MINDSPACE

TIME OUT FROM ATISHA

I've seen it happen countless numbers of times in class with Geshe la: our discussion goes back and forth over a particularly engaging idea—reincarnation or nonviolence or vegetarianism—and Geshe la's response and the student's response stumble over the simple fact that each party in the discussion proceeds from an unexamined, unarticulated, and very different assumption about the subject at hand. A real-time example of East meets West. There are, in fact, fundamental epistemological differences.

As I've read through the literature, I've stumbled on examples of these assumptions in Tibetan or Buddhist thought, and when I find them, I'm generally glad I did because to understand someone's assumptions about reality often goes a long way in explaining their reality. 

So what I propose to do is periodically take a break from Atisha and the 7-Point Mind Training and provide one of these eye-openers. I'll call these postings Time Out From Atisha.'

Today, I want to talk about reincarnation. No matter how logical it may seem to us, it is still not a part of our cultural inheritance, and it often does very little to address the Western fear of dying. We have trouble moving the idea from the head, where it registers logically, to our hearts where it directs our very perceptions, our emotions, our way of living, our way of fearing, our way of loving.

B. Alan Wallace mentions that we need to familiarize ourselves, through various discursive meditations, with the continuity of our lives beyond the current one, and he has suggestions for accomplishing this, but they seem at times very cerebral. It's important, though, to give it a try because it has a direct impact on our understanding of the 4 preliminaries, particularly as it impacts the preciousness of this human life and its place in the process death and dying. If we can ever get to the place where we make our decisions and judgments based on the notion that our central energy is not confined to this particular time and place, we will begin to make decisions that have long-term effects and benefits for all concerned.

But how to do that? Many of you have read Thich Nhat Hanh, and I find his approach to this issue
very helpful. He addresses it, among other places, in his wonderful little book, No Death, No Fear.

On pages 7-8, he writes:

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation.  The Buddha said that when conditions are sufficient something manifests and we say it exists. When one or two conditions fail and the thing does not manifest in the same way, we then say it does not exist. According to the Buddha, to qualify something as existing or not existing is wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as totally existing or totally not.

Of course the great strength of any teacher resides in his or her ability to find the analogy that will open up one of these mysterious truths. We're looking for the analogy that will lead us into a fruitful meditation on the idea, so that the idea is gradually transformed into a livable reality, one that will quietly condition the ways we react to the constantly changing world around us. Thich Nhat Hanh's analogy is the television or radio:

We may be in a room that has no television or radio. And while we are in that room, we may think that television programs and radio programs do not exist in that room. But all of us know that the space in the room is full of signals . . . We need only one more condition, a radio or a television set, and many forms, colors, and sounds will appear. It would have been wrong to say that the signals do not exist because we did not have a radio or television to receive and manifest them. They only seemed not to exist because the causes and conditions were not enough to make the television program manifest . . . It is our notion of being and non-being that makes us think something exists or something doesn't exist.

The point, of course, is that our bodies are simply televisions or radios, playing host to these life-signals that manifest in each of us until the conditions are no longer sufficient for us to broadcast the signal. It's a profound analogy because our personalities, our preferences, our tastes, our loves, our hatreds, these are simply elements of the broadcast, but not the signals themselves. When the elements of our personalities vanish, the signals remain. 

So there is no birth, there is no death. There is only manifestation of the signal, and we can, our teachers assure us, become aware of the signal, and nurture that awareness even after the personality fades away.

At any rate, that's one of the ways Thich Nhat Hanh talks about death and dying, and I've found it worthwhile to spend some time pondering it when death and dying is what I'm working on.

 

HOW TO FEEL IMPERMANENT . . . FOREVER

The first thing you're told as you begin lo-jong is to train in the preliminaries. There are four of them. I'll talk about the first two here: this precious human life, and death and impermanence. As we'll see, they're closely related.

But the overall purpose of these four ideas is pretty clear: to help you recreate on a daily basis the kind of feeling you have when you come out of a long illness and regain your health, or when you see a loved one you haven't seen for a long while, or you wake up after a cold winter to that first, warm spring day . . . the four preliminaries are designed to make you aware of how fortunate you are to be precisely where you are now, with all of the resources that lie at your fingertips.  And ultimately, these preliminaries, if you focus on them, will  give you access to the same energy when you are ill, when you are alone and lonely, and when you are staring out the window in the middle of winter, feeling that spring will never come. They are simply that powerful, and they're the fuel that drives the daily practice.

The first preliminary is often written as 'this rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity,' and the four qualifiers are important. 'Rare' because of all the forms of life that inhabit our world, the human form is a tiny percentage, and you're lucky to have landed here; 'precious' because our human life is the form of life that is most amenable to removing our suffering (dogs don't have our capacity to do it, and in the Tibetan cosmos, the gods don't see the reason for doing it); 'leisure' because having found this teaching, you probably have the time to pursue it, even if you do have to reorder your daily schedule a bit (people living in abject poverty, for example, require even more discipline and will to pursue it); and 'opportunity' because it's pretty clear when you look around you that there are an awful lot of people that don't have the opportunity, or the interest, to receive this instruction. In other words: the fact that you're reading a manual of mind training is very rare.

So you sit down every day, and you find fresh ways to remind yourself of this rare, precious, leisured, and opportunity-filled life that you've stumbled upon, and you take the energy and enthusiasm that rise from this insight directly into your practice. Some days it's easier to do it than others—habit is the culprit because habit keeps you from seeing things freshly—but if you keep at it, the energy matures, and becomes more and more accessible on a daily basis.

The meditation on death and impermanence is, in one sense, obvious enough—you never know when your time is coming; or if you have the opportunity now to practice, who knows about tomorrow; and all the other cliches you've heard.

Somehow these never really did it for me. Or if they did, they only got my attention for an hour or so, and then I'd be back assuming that I had x number of years to live because that was my average on the life insurance actuarial tables. I mean, an asteroid might collide with us tomorrow, but the odds are it won't, so I'm not concerned about it today.

But what did wake me up years ago was this, and I don't remember which teacher I got it from:  our own death is only the grossest, most obvious, and obviously tangible form of impermanence that we know. Don't linger so much on that. Anybody can get worked up about their death, but the commitment from that insight usually doesn't last. Realize instead that the ceaseless change we observe at the atomic level, at the emotional level, even at simplest level of thought, this ceaseless transforming of one thing into another, surrounds us, informs us, and in fact . . . is us! So if we are meant to observe what we might perceive as our physical death, and get some energy from that perception, we ought at least to consider the idea that this so-called death is nothing more than a transformation masked as a final ending because our perceptive apparatus isn't currently sharp enough to see its continuity beyond this life.

As I worked with this idea over the long haul, really looking at how everything is ceaselessly abandoning what it just was as it moves on to a new form that it just as quickly sheds for the newer one it embraces, I began to feel, intuit, dimly perceive—English probably doesn't have the verb—that I too was comfortably a part of this transformational stream and that ending just wasn't a part of it, although continuing in the traditional forms that I carry to school and into the classroom weren't a part of it either.

The result of all this was simply that I felt I had to get busy now because everything I did was causing a ripple in this transformational and changing stream (which gets into the third preliminary, 'actions and their results'), but that the old scythe-bearing grim reaper we know in the West wasn't casting that depressing shadow over my life. A kind of lightness of being ensued . . . an impermanence forever!

Sidney Burris