Getting Our Ducks in a Row

The first step on the Eightfold Path is Right View, Seeing things as they truly are, not through the filters of our past experiences. This first step is critical to the practice of all the other steps. It’s taught first because it’s an excellent place to start the journey. We begin by waking up to the fact that we are causing our own suffering. I think of it in the same vein as the first step of the 12-step program, when people admit that they are powerless over some old conditioned unskillful behavior.

This last week, someone said to me that they were waiting to do something until they got their ducks in a row. I’m so glad that they said it because I could really relate. No matter how many things are going right in my life, I’m often focused on the one or two things that aren’t going so well. Preparing for the holidays, my dear family has swerved into a familiar pattern of dysfunction and I along with them, and I have found myself frustrated trying to get them all in a row to no avail. I’m hoping that some of you can relate to this way that we see the world and our families and ourselves as a project, something to be changed and improved upon in some way.

Obviously dealing with our families is a lifelong journey, so we have plenty of opportunity to practice seeing things differently, seeing things with fresh eyes. I have started to see how my clinging to things being a certain way often ensures that I’m never completely happy. I’m subtly trying to get those ducks in some arbitrary row that I’ve made up. I make to do lists of all sorts, subconsiously feeling like once everything is done, then I’ll be happy. For me, the first step of the Eightfold Path, Right View, reminds me to honestly examine why I want things to be different in the first place.

In his teachings, the Buddha was trying to point out that getting the ducks in a row is not the purpose of life. If we do happen to get the ducks in a row, it will probably be fleeting because, before we know it, those pesky ducks will be running amok again OR we will desire new ducks or all the other ways that our thoughts and emotions can be scattered. So, before we start chasing after the ducks again, we could try a new approach. We can try using mindful awareness to examine more closely what is actually happening, seeing more clearly our thoughts, our motivation and our actions from a fresh perspective.

“If only…”

Lama Surya Das encourages us to identify those subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we hide from the truth, by identifying what we’re wishing for. “If only….” How would you finish that sentence?

If someone were to ask you about your childhood, what would you tell them? What is your story about that? Now how does that color the way you see the world right now? Don’t we all have this story that we’ve used to rationalize our behavior? How we all cling to our story about our past experiences…

Most of us, we continually consciously or unconsciously defend the stories that we repetitively tell ourselves…in Buddhism there is a Sanskrit word called, “Samsara” that is literally translated as “perpetual wandering”. It is the symbol of this cyclic conditioned existence that we find ourselves in. We often keep doing the same things, telling ourselves the same stories about it, and having the same frustrating outcome. So, Right View helps us get off the hamster wheel.

A Zen proverb says if you cling to nothing, you can handle anything. So, we can take this opportunity right now to be more honest with ourselves, to imagine being more Teflon that Flypaper.

Some exercises to practice Right View:

1. I don’t know. Even if you think you know, it’s extremely valuable to rest in the place of not knowing. Imagine yourself being in your situation for the very first time. What would it feel like to let go of our previously held beliefs about ourselves, others and start from a place of not knowing?

“We’ve enclosed ourselves in a relatively small space by thinking life is only one certain way. It binds us in, and we’re not aware that we’re living in a tiny, cluttered room. BUT With the practice of mindful awareness and quiet reflection, it’s as if the walls of the room are torn down, and you realize there’s a sky out there.” Larry Rosenberg, The Art of Doing Nothing (Spring 1998)

2. Self-inquiry. What am I holding on to?

What are you clinging to? What are you not being honest with yourself about? In this moment, finish this sentence, “If I were being completely honest, I would tell myself….” What would each of us say? How can we commit to dropping the old stories, dropping the old way of explaining things or people or past events or even ourselves.

If you are in an accident and you break your arm, ignoring it, not looking at it, will not fix it. It’s only when you face the reality of the wound, only then you can begin to take appropriate action to heal.

3. Let go of any sense of struggle

Who or what are we fighting with or against anway? How can we try to surrendering to the moment, the deep truth in the moment? Imagine, even for a moment, that life isn’t about struggling against something or someone. That life can be about being in the flowing of living. Letting go of this sense of struggle can be incredibly powerful.

4. Cultivate compassion

Sylvia Boorstein says that the practice of seeing clearly is what finally moves us toward kindness. Seeing, again and again, the infinite variety of traps we create for seducing the mind into a struggle, seeing the endless rounds of meaningless suffering over lusts and aversions (which, although seemingly urgent, are not where true happiness lies), we begin to feel compassion for ourselves. And then, quite naturally, when we feel compassion for ourselves, we feel compassion for everyone else. We can know as we have never known before that we are stuck, all of us, with bodies and minds and instincts and impulses, “all in a tug-of-war with our basic compassionate nature that yearns to relax into love. Then we surrender. We love. We laugh. We appreciate.”

With this first step of Right View, we commit seeing ourselves and others with insight and compassion. When we feel a sense of struggle, we can remind ourselves to take refuge in mindful awareness, from this sense of having a fresh, new experience. When we get lost, we need only pause, relax, open to what is here, what is now and re-arrive in the natural presence of just being. We can give up the struggle, embraced the ducks wherever they are, and allow ourselves to be at peace

This week, as many of us go through spending time with old friends and family, imagine that you are experiencing them for the very first time. Imagine that you truly don’t know. That we can ask ourselves honestly what we’re holding on to, and perhaps just a little we can let go of any struggle, and be at peace with and have compassion for whatever situation arises.

From Ananda Baltrunas, "A Prison of Desire" is a man that was in prison for 20 years and now is a Pureland Buddhist priest

"When I look for freedom today I find it not in fantasy or in dreams, but in simple awareness. What kind of freedom is it that exists in doing nothing? It is the freedom not to knee-jerk react. It is the freedom to merely observe. I don’t have to judge the trauma that arises in my mind. I don’t have to get involved with the hundred narratives that might try to occupy my mind during any given day. In not clinging to thoughts and ideas, wants and desires, hatreds and resentments, the prison of my most negative thoughts and emotions have faded into a haze that still arises but no longer dominates my life. I have found freedom: it is the freedom of nonattachment, the freedom to not cling and to not resist. It is the freedom to allow myself to surrender to each moment and be at peace."

John Corbaley Dharma Talk December 2010 Getting Sick

From John Corbaley (Thanks, John!)

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bout of illness. Nothing extremely serious; just some seasonal flu bug that had been making the rounds at work. It’s an occupational hazard when your workplace is 90% female abounding with young children. There seems to be quite a bit of this going around. I read in the paper the other day about a school in Overland Park that shut down last week because of this ailment. I also heard from someone about a retirement center in Johnson County that went on “lock down” because of it.

I have to start out by saying that I have been extremely lucky in avoiding the majority of these maladies over the years. It had been so long that I had been sick before that I really couldn’t even remember the last time I had been off work for illness, probably 10 or 12 years at least. And oh yes, I had had a flu shot over a month ago-a requirement for healthcare workers.

This bout, however, really hit me hard. I went to work on Monday, had an OK day; fixed dinner and had a nice evening. Then about midnight it hit. Visits to the bath facilities every half hour or so for the rest of the nite. I will spare you the gastro intestinal details which I am sure you can fill in for yourself. Suffice it to say, by the end of the second day of just lying there in the bed, unable to do pretty much anything, you just want someone to shoot you to make the pain and discomfort stop.

So thirsty, but the smallest sip of water makes you violently nauseated. And it just seems to go on and on. You really can’t take any medication, because you can’t keep it down. That sick. I thought of the Hungry ghosts in Buddhist cosmology, beings who populate one of the hell worlds, with stomachs the size of mountains and mouths the size of a needle’s eye, constantly yearning for something impossible to possess.

As this bout of illness strung out to the third, fourth, and fifth days, as you start to feel better by tiny increments, I began to develop a bit of perspective about what was happening to me. First off, I began to develop a bit of a realization about what it might be like for people with major health challenges from diseases that don’t go away, that they don’t ‘get better’ from, that are with them every day for the rest of their lives. An illness like the one I had gives you a flash-in-the-pan glimpse of how fundamentally that would change your perceptions, your outlook, and your life.

For one thing, it brings you into the moment like few experiences can. We are usually to numb to the processes of our bodies, when you’re in pain, you feel every moment. I really did come to view this as a gift; mostly because I knew that this was temporary, I knew that this eventually would stop, so I started to view it as a kind of gift, a gift of awareness of momentary phenomena.

This experience also gave me a fresh perspective on my relationship with food. For quite a few days, I had absolutely no appetite. For the first few days, of course, I couldn’t even think about food without feeling nauseated. Even after that, I still had that small momentary distance that kept hunger at arms length, and allowed me that ability to examine my perceptions of being hungry without being automatically sucked into the daily habit of being automatically hungry three times a day, as mealtime approached--That feeling, the three times a day one, wasn’t so much a sense of actual need for food, but more just a conditioned response to the time of day and anticipation of the habitual mealtime.

I still remember quite vividly that first time, in the middle of the night of the third or fourth day, when I took that first sip of water that I could keep down. I was vividly reminded of the mindful eating practices I had experienced on retreat. If you have never had the opportunity to try mindful eating, I highly recommend it. It really is quite easy to do, just bring your awareness in a careful, slow way, to the process of eating as you break it down step by step. I’ve been trying to do it in the days since.

Of course, your monkey mind works constantly against you, trying to pull your awareness this way and that, trying to get you out of the moment. It made me very aware of how unconsciously we do most things really, eating while we’re watching TV, driving, web surfing, whatever. What ever happened to just eating? We’ve become so programmed to just tasting and swallowing, tasting and swallowing. So easy to overwhelm our sensations of satiety, the feeling of enough, that overeating becomes the norm.

As I lay there in my sick bed those first days, I was reminded of the role of the early Buddhist monks as healers. For my dissertation, I had studied the voluminous sections of the Vinaya devoted solely to healing the sick, treating wounds and various medical conditions with a generous collections of herbs, ointments, and preparations. What a boon these simple monks would have been, traveling to new lands as mendicants, arriving at communities with this kind of knowledge among those who had never experienced it before.

How much they would have been welcomed and valued for these simple gifts of kindness and healing to relieve pain and discomfort. The Buddha was both wise and clever in carefully outlining these methods, recipes, and instructions for his bhikkhus, knowing how valuable they would be as the spread the dharma around the world.

The Buddha has always been viewed as a healer in the psychological sense, healing the illness of ignorance with the wisdom of the noble truths and eight fold path. But this role as healer has traditionally always been augmented in very practical ways with the knowledge of healing very physical ailments as well. The Bhaisaj Guru, the medicine Buddha, holds his urn of healing herbs and unguents, offering the gift of both bodily and mind bound deliverance from suffering.

This concept is best expressed in the words of an eighth century Indian monk Santideva, who described the quintessential healing role in his towering work, the Bodhicaryavatara, the Way of the Bodhisattva. I’ll close with a brief quote from it.

“May I allay the suffering of every living being,

I am medicine for the sick.

May I be both the doctor and their nurse,

until the sickness does not recur.

May I avert the pain of hunger and thirst with showers of food and drink.

May I become both drink and food in the intermediate eons of famine.

May I be an inexhaustible treasure for impoverished beings.

May I wait upon them with various forms of offering.

Abandonment of all is Enlightenment

And enlightenment is my heart’s goal...

I am the protector of the unprotected

and a caravan leader for travelers.

I have become the boat, the causeway, and the bridge

for those who long to reach the further shore.

May I be a light for those in need of light.

May I be a bed for those in need of rest.

May I be a servant for those in need of service, for all embodied beings.

For embodied beings may I be a wish-fulfilling jewel,

the pot of plenty, the spell that always works,

the potent healing herb,

the magical tree that grants every wish,

and the milk-cow that supplies all wants.

Just as earth and other elements

are profitable in many ways to immeasurable beings dwelling throughout space,

So may I be sustenance of many kinds for the realm of beings throughout space,

until all have attained release.”

--- John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.

What about reincarnation?

Is there such a thing as reincarnation? Do you have to believe in it to be a Buddhist?

Many Buddhist texts refer to it, but some Buddhist teachers don't believe that it is necessary to believe in reincarnation to follow the Buddhist path. Buddha himself is quoted, when directly asked about reincarnation, as saying that it’s irrelevant to enlightenment. In some Buddhist traditions, it's used as a description for how long it might take to become enlightened (some say lifetimes...) But other traditions believe that a person can wake up and be enlightened in an instant. A little confusing, yes?

Within the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, reincarnation is neither mentioned nor implied. We suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways. We are often trying to change the external world to fit our selfish desires, which we think will make us happy. We want things and other people to be a certain way, and we discover that we can't control them, no matter what we do (at least not for long), and this makes us frustrated, resentful, angry, hurt, etc. We can only control our focus and our actions (the Eightfold Path).

Desire is the not the enemy. Skillful Desire can bring us deep happiness--when we desire to be loving, kind and compassionate AND make that a priority in daily life. Then, we naturally start to act in loving and kind ways. Mindfulness and meditation practices help loosen our old selfish habits. With practice, everyone can experience this deep happiness. It becomes liberating to rise above the daily drama in life and see each moment, ourselves, each person from a more compassionate perspective. We begin to see that we’re all in the same boat--we all have struggles, we all act unskillfully at times, we all get sick, we are all going to die.

Are there any facts? Clearly, we can’t definitively PROVE reincarnation until after we die, so who knows? In the meantime, there are some interesting occurrences worth discussing:

Pam Reynolds: Pam Reynolds was a woman who had brain surgery, was declared dead on the operating table, came back to life, and told a very interesting story about floating above her body. She was able describe things about the room that would have been impossible for her to know from her position on the operation table. The surgeons and nurses confirmed her description. There are many other examples of this kind. Here’s some interesting details about Pam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Reynolds_(singer)

A boy named James: Here is a link to an ABC news report about a young boy who claimed he was a World War II pilot that got shot down and was able to describe intimate details of the dead man’s life that were unlikely to be easily known, particularly by a five-year old: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EWwzFwUOxA

For myself, I think it is possible, but I don’t linger on the issue. I try to have a positive attitude and be kind and loving in each moment. I assume that if I do that, it will all work out, regardless of whether there is a heaven, a hell, reincarnation or even nothing. With the Buddhist practices, I feel like I’m living the happiest life possible, after having tried many different methods along the way. There is incredible joy and peace that comes from understanding and the Four Noble Truths and following the Eightfold Path.

The Power of Intention

The second step on the Eightfold Path, is Right Intention. The power of intention is discussed in the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings by the Buddha,

The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit,

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings…

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

So what is this thingl called intention? Of course, we’ve all heard the saying that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, implying that our intentions are irrelevant and that our actions are the most important demonstration of our lives. Actions are important, but this common saying doesn’t take into consideration where actions come from in the first place. Imagine that you are standing over a person with a knife in your hand. Your intention is to harm them, you stab the knife into their heart and begin slicing into them, and they die. Now, imagine the very same action, but you are a surgeon and your intention is to heal them. Something goes wrong during the surgery, and they die anyway. The outcome is exactly the same, but the motivation for your action was extremely important to understanding the situation.

Jack Kornfield says that intentions are the seeds you plant in your heart that grow to become how you live your life. The stories you are telling yourself about your life are the foundation of how you experience life and how you react to any situation that you find yourself in. If you wake up in the morning, and something goes wrong, and you decide that it’s going to be a crappy day—then you’ve set your intention to find the crappiness in life. And we usually find what we’re looking for. Buddha recognized the power of intention. In the New Testament of the Bible, Paul said that we shall reap what we sow. And sowing actually begins with our thoughts and intentions.

In this moment, right now, ask yourself “What is my primary intention in life?” “Why do I get up in the morning?” When you think about getting older and reflecting back on your life, what do you want to see? In Buddhism, we are encouraged to start with a clear intention, not settling for just sleepwalking through life reacting in old conditioned ways.

“Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our love and compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

-Pema Chodron, from Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications)

When we’re feeling stressed or depressed or anxious or happy or cheerful or silly or whatever state of mind might arise, in that moment we can recognize these states of mind, and we can ask ourselves: “What is my intention?” “What do I want out of life, and what do I want to put into life?” We can wake ourselves up. We can use the rising of any emotion or thought to better understand ourselves and to recognize the power of clarifying our intention. An emotion or thought is NOT who we are! We always have a choice about how to respond to anything and anyone in our life. Bring to mind a time in your life when you felt stuck in a bad situation, when you had that feeling of having no choices, feeling that there was no way to escape some particularly difficult situation. When you think about those times, even when things might seem at their worst, we still have the ability to set our intention towards waking up, to being curious about the situation, not judging ourselves for whatever we’ve done in the past, giving ourselves the gift of forgiveness and clear seeing. Waking up enables us to see the world with fresh eyes, to see new options that we might have missed before.

Naturally, there will be times when we have to admit we’ve fallen back asleep, that we didn’t act with good intentions, or even times when our intentions were kind and compassionate, but the outcome was still less than desired. Even in those situations, we have a fresh opportunity to set our intention to waking up and getting back on track.

Sometimes it might seem like too much effort. Our limited minds might tell us that it’s just easier to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Living a life without any specific intention can at times seem very alluring. Let’s just smoke that cigarette or have that drink. Let’s watch TV until our brains turn to mush. Who cares? In those moments, when mindfulness seems like too much trouble, that is the most important moment for practice. That is the moment to remind ourselves of the deep, long-lasting happiness that can be found in waking up and staying awake. We can remind ourselves how wonderful life can be.

“Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. This flow-through of energy and ideas is at every moment directed by our choice. That's our role in it. We're like a lens that can focus, or a gate that can direct this flow-through by schooling our intention. In each moment our intention gives this energy direction.”

–Joanna Macy, from “Schooling Our Intention,” Tricycle, Winter 1993

So, First, in each moment, we can set our intention. And Second, in each moment, we can remind ourselves of why it’s worth making the effort. And third, we can identify the choices that we are making in our lives. It can often seem like there is just one answer, the old conditioned response, to whatever is happening in our lives. But that simply is not true. We live in arguably the free-est country on the planet—and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have choices. The Buddhist teachings encourage us to use our intention as a litmus test against which choices can be evaluated. Then, we can choose consciously. We can decide what we want our life to be about, and can then choose our thoughts and actions based on that intention.

Last year, a friend of mine was facing some very difficult challenges in her life. I asked her if it was okay for me to share some of her story—she said yes. She had always been a good saver and smart financial planner, but then she found herself in financial crisis: she and her husband were both out of work, having a mortgage that they were struggling to pay, savings having been depleted, no end seemed to be in sight. As she and I talked about the dire circumstances, I was struggling to find a way to help relieve her pain. But my friend had found her own inspiration. She said that she was ready to explore all the options, even ones that had once seemed inconceivable to accept. She said that she knew bankruptcy and foreclosure were options, that she could live in her dad's basement and start her own business. She talked enthusiastically about the joy of moving in with her dad and starting fresh. She had taken the blinders off of what was possible and found there to be possibilities that, not only could she consider, but that she could even see as positive.

Our intentions color the stories we tell ourselves. In the face of the worst financial situation of her life, she knew she had choices, and that it was up to her to decide what to do, that life was not happening to her. She was creating the life she was living, and no matter how dire things seemed, she could set her intention on making new choices, set her intention on seeing the world as a place of possibilities and those new choices could include joy and happiness. That is the power of intention.

So each of us gets to choose, not once in a lifetime or once a year, but we are choosing in each and every moment, how we are going to live our life. We are choosing whether we live with clear intention or whether we allow ourselves to get dragged down in the mire of old habits and old ways of seeing the world and old ways of seeing ourselves. It is a choice. And no matter how many times we might think that we fail, we always, every one of us, have a new moment to start fresh.

There’s a wonderful William Blake quote that says, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it actually is—infinite.

So, we can be encouraged that the work of waking up is an opportunity to see the world come alive. We can wake up to this truth, we can recognize our unique gifts and manifest those gifts in our everyday actions. We can recognize the flow-through of energy from intention to action. We can recognize that every moment is a moment to start fresh. In each moment, we can set our intention to living our true purpose.

The Intersection of Buddhism and Christianity

A woman asked me why I consider myself both a Buddhist and a Christian, and here was my response:

I grew up attending the Methodist church every Sunday; my parents were very religious. But, for me, I was having a difficult time believing that there was some guy in the sky who was watching everything and making decisions about my life. I just couldn't get it. So, I wandered off to find something that made more sense. I went to India to study when I was in college and had an opportunity to learn more about Buddhism, and the ideas that I learned simply made more sense to me. Buddhism has four components that are unique (as noted by the Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor):

• The idea of dependent origination: The idea that everything is interconnected. We are all always interacting with our environment and each other and ourselves in an ever-changing flow. The sense of separation and permanence is just an illusion.
• The Four Noble Truths: Life is difficult, and we make it more difficult by trying to be happy by doing and thinking things that are inherently dissatisfying over the long haul. In other words, we try to be happy by changing our external circumstances (I'll be happy if I get a new car, house, boyfriend, etc.) That never works for very long. Happiness is a state of being that we choose to reside in, regardless of our external circumstances.
• The practice of mindful awareness: Most of what confuses us is that we are sleepwalking through life, responding in old conditioned ways based on our upbringing and our old experiences in life. If we choose to be more aware of what we are thinking and doing, we start to get a better idea of what is motivating our thoughts and actions, then we can choose differently.
• The importance of self-reliance: It's not enough to just read stuff and say we believe. We must take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, and channel the incredible power within us to be a beneficial presence in the world.

With this inspiration, I decided to deepen my practice. I made a connection with a Buddhist teacher named Lama Surya Das, and I have been his student since 1999. Having a teacher helps people have a more objective perspective of how we get stuck and how to move forward.

Then, I rediscovered Christianity within the context of these Buddhist teachings. I now see how Jesus was saying very similar things. Although he talked about "God", I believe that he was using terms like Father as a metaphor, not as an actuality. I interpret "God" as Pure Potential, the "stuff" that all things are made of, this incredible energy that manifests into everything and everyone. We each have this unique point of awareness through which "God" manifests. Buddha called this Buddha Nature, the innate Great Perfection. I now see Jesus as a way shower, as someone who figured it out and tried to get us to see with fresh eyes as well. I think Jesus would have agreed with everything Buddha said.

One point of uncertainty I still have is whether there is a soul, or something within us that is eternal. Christianity obviously talks about it existing, and certain traditions of Buddhism refer to something similar that goes on beyond death. I'm not sure. I still have questions about whether there is some eternal part of us that stays intact after death, or if everything is truly impermanent and ever-changing. I guess we'll find out for sure when we die :-> Regardless, I don't need to believe in a soul to try and be a good person right here right now. I can use these tools to improve my life and be happy regardless of my external circumstances. That's what draws me to the Buddhist way of living and enables me to see the teachings of Jesus in a whole new way.

Space

Sometimes it seems we spend most of our time focusing on the “stuff” in our lives-things, people, situations, hopes, fears, future plans, past remembrances. The concepts and labels that we put on things and people can clutter our minds. Like a pack rat, we have collected both physical and mental stuff that bogs us down and blinds us to the innate sense and wisdom of being. In between all our “stuff”, within all this stuff, even within us, there is space, emptiness. Thich Nhat Hanh has a wonderful teaching on space. He suggests that we focus awareness not on the stuff, but rather on the space between, opening it up, expanding it, because that is where true freedom is. So, in this moment, take a few deep breaths. As you breathe in silently say, “I see myself as space”. And breathing out, silently say, “I feel free”. Breathing in—space, breathing out—free. The instruction is that simple.

Beyond what we spend the majority of our time focused on, beyond our mental and physical “stuff”, beyond these illusions is freedom. And within the very midst of them is freedom. We don’t have to go to India to find it; we don’t need any special equipment or time. We have the power to see the world in a totally different way--recognizing the essential emptiness of stuff. Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching is trying to help us drop our delusive thinking by instructing us to focus on the space instead--the space outside of ourselves and the space inside of ourselves and the space that is the essence of all things. Just for a minute, right now, take a few moments, and bring your attention to the empty space around you and empty space within you. Imagine that you can breathe in and out and expand the empty space, like de-cluttering your mental house, dropping the labels that we hold onto so tightly. Do some mental housecleaning. Let go of the perception that everything and everyone is something solid and permanent. Focus instead on emptiness as the essence of all things.

The concept of emptiness in Western culture can be very negative. You might hear someone sadly say, “My life is so empty”. We can look at this in another way. We could say, Yes! Great! I recognize that life is empty. These stories that we make up about everything and everyone in our life are just that—made up stories. In western culture, emptiness is seen as lacking, that a poor person that has nothing. And in Western culture, the person who has lots of things and people in their lives is thought to have everything. And yet, we know that judging happiness by the clutter in our lives won’t work. We all know many happy people with very little in their lives, and many unhappy people with lots of things. We don’t have to study Buddhism to witness that phenomenon. It’s not that having stuff is inherently good or bad, but rather our relationship to it that makes all the difference. If we can see the stuff as essentially empty and impermanent, we can free ourselves from the tethers of trying to hold on to it all.

Cleaning out the physical space in our lives is a valuable process, but cleaning out the mental space in our lives is also a valuable tool to discovering the peace and happiness that is here, right now, in this very moment. The irony is that we can’t see if for all our stuff.

Finding peace in our lives is as close as our next breath. Breathing in space, breathing out free.

“Far beyond delusive thinking, we attain complete Nirvana.” - The Heart Sutra

Basics of Meditation

We all know that meditating on a regular basis is “good” for us, so why is it so difficult to do? We each will need to ask ourselves three questions: Why meditate? What is meditation? And how to meditate?

To begin, we can ask ourselves why would we want to meditate in the first place? Why are you trying? …you may want less stress in your life, or maybe you want to have a spiritual experience…but don’t we all just want to be happy? This is something innately within all beings. We want to not suffer, we want to be happy. Thomas Jefferson thought it was so important, he made it one of the top three inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. The Buddha thought it was so important he noted that life is suffering as his very first teaching. No matter how unskillfully we think or act, we are all just trying to be happy or trying to relieve suffering, either our own or someone else’s, in whatever conditioned way we have learned. The Buddha also recognized that we suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways.

So, why meditate? To increase the happiness in ourselves and others. But more importantly, each of us must find our own specific motivation. When the going gets tough, you will need to be clear on why you sat down to meditate in the first place. Meditation can be a powerful transformer, but it doesn’t work to just read about it or hear about it. It requires actual practice. So ask yourself, why try? What is going on with me or my life that is motivating me to meditate? What motivated you to read this material? Be honest with yourself. Because when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, and you’re supposed to get up and meditate, at that moment, when you really just want to hit the snooze button, you’ll need to remind yourself of this specific motivation.

Second, what is meditation? Meditation in all its various forms begins with one objective: To train the mind. The mind is the most powerful tool that we have. The mind determines how we perceive everything and everyone in our life. The interpretation that our mind gives any situation is so strong that we believe that it is absolutely true. When you walk down the street, you see people who you didn’t know. Think about some stranger you recently. Bring them to mind. What were they wearing? How did they look? Now recognize some judgment you may have about them. What opinion did you already form about them? It seems so real, these opinions and perspectives that we have, yet they are mostly built on our conditioned habits of relating everything we see, feel, experience with something we previously saw, felt, experienced.

In this moment, point to your gizzard. Where did you point? How did you decide where to point? We search our internal database for any information we might have about a gizzard. Maybe something to do with chickens? Maybe something to do with eating? Thoughts and sensations and experiences might seem so real, but mostly we are making up stories about what is going on around us, based on our experiences in the past. Meditation is about helping us recognize these stories for what they are. Just stories. We have the power to transform our lives by looking at our stories, dropping the stories that aren’t serving us, and seeing things and people, including ourselves, more clearly. This is what meditation is all about.

What Meditation is NOT about is stopping our thoughts. Anyone who has tried to meditate even once knows the frustration of trying to stop thinking. The more we try to stop, the more it seems we think. Our mind is like a little puppy running around with too much energy, running from one thought to thought, sometime with very little connection. We spend most of our time either rehashing the past or fantasizing about the future, either can be pleasant or painful, but both the past and the future take us away from being fully present in this moment. Meditation is training the mind to see ourselves and the world more clearly. So, we begin by making friends with our thoughts and emotions, not pushing them away, not clinging to them, not ignoring them, letting them rise and fall of their own natural process.

Meditation falls in two primary categories: concentration or insight. There are techniques for increasing the level of concentration on a particular object, like a candle or a mantra or our breath, and techniques for increasing the level of consciousness we bring to the entirety of our experience.

In Buddhism, the term for concentrated meditation is shamatha. In shamatha practice, we start by focusing all our attention on an object, like our breath or a candle or a mantra. If you’re new to meditation, we usually start with our breath. Breathing in, know that you are breathing in, Breathing out know that you are breathing out. Be aware of all the sensations in your body of breathing. It helps to begin by focusing on one specific area, like the rising and falling of your chest as you breathe. Imagine experiencing each breath like that first breath you take after having your head under water. Breathe naturally but with full awareness. Then, when you realize that you have become distracted and are no longer focused on your breath, you gently, ever-so gently silently note, “thinking” and return awareness to the breath. Again and again as many times as needed. This is the basics of meditation.

The second primary type of meditation is insight or Vipassana. Once we start to concentrate our attention, the mind begins to settle down. The thoughts may still be coming and going, but slowly the hum of random thoughts have less power over us. In Vipassana or insight meditation, awareness then rests in the moment of just being, just sitting. No place to go, nothing to do, resting in the natural perfection of just living. Often, we make things a whole lot harder than they need to be. Just taking it all in, and seeing everyone as interconnected and perfectly placed. In Dzogchen, a particulat Buddhist tradition, it’s called the Natural Great Perfection. Seeing the innate perfection in things left just as they are. Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher, says that 50% of meditation is simply self-acceptance. Carl Rogers, a noted psychologist, says that we must first accept ourselves, before we can truly change.

So, meditation is not just about focusing on our breath, that is the first step. Meditation is a process to reveal the world around us and within us in all its glory, no matter what form. The flower is beautiful but will wilt and become garbage, the garbage will decompose and become a beautiful flower. With meditation, we can begin to look at life more wholistically. Things that we think are beautiful and things that we think are grotesque, they are all part of this incredible process called living. Meditation is ultimately about how to see it all and maintain a compassionate and loving presence--the happiness that lies deep within each moment, regardless of what is happening.

Third, we need to know how to meditate. As many of you may have already figured out, there are many different ways to train the mind--transcendental meditation, Insight meditation, Zen meditation. How to sort it all out? Well, we can start with these basic teachings, and then it’s time to explore the possible traditions. This upcoming Wednesday, September 29, 2010, at 7 pm – 9 pm, you will have an opportunity to experience some of the different kinds of meditation and the groups here at Unity Temple that practice those methods—Thich Nhat Hanh, Korean Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Vipassana--find what fits for you. This is an opportunity to find a small sangha to support your meditation practice.

I encourage everyone to try creating a meditation practice at home. It takes three essential ingredients. First, pick a place in your home, with a chair or a cushion. Designate a special room or corner as the place for meditation. You can make it fancy or plain, just make it consistent. Second, pick a time. It helps to have a specific time in the morning or at night, where you commit to making meditation the number one priority. Sit for five minutes or 20 minutes, the amount of time is less important than the consistency of doing it each day. Third, pick a practice, a type of meditation. I encourage those of you beginning to start with some guided meditations. I can suggest some CD’s that I’ve found helpful. So, you pick a place, a time and a type. That’s it.

Armed with our personal motivation, knowing what is to be done, and making it a priority to do so, we can now begin incorporating this simple practice into our daily lives, a simple practice that turns out to be incredibly transformative. Give yourself 30 days to try this “different” activity. Albert Einstein said that we can never solve a problem with the process that caused the process in the first place. Try out this new process, and let me know how it goes.

Lama Surya Das, a Dzogchen master, relates to life in this way, “Things are not as they seem to be, nor are they otherwise. So, we might as well burst out laughing.”

The Basics of Dzogchen

There are many different practices in Buddhism, just as there are in Christianity. Dzogchen is a set of practices within Tibetan Buddhism. Dzogchen is translated as the Great Perfection or the Great Completion. These teachings are based on the understanding that within each of us lies a primordial state of perfection. Lama Surya Das, a leading Buddhist teacher and author of Awakening the Buddha Within, has many books and lectures that cover this special set of practices. We also talk about this state as Buddha nature or our innate goodness. However, I’m sure many of us have days when we don’t feel like there is any goodness to be found. But even then and even now, it is here, just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be nurtured, just waiting to be allowed to shine. The teachings of Dzogchen encourage us to discover this innate goodness, to practice cultivating it, then put it into action in our lives.

We don’t have to wait to get reborn, we don’t have to even decide whether reincarnation is true or not. We just need to practice being present, and find out for ourselves if what they are saying is true. A great quote from a Dzogchen master named Manjusri is, “One instant of total awareness is one instant of total freedom and enlightenment.” Dzogchen breaks down this idea of “enlightenment” into bite size pieces.

There are three primary points in Dzogchen: View, Meditation and Action.

The Glimpse/View: To recognize one’s own nature

Meditation/Practice/Path: To practice resting in that nature

The Result/Fruition: To sustain that awareness

The basic premise of Dzogchen is that everything exists in the natural state. Imagine that everything you need right now exists in this present moment. No place to go, nothing to do, just be present and you will find whatever you need. How can this be? Imagine that whatever answer you are struggling with, whatever situation is worrying you, that the process for solving this issue is to first do nothing. Now, of course, many of us already choose the method of “doing nothing”. We do nothing because we are afraid, or we do nothing because we can’t decide, or do nothing because it seems too difficult to think about the problem. So, I’m not talking about THAT kind of doing nothing—I think most of us have all already mastered that. This is actually a different kind of “do nothing”. This is about being fully present in this moment and being open to the huge potential that exists in each moment. So maybe “being open and present” is a little doing, but mostly not doing--not being distracted, not struggling, not over-analyzing--just relaxing into the fullness of the present moment.

Most of us have already had a glimpse of being fully present. Recall a time that you were in nature or playing a sport well or listening to a great piece of music or see great art, when you felt “in the zone”, a sense of all things being connected, a sense of life being perfect, nothing to be added or subtracted. That is awakening. That is what this is all about. There is a state of being that we all can realize and cultivate.

One of the things I love about Buddhism is that it is very practical. This is not about anyone telling you what to believe. Buddhism is about offering up a new way of looking at the world, then you have to go try it out for yourself. It’s not enough to just read about it or hear about it. Test is for yourself. You decide if it works. And Dzogchen teachings are the same. There are people who came before us, who were kind enough to show us the path that worked for them. They found some techniques that worked, for breaking down pre-conceived notions of how they viewed the world, and now we have an opportunity to learn from their experience.

Dzogchen is the meditation teaching of non-meditation. We’re not trying to get to some higher level of consciousness; we are not trying to create some vision or special experience. We are practicing just being. We begin by bringing awareness to the breath, just breathing in and breathing out with awareness. But focus on the breath is not the end process. It is a stepping stone to just resting naturally in the moment. Imagine that you are in a dark room, with windows so dirty that you can’t see out. Your sense of the world would come from all the experiences that you have had inside that dark dirty room. Now, imagine one day that your arm accidentally brushes up against the window, and a little dirt is removed, enabling you to see a little bit of what lies outside the window. This little glimpse might encourage you to begin washing the window little by little until you see more and more of what’s going on around you. The dirt symbolizes all the thoughts and sensations that cloud our sense of being. There’s no reason to get mad at the dirt. We don’t need to feel badly for having the dirt—everyone has some. We just need to clean the windows. We are cleaning the windows of our awareness. With all this cleaning, we might then realize that, in truth, there is no window; there is no room. It’s just a mental construct that we created in order to define who we are. But with the practice of awareness, of seeing beyond our thoughts and sensations, we start to experience the fullness of life. When your window was dirty, the fullness of life still existed. There were still many other things happening beyond your small room, but YOU didn’t know it. This is a good illustration of the glimpse that Dzogchen is talking about. The glimpse of the fullness of life begins with just washing the window a bit.

The second step in this process reminds us that, to expand the number of moments we experience fully, we need to commit to and then follow through with practice. We commit to practice no matter how difficult or frustrating it might sometimes be. Oftentimes, early on in practicing mindfulness and meditation, we are struck by all the crazy thoughts and projections that we place on ourselves and the world. It can be somewhat unsettling. It may make you want to jump up and run out of the room and never meditate or be mindful again. BUT, this second step reminds us to stay put, to hang in there, to keep trying. As Pema Chodron says, if you can manage to hold your seat, especially during the tough times, great progress can be made. if you can manage to not get freaked out by what you’re experiencing, and to just sit and observe how your mind tries to hold onto its old way of viewing the world, then you start to see the incredible possibilities that truly do exist in this world.

Another powerful mindfulness exercise is described by Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. He suggests that we imagine we go back to our childhood, before we were given words to describe everything, before we personally had an experience of so many things. From this place of innocence and not-knowing, look around at everything and everyone and imagine that you are seeing and experiencing this world for the first time, without words or experiences to pre-judge. Imagine that you are experiencing yourself without words, without preconceived notions about who or what you are. By taking away our words and our memories, we can start to recognize what a huge impact our words and memories make on how we interpret the world that we live in today. In this way, we start to see the world anew. Dzogchen teaches that this is NOT just a mental exercise, that you really do have the ability to start fresh in each moment.

The last step and of course continual step, is action, continually expanding the moments spent in full awareness. With the glimpse, then practice, you begin to embody this new way of living in more and more moments of each day. You discover more and more ways to see the world and yourself in a fresh new way. You rest in the full view of life more often and that becomes your pattern, your “habit”, when the synapse of your brain become rewired.

There is a wonderful Dzogchen poem by the Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche:

Happiness can not be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation and letting go.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there -
open, inviting and comfortable.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing -

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.

Imagination

(To listen to the talk, click here)

In our search for happiness, imagination is one of the most powerful tools available to us. Stephen Batchelor has a wonderful chapter on imagination in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs. In it, he describes that the three most important factors in mastering mindfulness and meditation are:

• First is commitment. We make a conscious commitment to ourselves to devote time and effort to this worthwhile practice.
• Second is technique. We study and practice the techniques of mindfulness and meditation in order to master them.
• Third is imagination. It might seem surprising that he would elevate imagination to such importance. Why would we need to have imagination in order to awaken?

Why meditate in the first place? Why care about learning mindfulness? To relax? To de-stress? To find answers? There are many different reasons to begin a meditation practice, all excellent motivators in their own way. But one of the best motivators is our imagination. We imagine that life could be different. The first step in learning anything new is imagining that things could be different.

When people get depressed, one of the most debilitating aspects is that they cannot imagine living without being depressed. When we are in pain, it seems that we lose our ability to imagine life without pain. We all get caught up in the experience we’re having, clinging to it with the unconscious assumption that things will never change. And yet, it is possible. In the midst of a difficult experience, in the middle of reacting in our old unskillful ways, we can remember to imagine how things might be different, we can awaken to the incredible experience of living beyond our limited thinking and feeling.

How might we use our imagination as a powerful tool for passionately living life? Here are some ideas to consider.

First, we can recognize the ability to access imagination in each moment. Each moment is sacred—not just the ones spent meditating. Each moment. We are creating our life moment- by-moment. When we feel stuck in a certain situation or overwhelmed by the circumstances in our lives, we can remind ourselves to leverage the power of imagination to see clearly the breadth and depth of each situation, the possibilities beyond our limited way of thinking. We are deciding moment-by-moment how to live. Most of the time, we fall back on the easy answers, like what our parents did, or what our friends are doing or what we think we should do. We might think of so many moments as just getting through life, doing what we have to do…

Rodney Smith, a Vipassana teacher, encourages us in the following way: “We often feel our everyday existence is a distraction from our spiritual intention. When this happens, life is divided between the sacred and mundane, and the mind pits one concept against the other. But belief shapes reality, and if the belief is maintained that the sacred lies somewhere else other than Now, our spiritual life will be governed by that limitation.” We can choose to see the sacred in each situation, know our practice is not separate from living in each moment, visualizing the vast, limitless resource of imagination that creates our experience.

Second, we can practice using imagination. Our ability to think beyond our limitations is a learnable skill. Visualizations can be a powerful part of the practice, like the loving-kindness practice that we do, or imagining ourselves as the Buddha. These visualizations may at first seem corny or superficial, but that’s still a good place to start. Buddhist teachers encourage us that, even without thinking anything is changing, we are planting seeds. We know that a flower or plant begins to grow beneath the soil once it is planted, regardless if there is any change visibly seen. So are the seeds of love and compassion calling forth the awakening of innate Buddha nature, just by the mere practice of imagining.

Think of yourself as an artist. Each of us is creating a life. Each of us is writing the unfinished story of our life right now. Each of us is making choices about how to live our lives right now. The limitations that we think exist are in most cases, self-imposed. Take a few minutes, and imagine all the possible ways that you might live your life from this point forward. Think beyond your current circumstances, beyond any assumed limitations, beyond any self-imposed constraints, beyond, beyond. With this willingness to stretch beyond our boundaries, each of us can more wisely choose the possible ways we could live life to its fullest.

Third, we can never run out of imagination. Everyone feels down at times, we get sick, and get old, we feel scared and angry and frustrated. But, the truth of our being is that there is a never-ending source of light within us. We may feel angry, but we are not anger. We may feel afraid, but we are not fear. Thoughts and emotions are NOT who we are. We can remember that we are pure awareness, we can imagine that we are love and compassion. We can imagine being fully awake, fully present.

This innate goodness within us is like the Sun. The sun is always shining. It never stops. It doesn't need something outside of itself to shine. It just keeps shining--no matter what. There may be clouds in the way, it might be nighttime, so we don’t see the Sun, but the Sun is still shining. The light of our being is the same way. It might be covered up or out of view, but it’s still there . This unique point of awareness is always present in each moment.

Who or What is having this experience of living anyway? Who or what is having these thoughts or feeling these feelings right now? Who or what are you? Loosen any certainty that you are a certain way, loosen the clinging to misconception that life must unfold in a certain direction, that living is limited to a few old emotions and recurring thoughts. Imagine that you are not a thing or a body, but rather pure awareness manifesting anew in each moment. Imagine the possibilities.

Know that imagination is always available, in every moment, to every person. Access it, exercise it, strengthen it, leverage the power of it, use it as the fuel for our lives unfolding, and know the power it provides for transformation.

In fact, we would not have this Buddhist path, these powerful teachings, if the Buddha had no imagination. He would have not found a new answer, because he would not have imagined one to exist, and therefore would have not gone seeking a new way of living. That’s the power of imagination.