MINDSPACE

A DECLARATION OF COMMITMENT ALONG WITH SUSAN SONTAG, GRIEF, AND THE ORLANDO MASSACRE—PLUS A TIBETAN HERO

Orlando Vigil

The Orlando massacre is behind us. Sort of.

Details have emerged; others have been obscured. Funerals came and went. Some of our Senators undertook a filibuster; others cowered. And more stories are emerging to take Orlando's place in the news cycle.

Perhaps there will be a vote on a newly drafted bill to help make our country safer, to help move us toward a safer Union.

I don't know, and I don't care, in this sense: whether or not we have a vote, whether or not the Orlando massacre precipitates real and immediate change in our laws, I will continue to do what I have been doing now for a few years.

I will raise awareness about violence in American life. I will do it however I can—through my classes, through social media, through conversation, through blogs, through essays, through bearing witness, even through being slightly annoying and predictable—and I will not become mired in the peaks and valleys of defeat and success.

And for those of you who agree with me that violence in American life—you can define the term however you wish—is one of our country's most pressing issues, I am calling on you to do the same thing.

Each one of us can't do much alone, but if we work simultaneously at whatever draws us into this struggle, and work at our own pace, at a pace we can handle, things will begin to change.

I feel particularly emboldened today because I read an interview with Evan Wolfson, one of marriage-equality's long-term activists; he provided advice on how we might carry out our own campaign over the long haul in the face of so many defeats, setbacks, and slaughters.

To summarize his profound advice in two words: never quit. Just don't stop. Just keep going. What else is there to do?

If you haven't read it, and if you're concerned about how we bring commonsense gun control to a country seemingly bent on slaughtering itself, you must read it. 

I've read it three times, bookmarked it, and will return to it often. 

I was also reading Susan Sontag's obituary on Roland Barthes this morning, when one of her surgical assessments of the man leapt off the page: "It was characteristic that he hoped to find a source of strength in his devastating grief."

 There it was. The headline for the Orlando slaughter, and for all of the slaughters that have become characteristic of American life: strength from grief.

But how?

Susan Sontag

Grief, of course, is both a public and a private commodity. In the wake of a tragedy of Orlando's magnitude, grief overwhelms partly because it assumes such an indiscriminately public face. It arrives in waves. We cannot avoid it. It saturates every news outlet, every social platform, every photograph.

And those who belong to one of the families or communities—LGBTQ, Latino—that were victims of the attack must now confront the insidiously private grief, the invisible, destructive force that lies too deeply buried for those news outlets, for those social platforms, for those photographs.

Grief at this level is imageless and coercive. I have no experience of this kind of loss. And yet I know from my Tibetan friends who have survived torture, exile, and decades of imprisonment, that the fundamental teachings on compassion can exorcise grief and render it into a powerful, transformational tool. 

While I would never presume to speak for another's sorrow, particularly for the communities close to the Orlando attack, I have continually since the Orlando shooting remembered the several hours I spent with Palden Gyatso (part of whose remarkable story you can read here) over the course of two interviews separated by several years.  I was with my students who had traveled to India with me to help on our Tibetan oral history project, the TEXT Program, and our questions inevitably veered toward Gyatso's time in Chinese prisons and labor camps. 

Meeting Palden Gyatso

He had clearly suffered, and he clearly bore the scars, both physical and psychological, of his years spent in internment, but he never let himself entertain the idea of revenge as anything more than yet another destructive idea. He worked hard, through prayer, meditation, and analysis, to see revenge and hatred as choices, choices that he trained himself to recognize before they overtook him, and then, having recognized them, to pair them with other more accommodating notions, like gratitude and forgiveness. Slowly, he claimed, revenge and hatred would always yield their position to gratitude and forgiveness.

He was still alive, he daily reminded himself, he still had a functioning mind, and he would use it to create positive emotions for as long as he could each day—that was the essence of his testimony. I will never forget it.

And then he would sleep, and get up, and do it again.

We all can agree on this:  preserving such an attitude is the very least that we can do.

Because it turns out that if we attempt to maintain this attitude every day, to undertake this act of transformation, it is the very most that we can do because the transformation of grief and hardship into life-nourishing conditions always fosters stronger, more loving communities.

And these communities are the first line of defense agains mass-shootings.

These built communities will also cultivate a sense of integrity and compassion that we begin to direct toward ourselves. And, then, authentic, personal healing begins.

This, of course, is one of the founding ideas of monasteries and convents—draw together a group of people dedicated to finding compassion and tolerance within themselves, and a like-minded community will arise from it. But we can, and must, fashion similar communities within the secular arena too because they are vitally effective in bringing about the social changes that we seek. Of course, the LGBTQ communities, along with others, have been doing this for a very long time in a country that has made life for them harsh and unforgiving.

The many gun-violence prevention groups that we see in America now are also building communities, although for very different reasons and with different motivations—they are life-saving communities, however, given to healing our country of its wounds.

Gyatso indicated, after the interview was over, that these destructive ideas, wherever they appear, must be resisted and transformed within ourselves because if we don't, they will build within us the foundations for a community based on hatred.

And like a disease, if these violent ideas aren't actively resisted, and transformed, they will spread. But he also said that while grief can be seen as destructive, it can also serve as a harbinger, an emotional cipher that something deeply disruptive has occurred, oftentimes within the community, and that our normal daily responses to sadness and deprivation will no longer suffice.

So grief, in this sense, becomes an urgent call for community—for those who are suffering the most to seek out their community on their own terms, in their own time; and for those who have been less immediately, less imposingly affected to supply a complimentary community in ways both direct and indirect, a community that will lend support whenever those who have suffered a national tragedy need a deeper, more broadly based support. 

By gradually coming to see grief as a call to action, we can, to return to Sontag, transform grief into strength. Into the strength that rises from a grieving community and returns to rebuild that community by bringing compassion and forgiveness for everyone. This will take time, and patience becomes an essential ingredient as time passes and the work of healing progresses slowly, but these are the building blocks of real community.

We do this together, then, or we don't do it at all. 

 

 

 

IT'S A GREY TUESDAY & I'M FEELING SAD ABOUT THE IMMINENT PROSPECT OF LOSS

I begin on a grey Tuesday in February.  Fifty-eight-years-old.  My two-year-old daughter sleeps in her room nearby, my twenty-one-year-old son, who lives with his mother, is working at the grocery store a few miles down the road, and my wife is teaching at the University not far from that grocery store.  

My world is small. The television, my view over the horizon, tells me that Mitt Romney now has a problem because he has lost a few states in the Republican primary that he was expected to win.  If the actuarial life-tables speak the truth, I will not see as much of my daughter’s life as I would like to see.  Or as much of it as a younger father might expect to see.  And I could make a similar prediction about my wife.  We will not grow old together because she is a good deal younger than I am.  I am very sad about this.  And looking at Romney, I see that he looks sad too, although for very different reasons. 

Both of us, however, are sad about the prospect of loss.

Loss is the most vexing problem that we face.  It has enormous range because it doesn’t care about the normal boundaries that most of our problems respect.  Loss shows itself largely in our fears, and the fears that it generates run the gamut from the literal to the metaphysical—we fear losing our place in line at the grocery store when we realize we’ve forgotten the butter, but we also fear the end of life and the loss of everything that has characterized that life.  

I used to think that these fears have nothing in common.  I could get over my fear or anxiety, really, of having to wait a few more minutes in the grocery store because I understand what lies on the other side of more waiting:  frustration, impatience, anger, or no butter . . . All these things I can understand and dismiss.  

But end of life?  What lies on the other side of that?  

I don’t know.  

 

INTO THE DAILY GRIND WITH TRUNGPA'S MASTERPIECE

I've been re-reading Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting through Spiritual Materialism.  It came out in 1973, but I didn't find it then.  That was the year the Watergate trials began, Nixon told us he wasn't a crook, we were getting out of Vietnam, and Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon in March.  I was also letting a few Hare Krishna practitioners from India stay in my dorm room.  They couldn't speak much English, but they gave me free books, and their incense didn't smell like the stuff I bought at the head shop. I figured that was what India smelled like.  So there was a lot of stuff going on in 1973, and Spiritual Materialism wasn't on my radar.  

But I wish it had been because it would have saved me a lot of time.  And now that I'm much older and have read the book several times, and consulted it innumerable times, and am about to finish it again, I feel the same way:  if you're a Westerner, and if you're interested in Asian spirituality, particularly the kind we call Buddhism, and if, furthermore, the Buddhism that appeals to you is the kind we call Tibetan, then you need to have a go at this book.  

Trungpa was a controversial figure, but when he arrived in this country in 1970, he had a formidable task ahead of him—introduce a sophisticated and subtle spiritual practice to a hardened counter-culture that had deeply rooted suspicions regarding power, authority, gender, and sobriety.  He might well have been, for his time and for his American students, precisely what was needed.  I don't know.  I'll leave that judgment to his students and to the other experts.  

But Trungpa's mastery of the American language, his ability to find the right way of talking about his own mastery of Tibetan spiritual practice, has only been equaled by a precious few teachers since his time.  Spiritual Materialism is actually a collection of fifteen lectures that he gave at Boulder during the Fall and Spring of 1970 and 1971.  They are followed by questions from the audience, and his answers are worth the price of the volume.  One such question involves what we have to do to prepare ourselves to engage the spiritual path.  His answer ultimately addresses the Buddha's life.  Here is what he says about Shakyamuni, and it is characteristic of his no-nonsense approach to the Dharma:

After he [Shakyamuni] had studied numerous yogic disciplines under many Hindu masters, he realized that he could not achieve a completely awakened state simply by trying to apply these techniques.  So he stopped and decided to work on himself as he already was.  That is the basic instinct which is pushing its way through.  It is very necessary to acknowledge this basic instinct.  It tells us that we are not condemned people, that we are not fundamentally bad or lacking.

I could offer up a stream of quotations like this one; his teachings are clear, memorable, and imminently quotable.  But most important of all, they are enlightening; they shed light on complex concepts by situating them within the practical contexts of our daily lives.

And that is why Trungpa's book is still so valuable.  If the teachings don't live and thrive in the day-to-day grind, then they will not survive at all.  And it is only in the day-to-day to grind that the teachings in this book come fully alive.

So read this book and thank Trungpa for his massive talent.  The world would be a darker place without it.

AM I MEDITATING OR NOT?

The most important teaching the Buddha gave on mental development, or meditation, is called the Satipatthana sutra, or the Minfulness sutra, and it's the one where he establishes the practice of following the breath. (I provide this link only to give an indication of how the sutra reads; there are more user-friendly texts that I'll recommend in my books list.)  It's a practice that he apparently used all of his life and recommended that his students use as well. The discourse is so highly venerated that it's recited by Buddhists all around the world.

But that kind of meditation is often associated with the Theravadans or even the Vietnamese Mahayana practioners—I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hahn, for example.

So, if you're studying solely with a Gelugpa monk, the chances are you've never heard of this sutra because this kind of meditation does not occupy a large place in their understanding of the Buddha's teaching.  But the kind of study that Gelugpas do undertake has given them many of the same benefits they would have received had they emphasized the instructions found in the Satipatthana sutra.  A stable, clear, and luminescent mind . . . the Gelugpas have developed different techniques and different avenues to arrive at the same place.  But it's a complex curriculum, and for many Americans, a daunting one.

So, years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to read the sutra, get some commentary on it, and establish a solid foundation in this fundamental meditation practice.  The reason that so many children in America are diagnosed with ADD is partly because a wandering attention is native to our culture. We're good at multi-tasking, but not so good at extended mental focus. And this makes certain kinds of mental operations impossible.  Like extended mental focus.

All of us, I figured, irrespective of our spiritual traditions, could profit from gaining a little control over our thoughts.  And that's what the Satipatthana sutra is all about—gaining control.

After all, Buddha had recommended it, and there are good books and teachers around that can help us, and at the very least, we take away from the experience a mind that's a little bit clearer and more stable than it once had been.

It was a good decision, and one that I've never regretted.  Meditation of this sort is difficult in the beginning, and it takes continual maintenance, but it does get easier, and the results become more stable and clear as time passes and your meditation practice deepens.  And most importantly of all, the teachings, wherever you get them, become clearer, reach deeper, and transform more thoroughly. 

In other words:  the Buddha was right; meditation is necessary, and meditation works.  (In another posting, I'll clarify what the Buddha meant by that dicey word, "meditation."  As with everything else, he intended by it several things that are often lost in translation.)

I continually remind myself, though, that Buddhism, in all of its stunning variety, arises from the discoveries of one man who lived over 2500 years ago, and whose ideas are still solving our problems.  To ignore any of those solutions because they appear in another lineage or another school seems to me close-minded, at least.

THERAVADA, MAHAYANA, VAJRAYANA . . . O MY!

As students of Tibetan Buddhism studying under Geshe Dorjee, who studied under an illustrious lineage of teachers, we have access to a rich source of information and instruction. All of us know this, and all of us have shown unceasing gratitude for his presence here in Fayetteville. Our community is growing steadily, we are constantly pushing our limits, and we are learning at a rate that most of us would have scarcely believed possible before Geshe la arrived.

He is a catalyst of immense proportions.  And we have all responded in kind, with an equal and complimentary energy, in my opinion.  

As his students, we also have responsibilities, and I believe that we have honored those responsibilities with grace and intelligence.

My own sense of responsibility toward Geshe la has changed and developed over the eight years since I met him in 2004, and I thought I might take a moment to share some of those changes with you.

To do that, I want to talk about a few of the obstacles I've encountered over the years, and what they look like (in case you encounter them), and how I've dealt with them (in case you decide you need to deal with them.)  Many of these issues are old indeed and began when I first encountered Asian spirituality as a boy on a drug-store book-shelf—a paperback introduction to Hinduism with an incredible picture of Shiva on the cover.

As the years passed, I read a little bit, and I learned a few things.  Like:  Tibetan Buddhism belongs to the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism.  It does not belong to the Hinayana, or Theravadan school.  But the Mahayana school does include a Vajrayana practice, and some people claim to practice Vajrayana who don't, and some who claim to know very little about it are actually doing it.  

I got an email last year from an American who didn't know if he were going to be able to come to see the Dalai Lama, even though he lives in Little Rock and even though I had free tickets for him, because of the demanding nature of his "HYT vows."  I had to think about it too—it stands for Highest Yoga Tantra.

And so it begins . . . classifying, segregating, partitioning, relegating—one practice belongs to this part of the world, and one to this part of the world, and she does this one, and he does that one, and all of this is based on what we presume to be an accurate, historical understanding of what the Buddha taught.

While I believe it is very helpful to understand the historical reasons that we use terms like Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, and even more helpful to know why we are doing this practice and not this practice, I also believe that for many beginners, like myself, there are pitfalls here.  It's easy to become obsessed with the labels and categories, and to forget the species of thought that those labels and categories represent.  If you can peer beneath those labels, I think it's only logical to expect that the ideas they represent will be complimentary, and even relatively consistent.  After all, they arose from the mind of a very talented thinker and practitioner: Buddha Shakyamuni.  

But Buddha had never heard of Hinayana or Mahayana or Vajrayana.  And he'd certainly never heard of Buddhism.  He figured out four profound and essential truths about the human mind at age 35, and he spent the next 45 years trying to tell anyone who would listen what he had discovered.  And the implications of what he had discovered.  Like all teachers, he varied his teaching methods according to the abilities of his students.  If you read his discourses, he seems to be a very responsible teacher, insisting on developing the techniques that will maximize his chances of successfully delivering his material to his students.  That's how you defined a good teacher in the 5th century BCE, and that's how you define one now.

Three months after Buddha died, a Council of his closest followers convened and recited from memory his teachings, his suggested rules of conduct, and his longer discourses.  These were approved by those who had been there, and they were gathered together into five collections called Nikayas.  The teachings then were transmitted orally from teacher to student.

But none of these teachings were written down until the first century BCE, fully four hundred years after the Buddha died.  And these ideas would not arrive in Tibet for another 600-700 years.  So by the time Buddhism finds its way into Tibet, the Buddha had been dead for over a millennium. That his teachings were still vital, specific, and accurate, and still existing in an oral tradition for that length of time, testifies to their great power and clarity.

Buddha discovered world-changing things about the human mind, but that's not the half of it. He was also able to communicate those discoveries clearly, concisely, and memorably.  To have both of those talents is exceptional.

In my next posting, I'll talk a little bit more about the significance of these insights for our own daily practice.

COMPASSION'S RADAR, OR WHAT TO DO WHEN IT OCCURS TO YOU THAT YOU'RE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

I promised in my last posting that I would say something about the mind's default settings, the ones that we get at birth and the very ones that cause us so much grief.  What I'm going to do instead is talk about one very old method used by many spiritual practitioners from many traditions that will gradually reset those default settings.  Tibetans call it "exchanging self with others," or it's sometimes called "tonglen," or "metta" meditation, and though they're all distinct practices within themselves, they all issue from the same conviction: that the mind can be transformed from its current state of confusion into one of clarity and harmony.

Here's the point:  you don't have to keep the mind that you were given, and in fact, you probably shouldn't. You need to tune it up.  But it takes a lot of work and sustained effort, which is pretty much what happens whenever you try to uproot old and destructive habits and replace them with new, more life-giving ones.

Like a lot of Tibetan meditations, you're going to have use your imagination, which is the most effective tool we have for causing long-term beneficial changes in the fundamental perceptual apparatus that we carry around with us.  

So--imagine yourself at the center of a radar that has 7 concentric circles.  If you're at the center, then the next ring is occupied by your parents, whether living or not.  In the third ring, place your teacher, and he or she doesn't have to wear red robes or have a shaved head—anyone who's realigned the way you think about things will do.  In the fourth ring, find your loved ones, those who are always friendly to you and who return your kindness and love without hesitation. In the fifth ring, place those who aren't so friendly to you, or who will go out of their way to bring you discomfort, or hurt you in some way, or who are jealous of you, or who say distasteful things about you.  In the sixth ring, you find all of those folks you don't know, but see every day, walking down the street, driving a car, bagging your groceries, walking by, jogging . . . people you see, but don't know.  And finally in the seventh circle, place all living things.

Beginning with the first circle, generate for yourself a series of very clear and strong wishes or prayers and visualize yourself receiving them.  Wish that you might find authentic happiness, that you might cultivate the kind of deep satisfaction that allows you to find peace in every moment.  Realize that this is one of your deepest needs and desires, and that it is your birthright to wish for happiness, to be happy, and that you do, in fact, wish this for yourself. Release your Western guilt for a moment, as you privilige your own well-being.  Let this feeling, this wish, sink in quietly.  Realize its power.  This shouldn't be hard to do because each of us wants deeply to be happy, though many of us have little idea as to how to attain it. 

And then do the same thing, slowly, completely for the six remaining circles of living beings: your parents, your teachers, your loved ones, your adversaries, those who remain strangers to you, and all living things.  The point is to visualize these people in their human fullness as you address these wishes to them.  And the further point is to export that same strong feeling you have for your own happiness to each of those in each of the circles.  

But here's the test—try for one hour, or one half-hour, or 4 hours, or one day, to place all those people you meet in the appropriate place on your radar.  If you encounter someone who introduced you to a central idea that has had a continual impact on your life, she occupies, for example, the third circle of teachers.  As you greet her, repeat silently to yourself the wish that she find happiness and fulfillment.  Or do the same for your best friend in the fourth circle whom you meet for coffee, or for the library employee who just checked out your books and whom you don't really know, and who accordingly belongs in the sixth circle, or this person who doesn't like you and who resides in the fifth circle. Each person that you meet falls into one of these categories (some in more than one), and each is deserving of this kind of loving attention from you.  See them, recognize them, and direct these powerful wishes toward them.

Do it.  Then watch what changes within you.

By doing this on a regular basis—and it is an ancient practice that has been proven effective for millennia—you gradually change the most fundamental aspects of your sense of self and society.  And this is so because we're removing old habits of perception that cause us problems, and we're installing new ones that work better.  We're updating our minds.

And what rises from these updates gradually is a lightness, a kind of alleviation of the burden of self.  And this in turn lessens our fear, our anxiety, our worry, our guilt. It begins to dissolve our insistence that things be this way or that way.

But remember these are old habits that we're breaking, and if they die at all, they die hard. So we have to practice and practice.  

But it's good work if you can get it, right?  

CHANGING OUR MIND'S DEFAULT SETTING, IN WHICH I RECALL THE NIGHT I SAW MINE WAS IN NEED OF ADJUSTMENT

One of the most important realizations you have as an adult is that the mind you were given at birth, which is also the one you carry around with you as you go through your day and which Buddhists call the conventional mind, comes with a default setting that needs to be reset.  If you don't reset it, you'll continue to misinterpret the constant stream of data that you download on a daily basis.  

And because you're misinterpreting the data with the faulty setting, you're getting a skewed picture of reality, and because you're basing your hopes and dreams and plans and schemes on a skewed version of reality, those hopes and dreams and plans and schemes are always sabotaging themselves, and you're suffering.  

Different things compel us to wonder about this default setting, but once you question it, then you have to figure out how to tweak it.  And some of us may wonder about it, but never get around to tweaking it.  And some of us may never wonder about it at all.

For what it's worth, I knew from childhood that my settings were off because I had siezures. They usually happened in small micro-bursts, and then as a I got older, initially in my late twenties, those micro-bursts became the big neural storms known as gran mal siezures—unconscious, full amnesia, ER, hospital, months recovery, medication.  As a child, I knew they were coming because I was tired and excited.  Tired from not sleeping, and not sleeping from loving life.  A typical kid whose mind had some atypical hard-wire issues.

At first, I tried to understand these neural events on my own.  Once as a young boy—I think I was in the 7th or 8th grade—I jumped out of bed in the middle of the night, sat cross-legged on the floor until the sun came up, and tried to figure out why my mind behaved as it did.  Why it became over-charged, and over-electrified?  (A siezure, I learned later, is a mismanaged electrical current in the brain.)  

I knew I had to get out of my body somehow, so I visualized what I might look like, sitting in that room, from each corner of my room.  I got out of myself to see myself.  It was an exercise. Nothing more, nothing less, but I started doing it when I was a kid.  I was then able to see all the clutter that kept on rising and falling in my head, all the useless downloads in my mental cache, and I was able to clean it out.  Of course, it would fill back up, and I was an active boy, so I didn't look after the problem as I should until I got older and figured out what I needed to do.

I learned from these early experiments in consciousness that our minds are more like pieces of software than we might expect.  They can be rewritten to produce the results that we want. Things like happiness instead of sadness, joy instead of anxiety, patience instead of anger—all of these qualities can be developed because our minds are essentially plastic and very capable of being shaped to our desires.  

More on how to do this in a later posting. 

 

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

 

 

WELCOME TO MINDSPACE

Note to my readers:  I'm an English professor, and co-founder and co-director, along with Geshe Dorjee, of the Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas. I discovered the Asian spiritual tradition in a drug store in a small town in Virginia a long time ago when I bought a paperback primer on Hinduism because it had a cool picture of Shiva on the cover. I was maybe 12 years old. The book made so much sense to me that I told my parents at dinner one night that I was probably Hindu. They said, "OK, pass the salt."

Which is exactly what they should've said. So now I'm passing the salt to you.

Here you will find an intersection of concerns: I'm involved in the gun-violence prevention (GVP) movement, and my understanding of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings have fashioned and shaped my work within that movement. I haven't always written about this intersection, but I will do so here. I believe it's important that the fundamental Buddhist teachings, the ones that I understand, move into the public arena of social engagement.

The more purely political aspects of the GVP movement I address at my other blog, Gunsense. Please visit me there too.

Because I've learned a lot from the Tibetan tradition, and because the Tibetan people are mired now in a struggle for independence, it's hard to talk about the Tibetans without eventually getting into the politics of an oppressed people. When I want to talk about those things, I'll post over at our partner blog, TIBETSPACE. I hope to see you there as well.

Sidney Burris