Authors: Pema Chödrön
It might just be that we notice that we’re sometimes awake and we’re sometimes asleep; or we notice that our mind goes off, and our mind comes back. We begin to notice—the first big discovery, of course—that we think so, so much. We begin to develop what’s called
prajna,
or “clear wisdom.” With this clear wisdom, we are likely to feel a growing sense of confidence that we can handle more, that we can even love more. Perhaps there are times when we are able to climb out of the box altogether. But believe me, if that happened too soon, we would freak out. Usually we’re not ready to perceive out of the box right away. But we move in that direction. We are becoming more and more relaxed with uncertainty, more and more relaxed with groundlessness, more and more relaxed with not having walls around us to keep us protected in a little box or cocoon.
Enlightenment isn’t about going someplace else or attaining something that we don’t have right now. Enlightenment is when the blinders start to come off. We are uncovering the true state, or uncovering buddha nature. This is important because each day when you sit down, you can recognize that it’s a process of gradually uncovering something that’s already here. That’s why relaxation and letting go are so important. You can’t uncover something by harshness or uptightness because those things cover our buddha nature. Stabilizing the mind, bringing out the sharp clarity of mind, needs to be accompanied by relaxation and openness.
You could say that this box we’re in doesn’t really exist. But from our point of view, there is a box, which is built from all the obstructions, all the habitual patterns and conditioning that we have created in our life. The box feels very, very real to us. But when we begin to see through it, to see past it, this box has less and less power to obstruct us. Our buddha nature is always here, and if we could be relaxed enough and awake enough, we would experience just that.
So trust this gradualness and welcome in a quality of patience and a sense of humor because if the walls came down too fast we wouldn’t be ready for it. It would be like a drug trip where you have this mind-blowing experience but then you can’t integrate the new way of seeing and understanding into your life.
The path of meditation isn’t always a linear path. It’s not like you begin to open, and you open more and more and you settle more and more, and then all of a sudden the confining box is gone forever. There are setbacks. I often see with students a kind of “honeymoon period” when they experience a time of great openness and growth in their practice, and then they have a kind of contraction or regression. And this is often terribly frightening or discouraging for many students. A regression in your practice can create crippling doubt and a lot of emotional setback. Students wonder if they’ve lost their connection to meditation forever because the “honeymoon period” felt so invigorating, so true.
But change happens, even in our practice. This is a fundamental truth. Everything is always changing because it’s alive and dynamic. All of us will reach a very interesting point in our practice when we hit the brick wall. It’s inevitable. Change is inevitable with relationships, with careers, with anything. I love to talk to people on the meditation path when they’re at the point of the brick wall: they think they’re ready to quit, but I feel they’re just beginning. If they could work with the unpleasantness, the insult to ego, the lack of certainty, then they’re getting closer to the fluid, changing, real nature of life.
Hitting the brick wall is just a stage. It means you’ve reached a point where you’re asked to go even further into open acceptance of life as it is, even into the unpleasant feelings of life. The real inspiration comes when you finally join in with that fluidity, that openness. Before, you were cruising with your practice, feeling certain about it, and that feeling can be “the best” in many ways. And then wham! You’re given a chance to go further.
26
CREATE A CIRCLE OF PRACTITIONERS
T
he clear seeing that tends to develop in meditation practice can lead to genuine compassion because it’s through steadfastness with this continual succession of difficult or pleasing circumstances—and with all the moods and personality traits that you see in yourself—that you begin to have some genuine understanding of other people. That’s because we’re all the same in this way. I may have more aggression than you do, but you may have more craving than I do. I may not know very much about jealousy, but I may know a lot about pride or envy or loneliness, or I may know a lot about feeling unworthy. In some sense, if we just begin to have this emotional honesty with ourselves with what we begin to see about ourselves in meditation, then we begin to realize what other people are up against—just like us. And then we begin to have some compassion for other people.
In Buddhism, there’s something called the “three jewels.” They are the three most precious supports in your life; they are what you turn toward when you need support or encouragement. The first jewel is the Buddha, not as someone to lean on and answer all your questions and save you, but as an example of what you also can do. The second is the dharma, the teachings and practices that will help you. And the third is the
sangha,
the community of people who are also committed to awakening.
To me, sangha is a central support in meditation practice. Sangha is a community outside the realm of our work life and our everyday life, a place where we refrain from competition and one-upping each other. It’s also an opportunity to put the brakes on people-pleasing behaviors. Rather, we tell each other the truth of our experience.
The image that’s usually used for sangha in Buddhist community is an image of everyone standing together and maintaining unconditional friendship. They are not leaning on each other. If someone falls, not everybody falls. At the basis of an enlightened or awakened society, there are individuals who are taking responsibility for their own escalations and spin-offs, their own judgments and prejudices. They are helping each other with kindness and compassion. They give food to those who are hungry, and they give help to those who are sick. By sharing your experiences on the path, you might be helping another person—not from an up-down position, but from friend to friend. And sangha members do not have to live in the same place. You can pen pal with a fellow practitioner, or you talk on the phone. It is hard to go at this practice alone. And participating in a community of practitioners can make a big difference, especially when we hit those bumps in the road when our practice isn’t smooth sailing.
27
CULTIVATE A SENSE OF WONDER
W
hen we look at life, we see that we really don’t know anything for sure. When you travel to foreign lands, it’s such a good experience because you realize that people think differently in every single country. It’s particularly good to go to Asian and Third World countries, where people often think about things from an entirely different vantage point. You realize that most of your assumptions about reality come from your culture, from the era in which you were born, from your economic group, from your gender. There are a lot of assumptions about good and bad that are not universally held. This is the reason we have wars: one person has an idea of good that is someone else’s idea of bad, and as a result people kill each other. Throughout the history of the human race, people have killed each other because they have different ideas about what’s right and good.
The slogan “Regard all dharmas as dreams” encourages us to begin to wonder about everything. Take trees, for example. How about really looking at the trees where you live, exploring their bark and their leaves, noticing the way they smell? How about the grass, the air? See if you can go beyond just thinking, “Oh, yes, I know, it’s just another boring old spruce tree.” Allow yourself to get excited when you see hardwood trees—something with leaves that’s getting green because it’s spring. Let trees perk you up. Say “yes” to them. Let yourself be filled with wonder when you gaze at them.
I recently read an account of a man, a Native American, who became very sick. He lived in the early part of the twentieth century. He went into a coma, and the way the events turned out, when he came out of this coma he was in the white people’s village. (I’m not really sure how he got there, but that’s where he was.) And then this very interesting thing happened. In the mythology of his people, there was a long-held belief that said that when you die you go west to the great ocean, and in his people’s myths there’s a description of going through one tunnel after another to get there. People go through dozens of tunnels, heading west, to the great ocean. And this amazing thing happened to this man. He was taken on a train west, through tunnels, to the ocean. They were taking him to a big city. The story goes on, but the significant thing was that for the rest of his life he thought he was dead, because the reality had totally matched his people’s myth about death. And the accounts of this man are what I think comes closest to anything I’ve ever read of what it meant to be a child of illusion. Because the man thought he was dead, from that point on he was completely present. His mind and heart were completely open. He had the curiosity of a very young child, but at the same time he had the experience of a mature, adult man. He was in a culture that was totally alien to him by all standards, but he showed no signs of letting it throw him. He was completely fascinated by everything because he thought, “This is what happens when you die.” The story of this man reminds me of how we take so much of our experience for granted. And part of taking everything for granted is that we fear a lot of our experience. Our fear is based on old, hidden memories, old abuses that happened to us. These old, forgotten, buried things cause us to continually react in unfathomable ways and interpret in curious ways, and always edit our experiences and reactions in strange ways to protect ourselves. We fear a lot of the things that come to us, and we don’t even know why.
At the same time, we are very, very drawn to other “things.” Sometimes it becomes addictive. Things that represent comfort, things that represent some escape from misery, can become addictions. But it’s all happening at this level where we take things for granted and simply react against trees and animals; sounds and memories; smells and tastes; people’s faces, bodies, and gestures. We take it for granted that these things are the way they are, and therefore we live in a kind of prison.
So how can we bring wonder into our life in the same way as this Native American man? How can we bring curiosity into our life? The answer begins with the meditation instruction about being gentle and honest. Again, every time you say “thinking,” do it with such gentleness, with such honesty. All of that drama, all of that hope and fear, all of that entertainment, and all of that terror—whatever it is that goes along with the story that you’ve been telling yourself—you can just call it “thinking,” and you can say that with heart. Remember: all thoughts could be regarded as dreams. To bring wonder into your life, remember that when you don’t know, when you feel shaky because you’re not sure what’s happening, you don’t need to run. You don’t need to try to come up with an answer that will make the unknown OK. Train in relaxing. Train in softening. Use your meditation practice. Train in holding your seat with those uncertain, insecure, embarrassed, shaky feelings. This is productive of great well-being.
In fact, the only thing that keeps us from being alive and delighted—or alive and interested with some sense of appetite for our life—is that we have no encouragement to sit still. When we feel tense, when we feel pain, when we feel shaky, we have no encouragement to relax and soften our stomach and our shoulders and our mind and our heart. Anytime you want to make something out of your life, let go. Let go more. Soften. This is how your life becomes workable. This is how your life becomes wonderful. We have the seed of spaciousness and wonder in ourselves. We have the seed of warmth in ourselves. Meditation nourishes and waters these seeds.
There’s the space that seems to be out there, like the sky and the ocean and the wind, and there’s the space that seems to be inside. We could let the whole thing mix up. We could let the whole thing just dissolve into each other and into one big space. Practice is about allowing a lot of space. It’s about learning how to connect with that spaciousness that’s inside, and the spaciousness that’s outside. It’s about learning to relax, soften, and open—to connect with the sense that there’s actually a lot of room.
28
THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
F
rom the very beginning of this book, we’ve been studying something called
bodhichitta.
It’s said that the Buddha sat under the
bodhi
tree when he attained enlightenment. The word
bodhi
has a lot of different translations, but it basically means “wide awake.” Sometimes it’s translated as “enlightened.” It means a completely open heart, a completely open mind; it means a heart that never closes down, even in the most difficult and horrendous situations. Bodhichitta communicates a mind that never limits itself with prejudices or biases or dogmatic views that are polarized against someone else’s opinions. There is no limit to bodhi, no limit to its fluid and all-embracing openness.
The word
chitta
means “heart” and “mind”; it means both things simultaneously, so we define it as “heart-mind.” So you could say that bodhichitta is awakened heart-mind, or enlightened heart-mind, or completely open heart-mind. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche had a synonym for bodhichitta: he called it ‘soft spot.’ He said that we all have this “soft spot”; all living beings have this tenderness. Yet somehow we are born feeling that we need to cover it over and protect it. We live in a world where we think we need to contract and put masks over this part of ourselves that’s so tender and soft.