Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (8 page)

It’s a tricky business—not rejecting any part of yourself at the same time that you’re becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are. What most of us have been doing is gearing our lives toward avoiding unpleasant feelings while clinging to whatever we think will make us feel good and feel secure. From a conventional point of view, this makes perfect sense. But from the vantage point of remaining with our direct experience, the vantage point of opening to the tentativeness of life, this strategy is self-defeating, the very thing that keeps us stuck.

There’s an exercise that can help us reflect on this kneejerk tendency to cling to what makes us feel good and push away what makes us feel bad:

Sit quietly for a few minutes and become mindful of your breath as it goes in and out. Then contemplate what you do when you’re unhappy or dissatisfied and want to feel better. Even make a list if you want to. Then ask yourself: Does it work? Has it ever worked? Does it soothe the pain? Does it escalate the pain? If you’re really honest, you’ll come up with some pretty interesting observations.

One of the insights many people have when they do this exercise is yes, those efforts to make myself feel good
do
work—but not for very long. And the reason they stop working is that our strategies contain an inherent contradiction. We try to hold on to fleeting pleasures and avoid discomfort in a world where everything is always changing. Our strategies are not dependable. How we go about trying to feel secure and happy is at odds with the facts of life.

There’s a Buddhist teaching called the eight worldly concerns that describes this predicament. It points out our main preoccupations in life—what drives us, what we hope for, what we fear. It points out how we continually try to avoid the uncertainty inherent in our condition, how we continually try to get solid ground under our feet. The eight worldly concerns are presented as four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame.

Pleasure and pain drive us all the time. The attraction is simple: we want pleasure; we don’t want pain. Our attachment
to them is very strong, very visceral at either extreme. We can get that clenching-in-the-gut feeling of being hooked both when we crave something—when we’re consumed with wanting or needing—and when we’re averse to something and try to push it away.

We can spend a lifetime chasing after pleasure and trying to get away from pain, never staying present with the underlying feeling of discontent. But at some point it might hit us that there’s more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief.

Our attachment to gain and loss also keeps us running in the rat race. So we shed the light of mindfulness on our shenpa to what we have or want and our equally strong shenpa to what we don’t have or might lose. For instance, the money we have and the money we don’t have preoccupy both the rich and the poor—and just about everyone in between—in countries all over the world.

Recently I met a woman who had unexpectedly inherited five hundred thousand dollars. She was understandably ecstatic. She invested it and gleefully watched it grow, until the stock market crashed and she lost it all as suddenly as she had gained it. After two months of deep depression (she said she was almost catatonic and couldn’t eat or sleep), she had a revelation. It dawned on her that financially, she had been reasonably comfortable all along. She was fine before she hit the jackpot, and she was equally fine now that her newfound fortune was lost. It was her discovery of fundamental all-rightness, untouched by gain and loss, that she was overjoyed to report.

Gain and loss can also relate to the possessions we have or don’t have and the drive to acquire things (shopping
therapy, as some call it), as well as to the position in life we have or don’t have. Competition—often cutthroat competition—is painfully visible in our society today. We see it in politics, in sports, in business, even in friendships. We also see its painful consequences.

At Gampo Abbey, we try a different approach. Every July 1—Canada’s national day—we have a baseball game with the local Pleasant Bay Fire Department. We train for months ahead, and everybody plays with their whole heart—the firemen with their beers, us with our robes—but neither side really cares whether they win or lose. We all just have a great time without the suffering that’s inevitable when we’re entangled in loss and gain.

Fame and disgrace definitely snare us. Not many people are in a position to become famous, but this pairing can translate as wanting a good reputation—wanting people to think well of us—and not wanting a bad reputation. For most of us, this feeling runs very deep. For some of us, everything we do and say is to ensure that we’ll be well thought of, that we’ll be admired and won’t be scorned.

Shantideva says that reputation is about as flimsy as a child’s sand castle. We build it up, decorate it beautifully, and take great pride in it, but at the turn of the tide it all gets swept away. It’s like the good reputation of politicians or spiritual teachers that is lost overnight because of sexual misconduct.

And even when fame
is
achieved, does it bring the happiness that people anticipate? Consider how common it is to have wealth and fame but be miserable, like Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. What if, by contrast, we trained in staying in the middle—in that nongrasping open space between seeking what’s comfortable and avoiding what’s not?

Finally, let’s consider our attachment to praise and blame. We want to be complimented and we don’t want to be criticized. Some people blossom when they receive kudos for a job well done but go to pieces when they receive criticism, even if it’s constructive. Young children, teenagers, and yes, even the most mature of adults can have their spirits lifted up by compliments and cast down by criticism. We are so easily blown about by the winds of praise and blame.

This has been going on through the ages. They criticize the silent ones. They criticize the talkative ones. They criticize the moderate ones. There is no one in the world that escapes criticism. There never was and never will be, nor is there now, the wholly criticized or the wholly approved.

Shakyamuni Buddha said that more than twenty-five hundred years ago, but it seems that some things never change.

In one way or another, we’re all hooked by our attachment to the eight worldly concerns. Dzigar Kongtrül once said it’s as if we have a split personality: we can think we’re committed to a spiritual path, but sadly, we’re equally committed to the eight worldly concerns, to accepting what’s comfortable and rejecting what’s not. This gets us nowhere fast. Without that split personality, however, our commitment to waking up becomes wholehearted. We stop being blinded by the eight worldly concerns and stay present with the underlying discomfort.

When we decide to work with the commitment to not cause harm, we have to investigate how seduced we are by the eight worldly concerns. Are we willing to go to any
lengths to free ourselves from the tyranny of pleasure and pain, of what people think, of whether we win or lose, of whether we have a good or bad reputation? It doesn’t matter how far we get with freeing ourselves before we die. What matters is that we make the journey.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, the visionary genius Steve Jobs had this to say about freedom from the eight worldly concerns:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The first commitment is a vow to know your triggers, a vow that whatever it takes, you’ll compassionately acknowledge when you’re hooked by the eight worldly concerns—or, indeed, hooked by anything. When you look at what gets to you, it will undoubtedly have something to do with what you want or do not want. Whenever you realize you’re caught, right then, right on the spot, with kindness for yourself, you can acknowledge that you’re hooked. And then you can ask yourself: Which of the eight worldly concerns has me in its grip? Fear of loss? Hope of gain? The pain of being blamed? The desire to be praised? And who’s in control here—me or the eight worldly concerns?

We can’t even acknowledge what’s happening, however, if we’re caught up in our thoughts—in worrying and planning and fantasizing. That’s why we continue to train in meditation, noticing when we’re lost in thought and then coming back to this very moment.

I had an experience a few years ago of being liberated from the tyranny of the eight worldly concerns. At that time I was living at a retreat center along with nine other people, and every afternoon we would get together for a work period. This was a painful time for me because there was almost nothing I could do. I couldn’t haul water because of my bad back. I couldn’t paint decks because of environmental sensitivities. I was essentially useless in that situation, and it was extremely irritating to the work leader. I felt old, feeble, incompetent, and disliked. I felt really miserable.

This led me to some deep contemplation: If I wasn’t the well-respected, accomplished spiritual teacher I’d grown accustomed to being, then who was I? Without the outer confirmation, without the labels, who was I? I talked to Dzigar Kongtrül about my concern, and he asked me, “Isn’t it a big relief?” I had to be honest and say, “Not yet.”

Then a few of us were invited to attend some spiritual teachings in town. As soon as we arrived, I started to be treated as a special person. I had a special high seat, a special glass of water, a special place in the front row.

Seeing the dramatic difference in how I was perceived snapped some deep attachment I had to fame and disgrace, to loss and gain, to hope and fear about my identity. Up the mountain at the retreat center I was nobody. Down the mountain at the teaching I was a special guest, worthy of respect. But these were just shifting, ambiguous labels.
Fundamentally, I couldn’t ever be pinpointed, couldn’t ever be labeled definitively. At that moment, I genuinely felt the relief that Dzigar Kongtrül had asked me about.

The eight worldly concerns are, at bottom, just an outdated mechanism for survival. In that sense, we’re still functioning at a very primitive level, completely at the mercy of hope and fear. The mechanism of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure kept us from being eaten, kept us from freezing to death in winter, kept us figuring out how to get food and how to clothe ourselves. This worked well for our ancestors, but it isn’t working very well for us now. In fact, we continually overreact when it’s hardly a life-or-death matter. We behave as if our very existence were threatened, when all that’s at stake is maybe a late charge. We’re like Ping-Pong balls being bounced back and forth by our aversions and desires, and we’re way overdue for trying a fresh alternative.

In the year 2000 the elders of the Hopi Nation made a prediction about the future and offered advice on how to live in the upcoming millennium. The Hopi elders are considered the earth protectors, the ones who are responsible for the survival (or not) of our planet. They said that we were now in a fast-flowing river and that many of us would be afraid and try to cling to the shore. But those who cling to the shore, they said, “will suffer greatly.” The advice of the elders was to let go of the shore and push off into the middle of the river, see who was there with us—“and celebrate.”

Refraining but not repressing, contemplating our personal experience of being caught, acknowledging our triggers, the nonviolent practice of simmering—all of these are ways of letting go of the shore and pushing off into the middle
of the river. All of these are ways of allowing ourselves to live free of story lines, free of crippling attachments to what we want and don’t want, free of fixed mind and self-centeredness. If we don’t act on our craving for pleasure or our fear of pain, we’re left in the wide-open, unpredictable middle. The instruction is to rest in that vulnerable place, to rest in that in-between state, to not hunker down and stay fixed in our belief systems but to take a fresh look with a wider perspective.