Thinking V

To understand bondage and liberation, we need to see how we are bound by our thoughts. This is not just the discursive thoughts, but our projections, which are the objects of the discursive thoughts, and the emotions that link the two. This whole system of thoughts is bondage.

When we don’t recognize the nature of these phenomena, we are bound by them. We are taken in by the illusion or mirage, like thirsty people lost in a desert. When we recognize them, we are free from their compulsion. This is self-liberation: this freedom is not brought about by an outside agent, but by our own insight.

Lessons from a New Car

Last summer, when our 1995 Lexus developed an unhealthy affection for the repair shop, I started looking for something nice to replace it with. We finally got our new (to us) car at the end of last month. I had assumed that we would be in for the usual dharmic reminders that such major purchases provide: that an actual car never lives up to the anticipated dream-car; that what is new, fresh, and exciting, rapidly becomes a source of dukkha because of overlooked drawbacks and defects; that with the first scratch, impermanence would be rearing its ugly little head.

I had not counted on receiving a completely different type of teaching. It had been a really busy period when the car was delivered, and I barely had a chance to drive it around town. A week later, my wife Wendy and I headed out in the new car to Boston, New York, and Albany for two weeks of teaching, and visits with family and friends. After a couple of hours on the road, an intermittent squeaking sound from the heater fan became too obvious to ignore.

Wendy and I discussed whether to take the car into a dealership in Boston or New York, or wait until we got back to Halifax to get it repaired. I checked the Canadian warranty to try to figure out if the repair would be covered in the States. As we drove through New Brunswick worrying about what to do, Wendy observed that the irritating noise sounded like a bird chirping. For some reason, I said we should give the bird a name. Wendy said let’s call it Henry.

Soon we were talking about “Henry taking a nap,” when the sound disappeared; “Henry worrying about getting lost,” when we got off the highway and weren’t sure which way to go; “Leaving Henry at the motel parking lot,” when we started off the next morning with a quiet fan. Finally, we worried about getting the car repaired and hurting Henry!

It is amazing how changing our thoughts about a sound can completely change our experience of it. This is the principle behind the Vajrayana practice of visualizing oneself as a deity, and the environment as the deity’s palace: if we can get into the spirit of the game, we can transform our experience of samsara into the experience of a pure realm.

Are We There Yet?

Today is April 4th, 2008, the twenty-first anniversary of the parinirvana of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Twenty-one is the age when we are definitely considered to be adults in Western society, but have we students of Trungpa Rinpoche reached adulthood yet? I wonder.

I always imagined that there would be some clear experience of having arrived at spiritual maturity, a Buddhist bar mitzvah, or some sort of collective birthday party. Now I’m not so sure. I feel strongly connected with my gurus and the lineage, and surrounded by sangha, family, and friends, but I also feel very much alone, floating in space, with no planet in sight, and no umbilical cord to attach me to the mother ship.

Maybe twenty-one is the time to give up dreams of getting somewhere and just be. Maybe this is it.

Cheerful New Year!

Best wishes to all of you, as Buddhists around the world celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year, the Chinese New Year, the Lunar New Year, and Shambhala Day (as it is known in the Shambhala community).

Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Shambhala, made a point of wishing people a cheerful New Year, and cheerful birthday, instead of a happy New Year and happy birthday. He explained that happiness depends on circumstances, while cheerfulness is unconditional—we can always tune into our inherent well-being even if our circumstances are not happy.

It is our alienation from this basic well-being, buddha nature, our true nature, that keeps samsara spinning. By tuning into our true nature we can cheer up on the spot.

So, Cheerful New Year to you!

Eureka!

There’s an article about innovation in today’s New York Times that offers parallels to the process of progressing along the Buddhist path and provides important lessons for practitioners. It’s called “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work.”

The point of the article is that the popular myth that innovation depends on “eureka moments,” great breakthroughs, is a fiction. Innovation depends on a slow process of hard work with many little improvements and small insights.

The same thing could be said about the Buddhist myths of sudden enlightenment and transcendental visions. Progress on the path is always gradual and almost imperceptible. It comes from a slow process of study, contemplation, and meditation, with small insights and a gradual decrease in delusion and kleshas.

Hoping for sudden enlightenment is as debilitating as trying to find the innovation “that will ‘revolutionize the industry,’ create a ‘billion-dollar business’ or ‘make one rich overnight.’” Many people find it difficult to sustain their practice because, either they doubt that they have the “special talent” it takes to make the “big breakthrough,” or they gave it a try and “nothing happened.”

As Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, ‘Oh, this pace is terrible!’ But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself.”

Two Truths

All Buddhist traditions present two realities. Sometimes these are called samsara and nirvana. Sometimes they are called bondage and liberation. Sometimes they are referred to as suffering and its cessation.

Whatever they’re called, the problem is always the same: how do we get from point A to point B? How do we get from the crappy, uptight, confused reality that we currently experience, to the open, relaxed, brilliant reality of the buddhas? The funny thing about the Buddha’s answer to this question is that point A and point B are not two different locations, but one location viewed differently. Don’t you think that’s interesting?

This blog is about the process of transformation that gets us from point A to point B (which are really the same point) and some of the places of interest we might see along the way.