On my way home from work not long ago I walked past a sign on a lawn that said, "FREE". All of the wares it has advertised as for the taking had already gone, so I felt free to pick the sign up and take it home. To me it was a reminder of a fundamental truth: I am already free and any lack of freedom I feel is due to an imprisonment of my own devising. It brought to mind the wonderful Kabir poem about small men who "build cages for everyone they know, while the sage...keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." The sage knows that the cages are not only unnecessary but a hindrance. Nonetheless, as Heather Martin helpfully points out when discussing this poem, the sage does not unlock the cages, he merely drops keys, trusting to the native intelligence of the imprisoned to free themselves.
I mentioned a couple of days ago the Pema Chodron quote, "Not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution." Why is this? Because when we focus on resolution (one of my primary failings, I must admit), we are always leaning into the future, when everything will theoretically be definite and complete and comfortable. We are never in the here and now, where we are always free, no matter how confining our current circumstances may seem to be. The most enlightened of our leaders, from Martin Luther King to Gandhi to Nelson Mandela to the opposition leaders in Burma have emerged from years of imprisonment to say that they have never felt so free as when they were imprisoned because to allow the oppressors to determine the state of their mind would most certainly have let the bad guys win. But they also emerged free because they never lost sight of the fact that the freedom they sought was inside them and not "out there".
The core of the Buddha's teaching, as I have written several times before (stop me if you've heard this one) is that only when we place our focus on this moment and not on the past or future that we have any chance at joy. We may be unhappy about what is in this moment, but that need not take us away from joy. Right after the Buddha reached enlightenment, so the story goes, the forces of Mara were ranged against him. Mara, who is the embodiment of everything that works counter to enlightenment--fear, insecurity, lust, greed and their compatriots--said to the Buddha, "Don't you realize I could pluck your eyes out?" To which the Buddha responded, "Don't you realize that I would not care?" Though this seems a rather heavy witness (one would have to be enlightened to truly get to that point, I think), the point this story makes is that in this moment the Buddha is not blind. In the moment of having his eyes plucked out he would be in pain and sorrowful, but would never lose his focus on the here and now. And blind, he would embrace that blindness as his current reality and never mourn the loss. In other words, he would never lose the freedom that is this very moment. When I spoke of dread two days ago, I think I had lost sight of this basic truth.
Jack Kornfield uses the analogy of a snake. When we go walking in the woods we may fear seeing a snake. If we see a snake, we fear that it will notice us. When it looks our way, we fear that it will come our way. When it comes our way we fear that it will bite us. When it bites us, we fear what the venom will do to us. What we fear, then, is never what is present. This is the nature of fear, to dread that which we anticipate might happen. Mark Twain may or may not have said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." When we live in fear we leave the freedom of the present moment for anticipation of something vague in the future which might or might not occur. In a rather extreme example, I found myself one day concerned that a raccoon or other wild animal might follow my dog into the basement. Now, this may be a somewhat rational fear, but becomes ludicrous when you consider that I not only have no dog door, I have no dog! Of course, I was able to laugh at myself and leave this vague fear behind (we have considered getting a dog and I was thinking in a purely hypothetical way about the mere possibility of a pet door). But many of our fears seem to us very real, what Pema refers to as "ephemeral--but at the same time vivid and convincing--stuff."
The antidote to fear is not courage, though that helps. The antidote to fear is compassion, the ability to not only face our fears with love but also to turn our hearts toward the fear of others and to appreciate and incorporate a heart-felt understanding of those fears even before our own.
I mentioned a couple of days ago the Pema Chodron quote, "Not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution." Why is this? Because when we focus on resolution (one of my primary failings, I must admit), we are always leaning into the future, when everything will theoretically be definite and complete and comfortable. We are never in the here and now, where we are always free, no matter how confining our current circumstances may seem to be. The most enlightened of our leaders, from Martin Luther King to Gandhi to Nelson Mandela to the opposition leaders in Burma have emerged from years of imprisonment to say that they have never felt so free as when they were imprisoned because to allow the oppressors to determine the state of their mind would most certainly have let the bad guys win. But they also emerged free because they never lost sight of the fact that the freedom they sought was inside them and not "out there".
The core of the Buddha's teaching, as I have written several times before (stop me if you've heard this one) is that only when we place our focus on this moment and not on the past or future that we have any chance at joy. We may be unhappy about what is in this moment, but that need not take us away from joy. Right after the Buddha reached enlightenment, so the story goes, the forces of Mara were ranged against him. Mara, who is the embodiment of everything that works counter to enlightenment--fear, insecurity, lust, greed and their compatriots--said to the Buddha, "Don't you realize I could pluck your eyes out?" To which the Buddha responded, "Don't you realize that I would not care?" Though this seems a rather heavy witness (one would have to be enlightened to truly get to that point, I think), the point this story makes is that in this moment the Buddha is not blind. In the moment of having his eyes plucked out he would be in pain and sorrowful, but would never lose his focus on the here and now. And blind, he would embrace that blindness as his current reality and never mourn the loss. In other words, he would never lose the freedom that is this very moment. When I spoke of dread two days ago, I think I had lost sight of this basic truth.
Jack Kornfield uses the analogy of a snake. When we go walking in the woods we may fear seeing a snake. If we see a snake, we fear that it will notice us. When it looks our way, we fear that it will come our way. When it comes our way we fear that it will bite us. When it bites us, we fear what the venom will do to us. What we fear, then, is never what is present. This is the nature of fear, to dread that which we anticipate might happen. Mark Twain may or may not have said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." When we live in fear we leave the freedom of the present moment for anticipation of something vague in the future which might or might not occur. In a rather extreme example, I found myself one day concerned that a raccoon or other wild animal might follow my dog into the basement. Now, this may be a somewhat rational fear, but becomes ludicrous when you consider that I not only have no dog door, I have no dog! Of course, I was able to laugh at myself and leave this vague fear behind (we have considered getting a dog and I was thinking in a purely hypothetical way about the mere possibility of a pet door). But many of our fears seem to us very real, what Pema refers to as "ephemeral--but at the same time vivid and convincing--stuff."
The antidote to fear is not courage, though that helps. The antidote to fear is compassion, the ability to not only face our fears with love but also to turn our hearts toward the fear of others and to appreciate and incorporate a heart-felt understanding of those fears even before our own.
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