So we know that letting go is the answer to everything, but this is not always easy. As with everything, we need tools to practice with. The Buddha taught four ways to let go, and Ajahn Brahm presents this teaching in a wonderfully engaging manner.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to benefit from this teaching, everyone can understand it and put it into practice. As with so many things, of course, to be a practitioner of the Buddhist meditation technique will make it much easier to do.

and thanks to Colin in Singapore who posted this video. The feed from his site is in the sidebar to the right, Awakening the Buddha in Us. I don’t know him but I’ve long enjoyed what he posts to his site.

The full thought that makes up my title to this post came out of a planning meeting I took part in a few days ago. We are developing sustainable practices to fight the effects of climate change, and I mentioned that personally I have no hope that the human race can change its habits in time to save itself from massive catastrophe.

How then, some wondered, could I remain motivated?

Practitioners will readily understand that hope is not necessary at all for compassionate action to manifest. There was no time in the meeting to go into this, but I did post a short rallying call on the project blog the next day (proclaimed of course also to Twitter):

Lift up your hearts, because although the planet and our species are in great peril, all is not lost so long as we work constantly to seek solutions.
- Beyond Hope and Despair Lies Duty

That link will explain the project if you care – and it’s a wonderful project, another 350.org global demonstration and wakeup call. But it’s not why I’ve been so absent from this place, even though my time is consumed right now because of it.

I’ve lately started on the vajrayana by my own volition, beginning ngondro without a guru, and this has shaken up my life beyond any ability to write notes along the way. But now I think I can offer some findings.

~~~

I asked an acharya of my Shambhala lineage about this shortly after I’d begun and he supported what I was doing, but he felt impelled to tell me that I wouldn’t get very far without a living, human guru.

And I know this, but I don’t expect to get very far. Getting far was not my purpose.

From a book I was studying I had incidentally been practicing a little bit of Guru Yoga, and I found myself falling in love with Guru Rinpoche. I just wanted to be with Guru Rinpoche more. I realized that without intending it I had strayed into the vajrayana already, and I wanted to set some formality to it.

I started to practice The Dakini Heart Essence ngondro, falteringly of course, and the first time I went all the way through it and let it carry me I wept to realize I had come home.

It felt to me as if I had been hiking for several months already in the rocks and ridges of the high mountain country, on my own in wilderness with no human mark anywhere – and suddenly a makeshift wooden signpost appeared saying this is the border to the land of vajrayana. And the other side of the sign, the same rocks and ridges.

You could break a leg in such terrain, or fall an unimaginable depth, regardless of what they called the country.

~~~

It will take me another 2-3 years to arrive at the vajrayana in the Shambhala path. And the Sakyong, Mipham Rinpoche awaits my coming with boundless generosity. I don’t know if I’ll get there. My acharya doesn’t know. Many days my heart cries out for a teacher. But I feel that I can at least get on with some of the work while I wait.

When I am worthy of a teacher’s time, my teacher will appear. And if this never happens in this lifetime, it doesn’t matter. Let me tell you why.

I’ve realized in just the last few days that none of this is about me. It’s finally starting to sink in that this is about all sentient beings.

I’ve been reading a lot of commentary during this time, and the wonderful, glorious Chagdud Tulku with his heartwarming reality reminded me that no one will get anywhere (even with a teacher) without the aspiration to practice for the sake of all beings.

And this closed the circle for me.

I’ve been struggling so much to get this new thing right. There have been many days when I’ve felt pretty worthless. My ambition has run smack into my laziness and this has thrown my self esteem into ruin. I had never been accustomed to missing practice, or failing in discipline, and now I’ve seen many days when I’ve slunk off to bed without ever having practiced that day. Worthless.

I couldn’t just go back to shamatha and give up Guru Rinpoche. And I could feel the blessings in my life. And yet it was so hard to go forward.

Mama never said there’d be days like this.

But everything is karma. And wheels are made for turning. Time and tide bring new days. And Chagdud Tulku sure helps. And finally I see that it’s not for the perfection of me that I could practice, it’s for others.

It seems to me the only purpose of the path is to generate merit to dedicate to the enlightenment of all beings.

There is no other purpose.

And one can be an instrument, and pass the rain of blessings through oneself, back out into the three realms, until samsara is empty.

And so coming to the cushion and the floor, or not coming to the cushion and the floor, need not be a reflection of how strong I feel in my purpose or my practice. I don’t have to be very good at what I’m doing. Because anything I do will be better than everything I don’t do. Some merit will arise. Some merit can be dedicated to the enlightenment of all beings. If I practice.

And this has changed everything.

~~~

It turns out, then, that the title of this post applies all the way from the beginning of the post to the end, which this is

If there is merit here, I dedicate it to the enlightenment of all beings.

I love these clips, and maybe I can find the whole DVD somewhere. The narrative I find beautifully articulate and expressive of teachings familiar to practitioners.

(With gratitude to the original poster at YouTube.)

Clip 3 is an ocean of practice accomplishment, face after face of mind on the path of perfection. The final three faces in clip 3 are:

• His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche
• Venerable Kalu Rinpoche
• His Holiness the 16th Karmapa

 

When I watched these clips the meaning of “self-secret” seemed very evident to me. Especially when I read the comments at YouTube – always an exercise in generating the optimism necessary to prevail over despair. One person thought the practitioners in clip 3 were just stoned. But practitioners recognize mind intent on practice.

I thought about self-secret, how wisdom and knowledge present themselves to us when we open to them. When closed to the discovery we can stare for an eternity at what’s in front of us and never see it.

How wonderfully accomplished these people are! I wish I had the karma to have the fortune to meet the circumstances to follow this path, and then to have the character to follow it with such devotion. I have neither.

But the wonderful thing about understanding karma, and the teachings of the Dharma, is knowing that we can get the karma we don’t have. So I can aim my path with faltering steps towards the accumulation of merit sufficient to bring me to this terrible and auspicious stage.

Ah, may we all soon become enlightened together

I contemplated this very thing last Sunday, but the comparison came to me accidentally, backwards from experience so to speak. I was trying to experience a certain freedom of mind, and yet at the same time to be very physically present in the shrine room, with floors and people and light through the windows – in other words, not just caught in a concept of freedom, not just lost in focus, if I can say it that way.

This was what showed me how Guru Rinpoche’s revered statement applies. One is more here than ever before, and one’s mind is empty. And the practice of this is possible.

I had a bit of an answer recently during a Sunday morning sit at Shambhala. After working really hard for three hours and making some headway, as it were, I perceived that my ordinary self was struggling to catch up to the tastes of liberation experienced, and was very tired.

So it’s really perhaps just as simple as one has always perceived since starting to meditate: it’s not the being in the moment that takes energy, it’s having to start over again an instant later. It’s the firing up of the motor again. It’s the sadness at seeing ourselves cover the moment over with glue. The stickiness of our grasping. Seeing this again and again.

~~

Duality, duality. All answers to questions such as these must come in relative truths. And as Anam Thubten Rinpoche has made clear to us, we’ll have our ego with us every step of the way towards enlightenment – the ego is very spiritual, always ready to buy more time outside of liberation, with answers that keep the ego intact.

Even so, to share this or even consider it I have to use relative terms. As practitioners we have to think in terms of making progress, and even sometimes in terms of experiencing setbacks, although we don’t let such things hinder our practice. These are all just the appearances that arise and give us the material of realization. And as is taught, we use relative truth continually to switch our grasping away from samsara and towards liberation.

~~

The Shambhala Sunday sit for me is when I work the hardest all week. I really enjoy these three hours of meditating every week, I’ve been going since I started meditating four years ago. They help my practice through the rest of the week, and the longer sessions let me build a focus for things I don’t always attempt during my shorter sessions at home: things like guru yoga, contemplation of karma, death or compassion, and dwelling briefly in more subtle experiences perhaps.

In recent months during these longer sessions I’ve been working harder, raising windhorse frequently, supplicating Guru Rinpoche, really aiming for the clear mind of the master. I’ve found in certain blessed moments that I can experience a mind that is mine, yes, but which I can only approach through the mind of Guru Rinpoche. The great ones lift us higher I think, and I’ve heard it said that only the rain of blessings from them enables any of us to progress along the path.

~~

But I wonder if I should be so weary after this practice. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Am I going anywhere, or just digging a deep groove in the wrong place? This seems to be the thing to do, to chase after objectives, to aim for practice targets. But shouldn’t more energy flow into me? Shouldn’t there be less striving, more surrender?

Ah, practice. I don’t know these answers. It seems we move from one set of answers to a new set of mysteries.

And I call this a glad thing.

When something makes us happy we forget, or don’t notice, that all that’s happened is we’ve allowed ourselves to lift the pressure off our happiness button a little bit. The happiness that arises is a function inside ourselves, or we could better say, a quality of ourselves that exists always.

We can flash on memories, dreams, little instances of joy and exuberance and happiness – call it freedom perhaps? – and we can actually see that this feeling, this function of feeling, has been a faculty that we’ve possessed all along. It just needed a reason to come awake.

So the goal of practice in general is to pull back from the things we call events and circumstances, and draw closer to the faculty of ourselves that’s doing the experiencing. Drawing back from the reasons and the circumstances, drawing closer into ourselves purely as experiencers, we find the happiness faculty, and witness our own foot pressing down on it, keeping it choked back, while we wait for perfection to occur, to give us a reason – an excuse – for joy.

It’s basic mindfulness to all you seasoned meditators, but it’s always worth the reminder that we have to keep practicing when appearances arise and seem good, just as much as we do when coping with fear and the lowlier emotions.

Let’s always remember how well Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explains this in that post I made a while back, called When the Pain Gets Small Enough We Call It Happiness

A year or two of training and meditating passed before I really started to understand what the teachings were advising. Like many new Buddhists in the West, I had an overlay of moral encouragement applied to concepts such as gentleness. I didn’t realize that it has a purely functional purpose as a core practice instruction.

The great surprise for the westerner in Buddhism I think is to understand that the concepts presented are not moral injunctions in the sense we commonly think of such things. Everything is functional, based upon the nature of reality. For example, as a practice one does good deeds only because karma really does exist, and never ceases to operate. Therefore meritorious action sufficient to overwhelm unvirtuous action is the only way to supply oneself with increased advantage on the path.

When my teachers have repeated again and again the advice to be gentle with myself, it seems to me now that this has not been a way of saying, hey, you deserve a break today, so be nice because being nice is the nice thing to do. It’s more a way of saying, if you’re aggressive to yourself this is wrong action, and you move backwards a step. If you apply gentleness to yourself you allow newness to arise, and you stand a chance of moving forward.

~~~

In practice it seems easier for us to connect with our innermost sense of being with our eyes closed. I’ve heard many people after a group instruction on mindfulness meditation ask why we have to have our eyes open, when it seems easier to connect with our eyes closed. My silent answer has always been, because it’s harder with eyes open, just as life in the world on our feet is harder with our eyes open. But this is why we practice, and this is how we become present, in life, on our feet.

In the beginning I found it easier to touch my heart sometimes with my eyes closed. Or sometimes my eyes would close of themselves as I experienced an emotion that transported me. Or simply my eyes would feel tired and want to rest from being open, a purely physical thing. And I noticed every time, on opening my eyes, that a degree of intimacy with myself was lost.

Eventually I came to wonder how I could open my eyes and not break the contact. I experienced how tenderly we cherish ourselves, how intimately we love the blood and flesh of our own bodies. And how cold the world in comparison seems. And it became clear that somehow we have to bring this inside tenderness outside to all the world, and this enables us to stay connected with ourselves.

Gentleness, then, is the way to stay in one’s own being even as one regards the world of the ten thousand things that seems to exist outside our fabricated selves. And this becomes a practice one can perform as a training exercise.

~~~

The ramifications of experiencing the functional power of gentleness are large, to me.

The Buddhist understanding that compassion is our true nature; the observation of how coldly one treats a loved one as one labors to repair a wounded sense of self; the experience that caring for others removes all worries for oneself; the happy little “secret” of Buddhism that the most “selfish” thing one can do for oneself is to practice tonglen, the giving away of all one’s goodness to all beings, in exchange for taking on all their misery; the teaching that the experience of reality as emptiness comes indivisibly united with an embrace of compassion; the thought that aggression is said to be the most damaging to oneself of all the kleshas; the contemplation of the emptiness of ego, the non-existence of self except as a fabrication wrought only by exiling all other beings to a place outside one’s boundaries of trespass: all of these things combine to show me the way on the path, which dissolves in no self and all compassion, abiding in momentary reality.

Gentleness seems like the beginner’s way in, a way we can all pursue.

In delusion
We shy from distress,
And bolt from reality.
Tasting the tip of the power,
We feed our hunger for comfort
And squander our energy
In habitual reactions.

In wisdom
We learn
That there is no distress,
That there is no delusion,
And that all of our power
Keeps trying arising,
Invoked by the present,
To fill us exactly
Inside of each moment,
To help us prevail.

As I wake in the mornings I find it relatively simple to notice the thoughts beginning to form a picture of my circumstances “out there”. I catch myself getting absorbed in arising “realities” that I need to remember and deal with during my working day.

In the dark with my eyes closed I can pull myself back into my own experience itself, and most mornings I play with watching this concretization occur, pulling back from the going out. I’m always astonished at what a simple trick it is happening to me, and yet how unresistingly I get pulled into this delusion. David Deida has described this in nicely lay terms:

…you can feel your attention “come out” of a deeper, blissful consciousness and “carve” a world of thoughts, objects, feelings and relationships that you call your life. Out of the silent, blissful nothing of deep sleep, suddenly you are aware of – and absorbed by – whatever world reflects your current fears and hopes.
-from Finding God Through Sex

Having pulled back in the dark, however, the difficult task for me is retain this space as my eyes come open. This is something I’m practicing with, and in sitting meditation sometimes I’ll close my eyes, and try to discover what it takes to open them and retain the same completeness of experience.

(Tip. I’ve noticed that gentleness is the way to take my inward feeling of self-in-body out to the world outside the body. Gentleness, as all my Shambhala teachers have always emphasized.)

One morning a few months back I woke up and pulled myself back from this world of absorption, and felt utterly peaceful, resting in great spaciousness. I opened my eyes and retained the spaciousness. Softly I arose, and started getting dressed, spaciously sitting down to pull on some shoes.

As the left shoe was coming on I watched in bitter surprise as I turned away from the great peaceful mind of empty space and reached out to the clothing of thoughts and preoccupations to wrap myself in. I watched my space shrink and draw close, and I was able to detect a lingering trace of the desire for comfort that had caused this. Comfort.

Dammit. Pull on familiar clothes, bring on familiar thoughts, and before you know it you’re dumb again.