The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (14 page)

When you’re depressed, you may say to yourself, ‘Why bother to sit? Why bother to find out, for my own sake and for the sake of others, what this depression is about? Why does it drag me down? How come the sky was so blue yesterday and now everything is so gray? How come everyone was smiling at me yesterday and now they’re all frowning at me? How come yesterday I felt like I was doing everything right and today it seems I’m doing everything wrong? How come? How come? How come?’ If you’re alone in retreat, you still get depressed. There’s no one to blame it on; it’s just this feeling that happens. You ask yourself, what is it? What is it? What is it? I want to know. How can I rouse myself? What can I do that’s not completely habitual? How can I get out of this rut?

How do we stop the habitualness of our process? The teachings say, ‘Well, that’s why we sit. That’s what mindfulness is about. Look carefully. Pay attention to details.’ Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions. Still, sometimes you’ll read and read and you can’t find the answer anywhere. But then someone on a bus will tell you, or you’ll find it in the middle of a movie, or maybe even in a commercial on TV. If you really have these questions, you’ll find the answers everywhere. But if you don’t have a question, there’s certainly no answer.

Impermanence means that the essence of life is fleeting. Some people are so skillful at their mindfulness practice that they can actually see each and every little movement of mind – changing, changing, changing. They can also feel body changing, changing, changing. It’s absolutely amazing. The heart pumps blood all the time and the blood keeps going and the food gets digested and the whole thing happens. It’s amazing and it’s very impermanent. Every time you travel in a car, that might be the end. If you get really paranoid, impermanence can drive you crazy because you’re scared to step off the curb, you’re scared to go out of your house. You realize how dangerous life is. It’s good to realize how dangerous it is because that makes the sense of impermanence real. It is good to realize that you will die,
that death is right there on your shoulder all the time. Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn’t last forever. It might be over in the next instant! Sometimes it’s said that the end of every out-breath is actually
the
end; the opportunity is there to die completely. Suzuki Roshi gave the instructions, ‘Sit still. Don’t anticipate. Just be willing to die over and over again.’ Let that be a reminder. Being willing to die over and over again heightens the first reminder, the sense of gratitude and preciousness. Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up. Sometimes let it scare you. It is said, ‘Practice as if your hair were on fire.’ It’s okay if it scares you. Fear can make you start asking a lot of questions. If it doesn’t get you down, it’s going to start you wondering, ‘What’s this fear? Where did it come from? What am I scared of?’ Maybe you’re scared of the most exciting things you have yet to learn. Impermanence is a great reminder.

The third reminder is karma: every action has a result. One could give a whole seminar on the law of karma. But fundamentally, in our everyday life, it’s a reminder that it’s important how we live. Particularly it’s important at the level of mind. Every time you’re willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious. After a while what comes up is a more wakeful, more open thought. You’re conditioning
yourself toward openness rather than sleepiness. You might find yourself caught, but you can extricate yourself by how you use your mind, how you actually are willing to come back just to newness, the immediacy of the moment. Every time you’re willing to do that, you’re sowing seeds for your own future, cultivating this innate fundamental wakefulness by aspiring to let go of the habitual way you proceed and to do something fresh. Basically this is letting go of thoughts, the churning of thoughts, and coming back to the present moment.

In one of our chants we say, ‘Whatever arises is fresh, the essence of realization. Grant your blessings so that my meditation is free from conceptions.’ Freshness here means willingness to sit up if you’re slouching. If you want to stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, it means willingness to get up and take a shower with really good soap, to go down to the drugstore and buy something that smells good, to iron your shirt, shine your shoes, whatever it takes to perk up. It means doing whatever it takes to counteract your desire to throw everything on the floor, push it under the bed, not wash, just dive into this darkness. When these feelings come on, it does feel as if the whole world is collaborating with your own state of mind, acting as a mirror. Darkness seems to be everywhere. People are irritated at you, everything is closing in. Trying to cheer yourself up isn’t easy, and sometimes it feels hypocritical, like going against the grain. But the reminder is that if
you want to change your habitual stuckness, you’re the only one who can do it.

I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just talking about seeing how you always do the same habitual things when bad feelings – uneasiness, depression, fear – start coming up. You always do the same thing; you shut down in some habitual, very old way. According to the law of karma, every action has a result. If you stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, if you overeat for the millionth time in your life, if you get drunk, if you get stoned, you know that’s going to depress you and make you more discouraged, if it’s just this habitual thing that you think is going to make you feel better. The older you get, the more you know how it just makes you feel more wretched. The law of karma says, ‘Well, how do you want to feel tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now, ten years from now?’ It’s up to you how to use your life. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself. Sometimes you can say, ‘Couldn’t care less,’ but after the fourth day of lying under the sheets in your dirty, smelly clothes with your socks on, with the empty bottle next to the bed – whatever the scenario is – you say, ‘Maybe I should go out and buy a new shirt and take a shower and go and look at the ocean or walk in the mountains or make a nice meal or do
something
to uplift my situation, to cheer
myself up.’ Even though we may feel very heavy-hearted, instead of eating poison, we can go out and buy the best filet mignon or whatever it might be – in my case, the best peach.

The law of karma is that we sow the seeds and we reap the fruit. To remember that can be extremely helpful. So when you find yourself in a dark place where you’ve been countless, countless times, you can think, ‘Maybe it’s time to get a little golden spade and dig myself out of this place.’ I remember my first interview with my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, very well, because I was somehow hesitant to talk to him about what was really the problem in my life. Instead, I wasted the whole interview chattering. Every once in a while he said, ‘How’s your meditation?’ and I said, ‘Oh, fine,’ and then just chattered on. When it was over, I blurted out, ‘I’m having this terrible time and I’m full of anger and blah-blah-blah,’ in the last half-second. Rinpoche walked me toward the door and said, ‘Well, what that feels like is a big wave that comes along and knocks you down. You find yourself lying on the bottom of the ocean with your face in the sand, and even though all the sand is going up your nose and into your mouth and your eyes and ears, you stand up and you begin walking again. Then the next wave comes and knocks you down. The waves just keep coming, but each time you get knocked down, you stand up and keep walking. After a while, you’ll find that the waves appear to be getting smaller.’

That’s how karma works. If you keep lying there, you’ll drown, but you don’t even have the privilege of dying. You just live with the sense of drowning all the time. So don’t get discouraged and think, ‘Well, I got out of bed, I took a shower. How come I’m not living in a Walt Disney movie now? I thought I was going to turn into Snow White. I thought I was going to live happily ever after. The prince kissed me; I woke up. How come I’m not living happily ever after?’ The waves just keep coming and knocking you down, but you stand up again and with some sense of rousing yourself, standing up. As Rinpoche said, ‘After a while, you find that the waves seem to be getting smaller.’ That’s really what happens. That’s how karma works. So let that be a reminder. It’s precious and it’s brief and you can use it well.

Here’s another story about Rinpoche going to see his teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen. Rinpoche said that on this particular morning when he went in, Jamgon Kongtrul held up an object made of a beautiful white silvery metal that glimmered in the sun, with a long handle and something like prongs at the top. Jamgon Kongtrul said that it had been sent to him from England. Rinpoche came over and sat down and they looked at it. Jamgon Kongtrul said, ‘It’s for eating,’ and when the attendants brought the food, he took the four prongs, put them into the piece of food, held them up, put it into his mouth, and said, ‘This is how they eat with this over there. They put it into the food and then
the food sticks to these four prongs and then they put it into their mouth.’ Rinpoche looked at this and thought it was very ingenious, this object. Then Jamgon Kongtrul said to him, ‘Someday you’re going to meet the people who make these things, and you’re going to work with them. It’s not going to be easy, because you’re going to find that they’re more interested in staying asleep than in waking up.’ That’s what he said about us. So when you realize that’s true about yourself, remind yourself that it’s up to you whether you actually experience gratitude and the preciousness of your life, the fleetingness and the rareness of it, or whether you become more resentful and harsh and embittered and feel more and more cheated. It’s up to you how the law of karma all works out.

Finally, the fourth reminder is the futility of continuing to spin around on this treadmill that is traditionally called samsara. Someone once said that she felt as if she were on a record that just kept going round and round; she had got stuck in this groove, and every time she went around, the groove got deeper and deeper. I’ve also heard people say that sometimes, when they hear themselves speak, they feel as if they’re a tape recorder playing the same tape over and over and over. They get sick of it, but somehow they just keep playing it anyway because there is a funny little identity there that gives them some kind of security, painful though it may be. That’s samsara.

The essence of samsara is this tendency that we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. The basic teaching is that that is how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck in a very small, limited view of reality. That is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are all the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but you’re stuck in this cocoon, or maybe you’re inside a capsule, like a vitamin pill. Moment after moment, you are deciding that you would rather stay in that capsule. You would rather remain a vitamin pill than experience the pain of stepping out into that big space. Life in that capsule is cozy and secure. We’ve gotten it all together. It’s safe, it’s predictable, it’s convenient, and it’s trustworthy. We know when we walk into our house exactly where the furniture is, and it’s the way we like it. We know we have all the appliances we need and we have the clothes we like. If we feel ill at ease, we just fill in those gaps. Our mind is always seeking zones of safety. We’re in this zone of safety and that’s what we consider life, getting it all together, security. Death is losing that. That’s what we fear, that’s what makes us anxious. You could call death an embarrassment – feeling awkward and off the mark. Being totally confused and not knowing which way to turn could also describe death, which we fear so much. We want to know what’s happening. The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these
zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s samsara.

The opposite of samsara is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior’s journey. That’s what stirs us and inspires us: leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through the initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that’s uncertain and unknown. From that point of view, death becomes this comfort and this security and this cocoon and this vitamin pill-ness. That’s death. Samsara is preferring death to life. The fourth reminder is to remember that. When you find yourself with these old, familiar feelings of anxiety because your world is falling apart and you’re not measuring up to your image of yourself and everybody is irritating you beyond words because no one is doing what you want and everyone is wrecking everything and you feel terrible about yourself and you don’t like anybody else and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict, at that point just remember that you’re going through all this emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed. Basically, you
do
prefer life and warriorship to death.

Hopefully these four traditional reminders – precious human birth, the truth of impermanence, the law of karma, which is cause and effect, and the futility of continuing to prefer death to life – will help you and me for the rest of our lives, whether we are leaving here or staying on here, to wake up. So have a good journey home, and always remember – never give up!