It sometimes feels, lately, like life is all about trudging, putting one foot in front of the other, not to get anywhere, but just because it's what I am supposed to do. I have obligations, I have made choices and now the only manly thing to do is carry them out. One foot in front of the other. Do it because They Said So or I Said So and don't ask any questions. Poor me.
Well.
That's not a very satisfying way to live a life, now, is it? But let's dig a little deeper. After all, what we are searching for is not contentment or happiness but the truth, isn't it? We should never lose sight of the fact that the word dharma, which is what we use to describe the Buddha's teachings, simply means truth in Pali. At first blush this seems a bit egotistical, for the Buddha or those who came after him to claim that they found The Truth. But what this really means is that the Buddha encouraged everyone to find his or her own truth. If his teachings are useful in this pursuit, wonderful. If not, they are to be rejected; the Buddha was very clear about this. So, what's the truth here? Am I really feeling such a darkness, such bleakness as all that? No, not really. But it feels so much more important to be having an existential crisis than to say, "I am tired" or "I am cranky" or "All this darkness is getting me down" or "I would rather not do that today, thank you very much". It makes me feel like Proust or something, that my every Madelaine has deep meaning. But, I mean, Marcel, it was just a cookie, for God's sake.
I was listening to a dharma talk by Heather Martin yesterday (in case you forgot, you can get all the dharma talks you want for free [donations encouraged] at dharmaseed.org) and had an interesting experience I think most of us have had. She said something I have heard before, that I have said many times, that I intellectually accept and believe I thoroughly understand, yet when she said it I finally got it at some level I never got it before. What she said, in essence, was that there is no avoiding that which makes us feel sadness, grief, pain, loss, anger, illness, disrepute, or shame. It is most certainly not the point of the dharma to place us in a position where we no longer feel these things. There are in life what the Buddha called "the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows". He was not prescribing the sorrows ("you must go through these trials") but merely describing them ("like it or not, it's like this"). Nor was he recommending the joys as a preferable state of being. In fact, he want even further and said something quite radical: even having a preference for one mind set over another is suffering.
Now, wait just a minute. I should not prefer feeling good to feeling bad? What's up with that? Could that really be what the Buddha said? Well, not exactly. What he was saying is that the event itself is just an event. When the event occurs—as it is occurring—we have a choice to resist it if it's "negative" or embrace it if it's "positive" (these are our habituated responses) or to accept it as it is. Only the last is the path to freedom. The problem with us deeply conditioned human beings is that this reaction happens in a millisecond, so it ends up feeling inevitable and out of our control. That is what practice is all about.
It has always amazed me how athletes can react in a way that seems almost instinctive. How does one respond in time to a 100 mph tennis serve or pitched baseball? How does one move in just the right way to evade a defender in basketball? The answer is that they have practiced these things over and over and over again until the movements are second nature; they have conditioned themselves to have these responses. Just so, we have conditioned ourselves with our immediate responses to each event. It requires years of practice to recondition ourselves to another response, that of complete and full acceptance first. Only then can thoughtful action take place.
The insight I had yesterday had everything to do with the fact that I practiced and continue to practice day in and day out to find acceptance of every moment as it is. This has largely been an intellectual practice and often feels more futile than useful since the same conditioned responses of clinging and rejecting are still the most common ones for me. But I believe with all my heart that it is only by preparing the ground that these little insights come to us and are recognized as such. Out of such small insights is a larger, more global insight constructed. What we need is something in which we can believe strongly enough so we continue practicing even when it doesn't feel particularly fruitful within our definition of what fruit it should bear. But experiencing these insights can encourage us to seek more where those came from. When we find that the dharma really has been telling us the truth in some particular, it causes us to be curious about whether or not the rest of it might be true as well. When even this fails us, we can reflect that people we respect have used these principles to become better, more joyful, deeply compassionate human beings and believe that it is possible for us, too. We can reflect that billions of people over thousands of years have taken on this practice.
Perhaps the most important realization is that the spiritual path does not lead to progressively more and more pleasure. Sorry, it just doesn't. It may well lead to more joy, which is an entirely different thing. If we are practicing for the particular reason of feeling better, we are doing several destructive things. First, we are setting ourselves up to fail; as I said above, there are ten thousand sorrows that are unavoidable. Second, we are setting conditions on the dharma, which will inevitably fail these conditions and may cause us to believe the dharma has no efficacy. (We made these conditions up, by the way; nowhere is there a list of promises of what will be gained by this practice). Third, by loading up this practice with expectations we are allowing our egos to take over a process that is not of the ego but of the broader consciousness. This can only lead to suffering. As the saying goes, "expectations are premeditated resentments". These expectations can be very subtle, as simple as the belief that sometime, someday, if I practice long and hard enough I will be at utter, complete, imperturbable peace. The tricky part of the dharma is that this kind of peace truly is possible, but can only be found by achieving a state in which one no longer desires it (or anything else). So much of this practice is that of abandoning what we have come to believe as true in favor of what is truer. Our capacity to cling to beliefs that have never done what we believe they will never ceases to amaze me. (An example: if I get enough material goods, I will finally feel secure, safe, and comfortable; that's a popular one. Here's another oldie but goodie: if I accomplish all of the things on this list, I will be able to finally rest and be content). What evidence do we have that any of our assumptions are true? Have they ever been?
One of the things about which I have been cranky the past few days is that I am once again trying to live by the principles for eating I have set out in this blog after being somewhat lax over the holidays. I would really rather continue eating snowman cookies and drinking egg nog, thank you very much. That certainly is one option and there is nothing standing between me and another headless snowman. But I know that, contrary to what my body and mind seem to be telling me, there is no freedom in the indulgence of excessive amounts of food. There is freedom, however, in coming face to face with this irritability and my feelings of unfairness ("me want cookie!"), to use this as grist for the mill of my spiritual practice. Nothing is required of me but that I stick to my vow of renunciation and watch to see what happens. I have the chance to be a spectator at one of the finest shows of all time; I would be a fool to miss it.
Well.
That's not a very satisfying way to live a life, now, is it? But let's dig a little deeper. After all, what we are searching for is not contentment or happiness but the truth, isn't it? We should never lose sight of the fact that the word dharma, which is what we use to describe the Buddha's teachings, simply means truth in Pali. At first blush this seems a bit egotistical, for the Buddha or those who came after him to claim that they found The Truth. But what this really means is that the Buddha encouraged everyone to find his or her own truth. If his teachings are useful in this pursuit, wonderful. If not, they are to be rejected; the Buddha was very clear about this. So, what's the truth here? Am I really feeling such a darkness, such bleakness as all that? No, not really. But it feels so much more important to be having an existential crisis than to say, "I am tired" or "I am cranky" or "All this darkness is getting me down" or "I would rather not do that today, thank you very much". It makes me feel like Proust or something, that my every Madelaine has deep meaning. But, I mean, Marcel, it was just a cookie, for God's sake.
I was listening to a dharma talk by Heather Martin yesterday (in case you forgot, you can get all the dharma talks you want for free [donations encouraged] at dharmaseed.org) and had an interesting experience I think most of us have had. She said something I have heard before, that I have said many times, that I intellectually accept and believe I thoroughly understand, yet when she said it I finally got it at some level I never got it before. What she said, in essence, was that there is no avoiding that which makes us feel sadness, grief, pain, loss, anger, illness, disrepute, or shame. It is most certainly not the point of the dharma to place us in a position where we no longer feel these things. There are in life what the Buddha called "the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows". He was not prescribing the sorrows ("you must go through these trials") but merely describing them ("like it or not, it's like this"). Nor was he recommending the joys as a preferable state of being. In fact, he want even further and said something quite radical: even having a preference for one mind set over another is suffering.
Now, wait just a minute. I should not prefer feeling good to feeling bad? What's up with that? Could that really be what the Buddha said? Well, not exactly. What he was saying is that the event itself is just an event. When the event occurs—as it is occurring—we have a choice to resist it if it's "negative" or embrace it if it's "positive" (these are our habituated responses) or to accept it as it is. Only the last is the path to freedom. The problem with us deeply conditioned human beings is that this reaction happens in a millisecond, so it ends up feeling inevitable and out of our control. That is what practice is all about.
It has always amazed me how athletes can react in a way that seems almost instinctive. How does one respond in time to a 100 mph tennis serve or pitched baseball? How does one move in just the right way to evade a defender in basketball? The answer is that they have practiced these things over and over and over again until the movements are second nature; they have conditioned themselves to have these responses. Just so, we have conditioned ourselves with our immediate responses to each event. It requires years of practice to recondition ourselves to another response, that of complete and full acceptance first. Only then can thoughtful action take place.
The insight I had yesterday had everything to do with the fact that I practiced and continue to practice day in and day out to find acceptance of every moment as it is. This has largely been an intellectual practice and often feels more futile than useful since the same conditioned responses of clinging and rejecting are still the most common ones for me. But I believe with all my heart that it is only by preparing the ground that these little insights come to us and are recognized as such. Out of such small insights is a larger, more global insight constructed. What we need is something in which we can believe strongly enough so we continue practicing even when it doesn't feel particularly fruitful within our definition of what fruit it should bear. But experiencing these insights can encourage us to seek more where those came from. When we find that the dharma really has been telling us the truth in some particular, it causes us to be curious about whether or not the rest of it might be true as well. When even this fails us, we can reflect that people we respect have used these principles to become better, more joyful, deeply compassionate human beings and believe that it is possible for us, too. We can reflect that billions of people over thousands of years have taken on this practice.
Perhaps the most important realization is that the spiritual path does not lead to progressively more and more pleasure. Sorry, it just doesn't. It may well lead to more joy, which is an entirely different thing. If we are practicing for the particular reason of feeling better, we are doing several destructive things. First, we are setting ourselves up to fail; as I said above, there are ten thousand sorrows that are unavoidable. Second, we are setting conditions on the dharma, which will inevitably fail these conditions and may cause us to believe the dharma has no efficacy. (We made these conditions up, by the way; nowhere is there a list of promises of what will be gained by this practice). Third, by loading up this practice with expectations we are allowing our egos to take over a process that is not of the ego but of the broader consciousness. This can only lead to suffering. As the saying goes, "expectations are premeditated resentments". These expectations can be very subtle, as simple as the belief that sometime, someday, if I practice long and hard enough I will be at utter, complete, imperturbable peace. The tricky part of the dharma is that this kind of peace truly is possible, but can only be found by achieving a state in which one no longer desires it (or anything else). So much of this practice is that of abandoning what we have come to believe as true in favor of what is truer. Our capacity to cling to beliefs that have never done what we believe they will never ceases to amaze me. (An example: if I get enough material goods, I will finally feel secure, safe, and comfortable; that's a popular one. Here's another oldie but goodie: if I accomplish all of the things on this list, I will be able to finally rest and be content). What evidence do we have that any of our assumptions are true? Have they ever been?
One of the things about which I have been cranky the past few days is that I am once again trying to live by the principles for eating I have set out in this blog after being somewhat lax over the holidays. I would really rather continue eating snowman cookies and drinking egg nog, thank you very much. That certainly is one option and there is nothing standing between me and another headless snowman. But I know that, contrary to what my body and mind seem to be telling me, there is no freedom in the indulgence of excessive amounts of food. There is freedom, however, in coming face to face with this irritability and my feelings of unfairness ("me want cookie!"), to use this as grist for the mill of my spiritual practice. Nothing is required of me but that I stick to my vow of renunciation and watch to see what happens. I have the chance to be a spectator at one of the finest shows of all time; I would be a fool to miss it.
Yep, I knew something's been up with you lately. Take care of yourself, Reid.
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