Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (4 page)

When we say “Self-liberate even the antidote,” that’s encouragement to simply touch and then let go of whatever you come up with. Whatever bright solutions or big plans you come up with, just let them go, let them go, let them go. Whether you seem to have just uncovered the root of a whole life of misery or you’re thinking of a root beer float—whatever you’re thinking—let it go. When something pleasant comes up, instead of rushing around the room like a windup toy, you could just pause and notice, and let go. This technique provides a gentle approach that breaks up the solidity of thoughts and memories. If the memory was a strong one, you’ll probably find that something is left behind when the words go. When that happens, you’re getting closer to the heart. You’re getting closer to the bodhichitta.

These thoughts that come up, they’re not bad. Anyway, meditation isn’t about getting rid of thoughts—you’ll think forever. Nevertheless, if you follow the breath and label your thoughts, you learn to let things go. Beliefs of solidness, beliefs of emptiness, let it all go. If you learn to let things go, thoughts are no problem. But at this point, for most of us, our thoughts are very tied up with our identity, with our sense of problem and our sense of how things are.

The next absolute slogan is “Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence.” We can learn to let thoughts go and just rest our mind in its natural state, in alaya, which is a word that means the open primordial basis of all phenomena. We can rest in the fundamental openness and enjoy the display of whatever arises without making such a big deal.

So if you think that everything is solid, that’s one trap, and if you change that for a different belief system, that’s another trap. We have to pull the rug out from our belief systems altogether. We can do that by letting go of our beliefs, and also our sense of what is right and wrong, by just going back to the simplicity and the immediacy of our present experience, resting in the nature of alaya.

Let the World Speak for Itself

T
HE LAST
of the absolute bodhichitta slogans is “In postmeditation, be a child of illusion.” This slogan says that when you’re not formally practicing meditation—which is basically the whole rest of your life—you should be a child of illusion. This is a haunting and poetic image, not all that easy to define. The way it’s phrased tends to encourage you to not define it. The idea is that your experience after you finish sitting practice could be a fresh take, an ongoing opportunity to let go and lighten up.

This slogan has a lot to do with looking out and connecting with the atmosphere, with the environment that you’re in, with the quality of your experience. You realize that it’s not all that solid. There’s always something happening that you can’t pin down with words or thoughts. It’s like the first day of spring. There’s a special quality about that day; it is what it is, no matter what opinion you may have of it.

When we study Buddhism, we learn about the view and the meditation as supports for encouraging us to let go of ego and just be with things as they are. These absolute bodhichitta slogans present the view. “In postmeditation, be a child of illusion” or “Regard all dharmas as dreams” for example, are pithy reminders of an underlying way of looking at the world. You don’t exactly have to be able to grasp this view, but it points you in a certain direction. The suggestion that you view the world this way—as less than solid—sows seeds and wakes up certain aspects of your being.

Both the view and the meditation are great supports. They give you something to hold on to, even though all of the teachings are about not holding on to anything. We don’t just talk, we actually get down to it. That’s the practice, that’s the meditation. You can talk about lightening up till you’re purple in the face, but then you have the opportunity to practice lightening up with the outbreath, lightening up with the labeling. There is actual practice, a method that you’re given, a discipline.

The view and the meditation are encouragements to relax enough so that finally the atmosphere of your experience just begins to come to you. How things really are can’t be taught; no one can give you a formula: A + B + C = enlightenment.

These supports are often likened to a raft. You need the raft to cross the river, to get to the other side; when you get over there, you leave the raft behind. That’s an interesting image, but in experience it’s more like the raft gives out on you in the middle of the river and you never really get to solid ground. This is what is meant by becoming a child of illusion.

The “child of illusion” image seems apt because young children seem to live in a world in which things are not so solid. You see a sense of wonder in all young children, which they later lose. This slogan encourages us to be that way again.

I read a book called
The Holographic Universe,
which is about science making the same discoveries that we make sitting in meditation. The room that we sit in is solid and very vivid; it would be ridiculous to say that it wasn’t there. But what science is finding out is that the material world isn’t as solid as it seems; it’s more like a hologram—vivid, but empty at the same time. In fact, the more you realize the lack of solidity of things, the more vivid things appear.

Trungpa Rinpoche expresses this paradox in poetic and haunting language. To paraphrase
The Sadhana of Mahamudra:
everything you see is vividly unreal in emptiness, yet there’s definitely form. What you see is not here; it’s not
not
here. It’s both and neither. Everything you hear is the echo of emptiness, yet there’s sound—it’s real—the echo of emptiness. Then Trungpa Rinpoche goes on to say, “Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.”

This is as close as you could come to describing what it means to be a child of illusion. That’s the key point: this good and bad, happy and sad, can be allowed to dissolve into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

The practice and the view are supports, but the real thing—the experience of sound being like an echo of emptiness or everything you see being vividly unreal—dawns on you, like waking up out of an ancient sleep. There’s no way you can force it or fake it. The view and the practice are there to be experienced with a light touch, not to be taken as dogma.

We have to listen to these slogans, chew on them, and wonder about them. We have to find out for ourselves what they mean. They are like challenges rather than statements of fact. If we let them, they will lead us toward the fact that facts themselves are very dubious. We can be a child of illusion through our waking and sleeping existence; through our birth and our death, we can continually remain as a child of illusion.

Being a child of illusion also has to do with beginning to encourage yourself not to be a walking battleground. We have such strong feelings of good and evil, right and wrong. We also feel that parts of ourselves are bad or evil and parts of ourselves are good and wholesome. All these pairs of opposites—happy and sad, victory and defeat, loss and gain—are at war with each other.

The truth is that good and bad coexist; sour and sweet coexist. They aren’t really opposed to each other. We could start to open our eyes and our hearts to that deep way of perceiving, like moving into a whole new dimension of experience: becoming a child of illusion.

Maybe you’ve heard that the Buddha is not
out there;
the Buddha is within. The Buddha within is bad and good coexisting, evil and purity coexisting; the Buddha within is not just all the nice stuff. The Buddha within is messy as well as clean. The Buddha within is really sordid as well as wholesome—yucky, smelly, repulsive as well as the opposite: they coexist.

This view is not easy to grasp, but it’s helpful to hear. At the everyday kitchen-sink level, it simply means that as you see things in yourself that you think are terrible and not worthy, maybe you could reflect that that’s Buddha. You’re proud of yourself because you just had a good meditation or because you’re having such saintly thoughts. That’s Buddha too. When we get into tonglen practice, you’ll see just how interesting this logic is. Tonglen as well as basic shamatha-vipashyana practice leads us toward realizing that opposites coexist. They aren’t at war with each other.

In meditation practice we struggle a lot with trying to get rid of certain things, while other things come to the front. In order for the world to speak for itself, we first have to see how hard we struggle, and then we could begin to open our hearts and minds to that fact. The view and the meditation—both shamatha-vipashyana and tonglen—are meant to support a softer, more gentle approach to the whole show, the whole catastrophe. We begin to let opposites coexist, not trying to get rid of anything but just training and opening our eyes, ears, nostrils, taste buds, hearts, and minds wider and wider, nurturing the habit of opening to whatever is occurring, including our shutting down.

We generally interpret the world so heavily in terms of good and bad, happy and sad, nice and not nice that the world doesn’t get a chance to speak for itself. When we say, “Be a child of illusion,” we’re beginning to get at this fresh way of looking when we’re not caught in our hope and fear. We become mindful, awake, and gentle with our hope and fear. We see them clearly with less bias, less judgment, less sense of a heavy trip. When this happens, the world will speak for itself.

I heard a story about Trungpa Rinpoche sitting in a garden with His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. People were standing around at a distance, close enough to hear but far enough away to give them privacy and space. It was a beautiful day. These two gentlemen had been sitting in the garden for a long time, just sitting there not saying anything. Time went on, and they just sat in the garden not saying anything and seeming to enjoy it very much. Then Trungpa Rinpoche broke the silence and began to laugh. He said to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, pointing across the lawn, “They call that a tree.” Whereupon Khyentse Rinpoche started to laugh too. Had we been there, I think we might have had a little transmission of what it means to be a child of illusion.

We can practice this way in our postmeditation now and for the rest of our lives. Whatever we’re doing, whether we’re having tea or working, we could do that completely. We could be wherever we are completely, 100 percent.

Take the whole teatime just to drink your tea. I started doing this in airports. Instead of reading, I sit there and look at everything, and appreciate it. Even if you don’t feel appreciation, just look. Feel what you feel; take an interest and be curious. Write less; don’t try to capture it all on paper. Sometimes writing, instead of being a fresh take, is like trying to catch something and nail it down. This capturing blinds us and there’s no fresh outlook, no wide-open eyes, no curiosity. When we are not trying to capture anything we become like a child of illusion.

In the morning you feel one way; in the afternoon, it can seem as if years have passed. It’s just astounding how it all just keeps moving on. When you write a letter, you say, “I’m feeling crummy.” But by the time the person gets the letter, it’s all changed. Have you ever gotten back an answer to your letter and then thought, “What are they talking about?” You don’t remember this long-forgotten identity you sent out in the mail.

There was a Native American man called Ishi, which in his language meant “person” or “human being.” He was a good example of what it means to be a child of illusion. Ishi lived in northern California at the beginning of the century. Everyone in his whole tribe had been methodically killed, hunted down like coyotes and wolves. Ishi was the only one left. He had lived alone for a long time. No one knew exactly why, but one day he just appeared in Oroville, California, at dawn. There stood this naked man. They quickly put some clothes on him and put him in jail, until the Bureau of Indian Affairs told them what to do with him. It was front-page news in the San Francisco newspapers, where an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber read the story.

Here was an anthropologist’s dream come true. This native person had been living in the wilds all his life and could reveal his tribe’s way of life. Ishi was brought on the train down to San Francisco into a totally unknown world, where he lived—pretty happily, it appears—for the rest of his life. Ishi seemed to be fully awake. He was completely at home with himself and the world, even when it changed so dramatically almost overnight.

For instance, when they took him to San Francisco, he happily wore the suit and tie they gave him, but he carried the shoes in his hand, because he still wanted to feel the earth with his feet. He had been living as a caveman might, always having to remain hidden for fear of being killed. But very soon after he arrived in the city they took him to a formal dinner party. He sat there unperturbed by this unfamiliar ritual, just observing, and then ate the way everybody else did. He was full of wonder, completely curious about everything, and seemingly not afraid or resentful, just totally open.

When Ishi was first taken to San Francisco, he went to the Oroville train station and stood on the platform. When the train came in, without anyone really noticing, he simply walked away very quietly and stood behind a pillar. Then the others noticed and beckoned to him, and they all got on the train to San Francisco. Later, Ishi told Kroeber that for his whole life when he and the other members of his tribe had seen that train they had thought it was a demon that ate people, because of how it snaked along and bellowed smoke and fire. When Kroeber heard that, he was awestruck. He asked, “How did you have the courage to just get on the train if you thought it was a demon?” Then Ishi said, quite simply, “Well, my life has taught me to be more curious than afraid.” His life had taught him what it meant to be a child of illusion.

Poison as Medicine

W
ITH THE SLOGAN
“Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue” we begin to enter into the teachings on relative bodhichitta, the teachings on how to awaken compassion. We have so far been attempting to establish that the ground of all of our experience is very spacious, not as solid as we tend to make it. We don’t have to make such a big deal about ourselves, our enemies, our lovers, and the whole show. This emphasis on gentleness is the pith instruction on how to reconnect with openness and freshness in our lives, how to liberate ourselves from the small world of ego. We’ll keep coming back to this sense of freshness and open space and not making such a big deal, because we are now about to get into the really messy stuff.