The Soul Question

Do We Have A Soul?

When Western students first learn about Buddhism, the “Soul Question” inevitably arises from their backgrounds in the Abrahamic faiths. The short answer to this question, “No. Buddhists don’t believe there is a soul.

That answer is predicated on a particular definition, a particular understanding of what the word “soul” means. What Buddhism means by soul is something that is static and never changes, an essence that is eternal; an essence that is not effected by anything else.

Also, a soul is “partless,” meaning that it is not made-up of a bunch of pieces, like a car or a dog.

Another characteristic is that a soul can exist separately from body and mind. It can comes and go from place to place, and of course, life to after life. It lives inside a person like an occupant lives a house.

Buddhist philosophy says that there is no such thing. Nothing is permanent, nothing is in and of itself. How it posits this is complicated, but simply put the Buddhist understanding arises from a fundamental believe that all things are impermanent and conditioned by other things.

What Buddhism posits in place of a soul is an ever-changing Self that has no beginning and no end. It has many parts, so it is not something findable. It cannot exist separately. With our moment to moment to moment mental activity, that “me,” that conventional Buddhist “Self,” is just an imputation. It is not something that you can find solidly inside each moment. Nonetheless we have a conventional way of putting together all these moments and labeling it “Me.”

Buddhism emphasizes over and over that we are a conditioned phenomenon. What moves from one moment to another is a subtle Self that is described by the Five Aggregates, not a soul.

On investigation, the soul turns out to be a simple fiction. Unfortunately, is it a fiction that leads to believing in a large, complex false reality that has been the source of suffering for vast numbers of people since ancient times. Why this is so is addressed in a variety of teachings–chiefly, The Four Characteristics of All Phenomena, Dependent Co-Arising, and Emptiness.

Believing in a soul requires a vast network of speculative ideas about other permanent things and places–gods and heavens and hells, for example–in order to form a moral code. What we learn from simple personal observation of our impermanent and ever-changing Self is that the meaning of life is found in our impermanent and therefore interconnected nature: in being of benefit to others. And the first rule of being of benefit is “Do not harm.”

How do we do no harm? We can start with this simple exercise: Every time you approach someone with whom you expect to interact, ask yourself (in your head, no out loud): “What can I do to be of benefit to this person, here, now.” If you’re alone, ask it of yourself.

What Really Matters

Practicing with Emptiness

Once we pass the point of being novices in our practice, we see that emptiness is at the core of the dharma. For many students, the word itself is problematic. It is only later in their practice that they realize the reason they struggle with the word is that it too is empty. For now, let’s not make the word an obstacle to understanding this critically important Mahayana teaching.

Let’s start by looking at what emptiness means. Emptiness means that the things around us (animal, vegetable and mineral; people, places and events; thoughts, ideas and concepts) don’t have any set definition or value, don’t have any inherent meaning in and off themselves. Whatever meaning they do have is because we have assigned it to them.

We know this, at least on the most basic level, because we know that we can change the meaning of something: sometimes it is good to sleep in late, other times not (sleeping is empty); sometimes I think I look great, other times not (my appearance is empty). In fact, because things are empty we can change the story, the description we have of that thing. Empty means anyone can assign whatever definition or meaning or value they want to what’s happening. And that means we can learn to rewrite our stories in ways that reduce and end our pain and suffering.

What about stories that everyone agrees on, aren’t they true? In the 6^th century BC the Greeks determined that the world was round and measured the circumference of the earth pretty accurately, yet Europeans as a whole continued to believe that the world was flat until the 17^th century. The Alexandrians had measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy in the 1^st century BC, yet with the burning the great library and the beginning of the Christian era, the world became flat, flat, flat, again. Even if everyone seems to agree on a single story, that doesn’t make it true or permanent; it is still empty. It is still just a story. However, “accurate” understandings of the everyday world from stories are important and useful, as we’ll see.

Emptiness is empty of story, empty of inherent and always-the-same meaning and value. It does not suggest that the object doesn’t exist. My car isn’t a good car or a bad car, it just depends on how I view it. When it is running well, it’s a good car; when it breaks down, it’s a bad car. The knowledge that on an ultimate, empty level, it’s not even “a car” until I call it that, doesn’t mean, however, that it doesn’t exist. Of course it exists. “Car,” though is just a label, a story.

So being “empty” isn’t a denial that things exist. Rather it is an understanding that we superimpose upon ourselves–and on things around us–a false existence, a self-existence or essential reality that actually does not exist at all–a story about who we are and about the definitions, meaning of values of the things around us.

What is emptiness? Emptiness is the way things really are, in an absolute sense. It is the way things exist as opposed to the conventional way they appear. We naturally believe that the things we see around us, such as tables, chairs and houses are truly existent, because we believe that they exist in exactly the way that they appear.

However, the way things appear to our senses is deceptive and completely contradictory to the way in which they ultimately exist. Things appear to exist from their own side, without depending upon our mind. This computer, for example, seems to have its own independent, objective existence. It seems to be “outside” whereas our mind seems to be “inside.” We feel that the computer can exist without our mind; we do not feel that our mind is in any way involved in bringing the book into existence.

Although things that appear directly to our senses to be truly existent, in reality all phenomena lack, or are empty of, true existence. This computer, our body, our friends, and the entire universe are in reality just appearances to mind, like things seen in a dream.

On another level, though, we know that things are empty because we know that everything is impermanent, and being impermanent, everything is therefore interconnected. [How we know this will be the topic of a future blog.]

So why do we care? For two crucial reasons: Until we understand that there are two truths, a conventional truth, which is our understanding of things from our everyday perspective, our story-telling, and that there is also an ultimate truth, that things really don’t exist on their own as we seem to perceive them, that things really aren’t separate and solid as our senses imply, that in fact everything is ultimately interrelated and interconnected, we cannot (1) develop a moral code that allows us to distinguish between right and wrong, and (2) we cannot meaningfully learn to reduce and finally end our suffering. [Look for a further explanation of this in a future blog.]

Before explaining a simple way to practice with emptiness to reduce our suffering, even when we are experiencing “big dukkha,” even with events as intense as the death of a child or a terminal cancer diagnosis, I would like to offer Guy Newland’s analogy from Introduction to Emptiness. If this blog has at all wetted your appetite for more about emptiness, go to Newland’s book. He writes:

I concocted for my students the analogy of two radio stations. Channel A is "all things considered radio." This is our regular, conventional channel, and on it we get all kinds of information about the diversity and complexity of the world. Perhaps today they are airing a fierce debate: the proponents of red cars are angry, in a raging controversy with the proponents of blue cars. Normally we listen only to this station, so we take it all at face value and without deeper scrutiny. We are unaware that there is or could be any other channel. But in fact there is a second station, broadcast on channel B, the ultimate perspective. Channel B's programming is "all emptiness, all the time radio." Every phenomenon is presented only from the point of view of its ultimate nature. But when we tune into this channel, all of the detailed information from the other channel is unavailable. From the perspective of ultimate reality, red cars and blue cars are equally and exclusively empty [they are not even “cars.”].

Channel B, emptiness radio, adds new information and a deeper perspective on what is being discussed on the conventional channel. It shows that the things discussed on channel A definitely do not exist in the way that they are ordinarily presented [as solid, separate, and having an essential nature].

When we come back to channel A after tuning in to B, we now understand just how it is that channel A is merely conventional; it is not the only or final perspective. But this new information does not, of course, prove that red cars are in all ways identical to blue cars. [Nor does channel B tell us of the nonexistence of an essentially existent car, that there are no cars]. We still have to make distinctions and make choices about what, if anything, to drive. Channel B alone does not allow us to make practical distinctions, so we still need the information from channel A.

Each gives correct information about its domain.

Conventional realities are not wiped out by…emptiness. The problem of knowing which car to drive is the general problem of how to choose between possible courses of action. It is the question of how empty persons can make distinctions between right and wrong. [The great 14^th century Tibetan lama] Tsong-kha-pa shows that answering this question requires distinguishing between two types of knowledge about persons, as well as cars and other things.

Practicing with Emptiness

Most of us live rather exclusively listening to channel A. We see the world as seemingly permanent and separate. When my eyes make contact with the plant in my office, I say to myself, “I see the plant.” Pure channel A–me here, plant there, separate and each solid and existent on its own. When I don’t get what I want, when things don’t go my way, I get mad. Again, pure channel A.

This leads us to unending and unendable dukkha, to problems with everything. As Newland points out, when we listen to channel A we become unaware of channel B. To move significantly along the path toward peacefulness, we must develop an awareness of channel B running in the background, behind the information from channel A that we need to live everyday lives, make distinctions (we need to be able to distinguish between a son and a husband, for example), and we need these distinctions to be of value and benefit to our families, friends, communities, and so on.

And therein lies the practice. Instead of locking into and listening exclusively to channel A, which even when “accurate” is black-and-white, rigid and problematic, say to yourself–whenever you notice there is dukkha, whenever you notice that you are getting upset or angry: “Where is channel B here?”

Whether it is big dukkha: the death of a child or parent, a terminal illness, the loss of a job or house, or little dukkha, noticing a ding on the car door, the moment your body sends you a signal that dukkha is arising (and it is often easier to notice it in the body than the mind), just ask yourself, “Where’s Channel B here?” and you regain your footing on the Middle Path and the dukkha dissolves.

In these examples, the wisdom of emptiness on channel B lets us see beyond our sense of loss to a greater understanding that aging and death are part of every process. This lessons our attachment to “my” loss and allows for grieving rather than self-indulgence. With a terminal illness, channel B redirects our attention from wanting things to be otherwise to being present and doing what is most beneficial, allowing us to see clearly and feel peaceful as we pick wellness strategies. Similarly, a ding, channel B tells us, is simply a chip in the paint on a piece of plastic–I can get it fixed, or not, as is appropriate, without making it personal, without attaching and suffering.

“Where’s channel B here?” That’s the practice. Having the wisdom to keep an awareness of channel B while going about our lives in a channel A world.

If you would like more information about practicing with emptiness, please email.

Practicing with Death and Dying

Death and Dying, A Contemplative Meditation

It is impossible to experience one’s own death objectively and still carry a tune.

–Woody Allen

The aim of our spiritual journey a life without greed, anger and delusion. And these three: greed, anger and delusion, are at the core of our fear of death. Until we successfully address death as an event and issue, it’s unlikely we will be able to live with any meaningful level of peace and contentment, with any real off-loading of greed, angerand delusion.

What we know from observation in general, as well as in our meditation, is that we are impermanent and ever-changing. When we model this out into the five aggregates or the 12 links of dependent co-arising, we see that we are an ever-so-slightly different person from moment to moment, both physically and psychologically. If we can understand and then on a deeper level realize this, that we die and are reborn in each moment, death loses its grip on us. We see from this that life and death are just labels, just our stories about when something begins and ends rather than what is really happening, that everything is ever-changing and undifferentiated.

Finally I realized there is no death and I relaxed!

Coming to know that I am reborn in every moment, that I die and am reborn thousands upon thousands of times a day, has allowed my to understand that there is no death, just a process. A process that is simply the natural state of things, no more, no less. And certainly there is no reason for me to make the natural state of things into a personal problem by convincing myself that it should be other than what it is.

We all know that we are getting old and will someday die. But that understanding is so weak and underdeveloped that on a weightier level we are able to see ourselves as solid, substantial, somehow permanent–certainly not a process. Even our language hinders us in thinking about and talking about dying: there’s no way to die in the present tense. Dominique Bouhours, the late 17^th century French grammarian, put it this way in his last words:

I am about to–or I am going to– die: either expression is correct.

When we understand our impermanence and interconnectedness with everything: then and only then are we fully present in each moment and fully engaged; then and only then can we let go of the arrogance and conceit of my life being, my life being so important, my life being more valuable than the lives of others, and the delusion that my life is so important that it shouldn’t end. When we understand our impermanence and interconnectedness with everything: then and only then do we realize that there is only arising (birth), abiding (running our course), and ceasing (death); there is no death.

Our fear of death stems from the fear of our ceasing to exist, our fear of losing our identity and foothold in the world, our fear of not being here. And this fear is so deep that it prevents us from seeing all the tell-tale signs of death approaching; it is so strong that we spend billions on everything from beauty creams to botox to stop getting older, to slow the march toward death. Instead, what a spiritual journey tells us we should be doing, is to prepare for death.

“How can I Prepare for Death?”

In the broadest terms, we prepare for death by living skillfully, by living in ways that in each moment make us and our families and friends, our communities and our planet a better and more peaceful place. We do this by living wisely, with moral discipline, and through meditation. Living in that way requires a conviction to ripen our inner potential purely for the benefit of others and without defiling our efforts with craving, clinging and attachment.

Contemplative meditations on death are an important tool in learning to die peacefully, and with ease and grace.

Contemplation and meditation on death and impermanence are important because it is only by recognizing how precious and how short our life is that we are most likely to make it meaningful and to live it fully and because by familiarizing ourself with death, we can remove the fear that is so haunting.

The aim or mark of a spiritual practitioner is to have no fear, not now and certainly not at the time of death. People who practice to the best of their abilities in each and every moment will die, it is said, in a state of great bliss. In other words, the more diligent our practice, the less death is an issue.

Here’s a traditional Tibetan meditation that looks at the certainty and imminence of death and can help motivate us to make the best use of our lives. Consider making this a regular practice.

The practice is known as the nine-round death meditation, in which we contemplate the three roots, the nine reasonings, and the three convictions:

Root One: Death is Certain

1. There is no possible way to escape death. No one ever has. Of the current world population of over 7 billion people, virtually none will be alive in 100 years time.

2. Life has a definite limit. And although it is not defined, each moment brings us closer to death. We are dying from the moment we are born.

3. Death comes in a moment and its time is unexpected. All that separates us from the next life is one breath.

First Conviction: To practice the spiritual path, to cultivate positive, wholesome mental qualities and abandon unwholesome, negative mental qualities.

Root Two: The Time of Death is Uncertain

4. The duration of our life is uncertain. The young can die before the old, the healthy before the sick, etc.

5. There are many causes and circumstances that lead to death, but few that favor the sustenance of life. Even things that sustain life can kill us.

6. The weakness and fragility of one's physical body contribute to life's uncertainty.

The body can be easily destroyed by disease or accident.

Second Conviction: To ripen our inner potential now, without delay; to practice as though our head was on fire.

Root Three: The Only Thing That Can Help Us At The Time of Death Is Our Mental/Spiritual Development (because what goes into your next life are the karmic imprints we have accumulated in this life)

7. Worldly possessions such as wealth, position, money can't stop death

8. Relatives and friends can neither prevent death nor go with or for us.

9. Even our own precious body is of no help to us. We have to leave it behind like a shell, an empty husk, an overcoat.

Third Conviction: To work with great diligent on purifying body, speech and mind, without staining our efforts with attachment to worldly things and concerns.

My own experience with death leads me to suggest that starting here with the three roots is safe and doable. Try contemplating each of the roots, each of the nine reasonings, and each of the three convictions for an hour or so once a week, and in a few years, or a decade or two, when they have settled in and you have come to some sense of meaningful peace with them, consider finding a teacher who can guide you more deeply into other practices on dying and death, such as the meditations on decaying bodies that is a traditional part of the Theravada teachings, or the more advanced Tibetan practices that have developed this area of Buddhism into a deep and profound practice and science.

Email through our website if you have any questions about practicing with death and dying.

Understanding and Ending Our Dukkha

“I teach dukkha and the ending of dukkha.”

–The Buddha

The most important and fundamental aspect of our spiritual practice must start with an understanding of what the Buddha taught, what the aim of his teaching was, and that must start with an understanding of the one word that was the cornerstone of his teaching: dukkha.

Defining the Undefinable but Ever Present

No single English word adequately captures the full depth, range, and subtlety of the crucial Pali term dukkha. Over the years, many translations of the word have been used ("stress," "unsatisfactoriness," "suffering," etc.). Each has its own merits in a given context. There is value in not letting oneself get too comfortable with any one particular translation of the word, since the entire thrust of Buddhist practice is the broadening and deepening of one's understanding of dukkha until its roots are finally exposed and eradicated once and for all. One helpful rule of thumb: as soon as you think you've found the single best translation for the word, think again: for no matter how you describe dukkha, it's always deeper, subtler, and more unsatisfactory than that.

Dukkha is, from a definition by Buddhist scholar Francis Story: Disturbance, irritation, dejection, worry, despair, fear, dread, anguish, anxiety; vulnerability, injury, inability, inferiority; sickness, aging, decay of body and faculties, senility; pain/pleasure; excitement/boredom; deprivation/excess; desire/frustration, suppression; longing/aimlessness; hope/hopelessness; effort, activity, striving/repression; loss, want, insufficiency/satiety; love/lovelessness, friendlessness; dislike, aversion/attraction; parenthood/childlessness; submission/rebellion; decision/indecisiveness, vacillation, uncertainty.

Three Roots of Dukkha

(The Three Poisons: Greed, Anger, and Delusion)

What we notice from meditation is that we only do things, when all is said and done, to get more of what we want, what we like, what we think we should have or should be, or inversely, to get less of the things we don’t want, don’t like, and don’t think we should have.

We notice, as we watch our body and breath, that this constant desire for more is unending. We always need and want something more. This is the operant model we use for processing information. We filter all our experiences through this “greed” lens, storing all our memories in stories about whether we want more of this type of event or less.

We do this because of our delusion that the world should be other than what it is, and that if we can only get it to be our way, everything will be fine and we will be happy. This is nonsense. For it to work, everyone in the world would have to want things to be my way.

Because of this way of processing our lives, we are never able to be satisfied. And to make things worst, when we don’t get what we want, we become angry (everything from mild irritation to wrath arises from our greed and delusion).

This anger shadows our lives, an anger that arises from never getting enough, always having to protect and defend, never being satisfied. Simply put, we must overcome our greed and anger and delusion if we are to end our suffering. That is what the Buddha taught: life must be all about purifying ourselves and ending our suffering. Why would we choose anything else?

Observing Dukkha

If you pay attention (to your body and breath) for just five minutes, you learn that pleasant sensations lead to the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both are uncomfortable. So in the first minutes, you get a big lesson about suffering: wanting things to be other than what they are. Such a tremendous amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying attention to [your breath and] bodily sensations. –Sylvia Boorstein.

Try This Five Minute Meditation Now

Arrange yourself in a comfortable, upright position, in a chair or cross-legged on a sofa or the floor. Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Take a few deep breaths, observing the breaths at your abdomen. Find a spot in your abdomen where you can easily track your breath, allow yourself to breath normally, and focus there. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels.

If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back.

Observe the breathe in that spot for a minute or so, then shift to a spot two-inches to the right of the original location. Notice how it feels in this new spot. Observe it there for a minute or so, then shift to a spot two-inches to the left of the original location. Again, notice how it feels in this new location.  Observe it for a minute or so, then shift to a spot about two-inches above the original location. Again, observe it for a minute, then shift to a spot two-inches below the original location.

Finally, take a few noticeable, deep breaths and then gently open your eyes and consider how each spot felt different, how your created affinities and aversions, how you made your dukkha.

The Causes of Suffering

If we really want to end our suffering, we need some idea of what causes it. On the most basic level, the cause of suffering is our story-telling. As we experienced in the five-minute meditation above, we create our own suffering, we codify it into stories about what is good and fair, comfortable and satisfying, rather than allowing ourselves to just be present with what is.

To end our suffering, therefore, we have to eliminate the story-telling. This is best done methodically. It cannot be accomplished simply by an act of will, by wanting them to go away. The work must be guided by investigation.

Start by noticing the depth and breath of your stories.

Observe that all stories are fabrications, fictions, not real.

Next, notice the general structure of all story: they desire things to be other than what they are.

Then, observe how we attach to our stories, believe them to be true and accurate, protect and defend these foolish fictions.

Finally, stop believing your stories, stop believe that anything your mind tells you is true.

While you are practicing this, study hard the Two Truths, which will be the subject of a future blog.

Humility and Modesty

Humility and Modesty

Definitions:

Humility is to depart from a position of gentle, non-assertiveness. It is a behavior or attitude or spirit that wholly lacks arrogance and conceit. It is being unassuming without being proud or feeling inferior.

Modesty is to depart from a disinclination to call attention to oneself. Modesty involves observing proprieties, especially in speech, dress and comportment. It is avoid extremes through understatement in everything one has and does materially and spiritually.

Compassion tells us to ask and listen with humility and modesty, not to listen so we can respond with what we already know. But more importantly, this is the meta cognitive question that we should always be asking:

What should I do in each moment to strengthen and master my wandering anxious and stress-producing mind?

Like other spiritual traditions, Buddhism sees humility as a virtue. It advocates humility as a moral precept. As such it is often expressed in terms of exhortation against an arrogant or haughty attitude. Being a sign of ego-centeredness, pride is seen as impeding progress towards spiritual liberation. Buddhist practitioners believe that only a humble mind can readily recognize its own defilements of craving (or greed), aversion (or hatred) and ignorance, thereby embarking on the path of enlightenment and liberation. Behaving humbly is a merit and a desirable moral quality that comes from insight into the spiritual reality, it is both a prerequisite for peacefulness and a manifestation thereof.

Some Buddhist practitioners place so great an emphasis on humility that they are prepared to yield to others in any situation that involves a dispute or contention. This assumes that there is no right and so there is no need to assert my understanding over someone else. Within the Chinese cultural milieu, such a humble attitude is doubtless regarded as a virtue commensurate with the Confucian ethics of social order. Chinese Buddhism accepts it as a norm rather than an anomaly. In fact, the Buddhist principle of "no contention" (wu-cheng) requires that a practitioner refrain from quarreling or contending for personal interests, including intellectual interests. "No contention" implies a humbled ego through which the light of enlightenment may shine. Not so with American Buddhists in general.

But we must be careful in making humility a moral precept, for self-depreciation is as counter-productive as self-aggrandizement when it becoming peaceful.

Humility or modesty as practiced in traditional Chinese society is often criticized as being less than honest or even bordering on hypocrisy. A morally cultivated person is supposed to refrain from talking about his/her own merits and strengths, or to talk about them in a round-about way that suggests modesty. Furthermore, the norm of humility demands that one use stereotyped language that depicts oneself as being worthless but is nevertheless understood to be mere ceremonial courtesy. Even today, a scholar is supposed to refer to his/her publications as "my clumsy works", and an entertainer would beg "excuse" for a "homely and plain" feast and "less than satisfactory hospitality," even though deep down he feels very proud of what he has offered to the guests. Such superficial courtesy appears to be a strong value in societies on which Confucianism has left its mark, including Japan and Korea.

Although humility is important to Buddhism, ultimately spiritual attainments are associated with such personal qualities as the "middle way," a balanced personality that is neither arrogant nor "humble" in the sense of self-abasement. We may add the following criteria to define genuine humility:

·       Behave without arrogance, self-conceit and other egoist tendencies such as jealousy and an impulse to show off.

·       Respect others and show a genuine human interest in them without a desire to please or to impress.

·       Come up with an objective and honest understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses, with a realization that we are far from perfect and have a lot more to learn, to improve and to accomplish.

While we do not recognize self-depreciation or self-effacement as part of humility, we must recognize that our biological self is fraught with frailties and ignorance and that a true self characterized by such divine qualities as love, compassion, joy and wisdom is innate in everyone of us.

Humility

Do not find fault with others. If they behave wrongly, there is no need to make yourself suffer.

–Ajahn Chah (20^th-Century Thai monk)

Humility and Patience

I think that there is a very close connection between humility and patience. Humility involves having the capacity to take a more confrontational stance, having the capacity to retaliate if you wish, yet deliberately deciding not to do so. That is what I would call genuine humility.

I think that true patience has a component or element of self-discipline and restraint--the realization that you could have acted otherwise, you could have adopted a more aggressive approach, but decided not to do so.

On the other hand, being forced to adopt a certain passive response out of a feeling of helplessness or incapacitation--that I wouldn't call genuine humility. That may be a kind of meekness, but it isn't genuine patience or humility.


–His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Real Humility Is Genuineness

Humility, very simply, is the absence of arrogance. Where there is no arrogance, you relate with your world as an eye-level situation, without one-upmanship. Because of that, there can be a genuine interchange. Nobody is using their message to put anybody else down, and nobody has to come down or up to the other person’s level. Everything is eye-level.

Humility in the Shambhala tradition also involves some kind of playfulness, which is a sense of humor….In most religious traditions, you feel humble because of a fear of punishment, pain, and sin. In the Shambhala world you feel full of it. You feel healthy and good. In fact, you feel proud. Therefore, you feel humility. That’s one of the Shambhala contradictions or, we could say, dichotomies. Real humility is genuineness.

–Chogyam Trungpa

Conceit is very prone to arise when one is praised for some particular work or mental quality. Within limits praise from a knowledgeable person is stimulating and encouraging; some people who are modest or diffident by nature can only work well when they are appreciated. The trouble is that too much praise, particularly if it borders on flattery, stimulates the sense of "I"-ness. The ego sticks out its chest and feels two inches taller; it has a delicious feeling of security and believes itself to be invulnerable!

This is the nasty sort of pride that the ancient Greeks called hubris; it was looked upon as an insult to the gods, and when the Olympians found a man suffering from it they unloosed Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, who brought him to death or destruction.

The cultivation of humility is not easy; there's a temptation to indulge in mock-modesty, and untruthfully disclaim any real achievement, and still worse to be conceited about not being conceited. It is wiser, I think, to tackle Conceit at its first uprising; if one can do that, then Humility will develop in the natural course of events.

Pride has been aptly described as the "giant weed." We may grub up a few roots in this life-span, but the thing has already gone to seed and will appear in the future.

One year's seeds

Seven years weeds

say the old gardeners. If we acquire the habit of eradicating conceit in this life, the habit will travel on in our sankharas and bear good fruit the future.

Practices

1. Recognize conceit whenever it pops up and name it: arrogance, conceit, pride, etc; recognition automatically weakens it. This practice is doubly effective because it keeps you on your toes and induces a gentle distaste for the tendency.

2. Remember the first two factors of the noble eightfold path: right view and right intention.

Right view is having “no view” that would allow you to feel superior and right intention is the intention to expunge pride, arrogance, conceit and egotism.

3. Remind yourself profoundly that your talents are not due to your own virtue, but have arisen from all the actions of untold numbers of people in the past and present, therefore it is silly of me to be conceited about qualities which are not in any real sense "yours."

Grief and Grieving

Grieving

Grieving is self-talk, the stories we tell ourselves about the death of a loved-one. To understand grieving and how to grieve, we need to think of the mind as a filter: it filters the environment in a way that makes sense to us, filtering some things in, filtering others out. These filters are called “stories.” All stories have certain characteristics:

1.     For things to be other than what they are

2.     For us to know what to desire more of (or get less of), and

3.     To present a world that if permanent (reification)

Also, stories:

1.     Provide the basis for our self-awareness, and

2.     Make our sense of self and of the world consistent

Understanding grieving asks us to look even further into how our minds work so that we can process the grief and gain relief in a reasonable amount of time. Looking deeper, we see that we

are not really attached to the person who has passed, rather we are clinging to the “I” of our stories: “I didn’t want this to happen to my child….” From the perspective of how the mind works, it is an “I and of me” story. This means that what in fact has happened is that we have changed a static external condition into a personal problem.

The more value, meaning or weight we assign to the condition (family vs. friends vs. strangers, for example), the stronger and more difficult the problem. When it comes to grieving, the intensity of our stories makes in nearly impossible to see that we are imbedded in stories and that our grieving isn’t at all about the person who has passed on, but about our own displeasure at losing a story about who we are and what our relationship was. That last sentence may be the most difficult, and yet the most important, sentence in this whole blog. It is the key to unlocking our pain and suffering at the loss of a loved-one.

Grieving

Grieving is one of the strongest, deepest and most profound of our stories, and grieving for a child is stronger, deeper or more profound that any other form of grieving. No relationship is as unconditional, as selfless and as other-centered as our relationships with our children, and so the loss of a child produces the most intense and long-lasting stories.

We don’t need to examine Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, nor does it make sense to assume that if the grief is long-lasting it is because we are stuck in one of those imaginary stages, it just means the intensity of the stories around the loss are stronger. What we need to do is to look at how our minds twisted what really happened into suffering. How we attach story to story, story after story, to reinforce our notion that the death should not have occurred, and not the way it did occur. Seeing that, the story begins to dissolve and our suffering lessens and gradually ceases.

Simile of Kisa Gotami

When her young child had died, Kisa Gotami refused to believe it was dead. After asking many people — in vain — for medicine that would revive the child, she was finally directed to the Buddha. When she told him her story, he offered to provide medicine for the child, but he would need a mustard seed — the cheapest Indian spice — obtained from a family in which no one had died.

She went from house to house asking for mustard seed, and everyone offered to give her one. But when she asked if anyone had died in the family, the response was always, "Oh, yes, of course." After a while, the message sunk in: Death is universal. Her mind settled, and she was able to bury her child.

This teaching speaks to the universality of impermanence and death, and the power of the path of practice: that in the midst of this human world with all its sorrows and lamentations, there is still a way to find that which is free from grieving, aging, and illness: the Deathless. Deathless meaning the death of our stories that things should be other than what they are.

The Simile of the Mustard Seed Sutra

Slightly edited from the commentarial text

After flowing-on for beginningless time

Gotami arose in a poor family in Savatthi in the time of the Buddha.

Her name was Gotami-tissa,

but because her body was very skinny

she was called 'Skinny Gotami.'

When she went to her husband's family,

she was scorned [and called] “daughter of a poor family.”

Then she gave birth to a son,

and with the arrival of the son she was treated with respect.

But that son, running back and forth

and running all around while playing met his end.

Because of this, sorrow-to-the-point-of-madness arose in her.

She thought: "Before I was one who received only scorn,

but starting from the time of the birth of my son I gained honor.

These [relatives] will now try to take my son,

in order to expose him outside [in the charnel ground]."

Unable to accept her son’s death, and

under the influence of her sorrow-to-the-point-of-madness,

she secured her child’s lifeless body to her hip

and wandered in the city from the door of one house to another

pleading: "Give medicine to me for my son!"

People reviled her, saying "What good is medicine?"

She could not understand what they were saying.

Then a certain wise man, thinking:

"This woman has had her mind deranged by sorrow for her son;

the Buddha will know the medicine for her,"

said: "Mother, approach the fully Awakened One

and ask about medicine for your son."

She went to the to Buddha and said,

"Blessed One, give me medicine for my son!"

The master, seeing her situation, said,

"Go, having entered the city,

into whatever house has never before experienced any death,

and take from them a mustard seed."

"Very well, Sir," she replied,

and glad of mind she entered the city and came to the first house:

"The master has called for a mustard seed

in order to make medicine for my son.

If this house has never before experienced any death,

please give me a mustard seed."

"Who is able to count how many have died here?"

"Then keep it. What use is that mustard seed to me?"

And going to a second and a third house, and on and on house after house,

her madness left her and her right mind was re-established.

She thought, "This is the way it will be in the entire city.

By means of the Blessed One's compassion for my welfare,

I have realized the universal truth."

And having gained a sense of spiritual urgency from that,

she went out and covered her son in the charnel ground.

She uttered this verse:

It's not just a truth for one village or town,

Nor is it a truth for a single family.

But for every world in the ten directions and the three times,

This indeed is what is true — impermanence.

And so saying, she went into the presence of the master.

Then the master said to her,

"Have you obtained, Gotami, the mustard seed?"

"Finished, sir, is the matter of the mustard seed" she said.

"You have indeed restored me."

And the master then uttered this verse:

A person with a mind that clings,

Deludedly, to sons or possessions,

Is swept away by death that comes

— Like mighty flood to sleeping town.

At the conclusion of this verse, her “stories” dropped off,

her insight then grew... and she became a diligent seeker and disciple.

Practicing with Grieving

Death is a natural process: birth, aging and death are simply the way all life proceeds. The process is not the problem. It is our stories that the process shouldn’t happen: our wanting things to be other than what they are, our belief, as a 103 year-old woman said to me, that “no parent would ever have to watch her child die of old age”; our misguided assumption that “good health and long-life” are the natural process, not aging and death; our conviction that we are healthy and well (always), not aging and dying (always), that there is a “right” sequence to dying (no one should die young,” etc. When a death “seems” to fall our of our imagined right sequence, or when it is that of a child, the stories become even more intense and the grieving is even longer-lasting and profound.

As we know from the Sutra of Gotami and the Mustard Seed, whenever a life arises, it abides and then ceases. This is the natural way: birth, aging and death. It is the natural law of the universe. This natural law: we aren’t responsible for it, we can’t change it. And to cling to it, meaning to our ideas of what should be rather than what it is, especially in the face of the death of a loved-one, very dramatically increases our pain and suffering, our anguish and stress.

Our clinging is not something “real,” it is merely a concept, a concept that arises when we want something to be other than what it is and we focus our attention on it. To sustain grieving, we must constantly refocus on the idea, and to do this we must slightly intensify the story each time. So the causes of the grieving and our suffering are not outside us, but right inside us. And with patience and understand, we can allow it to transform our hearts rather than continue to causes us sorrow.

Once we begin to understand and realize how we cling, we can look closely at how our mind creates stories and begin the process of realizing that all our stories are our fabrications, created by the mind in a specific pattern that the mind has found useful to order to create a consistent universe for us, regardless of whether it has any validity or not, regardless of whether or not it is painful or beneficial.

As we practice with these understandings, we develop the crucial insights necessary to move from our traditional story-telling and self-talk, which leads us to suffer, to a new, wiser understanding that lets our suffering diminish and cease and allows peace of mind to return and creates the conditions necessary for the peace of mind to be sustained, even in the face of a powerful loss.

Our practice does not ask us to deny our feelings in the face of one of life’s greatest challenges, it simple asks us to look honestly at what is happening. It is only with a truthful and truth-filled heart that we can genuinely process death. When the grieving is kind and gentle, it calmly and quietly dissolves and then we can begin the deeper practice of realizing that there are no comings and goings.

Metta Practice for Mourning

Here’s a mourning practice that very quietly and naturally reshapes our perception of a loved-one we have lost so that we can move forward with them joyfully filling our hearts rather than overwhelming us with grief and sorrow.

Recite this chant, slowly and out-loud, twice a day for 49 days. As you recite it, visualize your loved-one with a big smile in a comfortable and happy setting. Sharpen the image and hold it in your imagination as you recite the chant.

Metta Chant

May I be free from anger and hatred.

May I be free from greed and selfishness.

May I be free from fears and anxiety.

May I be free from pain and suffering.

May I be free from ignorance and delusion.

May I be free from negative states of mind.

May I be peaceful and happy.

May I experience peace and tranquility of body and mind.

May name of the deceased be free from anger and hatred.

May name of the deceased be free from greed and selfishness.

May name of the deceased be free from fears and anxiety.

May name of the deceased be free from pain and suffering.

May name of the deceased be free from ignorance and delusion.

May name of the deceased be free from negative states of mind.

May name of the deceased be peaceful and happy.

May name of the deceased experience peace and tranquility of body and mind.

May all beings be free from anger and hatred.

May all beings be free from greed and selfishness.

May all beings be free from fears and anxiety.

May all beings be free from all pain and suffering.

May all beings be free from ignorance and delusion.

May all beings be free from negative states of mind.

May all beings be peaceful and happy.

May all beings experience peace and tranquility of body and mind.

Over the course of the 49 days of chanting, you will notice that your self-talk, your stories, will gradually shift from the pain of loss to memories and images of the person that are filled with joy and happiness. Forty-nine days is a the traditional mourning period in Buddhism, but feel free to continue the practice as long as it brings you comfort and allows you to integrate the loss into your life with a peaceful heart.

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