Comfortable With Uncertainty (4 page)

The third noble truth says that suffering ceases when we let go of trying to maintain the huge ME at any cost. This is what we practice in meditation. When we let go of the thinking and the story line, we’re left just sitting with the quality and the energy of whatever particular “weather” we’ve been trying to resist.

The essence of the fourth noble truth is that we can use everything we do to help us to realize that we’re part of the energy that creates everything. If we learn to sit still like a mountain in a hurricane, unprotected from the truth and vividness and the immediacy of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way. When we stop resisting and let the weather simply flow through us, we can live our lives completely. It’s up to us.

14

The Facts of Life: Impermanence

A
CCORDING TO THE
B
UDDHA
, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are. The first mark is impermanence. That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that.

We know that all is impermanent; we know that everything wears out. Although we can buy this truth intellectually, emotionally we have a deep-rooted aversion to it. We want permanence; we expect permanence. Our natural tendency is to seek security; we believe we can find it. We experience impermanence at the everyday level as frustration. We use our daily activity as a shield against the fundamental ambiguity of our situation, expending tremendous energy trying to ward off impermanence and death. We don’t like it that our bodies change shape. We don’t like it that we age. We are afraid of wrinkles and sagging skin. We use health products as if we actually believe that
our
skin,
our
hair,
our
eyes and teeth, might somehow miraculously escape the truth of impermanence.

The Buddhist teachings aspire to set us free from this limited way of relating to impermanence. They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change. Acknowledging this truth doesn’t mean that we’re looking on the dark side. What it means is that we begin to understand that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together. We no longer believe that there are people who have managed to avoid uncertainty.

15

Not Causing Harm

L
EARNING NOT TO CAUSE HARM
to ourselves or others is a basic Buddhist teaching. Nonaggression has the power to heal. Not harming ourselves or others is the basis of enlightened society. This is how there could be a sane world. It starts with sane citizens, and that is us. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

The ground of not causing harm is mindfulness, a sense of clear seeing with respect and compassion for what it is we see. This is what basic practice shows us. But mindfulness doesn’t stop with formal meditation. It helps us relate with all the details of our lives. It helps us see and hear and smell without closing our eyes or our ears or our noses. It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. As we become more wholehearted in this journey of gentle honesty, it comes as a shock to realize how much we’ve blinded ourselves to some of the ways in which we cause harm.

It’s painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while. It’s a journey that happens because of our commitment to gentleness and honesty, our commitment to staying awake, to being mindful. Because of mindfulness, we see our desires and our aggression, our jealousy, and our ignorance. We don’t act on them; we just see them. Without mindfulness, we don’t see them and they proliferate.

16

The Dharma

T
HE DHARMA
—the Buddha’s teaching—is about letting go of the story line and opening to
what is:
to the people in our life, to the situations we’re in, to our thoughts, to our emotions. We have a certain life, and whatever life we’re in is a vehicle for waking up.

Often we hear the teachings so subjectively that we think we’re being told what is true and what is false. But the dharma never tells us what is true or what is false. It just encourages us to find out for ourselves. However, because we have to use words, we make statements. For example, we say, “The everyday practice is simply to develop complete acceptance of all situations, emotions, and people.” That sounds like to do this is what’s true and not to do this would be false. But that’s not what it means. What it means is that we could find out for ourselves what is true and what is false.

Try to live that way and see what happens. You’ll come up against all your doubts and fears and hopes, and you’ll grapple with that. When you start to live that way—with that sense of “what does this really mean?”—you’ll find it quite interesting. After a while, you forget that you’re even asking the question. You just practice meditation or you just live your life, and you have insight—a fresh take on what is true. Insight comes suddenly, as though you’ve been wandering around in the dark and someone switches on all the lights and reveals a palace. It’s been there all along. It feels as if we’ve discovered something that no one else ever knew, and yet it’s completely straightforward and simple.

17

The Practice of Mindfulness and Refraining

R
EFRAINING IS
very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It’s the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It’s the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap.

An interesting practice that combines mindfulness and refraining is just to notice your physical movements when you feel uncomfortable. When we feel like we’re losing ground, we make all kinds of little jumpy, jittery movements. You might notice that when you feel uncomfortable you do things like pull your ear, scratch something even though it doesn’t itch, or straighten your collar. When you notice what you do, don’t try to change it. Don’t criticize yourself for whatever it is you’re doing. Just notice what it is.

Refraining—not habitually acting out impulsively—has something to do with giving up the entertainment mentality. Through refraining, we see that there’s something between the arising of the craving—or the aggression or the loneliness or whatever it might be—and whatever action we take as a result. There’s something there in us that we don’t want to experience, and we never do experience, because we’re so quick to act. The practice of mindfulness and refraining is a way to get in touch with basic groundlessness—by noticing how we try to avoid it.

18

Relax As It Is

I
T’S HELPFUL
to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It’s definitely not meant to repress anything, and it’s not intended to encourage grasping, either. Allen Ginsberg used the expression “surprise mind.” You sit down and—wham!—a rather nasty surprise arises. So be it. This part is not to be rejected but compassionately acknowledged as “thinking” and let go. Then—wow!—a very delicious surprise appears. Okay. This part is not to be clung to but compassionately acknowledged as “thinking” and let go. The surprises are endless. Mila-repa, the twelfthcentury Tibetan yogi who sang wonderful songs about the proper way to meditate, said that the mind has more projections than there are dust motes in a sunbeam and that even hundreds of spears couldn’t put an end to that. As meditators we might as well stop struggling against our thoughts and realize that honesty and humor are far more inspiring and helpful than any kind of solemn religious striving for or against anything.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

19

Working with Slogans

T
O REVERSE EGO’S LOGIC
, we practice the warrior slogans of Atisha, a Tibetan teacher who lived in the eleventh century. These slogans say things like, “Don’t be jealous,” and you think, “How did they know?” Or “Be grateful to everyone”; you wonder how to do that or why to bother. Some slogans, such as, “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment,” exhort you to go beyond common sense. These slogans are not always the sort of thing that you would want to hear, let alone find inspiring.

If we work with the slogans, they will become like our breath, our eyesight, our first thought. They will become like the smells we smell and the sounds we hear. We can let them permeate our whole being. That’s the point. These slogans aren’t theoretical or abstract. They are about who we are and what is happening to us. They are completely relevant to how we experience things, how we relate with whatever occurs in our lives. They are about how to relate with pain and fear and pleasure and joy, and how those things can transform us fully and completely. When we work with the slogans, ordinary life becomes the path of awakening.

20

Slogan: “All activities should be done with one intention”

B
REATHING IN
, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.

21

Turning Arrows into Flowers

O
N THE NIGHT
the Buddha was to attain enlightenment, he sat under a tree. While he was sitting there, the forces of Mara shot arrows at him to distract him from becoming enlightened, but with awareness he turned their weapons into flowers.

Traditional teachings on the forces of Mara describe the nature of obstacles and how human beings habitually become confused and lose confidence in their basic wisdom mind. The teachings on the four maras provide descriptions of some very familiar ways in which we try to avoid what is happening. Like the Buddha, it is possible for us to turn these arrows into flowers. Rather than trying to get rid of an obstacle or buying into a sense of being attacked, we can use it to see what we do when we’re squeezed. Do we close down or open up? Do we feel resentful or do we soften? Do we become wiser or more stupid?

1. Devaputra mara
   involves seeking pleasure. Any obstacle we encounter has the power to pop the bubble of reality that we have come to regard as secure and certain. When we’re threatened that way, we can’t stand to feel the edginess, the anxiety, the heat of anger rising, the bitter taste of resentment. Therefore, we reach for whatever we think will blot it out. We try to grasp something pleasant. The way to turn this arrow into a flower is to open our hearts and look at how we try to escape. We can use pleasure-seeking as an opportunity to observe what we do in the face of pain.
   
2. Skandha mara
   has to do with how we try to recreate ourselves when things fall apart. We return to the solid ground of our self-concept as quickly as possible. Trungpa Rinpoche used to call this “nostalgia for samsara.” When things fall apart, instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can use it as an opportunity to be open and inquisitive about what has just happened and what will happen next. That is how to turn this arrow into a flower.
   
3. Klesha mara
   is characterized by strong emotions. Instead of letting feelings be, we weave them into a story line, which gives rise to even bigger emotions. We all use emotions to regain our ground when things fall apart. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using heavy emotion as a way to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else.
   
4. Yama mara
   is rooted in the fear of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. We want to hold on to what we have. We want every experience to confirm us and congratulate us and make us feel completely together. We say the yama mara is fear of death, but it’s actually fear of life. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using the desire to control as a reminder to experience each moment completely new and fresh. We can always return to basic wisdom mind.
   

22

Nothing Solid

M
OVING AWAY
from our experience, moving away from the present moment with all our habits and strategies, always adds up to restlessness, dissatisfaction, unhappiness. The comfort that we associate with concretizing and making things solid is so transitory, so short-lived.

Moving into our experience—whether it’s the opening experience of love and compassion or the closing-down experience of resentment and separation—brings us an enormous sense of freedom: the freedom of nothing solid. Something about “nothing solid” begins to equal freedom. In the meantime, we discover that we would rather feel fully present to our lives than be off trying to make everything solid and secure by engaging our fantasies or our addictive patterns. We realize that connecting with our experience by meeting it feels better than resisting it by moving away. Being on the spot, even if it hurts, is preferable to avoiding. As we practice moving into the present moment this way, we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called liberation.