Geshe la's teaching today was centered on impermanence, both the gross and subtle levels. Geshe la defined gross-level suffering as that form of suffering that is plainly obvious to us without recourse to logic and reason--a broken leg, aging and sickness, a tsunami, disease and starvation. To understand subtle-level suffering we must have recourse to logic and reason, and we must find ways for the wisdom revealed by this logic and reason to permeate our fundamental understanding of our lives.
For example, we see our best friends on Saturday night, and on Sunday, when we meet them for lunch, we feel an undisturbed continuity between the two occasions; after we think about this for a while, after we consider our biologies, our cellular structure, our own changing relationships to our various surroundings--environmental, social, psychological--we realize that in fact this so-called undisturbed continuity is simply our habitual and mistaken perception. In fact, our friends have changed in every way possible over the intervening hours, and the lesson that we failed to recognize is a large one: everything is continually changing; nothing is permanent. The poiont is that we have to find a way to bring our intuitive behavior into conformity with our intellectual understanding of reality. That is one of the cental lessons that we draw from an initial study of The Wheel of Life.
Geshe la told us that our wishes and desires, based on the three poisons, dominate and shape our hopes for things that simply cannot exist or occur; hence our frustration and our suffering when we are continually unable to acquire the things that we pursue out of ignorance. The remedy is two-fold: 1) We must first understand the way in which the mind misconceptualizes the world; 2) We must next see how the world around us--and within us--is actually constructed. By realizing the afflicted nature of the mind and the actual structure of the world, we can begin to recognize the deep incongruence between the two, and at that point, we begin to see the true nature of the task that lies before us. We attempt to do two things simultaneously: recognize the true nature of reality, and fashion the mind that will allow us to perceive its true nature.
Geshe la spent a good deal of time talking about the Six Realms, a topic that is often very popular with Western audiences because of its relationship to what we recognize as a kind of afterlife. We have to be very careful here, however. The Six Realms are, to use a fifty-cent word, decidedly anthropocentric: it is a scheme designed for humans, by humans, with humans occupying the most advantageous position. Why? Because humans are the only ones who experience suffering, but are not incapacitated by it, and so develop the motivation to overcome it and thereby develop the aspiration for liberation.
So, as Geshe la said, meditating on the Six Realms allows us to develop a broad and enduring compassion because we are able to contemplate suffering at all levels from the most dramatic and painful of the Hell Beings to the most subtle of the Gods. Suffering, then, is everywhere, but it is only in the human incarnation that we can both recognize suffering's pervasiveness and still have the resources to address it. Hence, human life is precious because of the vast opportunities it holds for us to make progress toward liberation. For this reason, it is important that we develop a practice that can take advantage of every benefit that our current life offers us. Buddhist philosophy, as complex as it might become, is concerned to do only that--provide us with the tools we need to maximize our potential as human beings.
Geshe la has also indicated several times that we must be careful in understanding the Six Realms literally. Human consciousness evolves and changes, subject to cause and effect, and as a result, it passes through phases and stages that are best described by the characteristics that are associated with the Six Realms. So, it is also possible to understand the Realms as levels of consciousness that manifest within us continually, as our consciousness evolves and changes through the samsaric world.
Soon we will begin to delve more deeply into the workings of karma. Geshe la's story today of his teacher, not wishing to make a withdrawal on his stores of merit by staying in a five-star hotel, makes the point nicely: once we develop a deep understanding of karma, we hope as well to develop more effective ways of accumulating merit, realizing that every second holds vast opportunities to do so.
Sidney Burris, Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas
