Comfortable With Uncertainty (12 page)

Once I was shopping around for a spiritual path myself. In order to stop, I had to hear my teacher Chögyam Trungpa say that shopping around is an attempt to find security, an attempt to find a way to always feel good about yourself. You can hear the dharma from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you encounter a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it. In order to go deeper, there has to be a wholehearted commitment. You begin the warrior’s journey when you choose one path and stick to it. Then you let it put you through your changes. Without a commitment, the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or you’ll look for something else.

The question always remains: To what are we really committed? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life and the rest of the world so that it will give us security and confirmation? Or is our commitment to exploring deeper and deeper levels of letting go? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?

89

Three Methods for Working with Chaos

T
HERE ARE THREE
very practical ways for relating with difficult circumstances as the path of awakening and joy: no more struggle, poison as medicine, and regarding everything that arises as the manifestation of wisdom.

The first method is epitomized by meditation instruction. Whatever arises in our minds we look at directly, call it “thinking,” and go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the breath. When we encounter difficulties in our lives, we can continue to train in this way. We can drop the story line, slow down enough to just be present, let go of the multitude of judgments and schemes, and stop struggling.

Second, we can use poison as fuel for waking up. In general, this idea is introduced to us with tonglen. Instead of pushing difficult situations away, we can use them to connect with other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain. As one slogan puts it, “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of enlightenment.”

The third method for working with chaos is to regard whatever arises as the manifestation of awakened energy. We can regard ourselves as already awake; we can regard our world as already sacred. This view further encourages us to use everything in our lives as the basis for attaining enlightenment.

The world we find ourselves in, the person we think we are—these are our working bases. This charnel ground called life is the manifestation of wisdom. This wisdom is the basis of freedom and also the basis of confusion. In every moment, we make a choice: Which way do we go? How do we relate with the raw material of our existence?

90

On-the-Spot Equanimity

A
N ON-THE-SPOT
equanimity practice is to walk down the street with the intention of staying as awake as possible to whomever we meet. This is training in being emotionally honest with ourselves and becoming more available to others. As we pass people we simply notice whether we open up or shut down. We notice if we feel attraction, aversion, or indifference, without adding anything extra like self-judgment. We might feel compassion toward someone who looks depressed, or cheered up by someone who’s smiling to himself. We might feel fear and aversion for another person without even knowing why. Noticing where we open up and where we shut down—without praise or blame—is the basis of our practice. Practicing this way for even one block of a city street can be an eye-opener.

We can take the practice even further by using what comes up as the basis for empathy and understanding. Our own closed feelings like fear or revulsion thus become an opportunity to remember that others also get caught this way. Our open states like friendliness and delight can connect us very personally with the people that we pass on the streets. Either way, we are stretching our hearts.

91

The Truth Is Inconvenient

T
HE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
theism and nontheism is not whether one does or doesn’t believe in God. It’s an issue that applies to everyone, including both 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. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves.

Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. We sometimes think that Buddhist teachings are 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. 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. Just when you get a good one then he or she is gone. Nontheism is realizing that it isn’t just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

92

Abiding in the Fearless State

A
T A SPOT CALLED
Vulture Peak Mountain, the Buddha presented some revolutionary teachings on the wide-open, groundless dimension of our being, traditionally known as emptiness, absolute bodhichitta, or prajnaparamita.

Many of the students there already had a profound realization of impermanence and egolessness, the truth that nothing—including ourselves—is solid or predictable. They understood the suffering that results from grasping and fixation. They had learned this from Buddha himself; they had experienced its profundity in meditation. But the Buddha knew that our tendency to seek solid ground is deeply rooted. Ego can use anything to maintain the illusion of security, including the belief in insubstantiality and change.

So the Buddha did something shocking. With the teachings on emptiness he pulled the rug out completely, taking his students further into groundlessness. He told them that whatever they believed had to be let go, that dwelling upon any description of reality was a trap. The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to
anything
blocks wisdom.
Any
conclusions we might draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in unconditional openness, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.

This instruction—known as the
Heart Sutra—
is a teaching on fearlessness. To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear. Total fearlessness is full enlightenment—wholehearted, open-minded interaction with our world. Meanwhile we train in patiently moving in that direction. By learning to relax with groundlessness, we gradually connect with the mind that knows no fear.

93

The Essential Paradox

I
N THE
Heart Sutra
, one of the Buddha’s principal disciples, a monk named Shariputra, begins to question Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, asking, “In all the words and actions and thoughts of my life, how do I apply the prajnaparamita? What is the key to training in this practice? What view do I take?”

Avalokiteshvara answers with the most famous of Buddhist paradoxes: “Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.” His explanation, like the prajnaparamita itself, is inexpressible, indescribable, inconceivable. Form is that which simply
is
before we project our beliefs onto it. The prajnaparamita represents a completely fresh take, an unfettered mind where anything is possible.

“Form is emptiness” refers to our simple, direct relationship with the immediacy of experience. First we wipe away our preconceptions and then we even have to let go of our belief that we should look at things without preconceptions. In continuing to pull out our own rug, we understand the perfection of things just as they are.

But “emptiness also is form” turns the tables. Emptiness continually manifests as war and peace, as grief, birth, old age, sickness, and death, as well as joy. We are challenged to stay in touch with the heartthrobbing quality of being alive. That’s why we train in the relative bodhichitta practices of the four limitless qualities and tonglen. They help us to engage fully in the vividness of life with an open, unclouded mind. Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There’s no need to add anything extra.

94

Nothing to Hold On To

I
NSTRUCTIONS ON
mindfulness all point to the same thing: being right on the spot nails us. It nails us right to the point of time and space that we are in. When we stop there and don’t act out, don’t repress, don’t blame anyone else, and also don’t blame ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question with no conceptual answer. We also encounter ourselves.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find that something is not as 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.

The path of the warrior-bodhisattva is not about going to heaven or a place that’s really comfortable. Wanting to find a place where everything’s okay is just what keeps us miserable. Always looking for a way to have pleasure and avoid pain is how we keep ourselves in samsara. As long as we believe that there is something that will permanently satisfy our hunger for security, suffering is inevitable. The truth is that things are always in transition. “Nothing to hold on to” is the root of happiness. If we allow ourselves to rest here, we find that it is a tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. This is where the path of fearlessness lies.

95

Slogan: “Drive all blames into one”

D
RIVE ALL BLAMES
into one” is saying, instead of always blaming the other,
own
the feeling of blame,
own
the anger,
own
the loneliness, and make friends with it. Use tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.

I challenge you to experiment this way: drop the object of your emotion, do tonglen, and see if in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens. I have experimented with this, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while it seemed to me that it didn’t work. But as my trust grew, I found that that’s what happens—the intensity of the emotion lessens, and so does the duration. This happens because the ego begins to be ventilated. We are all primarily addicted to ME. This big solid ME begins to be aerated when we go against the grain and abide with our feelings instead of blaming the other.

The “one” in “Drive all blames into one” is our tendency to protect ourselves: ego-clinging. When we drive all blames into this tendency by staying with our feelings and feeling them fully, the ongoing monolithic ME begins to lighten up, because it is fabricated with our opinions, our moods, and a lot of ephemeral—but at the same time vivid and convincing—stuff.

96

This Very Moment Is the Perfect Teacher

A
S WE BECOME
more open, we might think that it’s going to take bigger catastrophes to make us want to exit in our habitual ways. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it’s the big ones that immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter the size, color, or shape of the catastrophe, the point is to continue to lean into the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than try to protect ourselves from it.

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” 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 dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom. It’s available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

97

Inviting Your Unfinished Business

Y
OU CAN BRING
all of your unfinished karmic business right into tonglen practice. In fact, you should invite it in. Suppose that you are involved in a horrific relationship: every time you think of a particular person you feel furious. That is very useful for tonglen! Or perhaps you feel depressed. It was all you could do to get out of bed today. You’re so depressed that you want to stay in bed for the rest of your life; you have considered hiding
under
your bed. That is very useful for tonglen practice. The specific fixation should be real, just like that.