North Shore Meditation and Dharma Center

Overcoming Doubt

2012-01-31T00:01:00.000-06:00

Doubt

Doubt is a part of every spiritual journey, and yet the resolution of doubt can bring great stability to a practice. But doubt is so complex and deeply imbedded in who we are and how we act that it is often difficult to notice, to understand, to see get beyond regardless of how strong thoure analytic belief in what we are doing.

While doubt may aid in keeping us from derailing, more often than not it prevents us from moving forward or changing.

Have a looksee at the qualities connected with doubt and there will be no doubt about the difficulties it makes for spiritual growth. [This list is from Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA.]

Physical Qualities

heavy

confused

foggy

sluggish

restless

leaning forward

fatigued

ungrounded

create comfort

urge to move

heat/pain

tightness

deflated

anxious

tense

shallow breath

agitated

emptiness in gut

contraction

folding in on self

uncomfortable in body

enervating

deflated

nervous

unsettled in chest

hungry

Cognitive Qualities and Beliefs

What’s the point?

Will it do any good?

I’m lazy

I can’t

vacillation/uncertainty

I don’t want to

I don’t know the answer

This doesn’t work

I’m not the type/not me

How can I figure it out?

I need help

It’s a cult

It doesn’t work

I should feel connected

I should be certain

There is a right way to be

I’m not ok

I’m not enough

I’m not worthy of the dharma

I’m not good enough

I’m unworthy

I’m flawed

I’m incapable

I should be able to figure this out myself

It’s too hard

I should be a monastic

I’ll never be a nun

I have to suffer

I have to give up everything

I’m going to lose who I am

Who am I if I give up my personality?

Emotions

aversion

anger

frustration

disconnected/lonely

fear

insecure

helpless

anxious

depressed

frenetic

nervous

unsettled

grief

intimidated

overwhelmed

confused and foggy

power

uncertain

wayward

shiftless

rudderless

despair

hesitant

Motivations

decrease of motivation

paralysis

try harder

make feeling go away

want to figure it out

quit

become passive

get my way

apathy

embrace my victimhood

can’t start

find an easy way out

find an excuse not to do it

run

avoid

destroy and refute it

do something pleasurable

Behavior

not do it

doing something one regrets

avoidance

put things on hold

shut down

eat

decide too quickly because of discomfort

with uncertainty

paralysis

escape

short with people

indecisive

quit

run away

shyness

avoid things/people

watch TV

sleep

internet/email

withdraw

stop eating

collect facts

read

make lists

procrastinate

anger

gossip

avoid sitting

imaginary conversations

head outdoors

head for the light

turn to nature

listen to dharma talks or lectures

talk about it

see a therapist

study it

turn towards it

Doubt in our practice is the fifth of the Five Hindrances. Mindfulness, meditation, and concentration, and wisdom and investigation are the keys to overcoming doubt. A strong or serious practice would include an emphasis on either mindfulness or meditation and either wisdom or investigation.

Be Here Now, Peacefully - Easy New Practices

2012-01-17T00:30:00.001-06:00

Practicing with Just Being Here

Consider these three practices to kept you here now:

1. The Don’t-Ask-Anything/Just-Do-It practice

2. The No-Expectations practice

3. The Or-Not practice

The classic reminders to be here and now are to recapture your breath or to develop a background awareness of your body. These both work, and they have worked for two thousand years in Asian Buddhist monasteries. For non-monastic Westerners with young practices, setting an intention to maintain a behavioral mantra can be much more effective.

Don’t-Ask-Anything/Just-Do-It Practice

Consider what would happen if you entered each endeavor and activity, not with the stridency or the arrogance of your Self dictating your behavior, but with a profound commitment to the humility that tells you not to ask anything of anyone. This isn’t about being independent, it’s about learning to be comfortable. It isn’t about another form of assertion, it’s about . This isn’t about finding a new value for ourselves, it is about discovering the real lack of value in everything, which is the uncovering of emptiness.

This isn’t just a practice aimed at physical acts, like telling a kid to get you your coat, or telling someone in the office to bring you back a sandwich when they return from lunch. That change (and it is not a little change) can be an important part of the humility that retrains us to avoid the Three Conceits: I am better than you, I am worse to you, I am equal to you (SN 1.20). It is much more encompassing than just asking others to bring or things rather than just getting them ourselves. It is about neither comparing nor contrasting–not judging.

Beyond that, there is the arrogant of expecting others to entertain us. Isn’t this what most small talk is aimed at? And isn’t that why gossip and small-talk are specifically listed as wrong speech?

Right Speech

Only speak when it will improve the silence.

Here are the five elements of right speech:

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak

2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit

3. Always speak in ways that can be understood

4. Only say it once

5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit (right intention) isn’t about winning

While wrong speech could be accurately and broadly described as anything we say that isn’t right speech, there are traditional key elements to wrong speech:

Harsh, mean-spirited or angry words

Falsehoods and slander

Gossip and small talk, and

Belittling others to raise your own status

It is important to look at our intention in speaking: does it come from one of the three right intentions or does it arise from selfish and self-cherishing notions and desire that we have, from an intent to make ourselves appear superior, from a wish to do create enmity, from a need to do harm or a belief that we should acquires retribution?

There is also our mistaken belief that others share our misguided goal-orientations–“Friends don’t do that kind of thing,” ”Kids your age don’t do that anymore,” “If I loved her I wouldn’t feel this way or if she loved me she wouldn’t do that…” Pinning our happiness on future happenings, goals, is the antithesis of Buddha’s path, a path that is solely directed toward teaching us to live here, now.

And amazingly, there is a belief that others inhabit our world to satisfy our trumped up needs. Realizing that we only think of others when we focus on them, and that we only focus on them when we want something from them (bhava), should for those on our path, indicate was must find another way of relating, one that is not asking anything of others. The first paramita (dana http://northshoremeditation.blogspot.com/2009/08/generosity-its-our-original-nature.html) is the new course for those who have begun to deeply understand their true self-centeredness. [Bhava is the tenth link in the chain of dependent origination.]

1. The Practice

Pick a weekend to try this: in all your interactions with others, and in any anticipation of those or other soon-to-be interactions, set your intention with this mantra, repeating it to yourself over and over throughout the weekend until it seems natural: I won’t or I am not asking anything from this interaction; I will just do it, just be there. It’s that simple, or not.

Once you get a handle on what this practice is like, consider extending it to other days of the week. For those in an office, this can seem daunting at first.

No Expectations Practice

We, and the world, can get along quite comfortably without all our unnecessary posturing. We could just be a simple, direct and straightforward person. We could form a simple relationship with our world, our coffee, our spouse. To do this we must abandon our expectation that the world should always be other than what it is. In other words, we must come to recognize and realize here, now. We must come to know that our path is simply to be here, now, without expectations.

2. The Practice

The meta cognitive question that arises as a practice is: Whenever you are uncomfortable, nervous, anxious, stressed, frustrated, angered, or the like, just look at the situation that is seemingly the source of the problem and say to yourself, strongly, “I have no expectations; no expectations.”

Say it often enough and you will begin to see the world without expectations as a comfortable, confident person.

“Or Not” Practice

Opinions support our emotions which defend and protect our affinities and aversions, our preferences. That’s how Sengcan, the third patriarch of Chan, describes our dilemma in life.

Faith in Mind

First stanza, by Sengcan

至道無難 The Great Way is not difficult

唯嫌揀擇 for those who have no preferences.

但莫憎愛 When love and hate are both absent

洞然明白 everything becomes clear and undisguised.

毫釐有差 Make the smallest distinction, however

天地懸隔 and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

欲得現前 If you wish to see the truth

莫存順逆 then hold no opinions for or against anything.

違順相爭 To set up what you like against what you dislike

是爲心病 is the disease of the mind.

不識玄旨 When the deep meaning of things is not understood

徒勞念靜 the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

In fact, we use this triad (preference, supporting emotion, and justifying view), to process and express information. All of our stories, all of our views, all of our opinions are, as we know from studying the five aggregates and the twelve links, false and foolish.

2. The Practice

The best way to imbed this notion that all our notions are nonsense is to simply say “Or not” to ourselves, or when appropriate out loud, as a tag at the end of any declarative statement we hear ourselves making.

Another way to use “Or not”: when someone says something that you disagree with, that upsets you in any way, minor or major, or when anyone expresses an opinion, just say to yourself “Or not.”

Do this all day for a week or two until it becomes a habit.

“Or not” is a way of practicing with the two truths, one of the most important understandings on the Bodhisattva’s path. http://northshoremeditation.blogspot.com/2011/08/without-this-perspective-youll-never-be.html

New Year's Celebration of Emptiness

2011-12-31T23:34:00.001-06:00

The Great Way Requires Great Commitment

Commit Now to a New Year of Practice with Emptiness

As Venerable Master Yin Shun points out in his book Investigations into Sunyata, for a meaningful practice, a practice in which we cultivate purity, we must develop an intimate understanding of emptiness. Getting to know emptiness is so important that Master Ji Ru says, “I only teach emptiness.”

This New Year, consider committing to a yearlong practice of investigating emptiness. If that sounds daunting, it really isn’t. And nothing will do more to bring you peace of mind and to end your suffering than to get a handle on emptiness. Here are three steps to get you on course for an empty new year.

1. A simple starting point would be to commit to making this bumper sticker slogan omnipresent in your life: Don’t believe anything your mind tells you. Since everything is empty, anything your mind tells you is, of course, false. Use it as a mantra; make it omnipresent in your thoughts. This will limit and weaken your attaching. It will ease you through your life rather than making you anxious and uneasy.

2. Next, consider committing to practicing with the two truths. This means we commit to acting from the premise that everything is a lie and so there’s no reason to believe it or attach to it. This is the enhanced version of the practice above.

The Two Truths, Plain and Simple

There are two truths and they teach us the real truth–that nothing is true. (“Dude, everything is a big lie!” as one of my students put it.)

The first truth is the everyday or relative truth. An example would be: This is a table, or this is a desk.

The second truth is the absolute truth. It tells us that the object we are discussing is, really, empty, that it has no inherent or permanent definition or value or meaning or weight.

The first truth says that what we call something is what it is. This is a common understanding: “This is a table.” Most people stop there. The problem is that, in truth, you and I can call it different things because it isn’t anything until we label it. And once we label it, we give it definition and meaning…and we are in trouble if we are not careful for we have created a false story and asserted it as true and substantive. In other words, we believe our lies and act on them.

If I can call it a table and you can call it a desk, then is one of us right and the other wrong? Obviously, we tend to believe we are right. We are, after all, attached to what we think. And that makes anyone who disagrees wrong, so we have to protect and defend our position. We do this without realizing that what we are protecting and defending is, at best, a false notion, at worst, a flagrant lie. In the political area, where the stakes are higher than arguing over whether something is a table or a desk, we see the depth of suffering caused by not practicing with the two truths, and how conflict and war results from believing our relative understanding of the world is true.

The two truths is telling us that we must realize both truths simultaneously, realize that they are just notions (stories) about things that are both there and not there simultaneously; true and not true simultaneously. So I can call it a table without attaching or really believing it is a table, so if you call it something else, I neither protect nor defend my position.

This is the core teaching of the Diamond Sutra, it is the heart of the teachings of great nuns and monks of medieval Christendom, it is fundamental to the long tradition of mystical Judaism, and it is a central tenet of Islam’s Sufism.

3. Study hard and take to heart the Four Marks of Existence (The Four Dharma Seals), the Five Aggregates (Five Skandhas), and the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination. By study hard, I mean learning the list in a functional, not academic, way. Start with a definition of how each element works in relation to the others in the list, and how it works in your life to create and to end your dukkha. Become comfortable enough with your understanding to be able to explain it to a 9-year-old. (You will be amazed at how easily a 9-year-old can grasp emptiness.) Study these three lists in the sequence listed here: the 4, the 5, and then the 12.

Next, contemplate them on the cushion. This can be done in two ways: one, sit for 5-10 minutes with your breath to calm body and mind, then do a thorough cognitive investigation of the teaching; and two, sit with the aim of observing them as they arise during meditation.

(1) Start by looking at the teaching in its broadest meaning: what is this list saying? What does it mean as a whole? How present is it in my life? Etc. Then narrow the meaning; examine each element: what does each mean in terms of my suffering, in terms of my liberation? Define each from your experience. Consider how each relates to the others in the list? Are the lists really linear or is that just a skillful means? Continue to take each element apart piece by piece. Limit your contemplative time on the cushion to 20 minutes at a time so you can stay very tightly focused on subject; the mind wanders too much after that. Repeat this frequently throughout the year, building on your previous understandings and conclusions.

(2) Watch the Marks or the Aggregates or the Links as they arise in your mind. See how one leads to the next: how each works in dependence to the others. If you understand them, you will be able to see them experientially on the cushion. If you are having difficulty finding them on the cushion, do some more reading and talking about them and then try again. Finally, when you know them experientially from the cushion, start watching for them in your everyday activities: see how a traffic light turning red can cause an aversion and its attendant story and note how telling yourself this “event” is empty can short-circuit the discomfort.

Email me if you have questions as you celebrate this new year with a focus on making emptiness, the ultimate teachings of the Buddha, central to you life.

4. Finally, consider some serious book study. These four books, I believe, will last you for a year of study, perhaps a lifetime. I suggest studying them in the sequence below.

1. Introduction to Emptiness by Guy Newland. This is a short, very clear and accessible examination of emptiness.

2. How Thing Exist by Lama Zopa Rinpoche. This is another short book, also very clear, that is a profound examination of emptiness.

3. Meditation on Emptiness by Jeffrey Hopkins. This is a serious examination of emptiness and the practices by which it can be realized. It is stimulating and extensive.

4. For Chinese speakers, Venerable Master Yin Shun’s heady Investigations into Sunyata is available in Chinese, both in print and online, I believe. I have a very rough translation of it into English; email me if you’d like me to send you the 300-page pdf.

Thanksgiving...hmmm.

2011-11-23T00:48:00.001-06:00

Let’s Not Be Thankful, Not Today or Any Day

Let’s Be Contemplative

In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared a three-day late autumn feast to celebrate the success of the harvest. They had prayed for a good harvest and when they got what they wanted, they celebrated. In 1863 Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, institutionalizing the idea that getting what we want is cause for celebration.

This was a very Puritan religious idea: seeking happiness from externals It is not a very Buddhist idea. In fact, Buddhism posits exactly the opposite idea. It sees greed, the unrelenting desire for more, as one of the three poisons (anger and delusion are the other two), not as a cause for celebration. Being thankful for getting what we want misses the whole point of our practice, which is to be selfless, present, caring and generous, which is to do our best in each moment and to allow our happiness, our Buddhanature, to arise from within.

So today, rather than giving thanks, consider spending some time reflecting on the Five Contemplations which have, for thousands of years, been recited by followers of the Buddha before meals.

The Five Contemplations

I contemplate how much positive potential I have accumulated in order to receive this food.
I contemplate my own practice (of generosity, moral rectitude, compassion, patience), constantly trying to improve it.
I contemplate my mind, cautiously guarding it from wrongdoing, greed, and other defilements.
I contemplate this food, treating it as wondrous medicine to nourish my body.
I contemplate the aim of our practice, accepting and consuming this food in order to accomplish it.

Getting Started with a Contemplative of The Five Contemplations

Sit in the traditional meditation posture and follow your breathe for 5 to 10 minutes, then start thinking about each of the key phrases in the Five Contemplations. After about half an hour of contemplate, go back to your breathe for another 5 to 10 minutes. Here are some notes to get you started.

Positive potential: Consider how mindful and morally disciplined you have been; consider what “mindful” and “morally disciplined” each mean and their relationship to each other.

My own practice: Consider what generosity, discipline, compassion and patience mean to you in the context of your practice, how much of each you exhibit in your daily life, and if you apply these with a sense of equanimity.

My mind: Contemplate mindfulness of mind, one of the four foundations of mindfulness, in relation to guarding against wrongdoings, and also how right effort applies here.

This food: Consider the interconnectedness of all phenomena that can be seen in food and its sustenance, and the moral implications of interconnectedness for you and your family and ultimately the planet and universe.

Aim of our practice: Consider the point of a Buddhist practice, what your aim is in following the path, and its implications for the future.

After half an hour or so of contemplation, return to your breath and follow it for another 5 to 10 minutes.

Happy Holiday.

Patience in a Paragraph

2011-10-31T23:00:00.000-05:00

Chew On This, Unpack It, Let It Settle In

Patience in a Paragraph

The alternatives to patience in the spiritual life form a spectrum of wasted energy from irritation and frustration to anger and all the way to fury and wrath. Such a waste. All the result of trying to force ourselves and others to change rather than allowing us and them to be. If we try to force change we prevent change from happening. Patience is needed if there is to be spiritual growth. Patience is neither passive nor submissive; it is finally being fully engaged, without our stories clouding our vision. Patient effort, enduring effort, persistent, consistent effort is needed for patience and peacefulness to replace the raucousness and violence of our greed, anger and delusion. In the end, patient, enduring effort is the pathway to a successful. This sort of effort, the effort that persists day after day, the effort that persists during good times and bad times, is an effort that understands and uses the law of karma. Actions have consequences. Skillful actions have beneficial consequences. Patient, enduring effort in skillfulness of body, speech and mind brings about spiritual growth and wisdom. Patient, persistent effort in ethics, meditation and study brings about spiritual growth and wisdom. Patience is a “perfection” (paramita) because it is natural aspect of reality, an aspect of wisdom. The nature of wisdom is expressed in the concept of the dependent origination. This law of conditionality states that everything arises in dependence on conditions. Spiritual progress too arises in dependence on conditions, and in the absence of those conditions it does not arise. We need to patiently and persistently create and put in place the conditions for spiritual growth to arise. This is in accordance with the world as it really is.

Being Patience, That's Our Practice

2011-10-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

Patience, Antidote for Anger (and all our other evils)

Patience, the practice of patience, of wholeheartedly being present, is the antidote for faulty frustrated desires (the I-wants and shoulda-hads) and unwanted occurrences (the I-shouldn’ta gottens, shouldn’t bes). That being the case, we need to make the perfection of patience an omnipresent practice; not just a fallback position to use in difficult situations.

Patience is a mind that is able to be fully present with whatever occurs. It is much more than just gritting our teeth and putting up with things, that’s the tolerance/intolerance thing. Being patient means to welcome wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. It is founded in a trust of ourselves to do what is right, without preparation or discursive analysis, in any situation.

When patience is present in our mind it is impossible for anger to gain a foothold. As we know from the cushion, since we can only have one thought at a time, if there is patience there cannot be anger.

It is always possible to be patient; there is no situation so bad that it cannot be accepted patiently, with an open, accommodating, and peaceful heart.

We start training ourselves to be patient on the cushion when we teach ourselves how to be patient with our thoughts and feelings as they arise, especially when we sit without moving and learn to be able to let go of discomfort. Letting go of our imagined discomforts, after all, is patience. Next we take it off the cushion and practice patience by learning to accept the small everyday difficulties and hardships that arise. Gradually our patient mindstate increases and we remain peaceful in the face of our perceived adversities. There are many examples of people who have managed to practice patience even in the most extreme circumstances––Empty Cloud, for example, when he was being tortured. or those in the final stages of cancer, who, although their bodies are ravaged, maintain peaceful minds.

If we practice the patience of voluntarily accepting suffering (which is all imagined and unreal), we can maintain a peaceful mind even when experiencing “suffering and pain.”

If we maintain this peaceful and positive state of mind through the force of mindfulness, angry minds will have no opportunity to arise. (You’re always breathing, so you can always return to your breath, even when someone is screaming at you). On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to dwell in aversive or harmful thoughts there will be no way for us to prevent anger from arising.

By training our mind to look at frustrating situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from anger and a lot of other unnecessary mental suffering: If there is a way to remedy an unpleasant situation, what point is there in being angry or worried? On the other hand, if it is completely impossible to remedy the situation there is also no reason to get upset either. This line of reasoning is very useful, for it leads is to realize through mindfulness that a peaceful life is a call to action, not thought.

Being patient doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something to improve the situation. If it is possible to remedy the situation, then of course we should; but to do this we do not need to become worried or angry. Simple awareness is all we need.

As long as we are alive, we cannot avoid seemingly unpleasant, difficult situations and a certain amount of physical discomfort, but by training our mind to look at frustrating, anger-producing situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from a lot of much if not most of our unnecessary suffering.

Instead of reacting blindly through the force of emotional habit (anger, worry, depression, etc.), we should examine the situation. We should not become angry just because things do not go our way. We must break that old habit of ours if we are to progress past anger and move meaningfully forward on the Path.

In reality all our problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things as they are – in which case it is patience, rather than attempting to change externals, that is the solution. Lessening and managing the anger, in its full spectrum from irritation to wrath, is not the point on which we practice. The point is to patiently be with things as they are and to let go of all our fabrications about how they oughta be/shoulda been. Problems do not exist outside our mind, so when we stop seeing other people and things as problems they stop being problems.

The Three Patiences

There are three kinds of situation in which we need to learn to be patient:

When we are experiencing suffering, hardship, or disappointment
When we are practicing Dharma
When we are harmed or criticized by others

Correspondingly, there are three types of patience:

The patience to deal with our perceived suffering in each moment – we do this when we realize that we are the source (it’s our stories based on our past actions) of all our suffering and that if we are patient with the suffering it will cease.
The patience required to practice the Dharma – this is using our understanding of emptiness and dependent arising to lessen attachment and increase patience though mindfulness, which guides us in eradicating our delusions and suffering.
The patience not to retaliate – we learn not to retaliate when we combine patience with compassion; and further when we realize we are the real source of the suffering is internal not external, so there is no reason for retaliation.

Reminder: Right Speech Produces Patience

Right speech leads to mindfulness, wisdom, and speaking calmly and with lovingkindness and compassion in our hearts. Those conditions tend to hold us stable in a patient mindstate. They also allay anger.

Only speak when it will improve the silence

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak

2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit

3. Always speak in ways that can be heard

4 Only say it once

5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit isn’t about winning

Avoid wrong speech:

1. Avoid harsh, mean-spirited or angry words

2. Avoid falsehoods

3. Avoid gossip and small talk

4. Avoid belittling others to raise your own status

We use wrong speech when we feel an aversion. Wrong speech is uttered in anger and intended to cause the hearer pain. Such speech can assume different forms:

1. Abusive speech: scolding, screaming, reviling, or demonizing with harsh, bitter words.

2. Insulting speech: hurling insults at someone for some perceived offensive quality or action that we don’t like or approve of.

3. Sarcasm, snarkiness and the like: speaking to someone in a sharp or ironic way intended to annoy or outright hurt them.

New Beginner's Class

2011-10-08T05:26:00.000-05:00

Beginner’s Mindfulness Meditation Class

Every Tuesday from 6:30 – 8:00 pm

Deerpath Primary Care

1800 Hollister Drive, Suite 102

Libertville, IL 60048

Email for more information

Meditation can wipe away the day's stress, bring you a new sense calm in your daily activities, improve the quality of your family life and reduce your stress at work. If stress has you anxious, tense and worried, try mindfulness meditation.

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, published by the American Psychiatric Association: A group mindfulness meditation program can effectively reduce symptoms of anxiety and panic and can help maintain these reductions. According to the National Institutes of Health: Mindfulness meditation is effective in decreasing stress symptoms in a wide variety of patients of all ages, genders, and educational backgrounds.The medical profession has been conducting studies on the efficacy of mindfulness and the impact of meditation on practitioners for over 30 years. Results show that people who meditate regularly experience significant wellness benefits decreased heart rates, respiration, blood pressure and oxygen consumption, all signs of improved wellness and physical health.

Mindfulness meditation is a simple and effective technique anyone can do anywhere to get themselves back in focus. It doesn’t require any special equipment, or clothing, can be done at home, at work, inside or out and even – under certain conditions – while driving. It’s a near perfect way to manage anxiety, control worry, lower tension and increase happiness.”

Although the roots of meditation go back thousands of years to the religious practices of ancient India, especially Buddhism, mindfulness meditation is a non-denominational, pan-sectarian practice. All three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have a meditation practice. It’s not something complicated or cultish - it’s simply sitting still, breathing mindfully and letting the mind quiet naturally.”

Join meditation teacher Carl Jerome of the North Shore Meditation and Dharma Center at DPC every Tuesday at 6:30 to learn how to meditate, to learn the insights that meditation offers, and to grow healthier and happier.

Here’s the Simple How-To of Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is when mind and body are wholly engaged with what is happening. No evaluating, no judging, no stories or notions about it. Just full engagement.

Mindfulness meditation is simply wholeheartedly observing our breath.

Mindfulness is the driving force of a clear, peaceful, calm, quiet and confident mind. Meditation is what charges our mindfulness battery.

What do we do? We just sit, still, without moving, and focus on our breath. No numbers, no words, no visualizations, no wondering about the breathing. Just noticing it go in and out: in the diaphragm, chest, or at the tip of the nostrils. When a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound, whatever, arises as a distraction and we notice that we are thinking or feeling of hearing, we let go of that distraction and mindfully return to observing our breath.

We don’t judge or evaluate our meditation. We just sit.

Meditation is about letting go, not attaining. How do we let go? We let go by focusing our attention on something else. For example, when we notice we are listening to a bird, we let go by simply (re)focusing on our breath.

We allow the breath to be natural. We don’t try to change it or control it. We simply breathe. Simply observe. We become calmer, healther, and more peaceful.

Buddhist Best Practices, Part 2

2011-10-03T00:06:00.000-05:00

In our last blog, we looked at the first three of the six paramitas. Here we look at the last three.

4. Right Effort

We generally describe right effort as abandon and refrain the unwholesome, develop and maintain the wholesome. But a definition is not a plan.

Right Effort requires us to simplify our life and to restructure it in ways that conduce to the performance of our practice. We can, once we see how, create an environment in which our practice can thrive. After all, what we are doing now is creating an environment in which our practice is difficult. So it is more a shift in style than something new.

Right Effort keeps us on the Path. We shift our lives in order to lower our stress levels. By minimizing our interactions with others we minimize “selfing,” ego-energizing involvements and conflicts. By taking the conditions of our body and mind seriously, we eliminate deleterious habits, eliminations that can be ended easily, providing we grasp the power that meditation and practice. We do instead of thinking and talking. We meditate and we gain insight. We create an environment in which practice can flourish and in which the sense of well-being we derive from this induces us to further practice.

Five Right Efforts

Techniques for Ridding Ourselves of Defilements:

1. For every defilement there is an antidote (patience for anger; generosity for jealousy, etc). The first of these right efforts is to replace the defilement with the wholesome mindstate that is its opposite.

This is often described as abandon and refrain, develop and maintain.:

	Unarisen	Arisen
Defilements	(2) Refrain	(1) Abandon
Wholesome Mindstates	(3) Develop	(4) Maintain

2. The second of the five right efforts is to activate these positive mindstates: regret and distaste. Ordinarily in the West these are considered negative mindstates, but in Buddhism these are positive mental qualities that we can used to abandon an unwanted thought or action.

Here’s how: Reflect briefly, quietly and gently on an unwholesome action, seeing it harmful. Next consider its undesirable consequences until a very gentle distaste for it sets in. Then, as regret arises in us we use that regret to calmly push the thought away, shelving it until and similar situation arises again. Next time, though, when we look at what happened last time we were in this type of situation, the regret leads us to change strategies. No guilt, no wallowing, no ruminating.

3. In this third method, we confront the defilement directly, scrutinize and investigate its structure and the structure of each of its components. When this is done, the defilement quiets down and disappears on its own. This contemplative destructuring, which requires patience to learn, is a very powerful tools for evaporating everything from physical pain to depression. Note that this is not a therapeutic model; we are not looking for sources and origins, we are only looking at the mental paradigms and models with which the defilement is created.

These first three are very effective ways to reset our behavior, to help establish new and lasting habitual patterns, leading to ever-increasing wholesomeness in our thoughts and actions.

4. The fourth technique is to strongly divert our attention away from the defilement. When a powerful, unwholesome thought arises and demands to be noticed, instead of indulging it we forcefully redirect our attention to a mindful presence somewhere elsewhere. This has a limited value, though, as it is weak at resetting our habitual behavior and only works if the defilement is met with a diversion of equal or greater strength.

5. The fifth right effort, to be used only as a last resort, is suppression–to vigorously wrestle the defilement to the ground and keep it pinned there until it can safely get up and redirect our attention to something better for us. Like four, this too has limited value and limited effectiveness, because it has little resetting strength.

5. Meditation

Meditation is what charges our mindfulness battery, and mindfulness is the driving force of a clear, peaceful, calm, quiet and confident mind.

What do we just do? We just sit, still, without moving, and focus on our breath. No numbers, no words, no visualizations, no wondering about the breathing. Just noticing it go in and out: in the diaphragm, chest, or at the tip of the nostrils. When a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound, whatever, arises as a distraction and we notice that we are thinking or feeling of hearing, we let go of that distraction and mindfully return to observing our breath.

We don’t judge or evaluate our meditation. We just sit.

Allow the breath to be natural. Don’t try to change it or control it. Simply breathe. Simply observe.

6. Wisdom

Wisdom, in the paramita context, can be considered as the understanding and intention that leads us to maintaining the practices of right effort, mindfulness and meditation. The right understanding, or view, is no view–just being mindfully present. The right intention is the intention to wholeheartedly and with utter diligence make it our life’s work to be generous, disciplined, patient, and mindful; plus be meditators.

Conceptually, Buddhist wisdom is often described as the four noble truths: there is suffering, its causes, that it is possible to end suffering, and the path to ending it. A level deeper of that concept are the five aggregates. And on the deepest level, wisdom is understanding and someday realizing the twelve links of dependent origination.

We will look at the aggregates and the links in upcoming blogs.

The First Three Buddhist "Best Practices"

2011-09-14T00:34:00.001-05:00

Part One: The First Three Paramitas

1. Generosity

2. Morality (Moral Discipline)

3. Patience

4. Right Effort

5. Meditation

6. Wisdom

These are the key practices of a bodhisattva, and their perfection, meaning doing them purely regardless of the circumstances, is the way of a bodhisattva. So if we emulate the paramitas, even when they don’t arises quite so naturally as we would like, we will be moving ourselves along the path to peacefulness. They can be thought of as a shorthand version of the Noble Eightfold Path.

There is considerable variation in the scriptural lists of paramitas, values we need to cultivate to live more peaceful lives and to reduce and eliminate our suffering. There is this Chan list of six, but there are other lists of ten as well. In one list of ten, patience is replaced by renunciation, and honesty, determination, lovingkindness, and equanimity are added.

1. Generosity   is the basic principle of enlightened living, giving without discrimination simply because there is a need. The implication, of course, is that there is no Self to get in the way.

2. Morality is leading a virtuous life (doing, saying, and acting appropriately), simply not doing what we know is wrong, meaning things that produce stress and anxiety for us, for those around us, and for the planet.

3. Patience   is the antidote for anger in its various forms, ranging from irritation to hatred, and is the mindstate that arises when we stop asking everything to be other than what it is.

4. Right Effort is the paradigm we must maintain diligently to move meaningfully along the path.

5. Meditation is what gives us the single-pointedness that allows peace and clarity to arise

6. Wisdom is the foundation of all our actions; it is right view or understanding and right intention)

1. Generosity

How are we supposed to do to attain freedom from suffering, to reach the emptiness of emptiness, to walk stably on the middle path? According to the Diamond Sutra, just be generous. Generosity, dana in Sanskrit, is often used in the context of making monetary offerings. But in daily life, generosity is meant is a much larger context. Generosity is what arises when our own self-cherishing and self-centered needs give way to being of benefit to others.

As we practice with the paramitas, our attachments, especially to our self, weaken and disappear. This is, in essence, the actuation of the Three Pure Vows (to do no harm, to be of benefit, to save all beings).

Generosity involves the gift, the giver and the receiver. Ideally, the giver should give simply because there is a need, with no expectation of personal gain, reward, or benefit; and the gift should be given without consideration of the receiver, with complete disregard for the recipient’s character or qualities. Finally, the gift can be material, it can be money or things, or it can be spiritual, meaning the gift of the dharma. Both hold an important place in perfecting this paramita, though spiritual giving, giving the gift of the teachings, is considered a higher form of giving.

The practice of giving purifies our minds and relieves our suffering in three ways. First, when we decide to give something of our own to someone else, we reduce our attachment to the object; making this a habit weakens our craving and clinging, the main causes of our dukkha. Second, establishing the habit of being generous resets our karma so that in the future we produce less and less dukkha for ourselves. And third, and most important, when giving is practiced with pure intention, our generosity produces virtue and wisdom, which has the immediate effect of changing our karmic course and eliminating dukkha.

The highest for of giving, which is neither material nor spiritual, is the giving of No-Fear.

Ten Practices for the Giving of No-Fear

1. The more peaceful we are, the more we give no-fear

2. Understand no-self, when there is no self, there is the giving of no-fear

3. Body – Slow gentle movement, no clumsiness, less eye-contact, humble stances

4. Speech – Right speech, gentle language, slow speaking, mindful speech

5. Mind -- Replacing defiled mind states with their antidotes

6. Equanimity – Stop discriminating and differentiating, stop value-adding judgments

7. Understanding that everyone acts only to relive their own suffering, never to cause us to dukkha

8. Making compassion the central point of departure for everything we do and don’t do

9. Become the smallest person in the room, allowing modesty and humility to guide our actions

10. Never go on the battlefield

11. Never say it more than once

12. Conquer our own fear of fear

13. Living with a heart filled with sympathetic joy

14. Always offering as much support and comfort as possible

15. Recognizing that we have intellectually, economically and spiritually a strong duty and responsibility to care for and protect the weak

The giving of no-fear is the giving of the gift of ultimate wisdom.

2. Morality (Moral Discipline)

Morality is acting in “right” ways. There are a number of lists that codify these behaviors. View them as guidelines, not absolutes; view them as rafts, not doctrines. Contemplate them anew each time conditions warrant their arising.

These can be used to guide our every decision:

1. Do no harm, then if possible

2. Be of benefit

3. If you can’t be of benefit, do nothing

4. Be morally disciplined and follow the rules

5. Meditate

6. Be wisdom-oriented

Use Right Speech

Only speak when it will improve the silence

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak

2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit

3. Always speak in ways that can be heard

4. Only say it once

5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit isn’t about winning

Wrong speech:

Harsh, mean-spirited or angry words

Falsehoods

Gossip and small talk

Belittling others to raise your own status

As Much As Possible, Maintain One of these Mind-States

1. Generosity

2. Compassion and Lovingkindness

3. Patience

4. Humility and Modesty

5. Moral Restraint

6. Equanimity

7. Right Speech

8. Truthfulness

9. Dependability

10. Regret (When we act appropriately but the outcome is not beneficial, then we use regret, very gently, to remind us to try another tactic next time.)

11. Distaste (Develop a gentle aversion to all that is unwholesome in body, speech and mind.)

The Precepts

I asked a student to contemplate these and she emailed me the next day saying “I must be missing something, I don’t do any of these.” I told her to contemplate just “no killing.” She emailed me a few days later: “I could spend a whole lifetime just on ‘No killing,’ couldn’t I?”

Don’t be deceived by their brevity and simplicity, these are life practices.

1. No killing

2. No taking of things not given

3. No sexual misconduct

4. No falsifying

5. No drugs

Patience

Patience is a mindstate that is able to accept fully whatever occurs. Patience is the antidote for faulty frustrated desires (greed, the I-wants and I shoulda-hads) and unwanted occurrences (negative greed: the I-shouldn’ta gottens and it shouldn’t bes), and for the anger that arises from not getting. We need to make the perfection of patience an omnipresent practice; not just a fallback position to use in desperation when screaming fails to accomplish our goal.

Being patient means being there wholeheartedly with whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. It is always possible to be patient; there is no situation so bad that it cannot be accepted patiently, with an open, accommodating, and mindful practice.

When we practice the patience of voluntarily accepting suffering (which is all imagined and unreal, so why not?), we can maintain a peaceful mind even when experiencing difficulties.

If we maintain this peaceful and positive state of mind through mindfulness, angry minds will have no opportunity to arise. (You’re always breathing, so you can always return to your breath, even when someone is screaming at you). On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to dwell in aversive thoughts and/or affirmations there will be no way for us to prevent anger and ill-will from arising.

By training our mind to look at frustrating situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from anger and a lot of other unnecessary mental suffering: If there is a way to remedy an unpleasant situation, what point is there in being angry? On the other hand, if it is completely impossible to remedy the situation there is also no reason to get upset either. This line of reasoning is very useful, for we can apply it when we feel ourselves just becoming angry and thereby move to patience.

Being patient doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something in response to “problematic” conditions. If it is possible to remedy the situation, then of course we should; but to do this we do not need to become angry. Simple awareness will do. And importantly, we need not to believe that things should be other than what they are.

In reality all of our problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things, as they are–in which case it is patient acceptance, rather than attempting to change externals, that is the solution. Lessening and managing the anger is not the point on which we practice. The point is to patiently accept things are they are and to let go of all our fabrications about how they oughta be/shoulda be.

Problems do not exist outside our mind, so when we stop seeing other people and things as problems they stop being problems. That’s patience.

Sitting perfectly still in meditation is one of the best training for a patient life.

Gain Freedom From Fear

2011-09-01T00:18:00.000-05:00

Freedom from Fear

Excerpted and edited from an article by Ajahn Geoff

The Buddhist idea about fear is complex. This is due partly to Buddhism's dual roots — both as a civilized and as a wilderness tradition — and also to the complexity of fear itself, even in its most primal forms. Think of a deer at night suddenly caught in a hunter's headlights. It's confused. Angry. It senses danger, and that it's weak in the face of the danger. It wants to escape. These five elements — confusion, aversion, a sense of danger, a sense of weakness, and a desire to escape — are present, to a greater or lesser extent, in every fear. The confusion and aversion are the unskillful elements. Even if the deer has many openings to escape from the hunter, its confusion and aversion might cause it to miss them. The same holds true for human beings. The mistakes and evils we commit when finding ourselves weak in the face of danger come from confusion and aversion.

The last three elements of fear — the perception of weakness, the perception of danger, and the desire to escape it — are needed to avoid the evils coming from complacency. If stripped of confusion and aversion, these three elements become a positive quality, heedfulness — something so essential to the practice that the Buddha devoted his last words to it. The dangers of life are real. Our weaknesses are real. If we don't see them clearly, don't take them to heart, and don't try to find a way out, there's no way we can put an end to the causes of our fears. Just like the deer: if it's complacent about the hunter's headlights, it's going to end up strapped to the fender for sure.

So to genuinely free the mind from fear, we can't simply deny that there's any reason for fear. We have to overcome the cause of fear: the mind's weaknesses in the face of very real dangers. The elegance of the Buddha's approach to this problem, though, lies in his insight into the confusion — or to use the standard Buddhist term, the delusion — that makes fear unskillful. Despite the complexity of fear, delusion is the single factor that, in itself, is both the mind's prime weakness and its greatest danger. Thus the Buddha approaches the problem of fear by focusing on delusion, and he attacks delusion in two ways: getting us to think about its dangerous role in making fear unskillful, and getting us to develop inner strengths leading to the insights that free the mind from the delusions that make it weak. In this way we not only overcome the factor that makes fear unskillful. We ultimately put the mind in a position where it has no need for fear.

When we think about how delusion infects fear and incites us to do unskillful things, we see that it can act in two ways. First, the delusions surrounding our fears can cause us to misapprehend the dangers we face, seeing danger where there is none, and no danger where there is. If we obsess over non-existent or trivial dangers, we'll squander time and energy building up useless defenses, diverting our attention from genuine threats. If, on the other hand, we put the genuine dangers of aging, illness, and death out of our minds, we grow complacent in our actions. We let ourselves cling to things — our bodies, our loved ones, our possessions, our views — that leave us exposed to aging, illness, separation, and death in the first place. We allow our cravings to take charge of the mind, sometimes to the point of doing evil with impunity, thinking we're immune to the results of our evil, that those results will never return to harm us.

The more complacent we are about the genuine dangers lying in wait all around us, the more shocked and confused we become when they actually hit. This leads to the second way in which the delusions surrounding our fears promote unskillful actions: we react to genuine dangers in ways that, instead of ending the dangers, actually create new ones. We amass wealth to provide security, but wealth creates a high profile that excites jealousy in others. We build walls to keep out dangerous people, but those walls become our prisons. We stockpile weapons, but they can easily be turned against us.

The most unskillful response to fear is when, perceiving dangers to our own life or property, we believe that we can gain strength and security by destroying the lives and property of others. The delusion pervading our fear makes us lose perspective. If other people were to act in this way, we would know they were wrong. But somehow, when we feel threatened, our standards change, our perspective warps, so that wrong seems right as long as we're the ones doing it.

This is probably the most disconcerting human weakness of all: our inability to trust ourselves to do the right thing when the chips are down. If standards of right and wrong are meaningful only when we find them convenient, they have no real meaning at all.

Fortunately, though, the area of life posing the most danger and insecurity is the area where, through training, we can make the most changes and exercise the most control. Although aging, illness, and death follow inevitably on birth, delusion doesn't. It can be prevented. If, through thought and contemplation, we become heedful of the dangers it poses, we can feel motivated to overcome it. However, the insights coming from simple thought and contemplation aren't enough to fully understand and overthrow delusion. It's the same as with any revolution: no matter how much you may think about the matter, you don't really know the tricks and strengths of entrenched powers until you amass your own troops and do battle with them. And only when your own troops develop their own tricks and strengths can they come out on top. So it is with delusion: only when you develop mental strengths can you see through the delusions that give fear its power. Beyond that, these strengths can put you in a position where you are no longer exposed to dangers ever again.

The Canon lists these mental strengths at five: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. It also emphasizes the role that heedfulness plays in developing each, for heedfulness is what enables each strength to counteract a particular delusion that makes fear unskillful, and the mind weak in the face of its fears. What this means is that none of these strengths are mere brute forces. Each contains an element of wisdom and discernment, which gets more penetrating as you progress along the list.

Of the five strengths, (1) conviction requires the longest explanation, both because it's one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated factors in the Buddhist path, and because of the multiple delusions it has to counteract.

The conviction here is conviction in the principle of karma: that the pleasure and pain we experience depends on the quality of the intentions on which we act. This conviction counteracts the delusion that "It's not in my best interest to stick to moral principles in the face of danger," and it attacks this delusion in three ways.

First, it insists on what might be called the "boomerang" or "spitting into the wind" principle of karmic cause and effect. If you act on harmful intentions, regardless of the situation, the harm will come back to you. Even if unskillful actions such as killing, stealing, or lying might bring short-term advantages, these are more than offset by the long-term harm to which they leave you exposed.

Conversely, this same principle can make us brave in doing good. If we're convinced that the results of skillful intentions will have to return to us even if death intervenes, we can more easily make the sacrifices demanded by long-term endeavors for our own good and that of others. Whether or not we live to see the results in this lifetime, we're convinced that the good we do is never lost. In this way, we develop the courage needed to build a store of skillful actions — generous and virtuous — that forms our first line of defense against dangers and fear.

Second, conviction insists on giving priority to your state of mind above all else, for that's what shapes your intentions. This counteracts the corollary to the first delusion: "What if sticking to my principles makes it easier for people to do me harm?" This question is based ultimately on the delusion that life is our most precious possession. If that were true, it would be a pretty miserable possession, for it heads inexorably to death. Conviction views our life as precious only to the extent that it's used to develop the mind, for the mind — when developed — is something that no one, not even death, can harm. "Quality of life" is measured by the quality and integrity of the intentions on which we act, just as "quality time" is time devoted to the practice. Or, in the Buddha's words:

Better than a hundred years

lived without virtue, uncentered, is

one day

lived by a virtuous person

absorbed in jhana.

— Dhp 110

Third, conviction insists that the need for integrity is unconditional. Even though other people may throw away their most valuable possession — their integrity — it's no excuse for us to throw away ours. The principle of karma isn't a traffic ordinance in effect only on certain hours of the day or certain days of the week. It's a law operating around the clock, around the cycles of the cosmos.

Some people have argued that, because the Buddha recognized the principle of conditionality, he would have no problem with the idea that our virtues should depend on conditions as well. This is a misunderstanding of the principle. To begin with, conditionality doesn't simply mean that everything is changeable and contingent. It's like the theory of relativity. Relativity doesn't mean that all things are relative. It simply replaces mass and time — which long were considered constants — with another, unexpected constant: the speed of light. Mass and time may be relative to a particular inertial frame, as the frame relates to the speed of light, but the laws of physics are constant for all inertial frames, regardless of speed.

In the same way, conditionality means that there are certain unchanging patterns to contingency and change — one of those patterns being that unskillful intentions, based on craving and delusion, invariably lead to unpleasant results.

If we learn to accept this pattern, rather than our feelings and opinions, as absolute, it requires us to become more ingenious in dealing with danger. Instead of following our unskillful knee-jerk reactions, we learn to think outside the box to find responses that best prevent harm of any kind. This gives our actions added precision and grace.

At the same time, we have to note that the Buddha didn't teach conditionality simply to encourage acceptance for the inevitability of change. He taught it to show how the patterns underlying change can be mastered to create an opening that leads beyond conditionality and change. If we want to reach the unconditioned — the truest security — our integrity has to be unconditional, a gift of temporal security not only to those who treat us well, but to everyone, without exception. As the texts say, when you abstain absolutely from doing harm, you give a great gift — freedom from danger to limitless beings — and you yourself find a share in that limitless freedom as well.

Conviction and integrity of this sort make great demands on us. Until we gain our first taste of the unconditioned, they can easily be shaken. This is why they have to be augmented with other mental strengths. The three middle strengths — persistence, mindfulness, and concentration — act in concert. Persistence, in the form of right effort, counteracts the delusion that we're no match for our fears, that once they arise we have to give into them. Right effort gives us practice in eliminating milder unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their place, so that when stronger unskillful qualities arise, we can use our skillful qualities as allies in fending them off. The strength of mindfulness assists this process in two ways. (1) It reminds us of the danger of giving in to fear. (2) It teaches us to focus our attention, not on the object of our fear, but on the fear in and of itself as a mental event, something we can watch from the outside rather jumping in and going along for a ride. The strength of concentration, in providing the mind with a still center of wellbeing, puts us in a solid position where we don't feel compelled to identify with fears as they come, and where the comings and goings of internal and external “dangers” are less and less threatening to the mind.

Even then, though, the mind can't reach ultimate security until it uproots the causes of these comings and goings, which is why the first four strengths require the strength of discernment to make them fully secure. Discernment is what sees that these comings and goings are ultimately rooted in our sense of "I" and "mine," and that "I" and "mine" are not built into experience. They come from the repeated processes of I-making and my-making, in which we impose these notions on experience and identify with things subject to aging, illness, and death. Furthermore, discernment sees through our inner traitors and weaknesses: the cravings that want us to make an "I" and "mine"; the delusions that make us believe in them once they're made. It realizes that this level of delusion is precisely the factor that makes aging, illness, and death dangerous to begin with. If we didn't identify with things that age, grow ill, and die, their aging, illness, and death wouldn't threaten the mind. Totally unthreatened, the mind would have no reason to do anything unskillful ever again.

When this level of discernment matures and bears the fruit of release, our greatest insecurity — our inability to trust ourselves — has been eliminated. Freed from the attachments of "I" and "mine," we find that the component factors of fear — both skillful and unskillful — are gone. There's no remaining confusion or aversion; the mind is no longer weak in the face of danger; and so there's nothing from which we need to escape.

We fear because we believe in "we." If we develop the strengths that allow us to cut through our cravings, delusions, and attachments, the entire complex — the "we," the fear, the beliefs, the attachments — dissolves away. The freedom remaining is the only true security there is. In trading away the hope for an impossible security, you gain the reality of a happiness totally independent and condition-free. Once you've made this trade, you know that the pay-off is more than worth the price.

Without This Perspective, You'll Never be Happy

2011-08-10T16:16:00.000-05:00

The Two Truths

At first when we meditate, we spend most of our time simply observing our breath. And that is difficult enough. But as we relax into our meditation, we develop insights about how our mind works.

One of the insights we have early on is that there are good sits and bad sits; there are meditation periods that feel like we are really meditating and others where we can barely get two breaths in a row without a distracting thought.

As we continue to observe this, over a period of weeks and months, we realize that meditation is just meditation, and whether we have a “good” meditation or a “bad” meditation is simply a question of how we choose to label it. If we get ten breaths in a row, then we might say, “I’ve had a good meditation.” If we’ve only had nine, though, would that make it bad? And what about 5 breaths twice or three times in a row?

In fact, it simply becomes good or bad when I have my self-talk tell me it’s good or bad. It doesn’t take long to realize that meditation is neither good nor bad; it is, intrinsically, empty of any definition or value, meaning or weight until I assign it a definition, value, meaning and weight.

On an implicit level, most people understand this. They understand that we can “reframe” things; we can alter the meaning or value of something by altering its context or definition, as the Taoist farmer story illustrates.

Taoist Farmer Story

This farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to condole him over his terrible loss. The farmer said, "What makes you think it is so terrible?” A month later, the horse came home--this time bringing with her two beautiful wild stallions. The neighbors became excited at the farmer's good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, "What makes you think this is good fortune?” A week later, the farmer's son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, "What makes you think it is bad?” A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer's son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. "What makes you think this is good?" said the farmer. 

What isn’t explicit, however, is that the reason we can reframe things is that they don’t have any permanent, set in stone, definition or value. That is the point of the Two Truths and we must realize it if we are to become peaceful and happy.

What This Means

This means that whether we like something or don’t like something is the problem, whether we label it good or bad is the problem. It’s not the nature of the thing that’s problematic, just the definitions and values we superimpose on it. When we realize the Two Truths, we stop assigning values in a way that makes us anxious and stressed and start assigning meaning from a place of peace. We shift our meta cognitive conversation so that it brings us and our families, friends, communities and world to a better place.

The solution suggested by this Two Truths concept is hard to execute, but relatively simple to understand. We must recognize that us and things are both real in an everyday sense and not real (meaning lacking in any intrinsic definition or meaning) at the same time. This isn’t denying the existence of anything it is simply explaining it in a different way. So the question is: Why is there a need for a two-pronged explanation?

The reason for understanding ourselves and the universe from this two-pronged perspective is that when viewed from only one of these, not both, we are making ourselves uncomfortable and stressed. If, for example, we tell ourselves something is good, then we have a positive emotional response to it and want more of it; similarly, if we tell ourselves something is bad, we have a negative emotional response and either want to get rid of it or ensure that we don’t get any more of it. In either case, we are left, at least a little but sometimes greatly, uneasy.

The middle path is when we see both of the truths as one. The middle path, the merger of the relative and absolute truths, is when we see the mundane while at the same time knowing that it is a mental construct open to constant revision rather than as something permanent.

Further, the Two Truths point to us to a deeper understanding of No-Self and that to a realization of Non-Self (see page 000). By no-self we mean that we are a fabrication, a mental construct based on our past memories and the stories we have told ourselves about those memories. It’s not to say that we don’t exist, that would be nonsense. Rather, it is to suggest that we make up stories about who and what we are. We might think we are great neighbors–we’re quiet, keep up the property, and very complain; our neighbors might disagree–they see us as aloof and unfriendly. We might think of ourselves as easy to get along with, some of our coworkers might disagree and think of us a rigid or stubborn. No one here is correct, no one incorrect. Why? Because any opinion is as valid as any other in a world where nothing is permanent.

Again, this is not to deny our existence or the existence of the things around us, but simple to say that we an they have no particular value or meaning until we assign it.

We all live as if we had a firm basis to our being, and that understanding of the universe generates our chronic disconnect, our endemic discomfort with life. If I understand all my ideas of self, all my concepts and ideologies, all my role definitions, all my emotions and definitions as having no inherent, permanent meaning or value, then my life eases up. I stop having meta cognitive conversations with myself about how bad things are, how they should be different, about what I have to avoid to be peaceful, etc. Instead, I recognize and realize things for what they are: just “things” here and now. When this happens, everything becomes clear. We simply tell ourselves to do what is next and appropriate, and it is always obvious what is next and appropriate.

The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to end our everyday uneasiness and discomfort, our anger and suffering, largely through behavioral shifts that occur when we practice with reflective meta cognitive voices instead of just falling into habitual dukkha-producing patterns.

Practicing with the Two Truths

“That’s Not True” Practice: To gain a better understanding of how we assign negative values and meanings to things that then cause us to be upset, try this practice: Every time you feel yourself irritated or frustrated or upset in any way, ask yourself: What’s upsetting me? (That Lincoln Navigator just cut in front of me; I hate when people do whatever-it-is.) And when you get the answer, tell yourself: “That’s not true.” (If you need to, add something like: She probably couldn't see me, there must be big blind spots on an SUV of that size.) Then immediately let go of the incident.

With the “That’s Not True” practice, we are developing the Two Truths into new meta cognitive voices, recognizing both truths at the same time, then immediately letting them go without any discomfort arising, without any further story-telling about how this or that shouldn’t have happened.

Note that this is a process. The more you do it, the faster and more effective it becomes, and the more peaceful you become. Here’s explicitly what happens: First, you notice that you have an internal meta cognitive conversation that is responsible for how you define and assign value to things and events, people and actions. Next, you recognize its content and effect on you. Third, you see what triggers the conversation. Then you change the meta cognitive voice to one that will lead you to reflect on what’s really happening in a way that leaves you feeling peaceful not upset. Finally, you notice that this new voice is making your life easier and so you use it more and more, rehearsing with it internally when you can, and externally when it would be beneficial.

“Or Not” Practice: Philip Whalen, the renowned Zen Master from San Francisco, had a single two-word phrase that he repeated incessantly: “Or not.” Whenever anyone said anything with great assurance, whenever an opinion was raised strongly, whenever almost anything was said confidently by a student or would-be student of his, he would say, “Or not.” This was his reminder to us of the Two Truths.

If you say it often enough, both in self-talk and verbally so others can hear, you eventually find any assertion silly and laughable. You eventually find you are shifting to a less secure “permanent” view of things to a fluid understanding of the world, to a Two Truths understanding of the world.

The Three Foundations of a Serious Buddhist Practice

2011-07-12T11:35:00.002-05:00

The Three Foundations of Our Practice

From Human-Centered Buddhism by Venerable Master Yin Shun

For the serious student of the Buddha, for a disciple of our teacher, Master ji Ru, the Venerable Master Yin Shun explains that there are three foundations to our practice.

The three mind factors that form the foundation of our practice are (1) confidence in and a vow to attain One Mind, (2) development of bodhicitta, of great compassion mind, and (3) a vision of emptiness.

ONE Generating One Mind–meaning confidence in and the vow to achieve One Mind.

In brief, this is to have such confidence in One Mind (our inherent Buddhanature) that One Mind become our ideal and goal. It also means to make a great vow, a vow that is the omnipresent and directing in all of the decisions of daily life, the vow to attain One Mind. This begins with having trust and appreciation for the profundity of the practice: the profundity and thoroughness of its wisdom, the expansiveness of its compassion, and the ultimate purity of mind it generates. This confidence must not be based on speculative thoughts, but on our own practice experiences.

Exercise:

(1) While we may get a momentary glimpse of one mind in certain mindful daily activities, although more likely not, the commitment to generating One Mind must include a commitment to attending silent retreats, retreats that are long enough to allow our One Mind to arise and produce the confidence in One Mind that allows us to achieve it stably. Commit now.

(2) Contemplate the Xinxinming (attached below)

If we could improve the affairs of the everyday world, of course it would be good but it would not be a thorough solution. When we have deep confidence that One Mind is the ultimate answer, and not doing worldly “good” deeds, we have the impetus to commit to the path and its way so as to purify the world and relieve all sentient beings from their suffering. Only then are we are vowing to seek One Mind for the greatest good of all beings while helping those around us along the way. So that we don’t stray, we must constantly reaffirm this aspiration.

TWO Develop Bodhicitta, or great compassionate mind, which is the union of compassion and wisdom through One Mind as the foundation of bodhisattva deeds.

Buddhism regards liberating sentient beings from the suffering as its highest ideal. The relative degree of relief from suffering here and now is secondary. Compassion has to be practiced with the understanding that mankind and all living beings are equal and interdependent until one realizes all beings and phenomena are empty of real substance. If all of our actions were based on self-interest then even if we were engaged in charitable enterprises, such activities would not qualify as bodhisattva deeds, as deeds of a great compassion mind.

Exercise:

Contemplate the three kinds of dana: material, spiritual and the giving of no-fear. Contemplate Chadrakirti’s model for compassion. Contemplate Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva, Chapter Three: Taking hold of Bodhicitta.

THREE Develop a vision of emptiness that is based on dependent origination.

Start by gaining a serious understanding of karma: the wholesome and unwholesome, cause and effect–the action and consequence sequence that comes from dependent origination. Going a step further, contemplate how everything in the world is based on conditioned origination. Of course suffering results from causes and conditions and therefore the ending of suffering has its causes and conditions. Likewise, birth and death and the ceasing of birth and death have their causes and conditions.

Contemplate: Emptiness from these perspectives: the two truths, the five aggregates, and dependent origination,.

Gratification, Danger, Escape

2011-06-30T00:12:00.002-05:00

The Real Problem Is That You Just May End Up In Heaven

Before my enlightenment, O monks, when I was still a Bodhisattva, this thought occurred to me: ‘what is the gratification in the world, what is the danger in the world, and what is the escape from the world?’ Then I thought: ‘whatever joy and happiness there is in the world, that is the gratification in the world; that the world is impermanent, pervaded by suffering and subject to change, that is the danger in the world; the removal and abandoning of desire and lust for the world, that is the escape from the world.’

In what can be seen as another version of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha explains this triad: gratification, danger, and escape, in the numerical sutras.

In essence, the sutras are explaining that what we generally call joy and happiness is the feeling of gratification from a sense pleasure–from seeing, hearing, tasting, touching feeling or thinking something we like or want or think ought to be. There are two levels of danger in this.

On the first level, we are attaching our happiness to pursuing and acquiring external things and experiences. The nature of these externals is that they are impermanent and fleeting, so we must always be seeking others and more. Doing our best is never enough. If we like golf, we need more time on the course and better scores to stay gratified. Even score of 66 is only gratifying until the next game. And so it is with clothes and music (why do people have 900 tunes on their iPhone and still need more?), and everything else. Additionally, because everything is impermanent, we are constantly losing the things on which we bank our happiness–houses burn down, portfolios collapse, restaurants close, and so on. So inherent gratification, we begin to see, is danger.

No sense experience is ever enough. No amount of gratification is enough. Therefore we are constantly seeking, constantly in need, always unsatisfied. Often almost unaware of how unsatisfied we really are. As we know, we are insatiable for sense pleasures because we deludedly think they are the source of happiness, when in fact they are the source of our discomfort, of our uneasiness and anxiety. Yet more danger.

On another level, there is the danger that if we get a great deal of sense gratification, we will be able to convince ourselves that we are happy, that we aren’t stressed, that we feel peaceful and happy. In Buddhist cosmology, constant sense gratification leads us to become devas, gods in the heavenly realm.

What’s wrong with being a god in a heavenly realm? Appealing as that may seem on the surface, what’s wrong is that it leaves us unaware of how fraught with danger our lives have become. We are unable to see that running from one purchase to another, from one vacation spot to another, from concert to another, is stressful and destructive. Once we become devas, we are stuck in the fog of our own delusion that we’re happy, and then one small event, like loosing our iPhone, can shatter us. A market crash that means we can no longer indulge ourselves in material luxuries leaves a deva karmically devastated, without any understanding of how to heal and find a path to spiritual renewal.

So the dangers are that we are pinning our happiness on impermanent externals and that, with enough sense gratification, we will no longer be able to see that there is really no need, or a way to escape this self-destructive cycle.

The way to escape, of course, is to stop believing that sense pleasure is the answer and to realize that we can have real longterm peace and happiness by abandoning our lust and desire for sensory pleasure and allowing our hearts to guide us into lives of compassion and service to others.

As another version of the Four Noble Truths, gratification suggests the first and second noble truths, that craving and clinging are the source of suffering, danger suggests the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, and escape suggests the third and fourth noble truths, that there is a way out of suffering, nirvana, and that there is a way to end suffering: the noble eightfold path.

The Ultimate Perspective On Life That Is No Perspective At All

2011-05-31T06:36:00.001-05:00

Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha

In the Blue Cliff Record, Case Three is a koan in which the great 8th century monk, Master Ma-tzu, once a man of great physical presence and prowess, has just awakened. He is lying quietly, old, sick and about to die. His attendant enters and asks, "How are you feeling?" Master Ma says, "Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha."

In Buddhist mythology, the Sun-faced Buddha lives for eighteen hundred years in brightness and good health; The Moon-faced Buddha lives only one night, in darkness and ill-health. Master Ma uses his final moments of life to teach his student that whether one is sick or healthy is unimportant. All one does, his answer suggests, regardless of the conditions, regardless of whether sick or healthy, all one does is just practice. Sick or healthy, there is no difference.

To practice this way, to be peaceful in the face of the unwanted and when “perceived injustices” arise, we must train ourselves to see things as they really are. But more than just that, we must be able to see things as we think they are: good or bad, wanted and unwanted, and at the same time to understand that their ultimate nature is undifferentiated. Then everything is one. It is this way of seeing the world that leads us to One Mind, to Buddhahood.

Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha doesn't lead us to being uncaring or indifferent, quite the opposite. It leads us to a very clear and powerful engagement with every moment, with a sense of awe and wonder that arises from within when differentiation and preferences no longer cloud our vision.

As Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, said in a dharma talk: SUN-FACED BUDDHA, MOON-FACED BUDDHA! "I am here, I am right here."

We Must Be Clear

2011-05-31T00:11:00.001-05:00

Now That We’re No Longer Singing

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!

Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.

I want to be clear. Not diplomatic. Not obtuse. Not sidestepping.

Here’s what happened to His Holiness when he tried to sidestep the issue:

From The Wall Street Journal:

According to an official statement released by the Tibetan Government in Exile on Wednesday, speaking at USC the Dalai Lama “said [that] in the case of bin Laden, his action was of course destructive and the September 11 events killed thousands of people…so his action must be brought to justice.”

The Los Angeles Times, on Wednesday wrote that this meant the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism implied Osama bin Laden’s death was justified.

But in its statement, the Tibetan Government in Exile disagreed.

When confronted with the most horrific, heinous deeds, whether perpetrated at us or upon us, real or imagined, or at or upon our family, or our friends, or our community, or our country…we never have the spiritual or moral right to kill the perpetrator.

The only thing a Buddhist is allowed to kill is his or her self. Or the Buddha, if he happens to get in your way. That’s it, both literally and metaphorically.

What’s the first precept? Do not kill. What does the Noble Eightfold Path tell us? Do not kill. What about the Bodhisattva Vows? Do not kill. Not mercy killings; not euthanasia, not suicide.

But what about our enemies? No. Absolutely not.

What did the Buddha do when Devadatta tried to kill him…three times? He responded with compassion. What did the Buddha do when King Kalinga cut his body limb from limb? He responded with compassion.

Let’s not delude ourselves. Revenge has no place on the middle path. The middle path has no place for hatred. Rejoicing in our defilements is not our practice.

The Buddhist response to a “perceived injustice” (Bodhidharma’s phrase), regardless of its scale, is compassion.

Change Your Karma, Change Your Life

2011-05-16T00:11:00.001-05:00

Giving, We Can't Afford Not To

In Buddhism, we talk about seeds, the memory fragments of how we acted in the past that lead us to act in similar ways in the future. Collectively, they form our karma, our predispositions to action that determine not only who we are but also how we will respond to the world in the future.

If we are acting in ways that are unwholesome, the dharma tells us to let go of the unwholesome behaviors and thoughts and replace them with their antidotes. So if we want to establish ourselves firmly on a path of spiritual growth, stably becoming more and more peaceful, we need to turn ourselves away from our self-centered actions, thoughts, and speech and start doing, saying, and thinking in exactly the opposite way.

What’s our greatest obstacle? In the dharma's understanding, it is the first of the three poisons, the constant and omnipresent desire for more more more which leaves us always off balance, always a little uneasy, even when we finally get what we want. And the antidote, the opposing pathway? That’s the first of the six paramitas: dana–generosity, giving, charity.

There are, in the traditional understanding of dana from the Pali Canon, three types of dana: material giving, spiritual giving, and the giving of no-fear. While on the surface, the practice suggestion below appears to be concerned only with material giving and its effects on us, in fact, it also strengthens the spiritual aspect of dana, the dharma within us, and also generate feelings of no-fear, in us and others.

In a dharma talk several years ago, Master Ji Ru said that dana was our most important practice. This exercise will show you why, in the most profound way. It will show you what happens when you to make dana central to your life. Doing it will karmically secure you on the path. It will not only plants new seeds to make your life more peaceful and happy, but it will leave you standing comfortably in the garden of compassion and loving kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity (the four heavenly abodes).

If we want to make the most wholesome of all behaviors, dana, our most habitual response to the world, we must constantly be thinking about it and practicing it. This is planting wholesome seeds, or in neuroscientific terms, making and keeping the implicit explicit. Keeping the implicit explicit, assuring dana stays in the forefront of our minds, fertilizes the dana garden and makes it flourish by clustering our neurons and hardwiring the behavior.

The practice: Make dana flourish: Commit to making a donation to a different charity each week for a year. The donation can be as little as a dollar or two, or\ more, depending on your budget. Decide how much you can afford and set an amount to give each week. Then, whichever the charity you choose, give that amount.

It isn’t the amount of the donation that matters, but the giving and the process leading to the giving that is important. This is about process more than outcome. Giving the same amount to each charity teaches us to be equanimous in the face of dukkha, to remain calm and clear when confronted with the suffering of others.

Having to find a different charity each week that we feel comfortable supporting keeps us constantly self-parenting, talking to ourselves about how to be charitable and the need and value of charity. It makes this implicit aspect of our Buddhanature explicit. It makes us more aware of need around us, a crucial element in keeping us motivated when we are faced with the distraction of our old self-centered habits, like feeling we need to hold onto what we have, like living from scarceness rather than abundance.

What I have seen in my practice of this exercise is that, as the months pass, it has gotten easier and easier to give. It hasn’t taken more thought and effort to find new charities; in fact, it takes less. Why? Because, I suspect, I have begun, at least on some levels, to live in the dana garden–giving has become my default position. The worries and concerns about not having enough and needing to get more (old karmic seeds that are now shrinking) have been replaced by a realization that I already have all that I need. And the four heavenly abodes, as I mentioned above, have quietly become, in a deeper and more meaningful way, my new residence.

Please join me in this practice.

Heroes Confirm: Sengcan was Right

2011-04-28T00:23:00.001-05:00

The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission names about 95 individuals from the United States and Canada each year as recipients of the Carnegie Medal. The medal is given to those who risk their lives to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the lives of others.

When those who have received the award where asked about their feelings at the moment of decision, every recipient asked had the same reply: there was no moment of decision. Whether climbing through a electric fence to save someone who was being mauled by a bull or searching a burning house for an aging resident who was unable to walk, or jumping on a attacker who was raping and stabbing a woman on the ground, each of the heroes said they acted spontaneously. There was no moment of decision. A startling answer to most people, but not to a disciple of the Buddha.

This illustrates what Sengcan said in the Xinxinming, his enlightenment poem, written fifteen hundred years ago. Sengcan, the third patriarch of Chan, points us to a place beyond picking and choosing, beyond discriminating-analytic-dual thought, a place in which we must have trust and then have faith. The mind that made these ninety-four hundred people heroes is the mind of liberation, the mind of pure love, the mind to which Sengcan is pointing.

May we all have faith in this mind beyond our preferences, as Buddha and Jesus and Mohammed and all our great spiritual teachers have had for thousands of years.

Here’s Robert Clarke’s translation of our third patriarch’s poem, which is one of the most beloved of all Chan teachings. Take it to heart and you will be free; it’s as simple as that.

The Xinxinming

The Great Way is not difficult

for those who have no preferences.

When love and hate are both absent

everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however,

and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth

then hold no opinions for or against anything.

To set up what you like against what you dislike

is the disease of the mind.

When the deep meaning of things is not understood,

the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The Way is perfect like vast space

where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.

Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject

that we do not see the true nature of things.

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,

nor in inner feelings of emptiness.

Be serene in the oneness of things and such

erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity by passivity

your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other

you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way

fail in both activity and passivity,

assertion and denial.

To deny the reality of things

is to miss their reality;

To assert the emptiness of things

is to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it,

the further astray you wander from the truth.

Stop talking and thinking,

and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

To return to the root is to find meaning,

but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. icon

At the moment of inner enlightenment

there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness.

The changes that appear to occur in the empty world

we call real only because of our ignorance.

Do not search for the truth;

only cease to cherish opinions.

Do not remain in the dualistic state.

Avoid such pursuits carefully.

If there is even a trace of this and that,

of right and wrong,

the mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One,

do not be attached even to this One.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,

nothing in the world can offend.

And when a thing can no longer offend,

it ceases to exist in the old way.

When no discriminating thoughts arise,

the old mind ceases to exist.

When thought objects vanish,

the thinking-subject vanishes:

As when the mind vanishes, objects vanish.

Things are objects because of the subject (mind):

the mind (subject) is such because of things (object).

Understand the relativity of these two

and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.

In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable

and each contains in itself the whole world.

If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine

you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion.

To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult.

But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute:

the faster they hurry, the slower they go.

And clinging (attachment) cannot be limited:

Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment

is to go astray.

Just let things be in their own way

and there will be neither coming nor going.

Obey the nature of things (your own nature)

and you will walk freely and undisturbed.

When the thought is in bondage the truth is hidden

for everything is murky and unclear.

And the burdensome practice of judging

brings annoyance and weariness.

What benefit can be derived

from distinctions and separations?

If you wish to move in the One Way

do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.

Indeed, to accept them fully

is identical with enlightenment.

The wise man strives to no goals

but the foolish man fetters himself.

There is one Dharma, not many.

Distinctions arise

from the clinging needs of the ignorant.

To seek Mind with the (discriminating) mind

is the greatest of all mistakes.

Rest and unrest derive from illusion;

with enlightenment

there is no liking and disliking.

All dualities come from ignorant inference.

They are like dreams or flowers in air -

foolish to try to grasp them.

Gain and loss, right and wrong,

such thoughts must

finally be abolished at once.

If the eye never sleeps,

all dreams will naturally cease.

If the mind makes no discriminations,

the ten thousand things are as they are,

of single essence.

To understand the mystery of this One-essence

is to be released from all entanglements.

When all things are seen equally

the timeless Self-essence is reached,

No comparisons or analogies are possible

in this causeless, relationless state.

Consider movement stationary

and the stationary in motion,

both movement and rest disappear.

When such dualities cease to exist

Oneness itself cannot exist.

To this ultimate finality

no law or description applies.

For the unified mind in accord with the way

all self-centered striving ceases.

Doubts and irresolutions vanish

and life in true faith is possible.

With a single stroke we are freed from bondage:

Nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing.

All is empty, clear, self-illuminating,

with no exertion of the mind’s power.

Here thought, feeling,

knowledge and imagination are of no value.

In this world of suchness

there is neither self nor other-than-self.

To come directly into harmony with this reality

just say when doubt rises not-two.

In this not-two nothing is separate,

nothing is excluded.

No matter when or where,

enlightenment means entering this truth.

And this truth is beyond extension

or diminution in time and space:

In it a single thought is ten thousand years.

Emptiness here, emptiness there,

but the infinite universe

stands always before your eyes.

Infinitely large and infinitely small;

no difference, for definitions have vanished

and no boundaries are seen.

So too with Being and non-Being.

Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments

That have nothing to do with this.

One thing, all things,

move among and intermingle without distinction.

To live in this realization

is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.

To live in this faith is the road to non-duality,

because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.

Words!

The Way is beyond language,

for in it there is

no yesterday

no tomorrow

no today.

Eating A Whole Chocolate Bar

2011-03-30T07:16:00.002-05:00

Eating A Candy Bar

A Dharma Story

Dad comes home from work just before dinner to hear Mom yelling at their 14-year old son for eating a chocolate bar when it’s half an hour before dinner. The mother is enraged; the father doesn’t see a problem.

What this story tells us is that eating a chocolate bar isn’t good or bad. It isn’t a right or wrong thing to do. Why? Because eating a chocolate bar doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. If it did, it would always be the same to everyone, regardless of the conditions. But that is not the case; otherwise the couple would be in agreement: they would both see the incident as bad, leaving them both infuriated, or they would both see it as good, leaving them patient and calm.

What the dharma tells us is that eating a candy bar can be either good or bad because eating a candy bar isn’t intrinsically anything, it is “empty.” When the dharma says something is empty, it isn’t denying that it is real. It is simply saying it is meaningless until we assign it a value. So in this example, it wasn’t good or bad until the parents imposed their ideas on it. And they could only impose their ideas on it because it was empty.

A further look at the incident reveals that the boy was hungry as dinnertime approached and so snacked on a chocolate bar. He was tired and worn down after basketball practice that afternoon; he saw eating the chocolate as a good choice. Mom became infuriated because she had spent an hour that afternoon shopping for dinner, another hour preparing a “healthy” meal for the family, and there was her son, ruining his appetite on a bar of sugar and fat. It was bad, wrong, disrespectful, unhealthy, and so on. Dad comes in the door, having had a great day at the office, and can’t see anything to get angry about: it’s just a chocolate bar.

What makes something right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust, fair or unfair, is simply whether we define it as something we like or don’t like. Things we feel an affinity for are right, good, just and fair; things feel an aversion toward are wrong, bad, unjust and unfair. Once those feelings arise in us, we fabricate “stories” to explain and justify the feelings. Then we take ownership of the stories and identify ourselves by them: “I’m the kind of mother who becomes angry when the boy misbehaves and her husband is unsupportive.” And that’s the problem.

It is always our “stories,” our skewed relationship with what’s happening not what’s happening, that causes our suffering–never the people, places, things or events that are happening.

This is a key understanding of the dharma, that everything is empty and that we are the source of our own suffering.

What this means is that if we stop telling stories we will end our suffering. It is that simple. The great way is easy; just stop the stories as Sengcan tells us. Unfortunately, we are great storytellers and we love our stories. It’s hard to see that giving them up will make us happy and even harder to give them up. But storytelling is the source of all suffering.

Do you love your wife?

2011-03-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

The Great Way Is All About Love

Whether we choose call it The Great Way, or the Tao, or Grace, or Universal Love, or Merging with the Divine, or Surrendering to Allah, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we understand and practice with The Great Way and its implications, both for everyday and for ultimate meaning.

The Great Way tells us to be here, now, present and observing; to be here, now, wholeheartedly, with judging, without preferences, without expectations, without opinions, without speculating or supposing or surmising. Not without discerning, but without preferring things to be other than what they are.

The Great Way is a process, a becoming, and it asks us to be in its becoming. No easy task.

When we are approaching The Way; when we are with The Way, or when we are The Way, we are observers, witnesses without karmic impediment or thrust, of whatever is in front of us. There is no desire for it to be anything other than what it is.

Do you love your spouse with wanting them to be anything other than what they are, in this moment and in every moment? The Great Way suggests if you do anything else, you don't love them. Do you love your spouse for exactly who they are in each and every moment, without judgment, without expectations, with hesitation? The Great Way suggests anything else would not be loving them. No easy matter.

GO FOR THE GOLD

2011-03-15T00:01:00.001-05:00

Candy or Gold, You’re Choice

What we call happiness in everyday parlance is only “happiness” because we’re not seeing it clearly. What we call “happiness” is, in fact, nothing more or less than being excited about getting what we want. In dharma terms, that’s greed, not happiness.

True happiness doesn’t come from getting what we want and it isn’t dependent on externals. Externals, as we know from meditation, are impermanent and always changing. To hang our happiness on something that is about to disappear isn’t real happiness. Real happiness comes from within, from letting go of our delusions, from being our Buddhanature, being our original untarnished self.

If we want to reach true happiness, we must be dedicated, disciplined, and above all, honest with ourselves. And we must be willing to give up the illusion of happiness that comes from getting our way in order to be happiness.

We act more like kids than adults in making this choice. We tell ourselves we want it both ways. We’re not willing to give up our candy for gold. We tell ourselves we can keep the candy and get the gold too, building one delusion on top of another. It doesn’t work that way. And even though we realize that it doesn’t work that way–after all, if it did we would be happy by now–we continue to tell ourselves we’re right and that we should be attached to the stuff we like and want.

Until we are willing to rearrange our priorities and commit to living a disciplined, meditation- and wisdom-informed life, all we will do is increase our unhappiness, our stress and anxiety. We know this, of course, if we look at what’s happening around things we say make us happy.

Take a closer look: What do most people say at the end of a cruise: WOW, this was great, we should do it again next year. Instead of enjoying the end of the cruise, we’re trying to get more of it and our idea of it. This is greed. This is protecting and defending our feeling about how great the trip was by buying another. This is fertilizing the seeds that say, “If a little is good, a lot is better” thinking that “a lot” will finally make us r-e-a-l-l-y happy.

Again, this excitement at getting what we want; it is not real happiness

We spend so much time working on our desires and attachments, strengthening them and increasing them, that we aren’t present with the things we tell ourselves are so wonderful and such a source of our happiness. We’d rather talk about how good it will be next year than to actually be on the cruise.

This is the candy in our life, and we hold onto it tenaciously. Ironically, it is exactly that tenacity that prevents us from moving along the path to real happiness, the gold.

Question is, do you want occasional moments when you delude yourself into thinking you’re happy or do you want to be happy all the time. Are you willing to trade the “happiness” that comes from getting externals for the happiness that comes from within, from a settled mind that is clear and at ease, even under the most difficult circumstances? The happiness that comes from spiritual well-being and a disciplined mind can survive even sickness, aging and death, so why is it that we are so willing to forego it for momentary “pleasures.”

When we let go of the candy, when we are willing to sacrifice external pleasures, we become free of the mental burdens, the stress and anxiety, that they entail and that binds us to our suffering.

External pleasures are our addictions to eye-candy, ear-candy, nose-candy, tongue-candy, body-candy, and mind-candy. They foster the three poison: greed, anger, and delusion, and they actively block the qualities we need to achieve inner peace. Even if we had all the time and energy of a million lives, the pursuit of these pleasures would only lead us further and further away from the goal.

So do we relish our passions or renounce them? Do we follow the path or only give it lip service?

GO FOR THE GOLD!

Compassion Comes in Stages

2011-02-24T00:15:00.000-06:00

The Three Stages of Compassion

Compassion is the essence of our practice. And practicing with compassion is a three-step process, as Chandrakirti explains at the very beginning of his Entering the Middle Way. Understanding this process tells us where to start and guides us as we become more and more capital-B-Bodhisattva-like.

We can all start here, now, by practicing with the first of the three types of compassion, compassion for the suffering of others. As we become more aware, we can move to practicing with the second type of compassion, compassion that arises from the suffering caused by delusion. Finally, when our practice deepens sufficiently, we practice the third type of compassion, compassion that arises from an awareness of emptiness.

Where we are on our path determines the type of compassion we practice, but knowing the direction in which our compassion will grow allows us to aspire toward deeper and deeper levels of compassion and to be open to an ever-increasingly profound practice.

Here is Chandrakirti’s triad:

1. Compassion with reference to beings.

This arises when our practice allows us to clearly perceive the pain and suffering of others. It is the first kind of compassion to arise and it causes us to strive to do what we can to help those who suffer.

This form of compassion is marked by our no longer being able to remain unmoved by the suffering of beings and by aspiring to do everything possible to help alleviate their suffering. It is often random and is not necessarily directed by wisdom. It is where we all begin as we dabble out toe in the stream.

2. Compassion with reference to reality.

This arises when we genuinely perceive how, through ignorance and delusion, beings create their own suffering. This compassion arises when we see deeply how, in striving to alleviate their suffering, beings are in fact causing themselves more suffering. Blinded by their ignorance of how things really are (impermanence and non-self), they continue to deepen their suffering thinking they are working to eliminate it.

Through understanding the illusory nature of reality, genuine perception of this situation brings forth this second type of compassion, which is more intense and profound than the first kind, and in which the delusions underpinnings of the suffering are addressed. Here there is focus and wisdom guiding our compassion. We see this type of compassion, for the most part, that we see in our Sangha.

3. Compassion without reference.

What distinguishes this third type of compassion from the first and second is that this compassion retains no notion of subject-object/self-other, nor of intention. [It is what the Buddha and Subhuti are chatting about in chapter ten of the Diamond Sutra.] It is the ultimate form of a Buddha or Bodhisattva's compassion. It depends on the realization of emptiness.

This third and most profound type of compassion opens naturally and spontaneous from within. It is our default or factory setting. It is simply who we are when we attain one mind. This is the compassion that is manifest in the mostly deeply practiced of our Teachers, those we address as Venerable Masters.

Understanding the three types of compassion, and the order in which they occur, tells us where to start with our practice of compassion, what to expect next, and extends our vision so that we may practice with ever-increasing depth to until we are able to be of benefit to all those touched by suffering, without discriminating and ultimately practicing without any preferences.

Stealth Buddhism: Dharma in the Business World

2011-02-15T00:05:00.000-06:00

While most practitioners “get” the big handful of basic tenets of Buddhism (the two truths, the three poisons, the four noble truths, up to if not necessarily the twelve links of dependent origination), applying these to our business lives can be baffling. For example, what does the dharma have to say about inventory control? Or, what does the Buddha tell us is the best strategy for negotiating a big deal? Or how do we keep line employees calm under pressure?

Buddhism was meant as a practice in the world. Quite an irony, since Buddhism is so infrequently taught today in an applied form. Sutras are translated, concepts are explained commentary-style, meaning what they “mean,” not how to use them. We’re almost never taught how to apply these dharma guidelines; how to use them in explicit business situations. We seem more comfortable with theory than practice.

If we’ve learned from our own experience with meditation and the dharma that stomping our heals and running around like warriors of certainty doesn’t make us more efficient and effective at the office, doesn’t make us better bosses, then perhaps it’s time to look for ways to apply Buddhism at work, to look at questions to ask ourselves so that modalities for applying the dharma appear.

There is a new sect of Buddhism developing in the workplace called Stealth Buddhism. From West Coast to East, Google to Monsanto to West Point, companies are teaching meditation and mindfulness, they just aren’t using the “B” word. As one consultant said: “As long as I don’t call it Buddhism, I can teach it anywhere.” “It’s basic Buddhist principles in a secular dissolution,” as another explained how she gets away with teaching dharma in corporate settings. Business Buddhism, it seems to most consultants, best serves us when it is Stealth Buddhism. Tis Buddhism without the label, I suspect, would have greatly appealed to the Buddha.

The dharma teaches us to be wise in our choices, disciplined in our action, caring, dependable and trustworthy in our interpersonal relations. That’s where we begin in applying the dharma to business. When our decision arises from one of the three poisons–greed, anger and delusion–our choice is never wise. So when it is time to make a decision, ask yourself: what am I trying to get out of this and why? If greed and/or anger are the motivation, then reconsider how you might effect the change in a way that honest, peaceful and beneficial.

The Pali Canon includes general principles for applying the dharma to business: Avoid any occupation or job whose main function causes harm and suffering or any kind of work that leads to one's own inner deterioration. Examples from the early scriptures are raising animals for slaughter or abuse, or slaughtering or abusing animals; manufacturing or dealing in weapons or arms; dealing in human slavery or prostitution; and producing or selling alcoholic beverages. The Buddha also says that his followers should avoid businesses and business practices that are deceitful, hypocritical, high-pressured, or dishonest. Obviously, the dharma implies we not engage in any kind of business that requires us to violate right speech and right action.

What does this say to terminating a “bad hire”? It certainly doesn't suggest the all too common three trumped-up writeups rather than being honest and paying for the unemployment. In the longrun, this type of dishonesty harms everyone? And there is always a sensitive, compassionate way to terminate a bad hire–kindly, gently, generously and honestly.

The Buddha places the positive aspects of dharma in the workplace under the three convenient headings of

1. Rightness regarding actions

Rightness regarding actions means that business systems should be designed to encourage and allow workers to fulfill their duties diligently and conscientiously.

2. Rightness regarding persons, and

Rightness regarding persons means that due respect and consideration should be shown to employers, employees, colleagues, and customers. An employer, for example, should assign his workers chores according to their ability, pay them adequately, promote them when they deserve a promotion and give them appropriate time off. Cooperation should be stressed over competitive in the corporate culture, and merchants and suppliers for the business should be held to the same standards.

3. Rightness regarding objects.

Rightness regarding objects means that in business transactions the articles or services to be sold should be quality-produced and presented truthfully.

Once we get past these generalizations, we need to learn to use our analytic and deductive reasoning skills in applying dharma in the workplace. One way to learn to do this is to take each of the basic concepts and ask how it could be applied in any given situation. Start asking yourself, reflectively, questions like: What does the first noble truth say about this? What would be the least harmful way of dealing with this? What practices would best serve my employees and company around this issue? It will seem awkward at first because we haven’t done it before so let’s look at a couple of examples.

Consider inventory control and maintenance. What do the bodhisattva vows [Do no evil; do only good; save all sentient beings], for example, have to say about inventory control? In other words, what would be the least harmful and most beneficial way to manage and control a company’s inventory?

The garage at my local gas station, uses a just-in-time inventory control system. Which is the most beneficial way the garage can operate. It orders everything it needs from its suppliers for delivery either the day it is needed or the day before. It is clearly the most beneficial way for that business to operate its inventory–production occurs ontime and nothing is wasted either in terms of financial or human resources or in terms of the environment.

Other types of businesses might need a dependent demand inventory management system that inventories only what production demands and when it needs it, or even a history based inventory control system in which items are stocked based on a history of what was previously used. To determine which is dharma-suggested, ask: What type of inventory control system would be the least harmful and most beneficial to the company, its employees, and the environment?

In the case of dependent or history-based systems, as the Vina Sutra (SN 35.205) tells us, we should not manage our stock in a way that is too tight nor in a way that is too loose. The dharma suggests it should be tight but not so tight that we have shortages. Mindful monitoring and controls can keep everything flowing without interruption.

Question is, are we asking ourselves, in relation to our operating systems: Are these systems mindful of our company's need to be as beneficial as possible to all concerned, or are they just expedient, based on our greed to get things done rather than to do them “right”? Are they honest rather than dishonest? Are they a source of suffering rather than a source of peacfulness for those operating them?

Here's another example: what does the dharma have to say about negotiating? As a negotiating strategy, the dharma would suggest reconciliation. In reconciliation, we fully accept whatever is presented to us, examine it mindfully, look clearly at the conditions, then we suggest whatever change or changes would be most beneficial for us and still be appropriate to the conditions. We simply do that over and over, never becoming impatient, frustrated or angry, never trying to get our own way, never becoming frustrated or angry. That way we stay clear-headed throughout the negotiation, which allows us to make the best deal. And if no deal is possible, we see that clearly and patiently accept it and move on.

Staying calm in crises, staying calm in customer service confrontations, just plain staying calm is a valuable and critical skill in any workplace. And what is the best practice for staying calm? Meditation. 2600 of experience has taught us that meditation is the most effective tool for developing calmness. Encouraging those on the firing lines to practice meditation, even perhaps giving them meditation time and a meditation space at work, will dramatically impact those under pressure, as well as customer satisfaction and office morale.

One San Francisco hotel, for example, had the executive committee (the senior management team) meditate together every morning for 20 minutes. The human resources manager said she noticed a significant reduction in conflict between those sitting and their direct reports.

Not all the results of applying the dharma in the workplace are easily measurable, not all will seem beneficial in the shortterm. But if we apply the dharma when conditions are right and with skillful means, the dharma will always be of benefit, both to the company and to the workers and to all sentient beings.

Our Ultimate Responsibility

2011-01-24T00:10:00.000-06:00

It’s Time for a Paradigm Shift

What Meditation Teaches Us about Facing Cancer

By Carl Jerome

We make decisions based on certain underlying assumptions we have about ourselves and our world. These notions, which are called paradigms, guide and in fact determine our every action. These are our habitual responses to the world. They are “the box” in the phrase “thinking outside of the box.”

We don’t start thinking outside of the box until we become convinced that the box isn’t working. When things don’t feel right, when they just don’t seem to make sense, when we can’t find the answer we’re looking for, we might search for another box, search for another paradigm that works or at least works a little better. When we make a change in our modus operandi, it’s called a paradigm shift.

It is important to realize that we don’t make changes until something significant seems to demand it, and even then, we are often slow to make paradigm shifts, sometimes in spite of the fact that our paradigm is debilitating. We tend to keep fighting to make the current paradigm work. Perhaps in the case of minor paradigms because we are stubborn or hard-headed.

In the case of major paradigms, like the two listed below, our attachment to the paradigm is often so deeply rooted that it is built into our biology. Our instinct for survival, for example, is such a strong paradigm that we don’t even sense that it can be changed, even though it can hinder us when we are attempting to save our lives. When our fight-flight paradigm is activated, we become tense and anxious. An anxious and stressed mind hinders us from seeing clearly and making the best choice under prevailing conditions.

Regardless of their magnitude, paradigms are all habits, and what we learn in meditation is that all habits can be changed.

Here are two of our major paradigms, both of which meditation suggests need to be shifted, especially in view of a cancer diagnosis:

1. If I get more of what I want and what I think I need or ought to have, then everything will be all right.

This is the biggest and baddest of all paradigms, for it leaves us always wanting and never satisfied. It says that we should base our lives on greed. It tells us to always be striving, never to be content.

2. I am healthy.

This paradigm falsely deludes us into thinking we will always be healthy. It prevents us from recognizing that getting sick it is the natural process of life and that sickness is simply a part of aging. It makes it impossible for us to remain clear-headed and fearless when illnesses occur, which is unfortunate because when an illness is life-threatening, that’s when we need to be really calm and clear so we can make appropriate decisions about treatment.

Until we understand our false and faulty paradigms, and how misguided they are, we won’t search for new paradigms. And until we not only search for new paradigms but actually make a paradigm shift, we will remain unable to address our most serious challenges, medical or otherwise.

The Key Paradigm Shift

Here is the new paradigm suggested by meditation (and the bodhisattva vows):

Our responsibility to ourselves, our families, our friends, and the world, is to use each moment to be of benefit to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our world.

Whether we are having lunch or deciding on a chemotherapy strategy for a recent cancer diagnosis, the paradigm is the same: do what is least harmful and most benefit to oneself, others and the world. This is a giant paradigm shift. And perhaps the most important realization that comes from meditation. Because when we do what is most beneficial, we become peaceful and make the best decision, even in face great difficulties and hardships.

As our paradigm shifts in this direction, self dissolves and we deadhead toward liberation.

A Quick Look at Dukkha

2011-01-14T08:12:00.002-06:00

Two Perspectives on Suffering

In our classes, when we talk about suffering (that all is dukkha, the first noble truth) and the need to consider it contemplatively and experientially, I ask students what they learned about suffering in their churches and synagogues. The answer is always a resounding “Nothing.”

The reason “suffering” is underplayed in Christianity and Judaism is that those faiths’ theological emphases are in other areas and so “suffering” is simply an underdeveloped concept. In Buddhism, on the other hand, “suffering” is the central theme and all the teachings are directed to understanding it, either cognitively or experientially.

Traditional Judeo-Christian theologians and philosophers, while admitting to the horror and uselessness of suffering, struggle to make sense of it. The difficulty arises from the belief that suffering cannot be eliminated, it is God-created and so part of the divine nature. God created suffering, as their reasoning goes, to purify and/or punish us for our sins.

The way to make sense of suffering in biblical traditions is to make it bearable by portraying suffering as somehow beneficial. Many Judeo-Christian thinkers suggest that suffering is a necessary test of faith. The greater the suffering, the stronger the faith. They suggest that suffering serves a higher, though unknown and unknowable, purpose. Often in Judeo-Christian thought, those who see themselves as “saved” or “chosen,” see their suffering as somehow special, different from the suffering of others, and particularly beneficial. The answer to the question “Why me?” in Judeo-Christian theology is that God acts in mysterious ways, ways we cannot know.

In the Buddhist view, suffering is never good, never beneficial. Suffering is always seen as bad, always seen as harmful. It is neither to be borne nor to be endured for the sake of some higher purpose. It is not an external creation of a higher being or a force of the universe. It is not the source of salvation. In Buddhism, suffering is not inexplicable and it does not need to be justified. For Buddhists, faced with the challenges of suffering, there is no question “Why me?”

In Buddhism, suffering is the result of our skewed relationship to the universe. Our ignorance about the way things really works results in our suffering. When, by dint of diligent, hard, spiritual work, we realign ourselves by trading ignorance for wisdom, suffering ends. Therefore, to a Buddhist, suffering and the end of suffering is entirely in our own hands. We increase our suffering, decrease our suffering, or eliminate our suffering, depending on how we think and what we do.

Confronting and Ending Our Biggest Dukkha

2010-12-27T00:12:00.002-06:00

When something big and awful happens to us, what do we do?

When we don’t get, or are about to not get, something we think is very important, what do we do?

The Buddhadharma suggests, and today’s neuroscience agrees, that if we want to end our dukkha, we must liberate ourselves from our addiction to preferences. Currently, we look at new situations and pick and choose what to do based on the habits we inherited from our hunter-gather, agrarian, and industrial ancestors. Instead of synthesizing new information, we just confirm what we already know.

Here’s what I mean: Say you want to know the best way to live. You go to an imam, a rabbi, a pastor, and a Buddhist monk. You ask each to tell you the how to live the best life, and each does. All four tell you something quite different. You go home, think about it, and decide which to follow. Question is, which do you follow?

Our ancestral mind, our living-in-distinction mind, our picking-and-choosing mind, in other words–our karmic habit energy, leads us to pick the way that is right, the way that confirms what we already know. The bigger question is, why did we even bother to ask if all we were going to do with the information was to pick the way we already knew was right, if all we were going to do was confirm what we already knew?

Confirming what we already know rather than synthesizing new knowledge may have been a useful “habit” 25,000 years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, or even 2500 years ago in the time of the Buddha and the upheavals of the axial age, or even 250 years ago at the start of the industrial age, but in our lives today, it is binding us more tightly than ever before to lives of unending dukkha. Lives where we can’t even see how to end our suffering…even when we are told the way.

To unbind our self so that we can deal effectively with big dukkha, with the loss of something we greatly value, we must shift our paradigm. We must change our karmic heading. We must respond to the dukkha without dual-mind. We must stop defining the situation as awful or terrible or unfair. We must let go of that false and faulty evaluating, let go of our picking and choosing and labeling energy. And then we must learn to consider every situation in the same way, with an open heart and faith in mind. We must learn that no situation is more weighty than any other.

[I say this from personal experience, not abstractly and in no way meaning to be insensitive to anyone else’s suffering. The big dukkha that led me directly to the Great Way was being told by my oncologist–in 1984–that I had less than a year to live.]

To realize that no situation is weightier than any other, that there are no situations, that there are no problem, we must stop confirming what we already know and learn to synthesize new knowledge. We must learn to see that there are only conditions. Understanding these is a big step in the right direction. It is, after all, what right view is teachings us.

We learn how to do this with grace and profundity in the third patriarch’s enlightenment poem, the Xinxinming.

Cutting to the chase, the answer is: we must train our minds to look at each new situation in life as simply a new set of conditions to which we must respond with a peaceful heart. As the Buddhadharma has been telling us for 2500 years, we simply need to abide in conditions instead of labeling things based on past information. There are only conditions, after all, not problems or difficulties or terrible things. Those are labels. And in any situation, regardless of the conditions, what do we do? We look clearly at what we are facing and we do what is most beneficial to making us and our families and our friends and the universe a more peaceful place.

The Buddha tells us to do this and this alone so that our big and small dukkha will dissolve. So that we can live lives of peace and happiness. So that we can to move from moment to moment toward liberation instead of toward more suffering.

So why don’t we listen, why don’t we train ourselves to live in conditions? The most important reason is that we think we think we already know the right way. That’s why we can’t see the Great Way.

Today is a good day to stomp our feet, become a knowledge synthesizer and commit to the Great Way. And what better place to learn it than from the Xinxinming.

Here’s an online version of the Xinxinming and a commentary.

Set a Place at Your Holiday Table for Mudita

2010-11-29T00:12:00.001-06:00

Make Mudita

The Centerpiece of Your Holiday Table

And Your Life

Even though mudita, which is generally translated as sympathetic joy, is one of the four heavenly abodes, relatively little seems to have been written about it and it is rarely the topic of talks. When it is discussed, it is usually presented as "sympathetic joy at the good fortune or success of others," the most minor of the four abodes, and not much more.

But consider it from this wider dharmic point of view. Consider mudita as a prerequisite of lovingkindness (metta) and of compassion (karuna). Meaning that appreciation of others is one of the chief aspects of mudita.

Because we cannot appreciate another person without seeing the good in them, then how can we expect ourselves to experience joy at an incident of good fortune or success in their lives when we feel nothing for the other person, or even worse, dislike them? Mudita is the answer: it is the source for finding the good in others and learning to recognize and admire the wholesomeness that is always there, even and perhaps most importantly when those others seem to be making our lives difficult.

Unless one has the faith and confidence in mankind that the Buddha had, practicing lovingkindness and compassion is, I suspect, difficult if not impossible without the appreciation that arises from mudita, and from a solid practice of mudita. What the dharma is suggesting is that an appreciation for the goodness of others should flow within each of us, all the time. That’s what underlies a solid practice of mudita.

This would lead us to faith in mankind’s potential for good and to acceptance of our inherent worthwhileness.

What better practice could there be for the holiday season?

Follow the Rules

2010-11-15T00:34:00.000-06:00

“Just follow the rules.” It’s that simple.

So perfect freedom is in—is under some rules. If there are no rules, there is no freedom. As long as you have rules you have freedom. Without being aware of the rules to try to obtain freedom means nothing. –Suzuki Roshi

There is no freedom without the law.
–Ancient Greek teaching Cecile B. DeMille put into the mouth of Moses on Mount Sinai

The first rule of Buddhism is follow the rules. The more profoundly we understand that rule, the less of anything else there is to know. The more stringently we follow that rule, the more clearly we see. The more we realize that rule, the more liberated we become.

There are implicit and explicit rules. Following them reduces our anxiety and clears the path for us. Implicit rules arise from conditions, are specific to the moment and ideally should be followed without thinking. Explicit rules are formally or informally codified. The challenge of explicit rules is that they are speculative rather than experiential, rigid rather than arising from current conditions. Nonetheless, they are rules and our obligation is to follow them.

Implicit rules look like this: When the alarm rings, the rule is to get up. When I take off my jacket, the rule is to hang it in the closet. If I use a credit card, the rule is that I be able to pay the balance when the bill arrives. If we want to rid ourselves of the constant anxiety we feel, we get up when it is time to get up–no snooze alarm and angst over arising, we need to put things away after we have used them–the way we taught our children to do, and we need to be financially responsible–we don’t need to spend more than we have.]

Explicit rules look like this: I don’t kill, steal, lie, abuse others or do drugs. I drive within the speed limit; I don’t fudge on my taxes; and I follow the company policies at work. [I follow the precepts and the laws and the policies and procedures.]

Our obligation as practitioners, an obligation that we see arising from meditation, is to learn ways to live in peace and harmony–with ourselves, our families, our friends, with all sentient beings, the planet and universe. Rules are what allows us to meet that obligation.

Rules restrain our minds, they give us order. They reduce our suffering and allow us to walk the path more stably and effectively. When that happens, our defilements and attachments lessen and we become more content, more confident and more peaceful, especially in the face of difficulties. Following the rules restrains our desires for sense stimulation and sense objects. As that craving and clinging for the things we see, hear, taste, touch, feel and think diminishes, we become calmer and more patient. Without rules, we would live in the constant dukkha of chaos.

Meditation helps us to see the rules clearly, contemplation and study help us to clarify the rules, and observing that we are calmer and happier when we follow the rules gives us faith to continue, especially when we disagree with a rule.

There can be no freedom without rules. Question is, why don’t we just follow the rules?

Journaling

2010-10-28T00:37:00.001-05:00

Taking A Page from Jewish Journaling

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was a tzaddik, a Jewish saint, and thinker of profound importance to the beliefs and practices of his sect and faith. He was the great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the early nineteenth century mystical philosopher who founded the Hasidic tradition. A group of Nachman’s followers, known as the Guardians of Justice, developed a journaling practice to keep them solidly on their spiritual path. Each night, they would write the answers to six questions.

The first question was “Did you say the shema today?” The shema is the affirmation of the Jewish faith and the assertion that there is only one God. In Buddhism it would be like reciting the Three Pure Vows. The second question was “Did you study the Torah today? In Buddhism, this is equivalent to asking if you taken some time to consider the meaning of the Buddha’s words. The third question was “Did you practice tzedakah today?” Tsedakah is dana. The fourth question was “Did you dance today?” For the Hasidim, dancing and singing with one’s fellow practitioners was a celebration of the joy of spiritual practice. In Buddhism it is equivalent to practicing sympathetic joy. The fifth question: “Did you practice sichat chaverim today? That’s right speech. The final question was “Did you practice hitbodedut today?” Hitbodedut is time in solitude: meditation.

Reading about this reminded me emphatically of how all mystical traditions are fundamentally the same. What we commonly think are differences are the result of garb, emphasis and language, not content and realization.

For those who journal or who like to journal, consider establishing a journal that follows this Hasidic model. Each day, write answers to these six key questions. Tracking these will give you a good idea of how solidly you are walking your Path.

1. Have I recited and practiced the Three Pure Vows today?

2. Have I taken time to consider the implications of the words of the Buddha in my life today?

3. Have I practiced dana today?

4. Have I practiced sympathetic joy today?

5. Have I practiced right speech today?

6. Have I meditated today?

(I have added a seventh question that I think strikes at the core Buddhist practice.)

7. What have I done today to end my greed today?

Here’s a quick review of the five doctrinal practices in the questions:

The Pure Vows

These vows list the ideal, the intention and the commitment of a bodhisattva, a person following the path. Buddhists practicing in Mahayana institutions around the world recite these vows every day. They are the guiding principles of a practitioner’s life. These short vows tell us what we need to do in any situation–not to do harm and to be of benefit in the largest way. They are the criteria we look to when we need to make any decision–big or small.

I vow to do no harm.

I vow to do only good.

I vow to save all sentient beings.

Dana

What are we supposed to do to attain freedom from suffering, to reach the emptiness of emptiness, to walk stably on the middle path? Be generous says the Diamond Sutra. Generosity (dana) involves the gift, the giver and the receiver. Ideally, the giver should give simply because there is a need, with no expectation of personal gain, reward, or benefit; and the gift should be given without consideration of the receiver, with complete disregard for the recipient’s character or qualities. Finally, the gift can be material: it can be money or things, or it can be spiritual, meaning the gift of the dharma. Spiritual giving, giving the gift of the teachings, is considered the higher form of giving. Higher even, according to the Diamond Sutra, than giving one’s life for another. The final form of giving is the gift of no-fear, meaning what we say and do and think generates only peace of mind in others and the world.

Sympathetic Joy

Sympathetic joy is unconditional joy for the welfare of others. It is a pure feeling of happiness that arises in us as we see someone else who is happy, who is successful in moving forward with their lives and their chosen path. By rejoicing in others' progress, we are supporting them and at the same time establishing a wholesome mindstate in ourselves that is of benefit to us and to others as well. Sympathetic joy is a helper for us on our Path; from sympathetic joy arises contentment and wisdom.

Right Speech

Only speak when it will improve the silence

Here are the five elements of right speech:

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak

2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit

3. Always speak in ways that can be understood

4. Only say it once

5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit isn’t about winning

While wrong speech could be accurately and broadly described as anything we say that isn’t right speech, however there are four traditional elements to wrong speech we should be vigilant not to practice:

1. Harsh, mean-spirited or angry words

2. Falsehoods and slander

3. Gossip and small talk,

4. Belittling others to raise your own status

Greed

Pursuing what we define as desirable and avoiding what we define as undesirable leaves us in a perpetual state of needing more, forever unsatisfied and unhappy. With every attainment there arises a new affinity or new aversion–more we have to get or get rid of, more greed. Greed is fundamental to how our mind works; it is the model we use for evaluating ourselves and everything else. And it is very hard to see that it is a poison. Or to see that there is an alternative.

Save the Planet–I just don’t get it.

2010-10-15T00:13:00.000-05:00

I never understood what it meant to Save the Planet. When I was in college, Save the Planet was on everyone’s lips. Save the Planet sounds good, and makes good bumper stickers and nice little buttons for backpacks and denim jackets, but fifty years after I first heard the phrase, it still doesn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t get it when I was shouting it at street rallies in the sixties. And I still don’t get it.

What exactly am I supposed to be saving? I thought the point of the dharma was that everything was impermanent. If that’s true, then Save the Planet is an oxymoron. What am I supposed to be making permanent, fixing and fixating on? The whole planet? And isn’t my wanting to fix it back to what it was, freeze it at some point in the past and make it unchanging, isn’t that just greed guised as good? And isn’t greed our nastiest and worst habit?

I live very near the lake in Chicago. It’s only a few minute walk to the edge of twenty percent of the world’s fresh water. Am I really doing anything to save the planet by not running the water when I shave, or by taking 90-second showers? I just don’t get it. I read that there’s a new ocean forming in Ethiopia. Am I supposed to do something to nurture it, or to fill in the rift and stop it?

While I don't get Save the Planet, I do get the Three Pure Vows, which I am committed to live by and which guide my life: Do no harm, Be of benefit, Save all sentient beings. That I get. That I do. And that is all I can do. That’s where my responsibility ends. For me Save the Planet doesn’t make any sense. It’s a greed-laden idea. It comes from speculative-mind. It’s wrong view. The Three Pure Vows, that’s right view.

Every time I hear myself utter the third vow, every time I set my intention to save all sentient beings, I remind myself that “all sentient beings” aren’t just living things. All sentient beings are everyone and everything–both animate and inanimate. All sentient beings are not only living beings, but also the trees and the forests, the rock and the mountains. In the wording of the Diamond Sutra, it’s everyone and everything …whether born from eggs, from the womb, from moisture, or spontaneously; whether they have form or do not have form; whether they have perceptions or do not have perceptions; or whether it cannot be said of them that they have perceptions or that they do not have perceptions.

While Save the Planet doesn’t tell me anything, the Three Pure Vows tell me everything. Those vows are telling me to do no harm to the people and things around me. Because our nature is to do, if I choose to do no harm and then do something, it will be of benefit. Where do I begin that practice? As one Zen teacher told me, “You start by taking care of the things on our doorstep.” The stuff on my doorstep, that I understand. That makes sense. That I can do.

Howso? By showing respect for everything I encounter. For living and sleeping and walking and driving and cleaning and everything else in ways that are respectful of those around me and of the environment. How do I approach that? By trying to do everything with awareness of the weight I am levying on those around me and on the things I am surrounded by; by being humble and modest in front of plants in my garden, my neighbors, friends, and family. When I conserve resources, I am doing no harm and being of benefit.

That’s what I do, that’s all I can do. That makes sense to me: Conserve Resources.

If Greed Worked, We'd All Be Happy By Now

2010-09-30T00:51:00.000-05:00

The list of Hollywood movies in which greed is the central theme is virtually endless…from classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), to the coming soon Return of Gordon Gekko.

In The Simple Men we are told that there are only two things in life “desire and trouble; whenever there’s desire there’s trouble.” The Simple Men is a movie about just how far a simple man will go for four million dollars. Would you kill your brother? Similarly, in Goodfellas, Jimmy Conway is a bank robber who methodically kills off everyone who helped him with a five million dollar heist rather than giving them their share of the stolen money.

In Brian de Palma’s epic crime film, Scarface, we see greed run rampant on the sun-washed streets of Miami. In the Coen brothers Fargo, we see that embezzlement is never enough. In Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s classic about conspicuous consumption, the ruthless Gordon Gekko assures us that "Greed…is good. Greed is right. Greed works."

Superman’s Lex Luther may rank as the greediest of all. After buying up most of the land bordering California, Luther plans to blow California off the map, making his dessert real estate into luxury coastal property. And let’s not forget Ocean’s 11, the casino heist movie which made it to the screen twice–once with the rat pack in 1960 and then again in 2001 with Clooney heading the cast. And Ocean’s 12, and 13, and perhaps even a 14, but I’m becoming greedy.*

None of these movies, much as we watch them, much as we celebrate in them, gets to the heart of the matter–that we are all greedy, that each of us is fundamentally greedy from the get-go, greedy beyond anything Hollywood could imagine. Raising moral questions about greed, which a few of the sited movies do, can make amusing conversation as we leave the cinema, but it too misses the point. Why? Because our greed is so to-the-core that we don’t even realize we are greedy, greedy, greedy.

In the dharma, greed is the first of the three poisons. It is first and foremost the reason we do anything. The way our mind works, we always want more. It is our karma as a species. And what we notice during meditation is that everything we do stems from our greed. We only do things, after all, to get more of what we want, more of what we like, think we should have or should be, or inversely, to get less of the things we don’t want, and so forth.

This is greed, the driving passion of our lives. It is fundamental to how our mind works. It is the model we use for evaluating ourselves; it is the model we use for making decisions. In the movies, it is easy to se how greed poisons everything, not so in real life. In the movies it is easy to see that there are alternatives. Not so in real life.

For me in my practice, the questions isn’t “What would I do for four million dollars?” but rather “What will I do today to end my greed?”

Here’s a simple exercise for practicing with greed: Whenever you are in conflict, whenever you need to make a choice, tell yourself emphatically: It is not about me getting what I want.

*It should be noted that I was looking at movies chiefly characterized by material greed, but in fact, all movies, like literature, are based on conflict, and all conflict arises from greed.

Perfecting Patience is Our Path

2010-08-30T00:01:00.003-05:00

Anger–The Problem

To end anger, one of the three poisons, and perfect patience, the third of the six paramitas, we must first recognize that anger is always destructive for us, for those around us, and for the world, and that its antidote is the diligent practice of patience.

Anger and Meditation

What we learn from meditating, from sitting still and seeing our minds, is that all anger is a defilement–an emotion that hinders us from seeing clearly and making appropriate decisions. Anger is, without a doubt to a meditator, the one of the strongest and most destructive emotions. We also learn from simple observation that defiled behavior can only lead to more defiled behavior; being angry cannot make us peaceful, acting angrily does cannot make this a better world.

For Buddhists or anyone who practices mindfulness meditation, anger is anger, anger is always a defilement, an afflicted emotion, and there is no such thing as righteous anger. And, “anger management” is an oxymoron. It is not about “managing” our anger, meaning making better use of our anger, it is about eliminating anger.

Anger is one of the most common and destructive defilements, it afflicts our minds almost all the time, whether it is in its least weighty forms, as uneasiness or irritability, or in its full-blown forms, as rage/fury and combat.

Ending Anger

To reduce and ultimately eliminate anger, we need to understand it and to develop wisdom, patience, and discipline

· We need to recognize anger and how and when it arises in our mind.

· We need to understand that for anger to arise, we must concoct a story about some perceived injustice;

· We must acknowledge how anger is always harmful, never beneficial, to both us and others and the world.

· We need to see that patience is the antidote for anger, and

· We need to understand the benefits of being patient in the face of difficulties.

· We then need to apply practical methods in our daily life to reduce our anger and even to prevent it from arising at all.

This is called leading a disciplined life.

Patience–The Alternative

Patience, the practice of patient acceptance, is the antidote for faulty frustrated desires (greed, the I-wants and shoulda-hads) and unwanted occurrences (negative greed: the I-shouldn’ta gottens, shouldn’t bes). We need to make the perfection of patience an omnipresent practice; not just a fallback position to use in desperation when screaming fails to accomplish our goal.

Patience is a mind that is able to accept fully whatever occurs. It is much more than just gritting our teeth and putting up with things, that’s the tolerance/intolerance thing. Being patient means to welcome wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are.

It is always possible to be patient; there is no situation so bad that it cannot be accepted patiently, with an open, accommodating, and peaceful heart.

We start training ourselves to be patient meditation, then we take it off the cushion and practice patience by learning to accept the small everyday difficulties and hardships that arise without complaint. Gradually our patient mindstate increases and we remain peaceful in the face of our imagined adversities.

· If we practice the patience of voluntarily accepting suffering (which is all imagined and unreal), we can maintain a peaceful mind even when experiencing difficulties.

· If we maintain this peaceful and positive state of mind through mindfulness, angry minds will have no opportunity to arise. (You’re always breathing, so you can always return to your breath, even when someone is screaming at you). On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to dwell in aversive thoughts there will be no way for us to prevent anger from arising.

· By training our mind to look at frustrating situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from anger and a lot of other unnecessary mental suffering: If there is a way to remedy an unpleasant situation, what point is there in being angry? On the other hand, if it is completely impossible to remedy the situation there is also no reason to get upset either. This line of reasoning is very useful, for we can apply it when we feel ourselves just becoming angry and thereby move to patience.

Being patient doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something to improve the situation. If it is possible to remedy the situation, then of course we should; but to do this we do not need to become angry. Simple awareness will do. For example, when we have a headache take a pain reliever, but until the tablet takes effect just accept whatever discomfort there is with a calm and patient mind.

As long as we are alive, we cannot avoid unpleasant, difficult situations and a certain amount of physical discomfort, but by training our mind to look at frustrating, anger-producing situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Instead of reacting blindly through the force of emotional habit (anger), we should examine the situation. We should not become angry just because things do not go our way. We must break that old habit of ours if we are to progress past anger and move meaningfully forward in our quest for peace and happiness.

In reality all of our problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things as they are–in which case it is patient acceptance, rather than attempting to change externals, that is the solution.

Lessening and managing the anger is not the point on which we practice. The point is to patiently accept things are they are and to let go of all our fabrications about how they oughta be/shoulda be.

Problems do not exist outside our mind, so when we stop seeing other people and things as problems they stop being problems. No anger.

Pluralism Misses The Point

2010-08-15T00:10:00.002-05:00

Ideally speaking, religious pluralism would be a sense of intereligious harmony based on mutual understanding of other faiths. The problem with pluralism, however, is that it assumes we’re all on different spiritual paths. As long that is the basic assumption, there can never be harmony. As long as we see our path as different from theirs, we are saying that our path is right. And saying that our path is right makes theirs wrong. Because we process information dualistically, for ours to be right, theirs must be wrong.

If we can’t be right without them being wrong, religions pluralism is an oxymoron, like tolerance (which is really intolerance its nice-guy cloths).

I’m not suggesting that we hire Richard the Lion-Hearted to capture Jerusalem, again, or that we invade Constantinople. But it does seem to me that pluralism is the mildest form of distaste we can have for other religions–in order of intensity next would be tolerance; then intolerance; then amping up to the next level: hostility, and demonizing, and finally, yes, time to get King Richard back. Damn the infidels.

Pluralism is such a pc term right now that we miss the point when we use it. We miss the point because pluralism misses the point. We are already in harmony, because we are really the same.

The point, then, is not to see other religions as separate and different from ours, but rather to notice and understand that there is only one path and we are all on it together. When we realize this, the aversion is gone. And that’s the point. Not to have an aversion for beliefs that appear different from ours.

Here’s how I understand that there is only one path and that we are all walking it together.

My practice, both on and off the cushion, tells me that everything I do, and in fact everything that everyone does, is simply an attempt to end or prevent my suffering. Why do I scratch an itch? To end my suffering. Why do I always look down when I am walking on stairs? To prevent my suffering (I fear if I don’t look down that I will fall.). Why do I always clasp by hands together with the left fingers over the right. To prevent my suffering (reversing my clasp would make me uncomfortable). Taking this to its extreme: Why do people abuse children? To end their suffering. Perverse as it is, child abuse is an attempt to relieve the abuser’s suffering. And genocides, as horrific as they are, are an attempt to end the perpetrator’s suffering. Our choices aren’t always wise, but they are always for the same reason.

Since everything I do is to prevent or end my suffering, and everything everyone else does is to prevent or end their suffering as well, then compassion is my factory setting, my default position. Which explains that fundamentally, at our core, we are all compassionate beings.

I believe all religions answer four questions in an attempt to end our suffering: Where did I come from? How did I get here? What should I do while I am here? And, where am I going next? What differentiates one religion from another is simply which of these questions it emphasizes? Christianity, for example, arising from a Messianic tradition, largely addresses the Where-am-I-going-next question. Buddhism, on the other had, is almost exclusively concerned with the What-should-I-do-while-I’m-here question.

So what separates one religion from another is not differences, but simply emphasis. What differences do appear are in the languages and cultures and customs and costumes, which are purely cosmetic.

Why any one person is attracted to one religion and not another is simply the result of their karma. Our individual histories lead us to seek the benefit of one practice now, perhaps another later. So in fact, having a variety of different practices available to choose from makes it easier for us to walk the path together.

So we are all on the same path, the path to end our suffering. And we all share the same original nature, compassion. When I teach in a church or a mosque, I don't’ see it as different and needing to be reconciled, I see it as just another expression of our path.

I watched my Teacher, Master Ji Ru, enter the sanctuary in a Protestant church. He stopped at the doorway, gently stepped in and bowed to the altar. Just as he does every time he enters the meditation hall in our Monastery. And that’s the point. Not pluralism.

Shifting to Right Paradigms

2010-07-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

It’s Time for a Paradigm Shift

We make decisions based on certain underlying assumptions we have about ourselves and our world. These notions, which are called paradigms, guide and in fact determine our every action. These are our paradigms, our habitual responses to the world. They are “the box” in the phrase “thinking outside of the box.”

We don’t start thinking outside of the box until we realize that the box isn’t working. When things don’t feel right, when they just don’t seem to make sense, when we can’t find the answer we’re looking for, we might search outside another box, search for another paradigm that works better. When we make a change in our modus operandi, it’s called a paradigm shift.

It is important to realize that we don’t make changes until something significantly wrong seems to demand it, and even then, we are often slow to make paradigm shifts, even when our paradigm is debilitating. We tend to keep fighting to make the current paradigm work. Perhaps in the case of minor paradigms because we are stubborn or strong-willed.

In the case of major paradigms, like the five listed below, our attachment to the paradigm is often so deeply rooted that it is built into our biology, our genes. Our instinct for survival, for example, is such a strong attachment that we don’t even sense that it can be changed, even though it obviously hinders us when we are attempting to save our lives. When our fight-flight paradigm is activated, we become tense and anxious. An anxious and stressed mind hinders us from seeing clearly and making the best choice under prevailing conditions.

Regardless of their magnitude, paradigms are all habits, and what we learn in meditation is that all habits can be changed.

Here are five of our major paradigms, all of which meditation suggests need to be shifted:

If I get more of what I want and what I think I need or ought to have, then everything will be alright.

This is the biggest and baddest of all the paradigms, for it leaves us always wanting and never satisfied. It says that we should base our lives on greed. It tells us to always be striving, never to be content.

I am not responsible for my state of mind.

This paradigm blames others for how we feel. This allows us to blame the people and stuff around us for our states of mind, absolving us of responsibility for our anger and other unwholesome responses. It is, after all, the neighbor that makes us angry; the “lousy” weather that ruined our vacation.

I am always right.

Regardless of what we do or think, we know that we are always right. Which makes anyone who disagrees wrong. Consider that even when you did something you thought was wrong, you believe that “under the circumstances” it was the right thing to do.

The best way to live is to find fault in everything.

This is hard for us to recognize, but we are always looking to make things better, to find the fault in what is happening and correct it. Tis paradigm makes us perpetual fault-finders, never able to comfortable in our own skin.

I can multitask.

One of the early observations from meditation is that we can only have a single thought at a time. We can’t think two things simultaneously. Which means that when we are multitasking, we are actually jumping back and forth between tasks. That raises our anxiety level and prevents us from performing any of the tasks optimally. This paradigm tells us it’s ok to listen to music and drink coffee and drive at the same time. And that’s not a good thing.

Until we understand our false and faulty paradigms, and that they are a source of stress and anxiety rather than of peace, we won’t search for new paradigms. And until we not only search for new paradigms but actually make a paradigm shift, we will remain unable to address our most serious suffering, our Big Dukkha.

Right Paradigms

Here are two right paradigm shifts suggested by meditation:

Our responsibility to ourselves, our families, our friends, and the world, is to use each moment to be of benefit to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our world.

Whether we are having lunch or deciding on a chemo-therapy treatment for cancer, the paradigm is the same: do what is least harmful and most benefit to oneself, others and the world. This is a giant paradigm shift. And perhaps the most important realization that comes from meditation. Because when we do what is most beneficial, we become peaceful and confident.

Our responsibility to ourselves, our families, our friends, and the world, is to use each moment to lessen our dependence on paradigms that create suffering and to act in ways that lead to longterm peace, happiness and well-being.

This means to walk the path. Regardless of your spiritual tradition, walking the path is being morally disciplined and doing what is needed to develop and act from wisdom.

For Buddhists, this means taking the road not taken, which is the Middle Path.

Mindful Eating

2010-07-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

Recently, I have seen advertisements for a variety of classes in mindful eating. Some with yoga. Some meditation. Some on their own. But when I look closely at the descriptions I notice that rather than mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense of being wholeheartedly present in the moment with whatever is happening then letting go and moving to the next moment, these classes are actually teaching sensory desire and attachment. It is a common mistake.

People often mistakenly think that because our experiences are impermanent and fleeting we should focus our attention on enjoying each experience “to the fullest.” That makes us more attached and more desirous, not less. That’s makes us more greedy, not less.

Like brushing our teeth mindfully, showering mindfully, urinating mindfully, eating mindfully is a meditative practice we should all do with the intention of mastering it. The liberated mind, after all, is the mindful mind.

Mindful Eating, Just Do It

If you really want to do an exercise in mindful eating, this is what I suggest:

Pick a restaurant that you like. Make a reservation there as early as possible for dinner, just when the restaurant opens and when there are the fewest patrons in the restaurant–maybe a Monday night at 6:00 PM. The quieter the restaurant, the fewer distractions to pull you away from your mindfulness. Make the reservation for one. This is an “eat alone” meal.

Arrive a few minutes early. If you are asked where you would like to be seated, say, “Anywhere is alright.” When the server arrives and asks if you want a drink, ask for a glass of water without ice. When it’s time to order dinner, ask the server to pick an appetizer and an entrée for you. Mention that you know the restaurant and just want to be surprised. Do mention if you have any allergies.

Mindful eating is about being present with the eating, not about picking and choosing. So far in this exercise, you really haven’t picked or chosen much, other than the restaurant.

While you wait for the food, just sit there, still and calm, hands in your lap and mind on your breath. Don’t look around to visual stimulation. Don’t concern yourself with what others in the restaurant might be doing or what food might be coming for you.

When the food arrives, nod thankfully. Eat slowly. Put your knife and fork down between bites. Fully address your attention to the experience of eating–to what it feels like to press the fork into the food, what it feels like to lift the food to your mouth, how the food feels and tastes in your mouth as you eat it and swallow it. Then let it go and take the next bite. Immediately let go of any judgements about the food. The point here is to experience the moment, the eating, not to savor or attach to it. Let each moment go so you can greet the next. Mindful eating is about being present with the eating, not about judging, not about liking and disliking. It should be no different from mindfully urinating.

When you have finished the entrée, order a dessert if you want. Do it with a minimum of words or mental commentary.

When you leave, just leave, mindfully. Be mindful of each movement and step. Then let go of this entire experience. Get into your car and drive home. Drive mindfully. No music, no radio, no cell phone, no thinking about the meal. Just drive when you are driving.

When you walk into the house, walk into your house. Don’t think about your driving experience, and don’t think about your dinner. Just do what is next.

That’s mindfulness. That the source of peace and well-being.

Five Ways To Abandon Negative Mindstates

2010-06-29T21:32:00.002-05:00

Another View of Right Effort

Right Effort, number six on the noble eightfold path, is generally described in terms of the four right efforts: abandon and refrain from the unwholesome, develop and maintain the wholesome. This is the classic formula in Buddhism for letting go of negative mindstates and replacing them with wholesome mindstates. But there is another way understanding of Right View.

In this less well known understanding, five techniques are offering for ridding ourselves of our defilements:

1. For every defilement there is an antidote (patience for anger; sympathetic joy for jealousy, etc). The first of these right efforts is to replace the defilement with a wholesome thought that is its exact opposite.

While our list of defilements is long, the list of antidotes is quite short:

Generosity

Compassion

Lovingkindness

Patience

Humility & Modesty

Moral discipline

Sympathetic joy

Equanimity

Right Speech

Trustworthiness

Dependability

2. The second of the five right efforts is to activate these positive mindstates: shame & embarrassment, regret & distaste. Ordinarily in the West these are considered negative mindstates, but in Buddhism these are positive mental qualities that we can used to abandon an unwanted thought or action.

Here’s how: Reflect quietly and gently on an unwholesome action, seeing it as a little embarrassing or somewhat shameful. Then consider its undesirable consequences until a distaste for it sets in. Finally, as regret arises in us we use that regret to calmly push the thought away, shelving it until and similar situation arises again. Next time, though, when we look at what happened last time we were in this type of situation, the regret leads us to change strategies. No guilt, no wallowing, no ruminating.

3. In this third method, we confront the defilement directly, scrutinize and investigate its source and the source of each of its components. When this is done, the defilement quiets down and disappears on its own. This contemplative destructuring, which requires patience to learn, is a very powerful tools for evaporating everything from physical pain to depression. Email if you would like more information about this technqiue.

These first three are very effective ways to reset our behavior, to help establish new and lasting habitual patterns, leading to ever-increasing wholesomeness in our thoughts and actions.

Using these five techniques skillfully, we slowly take back control of our mind. The wholesome thoughts and mindstates we want become the thoughts and mindstates we have. And when an unwholesome thought does arise, we have the tools to eradicate it.

Being Mindful, Always

2010-06-15T00:41:00.001-05:00

Ten Simple Mindfulness Exercises

There’s a limit to how successful we can be with our practice if mindfulness only occurs on the cushion once a day or once a week.

If we go for piano lessons once a week but never practice, it will take a long time to become proficient at the keyboard. Similarly with practices aimed at ending our dukkha, like mindfulness.

If you think of mindfulness as Right Habit, then obviously we need to practice more than just 2% of the time if we want mindfulness––if we want being peaceful––to become a habit and our way of life. That’s why we have to take our practice off the cushion, into our daily lives. We need to reinforce and support our formal practice of meditation with all sorts of Right Actions aimed at making us quieter and more peaceful.

Here are some exercises we can do to keep us aware of our less than equanimous mind-states and remind us to keep in a state of mindfulness:

1. Cover up caller ID [We answer the phone because someone is calling, when answering the phone is appropriate, not because of a story about the person on the other end. No more running dripping wet from the shower across 3 rooms to grab the cell phone, only to look at caller ID and to decide it’s someone we don’t want to talk to!]

2. Do only one big thing at a time. [Be present with the chores. Brush your teeth when you brush your teeth; drive the car––yes, no radio––when you drive the car; eat when you eat.]

3. Never speak about anyone who isn’t in the room. [Gossip and small talks are always harmful; they never occur in the present.]

4. Stop thinking about outcomes. [Abide in present conditions, doing the best you can in each moment, and don’t worry about outcomes; outcomes will soon enough be the present moment, and then we will deal with them.]

5. No more fabricating stories about what’s happening. [Stories are the deluded ideas and concepts, labels, views, and unproductive habits that guide our lives and keep us from being in the present.]

6. Assume that other person is always right; let go of your opinions and experience what is being said, what is happening. [Our opinions are just stories behind which we hide from the present.]

7. Have no expectations. [Be in the present with whatever arises; no expectations.]

8. Forget the idea that things should be fair or just. [More stories: just be in the present moment and feel the peace and joy of being here. instead of judging and wanting.]

9. Stop saying these four words: "I" "me" "my" "mine" for one full day. This is very hard. [This shows how peaceful things become when you lessen your attachment to your idea of your Self.]

10. Wear a mala. Let it be a constant reminder to be mindful. Whenever reasonable, roll the beads between your fingers to match your breath mindfully.

Mindfulness is the cornerstone of our practice. The more we embrace mindfulness as an everyday, every moment practice, the more we will progress in our spiritual goal to peace and tranquility.

Acting Appropriately

2010-05-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

How Should We Behave?

While many Buddhists are hesitant, some even loathe, to tell others how they should behave, or even to setup standards for themselves, Buddhism does give us some very strong guidelines. These are ways of behaving that skillfully use whatever is happening in our lives, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, to facilitate the ending of our dukkha.

These suggested ways of behaving are activities that weaken our bonds of attachment and that produce the clarity of mind needed for progress along the path. They are The Path, which in essence is just a list of skills worth mastering. They're our basic set of tools, so we will want to keep them handy and in good shape.

These guidelines aren’t speculative (which would be wrong view). Nor are they absolutes (again, wrong view). They are simply ways of behaving that minimize our dukkha and lead us to a life of peace and happiness.

The Six Paramitas (Generosity, Morality, Patience, Diligent Effort, Meditation and Wisdom), the Five Precepts (No Killing, No Stealing, No Sexual Misconduct, No Lying, No Intoxicants), and the eight aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration) are obvious examples of Buddhist behavioral guidelines.

But here is another skillful means way of looking at the criteria for daily decision-making:

Act Appropriately

These can be used to guide our every decision:

1. Do no harm, then if possible

2. Be of benefit

3. If you can’t be of benefit, do nothing

4. Be morally disciplined and follow the rules

5. Meditate

6. Be wisdom-oriented

Always Use Right Speech

Only speak when it will improve the silence.

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak

2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit

3. Always speak in ways that can be heard

4. Only say it once

5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit isn’t about winning

Avoid Wrong speech:

Harsh, mean-spirited or angry words

Falsehoods

Gossip and small talk

Belittling others to raise your own status

As Much As Possible, Maintain One of these Mind-States

Whenever a negative mind-state arises, use Right Effort to replace it with one of these positive mind-states:

Generosity

Compassion and Lovingkindness

Patience

Humility and Modesty

Moral Restraint

Equanimity

Right Speech

Trustworthiness

Dependability

Regret (When we act appropriately but the outcome is not beneficial, then we use regret, very gently, to remind us to try another tactic next time.)

Distaste (Develop a gentle aversion to all that is unwholesome in body, speech and mind.)

Overcoming Ignorance

2010-05-21T08:36:00.002-05:00

Ignorance, the Buddha said, is the ultimate cause of stress and suffering. By “ignorance” he meant not a general ignorance of the way things are—what we usually call delusion, or moha—but something more specific: ignorance of the four noble truths. And the Pali word he chose for ignorance—avijja—is the opposite of vijja, which means not only “knowledge” but also “skill,” as in the skills of a doctor or animal-trainer. So in stating that people suffer from not knowing the four noble truths, he wasn’t just saying that they lack information or direct knowledge of those truths. He was also saying that they lack skill in handling them. They suffer because they don’t know what they’re doing. The four truths are (1) stress—which covers everything from the slightest tension to out-and-out agony; (2) the cause of stress; (3) the cessation of stress; and (4) the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress. When the Buddha first taught these truths, he also taught that his full Awakening came from knowing them on three levels: identifying them, knowing the skill appropriate to each, and knowing finally that he had fully mastered the skills.

The Buddha identified these truths in precise, fairly technical terms. When identifying stress he started with examples like birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow, distress, and despair. Then he summarized all varieties of stress under five categories, which he called five clinging-aggregates: clinging to physical form; to feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; to perceptions or mental labels; to thought-constructs; and to sensory consciousness. The cause of stress he identified as three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality, craving to take on an identity in a world of experience, and craving for one’s identity and world of experience to be destroyed. The cessation of stress he identified as renunciation of and release from those three kinds of craving. And the path to the cessation of stress he identified as right concentration together with its supporting factors in the noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness.

These four truths are not simply facts about stress. They are categories for framing your experience so that you can diagnose and cure the problem of stress. Instead of looking at experience in terms of self or other, for instance, or in terms of what you like and dislike, you look at it in terms of where there’s stress, what’s causing it, and how to put an end to the cause. Once you can divide the territory of experience in this way, you realize that each of these categories is an activity. The word “stress” may be a noun, but the experience of stress is shaped by your intentions. It’s something you do. The same holds true with the other truths, too. Seeing this, you can work on perfecting the skill appropriate for each activity. The skill with regard to stress is to comprehend it to the point where you have no more passion, aversion, or delusion toward doing it. To perfect this skill, you also have to abandon the cause of stress, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path to its cessation.

Each of these skills assists the others. For example, when states of concentration arise in the mind, you don’t just watch them arise and pass away. Concentration is part of the path, so the appropriate skill is to try to develop it: to understand what will make it grow steadier, subtler, more solid. In doing this, you develop the other factors of the path as well, until the doing of your concentration is more like simply being: being a luminous awareness, being present, being nothing, being one with emptiness.

From that perspective, you begin to comprehend levels of stress you never noticed before. As you abandon the cravings causing the grosser levels, you become sensitive to subtler ones, so you can abandon them, too. In doing this, your ignorance gets peeled away, layer by layer. You see more and more clearly why you’ve suffered from stress: You didn’t grasp the connection between the cravings you enjoyed and the stress that burdened you, and didn’t detect the stress in the activities you enjoyed. Ultimately, when you’ve abandoned the causes for other forms of stress, you begin to see that the being of your concentration contains many subtler layers of doing as well—more layers of stress. That’s when you can abandon any craving for these activities, and full Awakening occurs.

The path to this Awakening is necessarily gradual, both because the sensitivity it requires takes time to develop, and because it involves developing skills that you abandon only when they’ve done their job. If you abandoned craving for concentration before developing it, you’d never get the mind into a position where it could genuinely and fully let go of the subtlest forms of doing. But as your skills converge, the Awakening they foster is sudden. The Buddha’s image is of the continental shelf off the coast of India: a gradual slope, followed by a sudden drop-off. After the drop-off, no trace of mental stress remains. That’s when you know you’ve mastered your skills. And that’s when you really know the four noble truths.

Craving, for instance, is something you experience every day, but until you totally abandon it, you don’t really know it. You can experience stress for years on end, but you don’t really know stress until you’ve comprehended it to the point where passion, aversion, and delusion are gone. And even though all four skills, as you’re developing them, bring a greater sense of awareness and ease, you don’t really know why they’re so important until you’ve tasted where their full mastery can lead.

For even full knowledge of the four noble truths is not an end in and of itself. It’s a means to something much greater: Nirvana is found at the end of stress, but it’s much more than that. It’s total liberation from all constraints of time or place, existence or non-existence—beyond all activity, even the activity of the cessation of stress. As the Buddha once said, the knowledge he gained in Awakening was like all the leaves in the forest; the knowledge he imparted about the four noble truths was like a handful of leaves. He restricted himself to teaching the handful because that’s all he needed to lead his students to their own knowledge of the whole forest. If he were to discuss other aspects of his Awakening, it would have served no purpose and actually gotten in the way.

So even though full knowledge of the four noble truths—to use another analogy—is just the raft across the river, you need to focus full attention on the raft while you’re making your way across. Not only does this knowledge get you to full Awakening, but it also helps you judge any realizations along the way. It does this in two ways. First, it provides a standard for judging those realizations: Is there any stress remaining in the mind? At all? If there is, then they’re not genuine Awakening. Second, the skills you’ve developed have sensitized you to all the doings in “simply being,” which ensures that the subtlest levels of ignorance and stress won’t escape your gaze. Without this sensitivity, you could easily mistake an infinitely luminous state of concentration for something more. The luminosity would blind you. But when you really know what you’re doing, you’ll recognize freedom from doing when you finally encounter it. And when you know that freedom, you’ll know something further: that the greatest gift you can give to others is to teach them the skills to encounter it for themselves.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu

To Be or Not To Be

2010-05-11T03:41:00.000-05:00

E Prime - The Ultimate Right Speech

According to Robert Anton Wilson, "In 1933, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the ‘is of identity’ from the English language.The ‘is of identity’ takes the form X is a Y, or ‘Joe is a Communist,’ ‘Mary is a dumb file-clerk.’ In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words ‘is’ or ‘to be’ and this new English without ‘is-ness’ he called English Prime, or E-Prime.

The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that ‘is-ness’ sets the brain into a medieval Aristotelian framework (which posits a permanence to our world view by suggesting that an event is naturally characterized by giving its position in space together with the time of its occurrence) and makes it impossible to understand modern problems and opportunities. Removing ‘is-ness’ and writing and thinking only and always in operational/existential language sets us, conversely, in a modern universe where we can successfully deal with modern issues."

From a Buddhist perpective, E Prime weakens and lessens our concept of the Self. It loosens our idea of Self at the third and fifth skandhas. At the third skandha, perception, it lessens our ability to attach a label to people and things, falsely making them appear as permenent, solid and substantive. At the fifth skandha, consciousness, where we normally appropriate and identify with our perceptions (I’m the kind of person who does this when he sees that”, E Prime shatters our clinging by stopping us from so easily identifying with our sense contacts.

For instance:

Standard English: The photon is a wave.

E-Prime: The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments.

Standard English: The photon is a particle.

E-Prime: The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

The description of a photon as either a wave or a particle is both inaccurate (a photon is both, depending) and polarizing (probably fighting words at the local quantum bar). We could make up a word like "wavicle" - but why? E-Prime seems an efficient and effective way to express all sorts of uncertainties, paradoxes, ambiguities, ambivalences and mysteries. In other words, E-Prime encompasses all the richness that the "is of identity" is too narrow to contain. For Buddhist, this makes E Prime ideal for expressing phenomena in a conditioned world.

E-Prime is not an easy language to learn. To say "You are wrong" in E-Prime, you would have to say, "Based on what I understood of the circumstances in the moment, I don’t understand your reason for doing what you did." To say "I am right," you would have to say "I behaved in accordance with my understanding of the situation."

Getting unstuck from the "is of identity" would make life both at the quantum bar and at home more peaceful. Give it a try.

If you don’t feel ready for a day of E Prime, try this simple linguistic exercise to loosen your clinging to Self: spend a day without using the pronouns "I, me, my or mine."

Cure Your Anger

2010-04-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

Patience is The Antidote

This is the third and final blog in the series on Anger

It is always possible to be patient; there is no situation so bad that it cannot be accepted patiently, with an open, accommodating, and peaceful heart.

We start training ourselves to be patient on the cushion when we teach ourselves how to be patient with our thoughts and feelings as they arise. Then we take it off the cushion and practice patience by learning to accept the small everyday difficulties and hardships that arise. Gradually our patient mindstate increases and we remain peaceful in the face of our imagined adversities. There are many examples of people who have managed to practice patience even in the most extreme circumstances––Empty Cloud, for example, when he was being tortured. or those in the final stages of cancer, who, although their bodies are ravaged, maintain peaceful minds.

· If we practice the patience of voluntarily accepting suffering (which is all imagined and unreal), we can maintain a peaceful mind even when experiencing suffering and pain.

· If we maintain this peaceful and positive state of mind through the force of mindfulness, angry minds will have no opportunity to arise. (You’re always breathing, so you can always return to your breath, even when someone is screaming at you). On the other hand, if we allow ourselves to dwell in aversive thoughts there will be no way for us to prevent anger from arising.

Being patient doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t do something to improve the situation. If it is possible to remedy the situation, then of course we should; but to do this we do not need to become angry. Simple awareness will do. For example, when we have a headache take a pain reliever, but until the tablet takes effect just accept whatever discomfort there is with a calm and patient mind.

As long as we are in samsara we cannot avoid unpleasant, difficult situations and a certain amount of physical discomfort, but by training our mind to look at frustrating, anger-producing situations in a more realistic manner, we can free ourselves from a lot of unnecessary suffering.

In reality most of our problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things as they are – in which case it is patient acceptance, rather than attempting to change externals, that is the solution.

Lessening and managing the anger is not the point on which we practice. The point is to patiently accept things are they are and to let go of all our fabrications about how they oughta be/shoulda be.

Problems do not exist outside our mind, so when we stop seeing other people and things as problems they stop being problems. No anger.

The Three Patiences

There are three kinds of situation in which we need to learn to be patient:

· When we are experiencing suffering, hardship, or disappointment

· When we are practicing Dharma

· When we are harmed or criticized by others

Correspondingly, there are three types of patience:

· The patience to deal with our perceived suffering in each moment – we do this when we realize that we are the source (it’s our past actions) of all our suffering and that if we are patient with the suffering it will cease

· The patience not to retaliate – we learn not to retaliate when we combine patience with compassion (and further when we realize we are the real source of the suffering, so why retaliate against someone or something else

· The patience required to practice the Dharma – this is using our understanding of emptiness and dependent arising to lessen attachment and increase patience, which may be the only way we have of eradicating our delusions and suffering

These three types of patience can liberate our mind from anger, one of our strongest and most obsessive delusions.

Right Speech Helps Allay Anger

The main root of harsh speech is aversion, assuming the form of anger. Harsh speech is speech uttered in anger, intended to cause the hearer pain. Such speech can assume different forms, of which we might mention three. One is abusive speech: scolding, reviling, or reproving another angrily with bitter words. A second is insult: hurting another by ascribing to him some offensive quality that detracts from his dignity. A third is sarcasm: speaking to someone in a way that ostensibly lauds him, but with such a tone or twist of phrasing that the ironic intent becomes clear and causes pain.

Harsh speech is an unwholesome action with disagreeable results for oneself and others, both now and in the future, so it has to be restrained. The ideal antidote is patience — learning to tolerate blame and criticism from others, to sympathize with their shortcomings, to respect differences in viewpoint, to endure abuse without feeling compelled to retaliate. The Buddha calls for patience even under the most trying conditions:

Even if, monks, robbers and murderers saw through your limbs and joints, whosoever should give way to anger thereat would not be following my advice. For thus ought you to train yourselves: "Undisturbed shall our mind remain, with heart full of love, and free from any hidden malice; and that person shall we penetrate with loving thoughts, wide, deep, boundless, freed from anger and hatred."

But while the main practice for eliminating anger is patience, holding wisdom in mind and speaking calmly and with lovingkindness and compassion in your heart can play a big part in holding you stable and in allaying anger.

Anger In Personal and Business Relationships

Anger is particularly destructive in relationships. When we live in close personal or business contact with someone, it is easy for us to become critical and short-tempered with our partner and to blame them for our faulty sense of discomfort. Unless we make a continuous effort to deal with this anger as it arises, our relationships will suffer. In relationships where there is continuous fighting, the anger eventually trumps the love––being stronger and more karmically active. Eventually there will come a point when before they have recovered from one row the next has already begun.

To prevent the build-up of bad feelings we need to deal with anger as soon as it begins to arise in our mind.

We clean our houses, so why not our minds? We clear away the dishes after every meal rather than waiting until the end of the month, because we do not want to live in a dirty house nor be faced with a huge, unpleasant job. In the same way, we need to make the effort to clear away the mess in our mind as soon as it appears, for if we allow it to accumulate it will become more and more difficult to deal with, and will endanger our lives and our relationship.

We should remember that every opportunity to develop anger is also an opportunity to develop patience. It is opportunity to erode away our self-cherishing and self-grasping, which are the real sources of all our problems. We do this by practicing with patience.

It is through our anger and hatred that we transform people into enemies. We generally assume that anger arises when we encounter a disagreeable person, but actually it is the anger already within us that transforms the person we meet into our imagined foe. Someone controlled by their anger lives within a paranoid view of the world, surrounded by enemies of his or her own creation. This false belief feeds the anger and makes us the victim of our own delusions and fantasies.

Stop Feeding Anger - 2nd in this 3-part series on anger

2010-03-31T10:01:00.092-05:00

Anger and How It Arises

Stop Feeding Anger

We feed anger every time we act angrily
We feed anger by watching violence on TV
We feed anger by reading newspapers and magazines
We feed anger by watching violent movies
We feed anger by playing violent games
We feed anger by participating in violent sports
We feed anger by watching, reading, and listening to news stories
We feed anger every time we let anger arise and bloom in us
We feed anger by telling ourselves that there is good, healthy anger
We feed anger when we justify our anger
We feed anger when we encourage others to be angry
We feed anger every time we speak angrily or harshly or abusively
We feed anger every time we are bullying, retaliatory, or vengeful.
We feed anger every time we threaten someone.

Anger is an aversive, negative mind-state that

· Focuses on someone (or something),

· Feels (second skandha) them to be unattractive or undesirable,

· Exaggerates their bad qualities and

· Wishes to harm them.

Anger arises at the level of the second skandha when there is a feeling of aversion, which is always! Realizing this may help to understand that anger is therefore never an appropriate response to anything!

Anger arises when we concoct a story about someone or something we don’t want or like, then develop an aversion to it, which in fact really doesn’t exist. Because anger is a fantasy, an exaggeration, anger is always unrealistic and intrinsically faulty. The person or thing that it focuses on does not in fact exist. So we develop anger from a fiction we create about someone or something that doesn't exist.

Anger, viewed this way, never serves any useful purpose whatsoever.

Understanding this, we then need to watch our mind carefully in order to recognize anger whenever it begins to grip us. The moment we feel the grip start, we need to practice discipline, awareness, and mindfulness. In other words, we need bring ourselves back close to the Path.

We do this by letting go (of the anger) and by resetting our intention to compassion and patience., This our attention and leads us to compassionate responses and actions that plant wholesome seeds in our garden and those allow us to make better choices in the future.

Understanding Anger

There is nothing more destructive than anger:

· It destroys our peace and happiness now, and

· Impels us to engage in negative actions that lead to untold suffering in the future.

· It blocks our spiritual progress and prevents us from accomplishing our spiritual goals.

Anger is by nature a painful state of mind. Whenever we develop anger,

· our inner peace immediately disappears and even

· our body becomes tense and uncomfortable.

· We are so restless that we find it nearly impossible to fall asleep, and whatever sleep we do manage to get is fitful and unrefreshing.

Metaphorically speaking, anger transforms even a normally attractive person into an ugly red-faced demon, a hell-being. We grow more and more miserable, and, no matter how hard we try, we cannot control our emotions.

One of the most harmful effects of anger is that it robs us of our reason and common sense:

“When reason ends, anger arises.” ––HHDL

Anger always carries with it a wish to retaliate against that or those whom we think have harmed us. Often we are willing to expose ourselves to great personal danger merely to exact petty revenge. To get our own back for perceived injustices or slights, we are prepared to jeopardize our job, our relationships, and even the well-being of our family and children.

When we are really angry we lose our freedom of choice, we are driven not by reason but anger and rage, anger violent sister. Sometimes this rage is even directed at our friends and family. Forgetting the immeasurable kindnesses we have received from our them, we often strike out against the ones we hold most dear. It is no wonder that an habitually angry person is soon avoided by those who know him.

The antidote for anger is patience, or “patient acceptance” as it is termed in Vajrayana, and if we are seriously interested in progressing along the spiritual path there is no practice more important than this.

Why We Get Angry

Anger is a response to feelings of aversion from the second skandha, making anger omnipresent. Whenever we are prevented from getting what we want (greed) or when we are forced into a situation we dislike (greed) – in short, whenever we have to put up with something we would rather avoid – our undisciplined mind reacts by immediately feeling aversive. This uncomfortable feeling is what turns into anger.

Training ourselves to be aware of the physical symptoms of anger, which arise before the emotional components, gives us a good chance of stopping anger from taking hold. Some of those physical responses we can notice are faster shorter breaths, increased heart rate, facila tension, muscle tension and jerkiness, teeth clenching and grinding, flushing, prickly sensation in the hands, and sweating.

As soon as you notice these sensations arising, shift your mindstate, intention and attention to reduce and eliminate the anger and let patience arise. If you wait the adrenaline will surge through your body and it will be too late. So act early to transform and reset yourself on the Path––using right effort–abandoning the anger and refraining from maintaining the conditions necessary to maintain it, then developing patience and compassion and maintaining those.

The final part of this series will appear in about 2 weeks. Look for the announcement in the Center's next newsletter.

There Is No Greater Evil Than Anger

2010-03-30T01:12:00.001-05:00

The First in a Three-Part Serie on Anger

Anger Is Always Unhealthy and Destructive

All the virtuous deeds and merit,

Such as giving and making offerings,

That we have accumulated over thousands of eons

Can be destroyed by just one moment of anger.

There is no evil greater than anger,

And no virtue greater than patience.

Therefore, I should strive in various ways

To become familiar with the practice of patience.

If I harbor painful thoughts of anger,

I shall not experience mental peace,

I shall find no joy or happiness,

And I shall be unsettled and unable to sleep.

––Excerpts from Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Shantideva

Anger and the Abrahamic Religions

From Genesis, where we see the first signs of the Abrahamic God becoming angry with Adam and Eve to Exodus, where God is raging, first at the Egyptians and then at his chosen people, through to Jesus tirade at the money-changers in the Temple to the command in Ephesians (4:26): “Be angry,” we see anger as godly and righteous, though both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures warn us against “worldly” or “manly” anger. The Quran shares many of these early references as well as references to Mohammed becoming angry and condoning righteous anger.

In the Abrahamic religions, there is good anger and bad anger. Good anger is the anger of God or his representatives (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, et al), or anger at what one supposes would anger God or his representatives, or anger at perceived injustices. All other anger, worldly anger, is defined as bad anger. This understanding of anger, however, condones and encourages most forms of anger and ultimately justifies everything from the periodic slaughters and genocides of the early Hebrew Scriptures to the medieval Inquisition and Crusades to today’s violent Jihads.

Anger and Buddhism

Buddhist on the other hand views all anger as a defilement. In fact, anger is such a strong defilement that it is categorized, along with greed and delusion, as one of the three poisons. And one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is that defiled behavior can only lead to more defiled behavior: being angry cannot make us peaceful, acting angrily does cannot make this a better world.

For Buddhists, anger is anger, anger is always a defilement, an afflicted emotion, and there is no such thing as righteous anger or righteous indignation. For Buddhists, “anger management” is an oxymoron. It is not about “managing” our anger, meaning making better use of our anger, it is about eliminating anger.

Ending Anger

To minimize and ultimately eliminate anger, we need to understand it and to develop wisdom, patience, and discipline

· We need to recognize anger and how and when it arises in our mind.

· We need to understand that for anger to arise, we must lack compassion for those who are suffering;

· We need to understand then that developing compassion will reduce our anger.

· We must acknowledge how anger is always harmful, never beneficial, to both us and others.

· We need to see that patience is the antidote for anger, and

· We need to understand the benefits of being patient in the face of difficulties.

· We then need to apply practical methods in our daily life to reduce our anger (right speech, for example) and finally to prevent it from arising at all.

This is called leading a disciplined life.

Leading a disciplined life and avoiding negative actions and mind-states is what Buddhists understand as The Path.

Kinda-Sorta In Dependent Origination Terms

When there is aversion, anger arises. With the ceasing of anger, compassion and patience arise.

When there is compassion and patience, anger does not arise.

The wisdom piece: Anger can arise because we are not being compassionate and patient. Which begs the question, why aren’t we feeling compassionate and patient? It is because our stories (our fabrications about what is happening rather than what is happening dominate our thinking) are causing us to pull seeds of great aversion.

To insist on compassion, we must learn to understand, on progressively deeper and deeper practice levels, that everyone is suffering and that everything they do, however dysfunctional, is an attempt to relieve their suffering.

When we see this, deeply see this, we become compassionate not angry and seek way to help rather than retaliate.

Studying and contemplating the first noble truth, there is suffering, can be very beneficial in developing this aspect of wisdom.

The second in this three-part series will be posted in about two weeks.

What Happens To Me After I die?

2010-03-12T06:58:00.001-06:00

Our eternal query, “What happens to me after I die?” has but three possible answers:

1. When your body dies, your soul lives on.

2. When your body dies, there is nothing more.

3. When your body dies, you are reborn.

Numbers 1 and 2 are the answers offered by eternalists and materialists respectively. According to eternalists, including Western theistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, when you die, your soul goes to heaven––or somewhere else, and lives on forever. According to materialists, including nihilists and annihilationists, there is nothing beyond this corporal existence. When the body dies, that’s it.

These two ideas, eternal life versus nothingness, were discussed and debated in the time of the Buddha 2500 years ago, just as they are today. Both are ideas that the Buddha categorically rejected.

Eternalism is refuted by our own experience of reality. When, by practicing meditation, our minds are calm and clear we observe conditions accurately, we see that everything is permanent. Since nothing is permanent, there can be no such thing as an eternal soul, or any other eternal entity; there can be no eternal place, such as heaven, and no eternal God, either.

Materialism is also refuted by our experience of reality. Materialism says we are physical entities only. But, when we practice meditation, we notice that we have a consciousness as well as a body, even if it is sometimes hard to differentiate the two. Our own experience tells us that we are not just a body.

Furthermore, Buddha observed the result of these views in the lives of the human beings who held them. He saw that eternalism led to mental laxity, and that materialism led to chaos and anarchy. Both of these isms, he said, are wrong views, for the reasons just sited. And both were wrong views because they were speculative views, and speculative views only serve to increase, rather than reduce, our suffering.

The Buddha’s answer to the question of what happens to us when we die is rebirth, answer number 3. Rebirth means that our present life is but a link in a chain of lives extending infinitely back in time and infinitely forward into the future––“from beginningless time to endless time,” as we say.

Without rebirth, there is no moral imperative to our actions, and autonomy and self-interest override any sense of ethics. After all, without rebirth, without consequences, why bother with anything other than autonomy and self-interest? The recent banking crisis perfectly illustrates how autonomy and self-interest trump ethical and moral values in a world without the consequences of rebirth.

It is rebirth that gives us consequences. Rebirth strongly suggests to us that we avoid evil and do good for the sake of our own well being. With rebirth, morally good deeds bring agreeable results, and bad deeds bring disagreeable results, for the effects of our actions correspond to the moral quality of those deeds. Therefore, when we behave immorally, amorally, or unethically we harm ourselves. We simply need to act in ways that lead to peace and happiness if we want to be peaceful and happy.

However, we clearly cannot find this kind of moral equilibrium within the limits of a single life. On the contrary, there are countless examples of evil people who live long, prosperous, luxurious lives. For example, King Leopold II of Belgian, whose forced labor camps resulted in the deaths of 3-5 million Congolese in the late 19^th century, lived a life of extravagance and luxury. His Villa Leopolda, a house he built in France for his mistress, was recently in the news when the Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov, defaulted on his agreement to buy the Villa. The selling price was $736 million! America’s robber barons, our own exemplars of unabated, opportunistic venality and greed from the same time period, seem modest in comparison. Consider Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose summer “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island is valued only at about $150 million!

The world is full of morally unscrupulous people who enjoy happiness, esteem, and success. On the other hand, we all know people who lead lives of utmost integrity, but who endure great suffering. One lifetime is just too short for the principle of moral equilibrium to reveal itself. Karma needs more time to work itself out.

The knowledge that our good and bad actions determine the quality of our future, in the nearterm and in future lives, affords us a powerful reason to avoid unwholesome conduct and to diligently pursue the good. Only when we realize that there is this moral equilibrium are we truly on the Path; only then is it a joy to be alive. Otherwise, the world is a dark and dangerous place, regardless of how successful we might be at any given moment.

Belief in rebirth and karma is fundamental to Buddhism. With these, we know our present living conditions, our dispositions and aptitudes, our virtues and faults, to be the results of our actions in the past, in this and in our previous lives. With that understanding, we bequeath our present actions to our future lives. We know that our present actions of body, speech, and mind, if well-chosen, will advance us along our spiritual Path, ushering us to peace and liberation.

Finally, there is a deeper significance to karma and rebirth that bears mentioning, and which has profound implications for the cause of ethical conduct. That is, if we inherit our personal lives from our own karmic past, the universe itself must be intrinsically both ethical and meaningful.

Together rebirth and karma make the universe an orderly, integrated whole, with transcendent significance. A logical pattern is revealed, not only in the physical and biological domains, but also in the ethical domain. We are able to discern the logic and see the pattern by virtue of knowing and practicing with the concepts of rebirth and karma.

Together rebirth and karma teach us that, beyond the range of normal perception, a moral law holds sway over our deeds, and, through our deeds, over our destiny. Karma, operating across the sum total of our lives, locks our volitional actions into the dynamics of the universe, thus making ethics an expression of the intrinsic orderliness of the cosmos.

How To Act Right, Making The Most of Every Moment

2010-02-28T06:55:00.000-06:00

Make Every Moment Count

Impermanence is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism. Yet it is often confused and distorted by these two wrong views of its meaning:

Wrong View One: Insight tells us to embrace our experiences without clinging to them — to get the most out of what’s happening in the present moment by fully appreciating its intensity, knowing that we will soon have to let them go to embrace whatever comes next. This offers us false wisdom on how to consume the pleasures of the moment.

Wrong View Two: Insight into change gives us hope. No matter what the situation, anything is possible: we can do whatever we want to do, get whatever we want even if we don’t have it yet, create whatever world we want to live in, and become whatever we want to be. This offers us false wisdom on the results of our actions.

The questions that arises from these false views are

1) If experiences are impermanence and fleeting, how could they be worth the effort needed to engage them?

And 2), how can we find genuine hope in the prospect of positive change if we can't fully rest in the results when they arrive? Aren't we just setting ourselves up for disappointment?

The real wisdom of impermanence is that the effort which goes into making us more peaceful and happy is worthwhile only if the produces well-being and happiness that is largely resistant to change, largely stabilizing.

If all our experiences of the present are something fabricated or produced, moment-to-moment, from the raw material provided by our past actions, from our seeds, then in our desire to consume pleasure, we are producing and consuming pain, dukkha.

So what do we do with our stressful experiences? Buddhism suggests that we learn to use them to get beyond them. Buddhism suggests that our obligation in response to every moment, to every new experience, is to learn to use it in a way that furthers our spiritual growth. Types of actions that do this are labeled “the path.”

These activities include acts of wisdom, acts of virtue, and the practice of meditation. They include generosity, compassion and lovingkindness, patience, humility, moral disciple, right speech, dependability, and regret (When we act in a way that is seemingly appropriately but the outcome is not beneficial, then we use regret, very gently, to remind us to try another tactic next time.)

These activities produce a sense well-being and peace relatively stable and secure, relatively helpful. For this reason, they lead us further along the path, rather than obstructing our progress. So they are skills that need to be mastered. They are the basic set of tools we have making everyday decision-making. In any situation, our intention should be to choose one of them as the basis for our next action.

With that attitude, we make use of impermanence and the process of change to move us freedom, well-being, peace and happiness. And that's what Buddhist practice is all about.