Being Love – 3 – The obstacles between our experience and being love

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here) 

Today we continue a series of talks based on the book by Thich Nhat Hanh entitled, Teachings on Love.  This morning we will focus on identifying the obstacles that sometimes arise that diminish our ability to be love.  My Buddhist teacher has a beautiful quote about this topic.  He says,

“What does it matter if everyone loves me or what does it matter if nobody loves me.  I am Love, and I can cultivate Love expressing.”

We all want to receive love and give love, but why is it sometimes so difficult to do so?  And if enlightenment is so awesome, why don't we all do whatever it takes to stay in that enlightened state in each moment of each day?  

I have often wished that just reading a few books would enlighten me.  There are stories of people becoming enlightened by being hit on the head with a shoe (after much study and practice).  There are stories of people being enlightened who could not read nor write, but simply listened to the teachings with an open heart.  Today, I’m going to say some words, but words are not the experience.  My only aspiration is that together we create some fertile ground for simply being aware, beyond our old ways of "seeing" ourselves and the world, so that we can each perhaps experience an awakening.

This morning, I want to talk a bit about the Heart Sutra, which is one of the shortest Buddhist teachings, but said to be so powerful that in its short 14 lines, it is the Heart, the Essence, of Transcendent Wisdom.  The original writer is not known, but guessed to be a Chinese monk living about in the 3rd century CE.  The Heart Sutra is an elegant description of what stands between us and enlightenment.  First, we confuse knowledge with wisdom.  We all know that reading a book about riding a bike might be nice, but it is no substitute for getting on a bike and attempting to stay upright as you peddle.  One of the key components in the Heart Sutra is pointing out this distinction.  We need to practice meditating and being aware in order to transform the experience we are having of ourselves and the world around us.   

A second important point in the Heart Sutra is confronting our sense of duality, and how that gets in the way of enlightenment (in fact who or what is being enlightened?).  I feel so solid, separate and permanent.  I think I “know” who and what I am, and yet….Who or what am I?  In order, to break down our pre-conceived notions of this versus that, them versus us, the Heart Sutra challenges us to realize that we are not permanent, separate, solid beings.   It does so by going through what in Sanskrit is called the Five Skandhas (translated as aggregates or heaps or bundles), which attempt to break down this wholistic sense of self that we have built up and mentally hold on to.

For example, you may have had some breakfast or at least a cup of tea or coffee. At this very moment, you are digesting and absorbing that substance into your system.  You are becoming what you just ate and drank.  Or rather, what you just ate or drank is becoming you.  At what point, does it stop being a separate liquid or food, and become you?

In this way, we can reflect upon ourselves and the world around us to strip away these obstacles that cause us to not "see: ourselves and the world clearly.  The Five Skandhas are like a filter between our experience and being fully awakened.  

(From Wikipedia)  Sogyal Rinpoche wrote:

Once we have a physical body, we also have what are known as the five skandhas — the aggregates that compose our whole mental and physical existence. They are the constituents of our experience, the support for the grasping of ego, and also the basis for the suffering of samsara.

They are:

1. form (Skt. rūpa; Tib. གཟུགས་, Wyl. gzugs)

2. feeling (Skt. vedanā; Tib. ཚོར་བ་, Wyl. tshor ba)

3. perception (Skt. saṃjñā; Tib. འདུ་ཤེས་, Wyl. ‘du shes)

4. formations (Skt. saṃskāra; Tib. འདུ་བྱེད་, Wyl. ‘du byed)

5.  consciousness (Skt. vijñāna; Tib. རྣམ་ཤེས་, Wyl. rnam shes) 

When we look more closely at what it is that we call ‘I’, we can see that it includes several elements, not just the parts that make up our physical bodies, but also our various senses and our minds.  In Buddhism, we can examine the self and our experience more precisely, by using these five categories. Note that each category is not distinct but rather there is sort of a spectrum with some overlap.  We utilize the categories to help us understand experience from a different perspective.

1. Form/Matter:  Forms are the elements of earth, water, fire and wind, and then the resultant forms – that which is made from these elements.  There is a visual form, which means the various colors and shapes that appear to our eyes. Sounds may occur naturally or be man-made, or they may be a combination of the two, such as when a person beats a drum. A lot of sounds are just meaningless noise, but to some, we give meaning. Smells or odors can be natural or artificial.  Tastes are said to be of six kinds, roughly translated as sweet, sour, bitter, hot, astringent and pungent.  Textures, or tactile sensations, may be felt on the body’s surface or in its interior. Form means our physical bodies and the physical forms that we find all around us.
2. Feelings/Sensations: Although this is called the skandha of feelings, it does not mean emotional feelings, but something more like sensations.  We are always experiencing sensations.  In this moment, you might have a particular ache or pain, or perhaps a pleasant sensation somewhere in your body, or you may be aware of the sensation of your heart beating.  You might also experience drowsiness or restlessness in your body as a sensation.
3. Perceptions:  Perception means the recognition of identities or names, and on the sensory level it means the discernment of the five objects of sense.  Technically, perception is defined as ‘that which grasps or identifies characteristics’. Perception could be non-conceptual, in the case of the five physical senses, or conceptual, as in the perception of thoughts and ideas.  Perception is either just awareness of our reaction to a sensation (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) as well as the moment we identify forms and feelings with names.  Perception can be non-discerning when you encounter something for the first time and therefore do not recognize it, just as a child does many times a day, or when someone hears a language that they do not understand.
4. Mental States/Formations:  This category refers to thoughts and emotions. These mental states include all the thinking and feeling we have created based on pre-conceived notions, judgments, biases, even including appreciation, mindfulness and concentration.  There are mental states like faith, whether it is what we call “blind faith” or “faith with doubt”.  We then make judgments about the goodness or badness, the skillfulness or unskillfulness, of these mental states, and that leads to more mental states.  Mental states also include the stories that we make up about what is happening to us and around us.
5. Consciousness: Consciousness, the fifth skandha, is the one where there are differing descriptions in the various Buddhist teachings.   We are conscious or aware in this moment, but some teachings categorize that as a mental state.  Some say this category is the ego, that which recognizes itself as separate from others based on mental activity.  Others use this category for all the stored memories that we have that cause us to create this persona—I am who and what I am because of my past experiences and my memories of those times.

We can explore the Five Skandhas using a simple example of burnt popcorn.

1. There is the form of burnt popcorn.
2. There is the smell of burnt popcorn.
3. There is a perception of the smell as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
4. There is a mental state, perhaps a judgment about who burned the popcorn, or about ourselves if we burned the popcorn.  
5. There is a memory of any time we have previously experienced burnt popcorn that has been incorporated into who we are. 

Now, who or what are we beyond these five categories?  Can you imagine or experience a sense of awareness that is beyond doing and not-doing, beyond dualistic thinking?  We can practice resting in this natural state of just being--no place to go, nothing to fix or change.  Just Awarenesss aware of Awareness.  Beyond our limited sense of self; "being" as part of the whole.  

In Buddhist teachings, we are all Buddhas by nature, it is merely covered by temporary obscurations.  We can have the experience or rather the experience can be had right here right now.  What are you holding on to, what is keeping you from slipping into the experience, the glimpse, the taste?   There are several practices that have been created to help us experience this awareness, an awareness that is beyond mindfulness or sensations or stories or perception or perspective.

Real love is created from recognizing our Buddha nature, the natural state of our mind.  By recognizing awareness again and again, we train our mind to rest in the natural state.  The Buddhist teachings call this our inheritance, our great glorious generous inheritance, the glory of the natural state.

It is the nature of our mind to build concepts, create labels and judgments, to create stories and have preferences. We spend out entire life creating this comfortable box for ourselves. Then, sometimes, the world messes with our box, or the way we see ourselves or the way we want to see ourselves. Or crappy stuff happens, and shakes the foundation of our mind's view of the world.

We are here to deconstruct our self concepts, we can practice not being so sure about who we are to how the world is.  When we are willing to stop hanging on to these old concepts, concepts that we think are holding it all together, we can begin to see and experience ourselves and the world in a radically new way.

We practice not being so concerned about the object and the labels but rather to recognize its true nature. Look all around us. Imagine your mind is empty yet cognizant.  Explore experiencing awareness before dualistic thinking kicks in.  In the glimpse of awareness, love will naturally arise.  It is our most natural state.  The love arises, knowing that we are all part of the same ocean, parts of the same whole.

 “What does it matter if everyone loves me or what does it matter if nobody loves me.  I am Love, and I can cultivate Love expressing.”