Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (11 page)

3. R
EMEDIAL ACTION.
The third part of confessing your neurotic activity is remedial action, doing something about the whole thing, doing some kind of practice to water the seed of wisdom, giving it the necessary moisture to grow. To see neurosis as neurosis, to have a sense of regret and to refrain, and then to do the practice helps to purify the whole situation. The practice traditionally suggested is to take refuge in the three jewels—the Buddha, the dharma, and the
sangha.

To take refuge in the Buddha is to take refuge in someone who let go of holding back, just as you can do. To take refuge in the dharma is to take refuge in all the teachings that encourage you and nurture your inherent ability to let go of holding back. And to take refuge in the sangha is to take refuge in the community of people who share this longing to let go and open rather than shield themselves. The support that we give each other as practitioners is not the usual kind of samsaric support in which we all join the same team and complain about someone else. It’s more that you’re on your own, completely alone, but it’s helpful to know that there are forty other people who are also going through this all by themselves. That’s very supportive and encouraging. Fundamentally, even though other people can give you support, you do it yourself, and that’s how you grow up in this process, rather than becoming more dependent.

4. RESOLUTION. The fourth aspect of laying down your evil action is the resolve not to repeat it. Again, this can be tricky if misunderstood: the point is not to be harsh with yourself. Don’t let an authoritarian inner voice tell you that if you do it again you’re going to get a lump of coal in the bottom of your stocking.

All four parts of this process come from confidence in your basic goodness. All four come out of some gentleness toward yourself because there’s already a sense of appreciation. You can regret your neurosis and open. You can refrain from doing it again because you don’t want to harm yourself anymore. You can practice because you have basic respect for yourself, and you wish to do what nurtures your sense of confidence and warriorship rather than what makes you feel more poverty-stricken and isolated. So, finally, resolving not to do it again becomes a complete surrender, the last stage in a fourfold process of opening further.

Feeding the ghosts.
So far we’ve described two of the practices in “Four practices are the best of methods”: accumulating merit and confessing our neurotic crimes, or purifying our neurosis through this fourfold process. The third practice is to feed the ghosts. This involves relating to your unreasonableness. The way you relate to it is by making a relationship with it. Traditionally, you make a little
torma
—a little cake—and you offer it. Maybe you offer it during a ceremony, maybe you put it out each morning, but in any case you physically offer something to the ghosts, the negative aspects of yourself.

When Trungpa Rinpoche talked about feeding the ghosts, he talked about unreasonableness that just pops up out of nowhere. Out of nowhere we are unbearably sad. Out of nowhere we’re furious and we want to destroy the place. He said, “Your fists are at your wife’s eyes.” What an image! Without a warning, unreasonableness just comes up out of nowhere—Bang!—there it is. Frequently it comes first thing in the morning, and then the whole day has that angry, pissed-off feeling. It’s the same with sadness, the same with passion.

This sudden unreasonableness that comes out of nowhere is called a
dön.
It wakes you up, and you should regard that as best, rather than try to get rid of the problem. So, on the outer level, you give the dön a cake. On the inner level, you see that a dön has risen, that it has all this force, but you refrain from blackening anybody’s eyes, from acting it out, and you also refrain from repressing it. You take the middle way yet again and let yourself be there with the full force of the dön. Being there has the power to purify you. That’s a description of 100 percent mindfulness.

Just as you accumulate merit by going beyond hope and fear and saying, “Let it be,” the same with the dön; there’s some sense of “let it be.” There is even an incantation that says, “Not only do I not want you to go away, you can come back any time you like. And here, have some cake.”

Personally, when I read that, I got sort of scared. The commentary said that you invite them back because they show you when you have lost your mindfulness. You invite them back because they remind you that you’ve spaced out. The döns wake you up. As long as you are mindful, no dön can arise. But they’re like cold germs, viruses; wherever there’s a gap—Boom!—in they come. The dön will refuse your invitation to come back as long as you’re awake and open, but the moment you start closing off, it will accept your invitation with pleasure and eat your cake anytime. That’s called feeding the ghosts.

Offering to the protectors.
The fourth practice is to offer to the protectors, or ask the protectors to help you with your practice. The protectors protect the principle of enlightenment; they protect our inherent wisdom, our inherent compassion. In
thangkas
—Tibetan scroll paintings—they appear as wrathful figures with flames coming out of them, big teeth and claws, and necklaces of skulls. The protectors are protecting against unkindness, against lapses of wisdom, against harshness and petty-mindedness, against fundamental insanity of any kind. The reason they appear so wrathful is that they’re not going to buy that stuff. And who is it that’s not going to buy that stuff? In truth, it’s your own wisdom.

Under this slogan comes the teaching on learning to appreciate the giant
No.
Again, this is based on respect for yourself, loving-kindness for yourself, which is to say, confidence in your basic goodness. When you start to close down and shut off, an abruptness occurs, which is basically the giant No. It is not authoritarian in the sense that somebody’s out to punish you. It is inherent encouragement not to spin off into neurotic stuff.

When anger or any other klesha arises, its basic energy is powerful, clean, and sharp and can cut through any neurosis. But usually we don’t stop at that. We usually spin off into what’s been called negative negativity, which is pettiness, resentment, aggression, righteous indignation. Then this protector aspect of the mind that protects your basic wisdom rears its flame-covered head and says
No.
Learning to appreciate the giant No comes out of compassion for yourself and is very similar to regretting, refraining, taking refuge in the three jewels, and resolving not to do it again.

Let’s say you’re all upset, you’re yelling at someone and they’re yelling back, there’s a big fight going on, you stomp out the door and slam it on your finger. That’s the essence of the protector principle. It wakes you up.

The outer practice is to offer to the protectors, the wisdom principle. Traditionally you offer cake. At the inner level, you’re inviting that principle to be alive and well in your being. You’re willing to practice in order to nurture your ability to know when you’re awake and when you’re falling asleep and to bring yourself back to the wakefulness of the present moment.

In the lojong teachings, the approach is that the best way to use unwanted circumstances on the path of enlightenment is not to resist but to lean into them. Befriending emotions or developing compassion for those embarrassing aspects of ourselves, the ones that we think of as sinful or bad, becomes the raw material, the juicy stuff with which we can work to awaken ourselves. The four practices are the best of methods for overcoming resistance, the best of methods for transforming bad circumstances into the way of enlightenment.

12

Empty Boat

I
HAD AN INTERVIEW
with someone who said she couldn’t meditate; it was impossible because she had real-life problems. In the meditation we’re doing we’re trying to bring home the very supportive message that real-life problems are the material for waking up, not the reason to stop trying. This is news you can use.

Today’s slogan is “Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.” This is a very interesting suggestion. These slogans are pointing out that we can awaken bodhichitta through everything, that nothing is an interruption. This slogan points out how interruptions themselves awaken us, how interruptions themselves—surprises, unexpected events, bolts out of the blue—can awaken us to the experience of both absolute and relative bodhichitta, to the open, spacious quality of our minds and the warmth of our hearts.

This is the slogan about surprises as gifts. These surprises can be pleasant or unpleasant; the main point is that they can stop our minds. You’re walking along and a snowball hits you on the side of the head. It stops your mind.

The slogan “Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence” goes along with this. Usually it is considered a slogan for when you’re sitting on the cushion meditating; you can then rest your mind in its natural, unbiased state. But the truth is that when the rug is pulled out the same thing happens: without any effort on our part, our mind finds itself resting in the nature of alaya.

I was being driven in a car one day, when a horn honked loudly from behind. A car comes up by my window and the driver’s face is purple and he’s shaking his fist at me—my window is rolled down and so is his—and he yells, “Get a job!” That one still stops my mind.

The instruction is that when something stops your mind, catch that moment of gap, that moment of big space, that moment of bewilderment, that moment of total astonishment, and let yourself rest in it a little longer than you ordinarily might.

Interestingly enough, this is also the instruction on how to die. The moment of death is apparently a major surprise. Perhaps you’ve heard this word
samadhi
(meditative absorption), that we remain in samadhi at the moment we die. What that means is that we can rest our minds in the nature of alaya. We can stay open and connect with the fresh, unbiased quality of our minds, which is given to us at the moment of our death. But it’s also given to us throughout every day of our lives! This gift is given to us by the unexpected circumstances referred to in this slogan.

After the gap, when you’ve begun to talk to yourself again—“That horrible person” or “Wasn’t that wonderful that he allowed me to rest my mind in the nature of alaya?”—you could catch yourself and start to do tonglen practice. If you’re veering off toward anger, resentment, any of the more unwanted “negative” feelings, getting really uptight and so forth, you could remember tonglen and the lojong logic and breathe in and get in touch with your feeling. Let the story line go and get in touch. If you start talking to yourself about what a wonderful thing just happened, you could remember and send that out and share that sense of delight.

Usually we’re so caught up in ourselves, we’re hanging on to ourselves so tightly, that it takes a Mack truck knocking us down to wake us up and stop our minds. But really, as you begin to practice, it could just take the wind blowing the curtain. The surprise can be something very gentle, just a shift of attention. Something just catches your eye and your attention shifts, and you can rest your mind in the nature of alaya. When you start talking to yourself again, you can practice tonglen.

The surprise comes in pleasant and unpleasant forms—it doesn’t really matter how. The point is that it comes out of the blue. You’re walking down the street, caught in tunnel vision—talking to yourself—and not noticing anything, and even the croak of a raven can wake you up out of your daydream, which is often very thick, very resentful. Something just pops it; a car backfires, and for a moment you look up and see the sky and people’s faces and traffic going by and the trees. Whatever is happening there, suddenly you see this big world outside of your tunnel vision.

I had an interesting experience of something surprising me like this on retreat. It was a very strong experience of shunyata, the complete emptiness of things. I had just finished my evening practice. I had been practicing all day, after which you might think I would be in a calm, saintly state of mind. But as I came out of my room and started to walk down the hall, I saw that in our serving area someone had left dirty dishes. I started to get really angry.

Now, in this retreat we put our name on our dishes. Everyone has a plate and a bowl and a mug and a knife and a fork and a spoon, and they all have our name on them. So I was walking down and I was trying to see whose name was on those dishes. I was already pretty sure whose name was on them, because there was only one woman of our group of eight who would leave such a mess. She was always just leaving things around for other people to clean up. Who did she think was going to wash these dishes, her mother? Did she think we were all her slaves? I was really getting into this. I was thinking, “I’ve known her for a long time, and everyone thinks she’s a senior practitioner, but actually she might as well have never meditated for the way she’s so inconsiderate of everybody else on this planet.”

When I got to the sink, I looked at the plate, and the name on it was “Pema,” and the name on the cup was “Pema,” and the name on the fork was “Pema,” and the name on the knife was “Pema.” It was all mine! Needless to say, that cut my trip considerably. It also stopped my mind.

There’s a Zen story in which a man is enjoying himself on a river at dusk. He sees another boat coming down the river toward him. At first it seems so nice to him that someone else is also enjoying the river on a nice summer evening. Then he realizes that the boat is coming right toward him, faster and faster. He begins to get upset and starts to yell, “Hey, hey, watch out! For Pete’s sake, turn aside!” But the boat just comes faster and faster, right toward him. By this time he’s standing up in his boat, screaming and shaking his fist, and then the boat smashes right into him. He sees that it’s an empty boat.

This is the classic story of our whole life situation. There are a lot of empty boats out there that we’re always screaming at and shaking our fists at. Instead, we could let them stop our minds. Even if they only stop our mind for one point one seconds, we can rest in that little gap. When the story line starts, we can do the tonglen practice of exchanging ourselves for others. In this way everything we meet has the potential to help us cultivate compassion and reconnect with the spacious, open quality of our minds.