Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (2 page)

Happily, the Buddha gave many instructions on how to do
just this. Among these instructions are what are known in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the Three Vows, or Three Commitments. These are three methods for embracing the chaotic, unstable, dynamic, challenging nature of our situation as a path to awakening. The first of the commitments, traditionally called the Pratimoksha Vow, is the foundation for personal liberation. This is a commitment to doing our best to not cause harm with our actions or words or thoughts, a commitment to being good to each other. It provides a structure within which we learn to work with our thoughts and emotions and to refrain from speaking or acting out of confusion. The next step toward being comfortable with groundlessness is a commitment to helping others. Traditionally called the Bodhisattva Vow, it is a commitment to dedicate our lives to keeping our hearts and minds open and to nurturing our compassion with the longing to ease the suffering of the world. The last of the Three Commitments, traditionally known as the Samaya Vow, is a resolve to embrace the world just as it is, without bias. It is a commitment to see everything we encounter, good and bad, pleasant and painful, as a manifestation of awakened energy. It is a commitment to see anything and everything as a means by which we can awaken further.

But what does the fundamental ambiguity of being human mean in terms of day-to-day life? Above all, it means understanding that everything changes. As Shantideva, an eighth-century Buddhist master, wrote in
The Way of the Bodhisattva:

All that I possess and use

Is like the fleeting vision of a dream.

It fades into the realms of memory;

And fading, will be seen no more.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, the ground is always shifting. Nothing lasts, including us. There are probably very few people who, at any given time, are consumed with the idea “I’m going to die,” but there is plenty of evidence that this thought, this fear, haunts us constantly. “I, too, am a brief and passing thing,” observed Shantideva.

So what does it feel like to be human in this ambiguous, groundless state? For one thing, we grab at pleasure and try to avoid pain, but despite our efforts, we’re always alternating between the two. Under the illusion that experiencing constant security and well-being is the ideal state, we do all sorts of things to try to achieve it: eat, drink, drug, work too hard, spend hours online or watching TV. But somehow we never quite achieve the state of unwavering satisfaction we’re seeking. At times we feel good: physically nothing hurts and mentally all’s well. Then it changes, and we’re hit with physical pain or mental anguish. I imagine it would even be possible to chart how pleasure and pain alternate in our lives, hour by hour, day after day, year in and year out, first one and then the other predominating.

But it’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for
this is
freedom
—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

What the fundamental ambiguity of being human points to is that as much as we want to, we can never say, “This is the only true way. This is how it is. End of discussion.” In his interview, Chris Hedges also talked about the pain that ensues when a group or religion insists that its view is the one true view. As individuals we, too, have plenty of fundamentalist tendencies. We use them to comfort ourselves. We grab on to a position or belief as a way of neatly explaining reality, unwilling to tolerate the uncertainty and discomfort of staying open to other possibilities. We cling to that position as our personal platform and become very dogmatic about it.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn’t always conform to our view.

When I first came to Gampo Abbey, I thought of myself as a likable, flexible, openhearted, open-minded person. Part of that was true, but there was another part that wasn’t. For one thing, I was a terrible director. The other residents felt disempowered by me. They pointed out my shortcomings, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying because my fixed identity was so strong. Every time new people came to live at the abbey, I got the same kind of negative feedback, but still I didn’t hear it. This went on for a few years. Then one day, as if they had all gotten together and staged an intervention, I finally heard what everyone had been telling me about how my behavior was affecting them. At last, the message got through.

That’s what it means to be in denial: you can’t hear anything that doesn’t fit into your fixed identity. Even something positive—you’re kind or you did a great job or you have a wonderful sense of humor—is filtered through this fixed identity. You can’t take it in unless it’s already part of your self-definition.

In Buddhism we call the notion of a fixed identity “ego clinging.” It’s how we try to put solid ground under our feet in an ever-shifting world. Meditation practice starts to erode that fixed identity. As you sit, you begin to see yourself with more clarity, and you notice how attached you are to your opinions about yourself. Often the first blow to the fixed identity is precipitated by a crisis. When things start to fall apart in your life, as they did in mine when I came to Gampo Abbey, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

The purpose of the spiritual path is to unmask, to take off our armor. When that happens, it feels like a crisis because it
is
a crisis—a fixed-identity crisis. The Buddha taught that the fixed identity is the cause of our suffering. Looking deeper, we could say that the real cause of suffering is not being able to tolerate uncertainty—and thinking that it’s perfectly sane, perfectly normal, to deny the fundamental groundlessness of being human.

Ego clinging is our means of denial. Once we have the fixed idea “this is me,” then we see everything as a threat or a promise—or something we couldn’t care less about. Whatever we encounter, we’re either attracted to it or averse to it or indifferent to it, depending on how much of a threat to our self-image it represents. The fixed identity is our
false security. We maintain it by filtering all of our experience through this perspective. When we like someone, it’s generally because they make us feel good. They don’t blow our trip, don’t disturb our fixed identity, so we’re buddies. When we don’t like someone—they’re not on our wavelength, so we don’t want to hang out with them—it’s generally because they challenge our fixed identity. We’re uncomfortable in their presence because they don’t confirm us in the ways we want to be confirmed, so we can’t function in the ways we want to function. Often we think of the people we don’t like as our enemies, but in fact, they’re all-important to us. They’re our greatest teachers: special messengers who show up just when we need them, to point out our fixed identity.

The discomfort associated with groundlessness, with the fundamental ambiguity of being human, comes from our attachment to wanting things to be a certain way. The Tibetan word for attachment is
shenpa
. My teacher Dzigar Kongtrül calls shenpa the barometer of ego clinging, a gauge of our self-involvement and self-importance. Shenpa has a visceral quality associated with grasping or, conversely, pushing away. This is the feeling of
I like, I want, I need
and
I don’t like, I don’t want, I don’t need, I want it to go away.
I think of shenpa as being hooked. It’s that stuck feeling, that tightening or closing down or withdrawing we experience when we’re uncomfortable with what’s going on. Shenpa is also the urge to find relief from those feelings by clinging to something that gives us pleasure.

Anything can trigger our clinging, our attachments: someone criticizes our work or looks at us the wrong way; the dog chews our favorite shoes; we spill on our best tie. One minute we’re feeling fine, then something happens,
and suddenly we’re hooked into anger, jealousy, blame, recrimination, or self-doubt. This discomfort, this sense of being triggered because things are not “right,” because we want them to last longer or to go away, is the felt experience, the visceral experience of the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

For the most part, our attachment, our shenpa, arises involuntarily—our habitual response to feeling insecure. When we’re hooked, we turn to anything to relieve the discomfort—food, alcohol, sex, shopping, being critical or unkind. But there is something more fruitful we can do when that edgy feeling arises. It’s similar to the way we can deal with pain. One popular way of relating to physical pain is mindfulness meditation. It involves directing your full attention to the pain and breathing in and out of the spot that hurts. Instead of trying to avoid the discomfort, you open yourself completely to it. You become receptive to the painful sensation without dwelling on the story your mind has concocted:
It’s bad; I shouldn’t feel this way; maybe it will never go away.

When you contact the all-worked-up feeling of shenpa
,
the basic instruction is the same as in dealing with physical pain. Whether it’s a feeling of
I like
or
I don’t like,
or an emotional state like loneliness, depression, or anxiety, you open yourself fully to the sensation, free of interpretation. If you’ve tried this approach with physical pain, you know that the result can be quite miraculous. When you give your full attention to your knee or your back or your head—whatever hurts—and drop the good/bad, right/wrong story line and simply experience the pain directly for even a short time, then your ideas about the pain, and often the pain itself, will dissolve.

Shantideva said that the suffering we experience with physical pain is entirely conceptual. It comes not from the sensation itself but from how we view it. He used the example of the Karna, a sect in ancient India in which the members burned and cut themselves as part of their ritual practice. They associated the extreme pain with spiritual ecstasy, so it had a positive meaning for them. Many athletes experience something similar when they “feel the burn.” The physical sensation in itself is neither good nor bad; it’s our interpretation of it that makes it so.

I’m reminded of something that happened when my daredevil son was about twelve years old. We were standing on a tiny platform on the prow of a large ship—kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the movie
Titanic—
and I started to describe to him my fear of heights. I told him I wasn’t sure I could stay there, that I was having all sorts of physical sensations and my legs were turning to mush. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he said, “Mom, that’s exactly what
I
feel!” The difference is that he
loved
the feeling. All of my nieces and nephews are bungee jumpers and spelunkers and enjoy adventures that I avoid at any cost just because I have an aversion to the same feeling that gives them a thrill.

But there’s an approach we can take to the fundamental ambiguity of being human that allows us to work with, rather than retreat from, feelings like fear and aversion. If we can get in touch with the sensation as sensation and open ourselves to it without labeling it good or bad, then even when we feel the urge to draw back, we can stay present and move forward into the feeling.

In
My Stroke of Insight,
the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains
the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it’s because we’ve chosen to rekindle it.

The fact of the shifting, changing nature of our emotions is something we could take advantage of. But do we? No. Instead, when an emotion comes up, we fuel it with our thoughts, and what should last one and a half minutes may be drawn out for ten or twenty years. We just keep recycling the story line. We keep strengthening our old habits.

Most of us have physical or mental conditions that have caused us distress in the past. And when we get a whiff of one coming—an incipient asthma attack, a symptom of chronic fatigue, a twinge of anxiety—we panic. Instead of relaxing with the feeling and letting it do its minute and a half while we’re fully open and receptive to it, we say, “Oh no, oh no, here it is again.” We refuse to feel fundamental ambiguity when it comes in this form, so we do the thing that will be most detrimental to us: we rev up our thoughts about it.
What if this happens? What if that happens?
We stir up a lot of mental activity. Body, speech, and mind become engaged in running away from the feeling, which only keeps it going and going and going.

We can counter this response by training in being present. A woman who was familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor’s observation about the duration of emotion sent me a letter describing what she does when an uneasy feeling comes up. “I just do the one-and-a-half-minute thing,” she wrote.

So, that’s a good practice instruction: When you contact groundlessness, one way to deal with that edgy, queasy feeling is to “do the one-and-a-half-minute thing.”