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.”

“Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors--people who have a certain hunger to know what’s true--feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teaches where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

So this chapter is about how we want to escape from discomfort, from the things that we fear, from the things that have made us reach our limit. We run away through addiction, materialism, even hopes and fears. But she says the important thing is to continue meditating through all of these emotions and allow these feelings to be diagnostic.

“The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may just be to keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we feel exactly like Rinpoche’s attendants and freeze and terror. Our bodies freeze inside our minds. How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we’re feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it’s a noble way to live. It’s definitely the path of compassion, the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness. “

“The safest and most nurturing place to begin working with this way is during formal meditation. On the cushion, we begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing and of what it feels like to let the energy just be there. That is why it’s so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again. This shows the seeds that enable us to be more awake in the midst of every day chaos. It’s a gradual awakening, and it’s cumulative, but that’s actually what happens. We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation, so that will be more awake in our lives. “

So in meditation, we basically start to see ourselves clearly. We acknowledge whatever arises without judgment, “letting the thoughts, simply dissolve, and then go back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation. Up-and-coming all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsessed with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here. So girl room Pache puts it, we simply bring our mind back home. After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stopped, struggling and relaxed. We stopped talking to ourselves and come back to the freshness of the present moment.… In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal-quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that, sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience.“This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us. “is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on – that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not disassociate. Weakness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives. “

I’ve run out of books by Thich Nhat Hanh, so I am back to Pema Chodron, When things fall apart.

It’s interesting that the practices are so similar between the two teachers, yet the emphasis is really quite different. This chapter is about fear. She also does start with different techniques in Buddhism. “With insight meditation, we begin practicing mindfulness, being fully present with all our activities and thoughts. With Zen practice, we are teachings on emptiness and our challenge to connect with the open, unbounded clarity of mind. The Vajrayanana teachings introduce us to the notion of working with the energy of all situations, seeing whatever arises as inseparable from the awaken state. Any of these approaches might hook us in fuel or enthusiasm to explore further, but if we want to go beneath the surface and practice without hesitation, it is inevitable that at some point, we will experience fear.“

Later she says that fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. “During a long retreat, I had what seemed to be the earthshaking revelation that we cannot be in the present and run our storylines at the same time. It sounds pretty obvious, I know, but when you discover something like this for yourself, it changes you. Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder encourage. And so does fear. In fact, anyone who stands at the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place, and this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time. “

What we’re talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking at right in the eye – not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not gonna be much room for the arrogance that holding onto ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shut down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kind of discovery is that are made through practice. Have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.… As one student so eloquently put it, “Buddha nature, cleverly, disguised as fear, kicks her ass into being receptive. “

So the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.… The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find something that is not what we thought. That’s what we’re going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion – not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that Point to what life really is when we let things fall apart, and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.”