Comfortable With Uncertainty (10 page)

There are so many ways to practice generosity. The main point isn’t so much what we give, but that we unlock our habit of clinging. A traditional practice is simply to offer an object that we cherish from one hand to the other. A woman I know decided that whatever she was attached to she’d give away. One man gave money to people begging in the streets every day for six months after the death of his father. It was his way of working with grief. Another woman trained in visualizing giving away whatever she most feared losing.

Giving practice shows us where we’re holding back, where we’re still clinging. We start with our well-laid plans, but life blows them apart. From a gesture of generosity, true letting go will evolve. Our conventional perspective will begin to change. The causes of aggression and fear begin to dissolve by themselves when we move past the poverty of holding back and holding on.

The journey of generosity is one of connecting with the wealth of bodhichitta so profoundly that we are willing to begin to give away whatever blocks it. We open ourselves and let ourselves be touched. We build confidence in all-pervasive richness. At the everyday level, we experience it as flexibility and warmth.

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Discipline

D
ISSOLVING THE CAUSES
of aggression takes discipline, gentle yet precise discipline. Without the paramita of discipline, we simply don’t have the support we need to evolve. At the outer level, we could think of discipline as a structure, like a thirty minute meditation period or a two-hour class on the dharma. Probably the best example is the meditation technique. We sit down in a certain position and are as faithful to the 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 process is like inviting that basic richness into our lives. So we follow the instruction just as centuries of meditators have done before.

Within this structure, we proceed with compassion. On the inner level, the discipline is to return to gentleness, to honesty, to letting go. The discipline is to find the balance between not too tight and not too loose—between not too laid-back and not too rigid.

Discipline provides us with the support to slow down enough and to be present enough so that we can live our lives without making a mess. It provides the encouragement to step further into groundlessness. We are disciplining any form of potential escape from reality. Discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment.

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Patience

T
HE POWER
of the paramita of patience 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. Then we can send out a sense of space, which further slows things down. Sitting there, standing there, we can allow the space for the usual habitual thing
not
to happen. Our words and actions might be quite different because we allowed ourselves time to touch and taste and see the situation first.

As we train in the paramita of patience, we are first of all patient with ourselves. We learn to relax with the restlessness of our energy—the energy of anger, boredom, and excitement. Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practice patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.

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Joyous Exertion

T
HE PARAMITA
of exertion is connected with joy. In practicing this paramita, like little children learning to walk, we train with eagerness but without a goal. This joyful uplifted energy isn’t a matter of luck. It takes ongoing training in mindfulness and maitri, in dissolving the barriers and opening the heart. As we learn to relax with groundlessness, this enthusiasm will emerge.

Through continual practice we find out how to cross over the boundary between being stuck and waking up. It depends on our willingness to experience directly feelings we’ve been avoiding for many years. This willingness to stay open to what scares us weakens our habits of avoidance. It’s the way that ego-clinging becomes ventilated and begins to fade.

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy. Exertion is connecting with our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way. If we really knew how unhappy it was making this whole planet that we all try to avoid pain and seek pleasure—how that is making us so miserable and cutting us off from our basic goodness—then we would practice as if our hair were on fire. There wouldn’t be any question of thinking we have a lot of time and we can do this later.

Yet when we begin to practice exertion, we see that sometimes we can do it and sometimes we can’t. The question becomes: How do we connect with inspiration? How do we connect with the spark and joy that’s available in every moment?

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Meditation

W
HEN WE SIT
down to meditate we leave behind the idea of the perfect meditator, the ideal meditation, and preconceived results. We train in simply being present. We open ourselves completely to the pain and the pleasure of our life. We train in precision, gentleness, and letting go. Because we see our thoughts and emotions with compassion, we stop struggling against ourselves. We learn to recognize when we’re all caught up and to trust that we can let go. Thus the blockages created by our habits and prejudices start falling apart. In this way, the wisdom we were blocking—the wisdom of bodhichitta—becomes available.

Meditation may be the only thing we do that doesn’t add anything to the picture. When we sit down to meditate, we can connect with something unconditional—a state of mind, a basic environment that doesn’t grasp or reject. Everything is allowed to come and go without further embellishment. Meditation is a totally nonviolent, nonaggressive occupation. Not filling the space, allowing for the possibility of connecting with unconditional openness—this provides the basis for real change. The more we sit with this impossibility, the more we find it’s always possible after all.

When we cling to thoughts and memories, we are clinging to what cannot be grasped. When we touch these phantoms and let them go, we may discover a space, a break in the chatter, a glimpse of open sky. This is our birthright—the wisdom with which we were born, the vast unfolding display of primordial richness, primordial openness, primordial wisdom itself. When one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, we can rest in that space.

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Letting the World Speak for Itself (“Don’t Misinterpret”)

T
HE SLOGAN
“Don’t misinterpret” means don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. That’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground.

When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you think you have a little scheme that is going to work, it doesn’t work. It was very beneficial to one person, but when you try it on the next person, he looks at you as if you’re crazy, and when you try it on somebody else, she gets insulted. Coming up with a formula won’t work. You don’t know what’s going to help, but all the same you need to speak and act with clarity and decisiveness. Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what’s happening. They come from opening your heart and not running away. Then your actions and speech accord with what needs to be done—for you and for the other person.

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Meditation and Prajna

A
S HUMAN BEINGS
, not only do we seek resolution, we feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We deserve something better than resolution: we deserve our birthright, which is prajna, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

Prajna is the unfiltered expression of the open ear, open eye, open mind that is found in every living being. It’s a fluid process, not something definite and concrete that can be summed up or measured.

Prajnaparamita is our human experience. It is not particularly regarded as a peaceful state of mind nor as a disturbed one. It is a state of basic intelligence that is open, questioning, and unbiased. Whether it comes in the form of curiosity, bewilderment, shock, or relaxation isn’t really the issue. We train when we’re caught off guard and when our life is up in the air.

Meditation provides a way for us to train in prajna—in staying open right on the spot. We train, as Trungpa Rinpoche said, in “not afraid to be a fool.” We cultivate a simple direct relationship with our being—no philosophizing, no moralizing, no judgments. Whatever arises in our mind is workable.

It’s like lying in bed before dawn and hearing rain on the roof. This simple sound can be disappointing because we were planning a picnic. It can be pleasing because our garden is so dry. But the flexible mind of prajna doesn’t draw conclusions of good or bad. It perceives the sound without adding anything extra, without judgments of happy or sad.

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Plan to Stay Open

A
T THE BEGINNING
of your day, using your own language, encourage yourself to keep your heart open, to remain curious, no matter how difficult things get. Then at the end of the day when you’re just about to go to sleep, review what happened. You may notice that the whole day went by and you never once remembered what you had aspired to do in the morning. Rather than using that as ammunition for feeling bad about yourself, use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself better. Use it to see all the funny ways in which you trick yourself, all the ways in which you’re so good at zoning out and shutting down. If you don’t want to do the bodhichitta practices anymore because it feels like a set up for failure, generate a kind heart toward yourself. Reflecting over just one day’s activities can be painful, but you may end up respecting yourself more. You’ll see that there are many changes in the weather of a day; we’re never just one way or another. The more you’re willing to open your heart, the more challenges come along.

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Slogan: “Abandon any hope of fruition”

F
RUITION” IMPLIES
that at some future time you will feel good. One of the most powerful Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is the feeling that the present moment is not good enough. We frequently think back to the past, which maybe was better than now, or perhaps worse. We also think ahead quite a bit to the future, always holding out hope that it will be a little bit better than now. Even if things are going really well now, we usually don’t give ourselves full credit for who we are in the present.

For example, it’s easy to hope that things will improve as a result of meditation: we won’t have such a bad temper anymore or we won’t be afraid anymore or people will like us more than they do now. Or perhaps we will fully connect with that awake, brilliant, sacred world that we hope to find. We use our practice to reinforce the implication that if we just did the right things, we’d begin to connect with a bigger world, a vaster world, a world different from the one we’re in now.

Instead of looking for fruition, we could just try to stay with our open heart and open mind. This is very much oriented to the present. By entering into this kind of unconditional relationship with ourselves, we can begin to connect with the awake quality that we already have.

Right now, can you make an unconditional relationship with yourself? Just at the height you are, the weight you are, with the intelligence that you have, and your current burden of pain? Can you enter into an unconditional relationship with that?

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Cool Loneliness

C
OOL LONELINESS
allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideas of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.