, and it happens by the aspiration and longing to want to communicate with yourself and others. Each of us finds our own way."