The Lotus Still Blooms (23 page)

Even our deepest and most holy states of being are still impermanent. We can achieve great states of mind and being and live for a while in a state of clear light. But something rattling always occurs. Life makes its outrageous demands on our time and attention, and our elevated state of being collapses into the mundane. Impermanence.

Impermanence and an understanding of it can cause us to value our beloved, our parents, our children, our family and our friends even more. My husband, David, daily engages in the Buddhist practice of meditating on his own death, a practice I have yet to begin. He says that meditating on his impermanence assists him living in and appreciating more fully the present moment.

He finds this meditation to be most beneficial among his spiritual practices. Once several years ago I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak of this practice and his having done it for many years. In his engaging, whimsical way he said, “I have been taught that this will be beneficial at the moment of death, but since at the moment of death I won’t be able to tell you if this is so, I’ll just have to see!” Then he laughed heartily.

Practicing clinging, grasping and attachment is the antithesis of embracing the Dharma Seal of Impermanence. We cling to what was, and we cause ourselves to suffer. We grasp at what we once had, and we cause ourselves to suffer. We attach ourselves to mistaken concepts and attitudes, to unskilled behaviors, to unconscious people, and we cause ourselves to suffer.

Through these three ego activities we endeavor to keep life like it was. We endeavor to keep the river from flowing, but we cannot stop the flow of life no matter how much we protect or fight our own battle against it. When we awaken to the fact of impermanence, we can then begin to live a more mindful existence, which in turn results in a more loving and joyous life.

A renowned Buddhist teacher, who himself was a teacher of the Dalai Lama and who spent twenty-two years of his life in retreat, said near the close of his life: “When you look deeply, you realize there is nothing that is permanent and constant, nothing, not even the tiniest hair on your body. And this is not a theory but something you can actually come to know and realize and see, even with your very own eyes.”

Meditating on impermanence is not something most of us relish doing. We have become very adept at pretending that, if we do not look deeply, we can keep the masquerade going forever, but . . . we cannot. Everything we treasure will one day be visited by the three fellows of sickness, aging, death. This applies to a body as well as to an automobile or your home or the Grand Canyon.

If you have been laying up your treasures in the material world, valuing your “stuff” as though those things have meaning, the day of awakening will come. And if you aren’t mindful now and don’t endeavor to know a deeper truth, that day can be quite painful.

A dear and beautiful friend of mine, had been, as long as I had known her, Velcroed to her possessions. She believed her “stuff” gave her a sense of self, status and position. Time went by, her accumulations grew, and her husband’s accumulations grew. Among her husband’s accumulations was a girlfriend living in their second home. My friend was slammed in the face with some very unpleasant facts. Filing for divorce was extremely difficult, for she did love her husband. But she had been in total denial about his extended “business” absences. She did not live in an “equal division” property state and had not been married for twenty years, which would have put her in a better financial position.

To shorten this grim story, she did not fare well in the divorce settlement, in part because she was too traumatized and frightened to stand up to her estranged husband and his powerful attorneys. Her life as she had known it was over. Her husband was gone. Her home had to be sold. Her possessions, besides being divided up, also had to be sold because she was so cash poor. What she had been and what she had possessed was no more.

For the first few months she was inconsolable and considered suicide. Why? Because she had no inner resources. She built her sense of self on outer resources and was quite clueless about any inner world. With the help of family, friends and therapy, she slowly began to crawl out of the black abyss to which she had descended. She did have a good heart, albeit a wounded one. Life forced her to look at her attachments and her clinging and grasping. She was taught a very harsh lesson on impermanence that she is still learning. She thought all her stuff gave her life meaning. Now she is seeking meaning from within through finally finding a spiritual practice, seeking a spiritual community and continuing in therapy.

The teachings on meaninglessness, which I first encountered in
A Course in Miracles
, were a perfect introduction for me to have to grasp impermanence. To learn that nothing has an inherent sense of meaning than to come to understand that with practice it was a tiny leap for my conditioned mind to make into understanding impermanence and emptiness.

The Seed of Impermanence does not mean that we do not treasure life. Rather, a true understanding of impermanence allows us the experience of being truly alive and all that accompanies that feeling. It brings us to a state of mind where we can value every person, each moment, because we know however wonderful, boring or challenging it is, it is fleeting. Don’t make the soul mistake of not valuing those you love while they are with you. Love them now. Be kind to them now. Be generous with them now. Treasure them now.

We can learn through pleasure or pain. Unfortunately most of us choose pain. And it was then that through loss, chaos, cheating and deception my friend was forced to learn her lessons. In time it did bring her closer to her core, the love and goodness that was and is in her.

May the profound words of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche resonate in your heart: “Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.” What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

In meditation do a life review of the 10 Destructive Actions. These ten break down as three physical, four verbal and three mental.

These ten destructive actions lead to great mental confusion and distress. To do this meditative practice properly with adequate focus on each action, you may need to do it in three parts over three days. Practice releasing them until you feel a positive shift in your consciousness and sense your perceptions clearing.

Look at each one of the ten and ask: How has this shown up in my life? How does this apply to me? It may be helpful to have a notepad and jot down whatever arises in your mind.

To deepen this practice you can on another occasion explore how you feel others have directed these ten destructive actions toward you. Practice forgiving yourself and others for whatever arises in order to free yourself from its karmic hold on you.

Repeating this meditation frequently clears out these destructive factors from our minds and the other person’s and leads us into having a pure heart. This is particularly beneficial to prepare one to be conscious at the time of death.

Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully communicates in
The Heart of the Buddha Teachings
: “As long as we see ourselves as the one who loves and the other as the one who is loved, as long as we value ourselves more than others or see ourselves different from others, we do not have true equanimity. We have to put ourselves ‘into the other person’s skin’ and become one with him if we want to understand and truly love him. When that happens there is no ‘self’ and no ‘other.’”

Like certain other Buddhist teachings, non-self is a difficult concept initially for the Western mind to grasp. I generally think of non-self as oneness, although my Buddhist friends tell me it is not exactly the same. It can be more fully explained as emptiness. There is no self that remains the same.

There is no permanent self. We can understand this, because we know every second countless cells are dying and others are replacing them. Thus, we are not
exactly
in the same form from one moment to the next. This is non-self. Nothing is ever separate.

I can understand the concept of separation. Believing we are separate keeps us from knowing the depths of the great spiritual teachings. One can adamantly believe that he is separate from you, from the annoying relatives, from the homeless man on the subway—but the truth is, he is not. This is non-self. Personally I think something has got to be lost in the translation of the word “non-self.” Healing the Divide is a Buddhist organization founded by Richard Gere. As the name implies, it is dedicated to assisting us in seeing the oneness of us all.

Those I call annoying are in me. You are in me. I am in you. The homeless man is in me. The radiant child is in me. The flower, the tree, the sky, the ocean is in me. We are all interwoven in the same fabric of life.

Non-self is not a Buddhist philosophy, it is an insight. In our Western thought, when we grasp non-self it is an “aha” moment, a great and profound insight into the fundamental nature of life.

To explain this challenging concept of non-self more fully, I have adapted a teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh in which he explains non-self in a family construct.

Our families are in our consciousness. We carry all the seeds of our particular families in our “store consciousness.” We can deny them, attempt to shut them out of our lives, but there they are, lurking in our store consciousness.

I know a number of families in my work and world where an adult son has pulled away and completely rejected his family of origin, usually for no apparent reason. A minor upset or infraction occurs, and “Joey” is gone. It makes no sense whatsoever to everyone in the family. It seems unreasonable. Joey has left no forwarding address. This is not a rare or random occurrence. I know of at least six families where this has occurred. Such family dysfunctions show up everywhere. Oh how we wish it was not so. But it shows us, if we are willing to see, that when we run away we are still carrying our family in us.

Impermanence and non-self can open the doors to reality for us, as we begin to touch all things and all aspects of life deeply. We come to understand that one thing is all things, that one person is all persons.

Many years ago I learned this wonderfully insightful exercise from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I have taught it to numerous folks:

Whenever you cast a judgment upon another person, you train your mind to instantly respond by saying, “Just like me.” Examples:

A truth I have long endeavored to live and have taught is that it is not possible for us to observe, witness or judge a behavior or trait in another person unless it lives in us. People generally resist this teaching, and some even raise bitter objections. No matter how adamantly they argue, it does not alter “Just like me.” If anything, it brings the teaching into greater clarity.

I teach this concept in my first book,
A Course in Love
. There was a woman who was in my congregation years ago who really loathed me (we know she actually loathed herself, even though she focused her venom toward me). For the longest time I could not get a grasp as to why she was in my life. I’d practice forgiving her, blessing her, letting her go, sending her on to meet her good, and she would still be there snarling at me from the front row and taking notes. I later found out the notes were about my wardrobe, not my teachings. She was vitriolic in her hateful words toward me, but she would not evaporate or go away no matter how much I prayed.