Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (14 page)

The third commitment is not future oriented. It’s about being fully open to whatever is coming along right now. It involves leaning in to our direct experience, appreciating our direct experience, being one with our direct experience, not coloring our sense perceptions with our concepts, our internal dialogue, our interpretations of what’s going on. When we feel uneasy, we tend to become very opinionated and cling to our views, trying to get rid of that shaky, edgy feeling. But another way to deal with that uneasy feeling would be to stay present with it and renew our commitment to sanity. This vow requires deep training in bearing witness to ourselves with immense compassion. We bear witness to ourselves when we pull back into fixed ideas, into fixed identity and ego clinging, into wanting life on our terms—all in order to escape the fundamental ambiguity of being human. With the third commitment, we come to know ourselves with kindness and immense honesty. This is going deeper with making friends with ourselves.

With the commitment to embrace the world, we continue to question our belief in a fixed identity. In a poem
written just before his death, the Chan master Sheng Yen wrote, “Intrinsically, there’s no I. Life and Death thus cast aside.” At the end of life, it becomes clear that there’s no fixed identity, that in terms of this particular body, this particular identity, we’re going to leave it behind. But that begs the question: If there’s no intrinsic I, then who feels all this pleasure and pain? Master Sheng’s death poem went on to say, “Within emptiness, smiling, weeping.” He didn’t say, “Within emptiness, not engaging in life.”

But it’s only when the fearful “I” is not pushing and pulling at life, freaking out and grasping at it, that full engagement is possible. We become more fully engaged in our lives when we become less self-absorbed. As we have less and less allegiance to our small, egocentric self, less and less allegiance to a fixed notion of who we are or what we’re capable of doing, we find we also have less and less fear of embracing the world just as it is. As Leonard Cohen once said about the benefits of many years of meditation, “The less there was of me, the happier I got.”

Letting go of the fixed self isn’t something we can just
wish
to happen, however. It’s something we predispose ourselves to with every gesture, every word, every deed, every thought. We’re either going in the direction of letting go and strengthening that ability or going in the direction of holding on and reinforcing that fear-based habit. We can choose reality—stay with it, be here, show up, be open, turn toward the sights and the sounds and the thoughts that pass through our minds—or we can choose to turn away. But if we turn away, we can pretty much count on staying stuck in the same old pattern of suffering, never getting closer to experiencing wakefulness, never getting closer to experiencing the sacredness of our existence.

The Tibetan teacher Anam Thubten once gave a talk entitled “Falling in Love with Emptiness.” That captures the feeling of the third commitment: falling in love with the human condition and not dividing ourselves in two, with the so-called good part condemning the so-called bad part and the bad part scheming to undermine the good part. We’re not trying to cultivate one part of ourselves and get rid of another part. We’re training in opening to it all.

In his talk, Anam Thubten said that in order to fall in love with emptiness, we have to ask ourselves an important question: “Am I willing to let go of everything?” In other words, am I willing to let go of anything that is a barrier between me and others, a barrier between me and the world? This is what you need to ask yourself before you can unequivocally make a commitment to embrace the world. But there’s no need to be hard on yourself if your answer is unequivocally “yes” one day and “this is too difficult” the next. Keeping this commitment is traditionally said to be like keeping dust from settling on a mirror. Just as with the warrior’s vow, this vow is easily broken, but we can mend it by simply recommitting to staying open to life.

Each person’s life is like a mandala—a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear, and think forms the mandala of our life. We enter a room, and the room is our mandala. We get on the subway, and the subway car is our mandala, down to the teenager checking messages on her iPhone and the homeless man slumped in the corner. We go for a hike in the mountains, and everything as far as we can see is our mandala: the clouds, the trees, the snow on the peaks, even the rattlesnake coiled on the path. We’re lying in a hospital bed, and the hospital is our mandala. We don’t set it up; we don’t get
to choose what or who shows up in it. It is, as Chögyam Trungpa said, “the mandala that is never arranged but is always complete.” And we embrace it just as it is.

Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening. From this point of view, awakening is right at your fingertips continually. There’s not a drop of rain or a pile of dog poop that appears in your life that isn’t the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn’t a doorway to sacred world. But it’s up to you whether your life is a mandala of neurosis or a mandala of sanity.

The pain of your confused mind and the brilliance of your awakened mind make up the mandala of your life. It’s an environment in which birth and death, depression and joy, can coexist. No problem. The beauty, the kindness, the nobility, the excellence, the heartbreak, the cruelty, the ignorance—you can embrace it all. You don’t need to avoid any of it. Even difficult emotions like anger, craving, ignorance, jealousy, and pride are part of your mandala, and you can welcome them.

Whatever appears in our nighttime dreams, whatever appears in our waking life—in our mandala—is vividly unreal, and yet that’s all there is. We can call it poison; we can call it wisdom. Either way, it’s up to us whether we work with it or try to run away. The third commitment invites us to make the mandala of our life an ally and the birthplace of our enlightenment.

The Zen master Dogen said, “To know the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” The only way to forget the self—to realize that there is no fixed, intrinsic self—is to know the self. We have to know ourselves fully and completely, avoiding nothing, never averting our gaze. We have to be curious about this
thing called My Life, curious about this person called Me. With the commitment to embrace the world, we move in close and investigate.

The last words of Dogen’s teaching say, “To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” With this commitment we vow to not get in our own way, we vow to stop insisting that things be the way we want them to be and to stop insisting that the way we want them to be is the way they really are. To forget the self, we first have to know our shenpa, our propensities, our exits really well—and then be willing to let them go. We have to be willing to overcome the laziness that keeps us biting the same hooks again and again as if it didn’t matter. We have to be willing to listen to our wisdom instead of following our robotic, habitual patterns. We have to be willing to invite scary feelings to stay longer so that we can get to know them to their depth. We have to be willing to entertain the thought that we are basically sane, basically good, and that we have the potential to be fully and utterly awake.

Then, when we’re no longer seduced by the self, Dogen says we will be enlightened by all things. That’s the third-commitment experience: life as an enlightened mandala that is always encouraging us to be awake, to be alive, to be fully present, to be more accommodating and more available to others.

The commitment to not cause harm is very specific about what we’re to cultivate and what we’re to refrain from. There’s a list of so-called virtuous actions and a list of so-called nonvirtuous actions. We don’t lie; instead we’re truthful. We don’t steal; instead we’re generous. And so on. But with the third commitment, we have to find out for ourselves how to proceed. There are no instructions. There is nothing
to hold on to. You have to decide for yourself what gives you inner strength, what minimizes your confusion, what helps you get unstuck, what brings you closer to experiencing life without a story line. And then you refrain from anything that is too overwhelming at present—anything you’re not ready to deal with yet. But always your aspiration is to reach the point where there’s nothing you can’t deal with, nothing you can’t work with. Until then, you simply move in the direction of clarity, becoming more and more able to see shenpa as shenpa, being hooked as being hooked, views and opinions as just views and opinions.

The key to this commitment is to be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t handle at the moment. If you’re trying to recover from drug abuse, for example, you don’t hang out with your old drug dealer. If you’re trying to recover from alcoholism, you don’t hang out in bars. But with the third commitment, unlike the first commitment, there’s no list of dos and don’ts, nothing that says “don’t go to bars.” Whatever list there may be is your own list—a list that is merely an indication of where you are at present. You’re not looking to avoid these things for the rest of your life. If you’re a recovering alcoholic, for instance, you would probably like to reach the point where your recovery is so dependable that you can help people who are still caught in the addictive cycle. In order to do that, you might, on occasion, find yourself in a bar. But if after twenty minutes in the bar you say to yourself, “To really be of help to this person, I think I should have just one little drink,” then you’re only kidding yourself.

We have to decide matters like that for ourselves. At the level of the third commitment, decisions are personal, individual. We might wish there were a list telling us what we
should and shouldn’t do, but there isn’t. The responsibility falls on us.

Together, the Three Commitments form the education of the warrior. On the warrior path, we train patiently in never turning away from our experience. And when we do turn away, it’s based on being able to discriminate between turning away because we know we can’t handle something at the moment and turning away because we don’t want to feel what we’re feeling, don’t want to feel our vulnerability. But we don’t develop this discrimination all at once. We get there inch by inch, moment by moment, step by step, working with our mind and heart.

People often ask me, “How do we know whether to refrain from something or go toward it?” My answer is, just practice what comes naturally at the time. If the first commitment, refraining, seems like it would be the most helpful, do that. But if you feel that you can keep your heart and mind open a little longer to someone who’s irritating you or triggering your impatience, then follow your instinct and do that. Then maybe, based on having been able to stay open a little longer in that situation, you’ll begin to get a sense of what it would mean to not turn away at all.

As we go deeper with our experience, we begin to be able to speak and act freely, fully confident that we won’t cause harm. But without self-awareness—without knowing whether we’re hooked, knowing whether our heart and mind are open or closed—we’re almost sure to create confusion and pain. Our intention with this vow is to open completely to whatever arises, to experience exactly where we are as sacred ground. A confused mind perceives the world as confused. But the unfixated mind perceives the world as a pure land, a mandala of awakening.

What’s happening on our earth today is the result of the collective minds of everyone on the planet. So the message is that each of us has to take responsibility for our own state of mind. The third commitment points to how the world could be transformed from a place of escalating aggression, with everyone defending their territory and their fixed ideas, to a place of awakening.

If our minds become cold and cruel and capable of harming others without a second thought, war erupts and the environment deteriorates. Even the most brilliant political system can’t save the world if the people are still committed to a fear-based way of living. Peace and prosperity come from how we, the citizens of the world, are working with our minds. By not running from the vicissitudes of life, by fearlessly opening to them all, we have the opportunity not only to change our own life but also to help change the earth.

I think it’s important to emphasize that we work on the mind and then, based on that, take action. And we take action with the understanding that everyone is basically good. No one is cast out. No one is excommunicated from the mandala. When the conditions come together, even people whose lives have not been exemplary can rise to the occasion and help others. Think of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved hundreds of Jews in World War II by employing them in his munitions and metalwork factories. He wasn’t the nicest guy on the planet: to many, he was a profiteer who partied with the SS elite. Yet Schindler doggedly defended his workers against Nazi efforts to deport them, and he will always be remembered for his nobility and courage.

Like Schindler, most of us are a rich mixture of rough
and smooth, bitter and sweet. But wherever we are right now, whatever our lives are like in the moment, this is our mandala, our working basis for awakening. The awakened life isn’t somewhere else—in some distant place that’s accessible only when we’ve got it all together. With the commitment to embrace the world just as it is, we begin to see that sanity and goodness are always present and can be uncovered right here, right now.

10

Awakening in the Charnel Ground

I
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IBET
, because the ground is frozen most of the year, earth burial is impossible. So when someone dies, the body is cut into pieces and taken to the charnel ground, the burial ground, where jackals and vultures and other birds of prey come and feed on the body parts. Strewn with limbs and eyeballs and entrails, the charnel ground is a grizzly place—hardly somewhere we would want to hang out.