The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (4 page)

The message is that each of us has all that it takes to become fully enlightened. We have basic energy coursing through us. Sometimes it manifests as brilliance and sometimes it manifests as confusion. Because we are decent, basically good people, we ourselves can sort out what to accept and what to reject. We can discern what will make us complete, sane, grown-up people, and what – if we are too involved in it – will keep us children forever. This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us.

six
joy

A
lmost a year ago, a dear friend of ours, Sister Ayya Khema, a German woman who is a Theravadin nun living in Sri Lanka, came to visit us and to lead a
vipashyana
(insight meditation) retreat. The retreat for me personally was something of a revelation, because she emphasized joy. I hadn’t realized how much emphasis I had put on suffering in my own practice. I had focused on coming to terms with the unpleasant, unacceptable, embarrassing, and painful things that I do. In the process, I had very subtly forgotten about joy.

In our seven-day silent retreat, Ayya Khema taught us that each of us has in our heart a joy that’s accessible to us; by connecting to it and letting it flower, we allow ourselves to celebrate our practice and our lives. Joy is like a soft spring rain that allows us to lighten up, to enjoy ourselves, and therefore it’s a whole new way of looking at suffering.

In a little book called A
Guide
to
Walking Meditation
, in the chapter ‘The World Contains All the Wonders of the Pure Land,’ Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘I don’t think that all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the
three times will criticize me for giving you a little secret, that there is no need to go somewhere else to find the wonders of the Pure Land.’ That sense of wonder and delight is present in every moment, every breath, every step, every movement of our own ordinary everyday lives, if we can connect with it. The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

Joy has to do with seeing how big, how completely unobstructed, and how precious things are. Resenting what happens to you and complaining about your life are like refusing to smell the wild roses when you go for a morning walk, or like being so blind that you don’t see a huge black raven when it lands in the tree that you’re sitting under. We can get so caught up in our own personal pain or worries that we don’t notice that the wind has come up or that somebody has put flowers on the diningroom table or that when we walked out in the morning, the flags weren’t up, and that when we came back, they were flying. Resentment, bitterness, and holding a grudge prevent us from seeing and hearing and tasting and delighting.

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to
which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.

Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.

Trungpa Rinpoche always used to say, ‘You can do it.’ That was probably one of his main teachings, ‘You can do it.’ Thich Nhat Hanh, in his
Guide
to
Walking Meditation
, begins by talking about how everybody carries around this burden, and if you want to put it off, if you want to lay it down, you
can
do it. You
can
connect with the joy in your heart.

On a day of silence like today, when things are very still, you may find that you are feeling grim and doing everything with a grim expression: grimly opening the door, grimly drinking your tea, concentrating so hard on being quiet and still and moving slowly that you’re miserable. On the other hand, you could just relax and realize that, behind all the worry, complaint, and disapproval that goes on in your mind, the sun is always coming up in the morning, moving across the sky, and going down in the evening. The
birds are always out there collecting their food and making their nests and flying across the sky. The grass is always being blown by the wind or standing still. Food and flowers and trees are growing out of the earth. There’s enormous richness. You could develop your passion for life and your curiosity and your interest. You could connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.

The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, ‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’ Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

seven
taking a bigger perspective

T
his morning when I came to meditation I was hungry and tired; I was also happy. When we took the morning walk, I felt even happier, and I realized it had to do with something that happens to us when we practice: we find that we have a bigger perspective on our lives. This feels almost like a blessing or a gift.

In many traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, the circle is a powerful symbol for the sacredness of all things. Throughout these traditions, there are rituals in which the image of the circle is used like this: by drawing a circle around yourself and standing in the middle of it, you realize that you are always at the center of the universe. The circle that surrounds you shows you that you’re always in the sacred space.

In Buddhism we talk about mindfulness and awareness. We’re taught mindfulness through oryoki, and through bowing, and through being with the breath, labeling our thoughts ‘thinking.’ There’s a lot of precision, but also a lot of gentleness. Along with being very precise about our world, there’s also
always space around us that is called gentleness: we allow ourselves to experience how large and fluid and full of color and energy our world is. This space is our circle.

When we talk about mindfulness and awareness, we’re not talking about something stern, a discipline that we impose on ourselves so that we can clean up our act and be better and stand up straighter and smell nicer. It’s more that we practice some sense of loving-kindness toward microphones and oryoki bowls and our hands and each other and this room and all the doors we go in and out of. Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you’re always standing at the center of the world.

Some of you may have read a book called
Black Elk Speaks
, in which an old Plains Indian man tells how he had a great vision when he was nine years old. He became so sick that everyone thought he was dead. He was in a coma for a week or more, during which he was shown how the sacred way in which his people lived was going to be lost. He was also shown ways to help save it from being completely lost. In this coma he was taken to the top of Harney Peak, in the Black Hills of Dakota, which the Native Americans of the United States regard as the center of the world. But after he had been taken to Harney Peak and been given this great vision, Black Elk said that he realized that everywhere was the center of the
world. Basically, everywhere you are is the center of the world. You’re always standing in the middle of sacred space, standing in the middle of the circle.

People often say, ‘Meditation is all very well, but what does it have to do with my life?’ What it has to do with your life is that perhaps through this simple practice of paying attention – giving loving-kindness to your speech and your actions and the movements of your mind – you begin to realize that you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle, and that’s your whole life. This room is not the sacred circle. Gampo Abbey is not the sacred circle. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’re always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always around you. Everyone who walks up to you has entered that sacred space, and it’s not an accident. Whatever comes into the space is there to teach you.

Through my experience of Buddhism and my deep love and respect for my teachers, the teachings, and the practices, I’ve come to see that it’s good to stick to one vehicle and go deeper and deeper and deeper. But by doing this, I’ve begun to see the sacredness of everybody’s wisdom and the fact that people discover the same truths through many avenues. Meditation begins to open up your life, so that you’re not caught in self-concern, just wanting life to go your way. In that case you no longer realize that you’re standing at the center of the world, that you’re in the middle of a sacred circle, because you’re so concerned with your worries, pains, limitations, desires,
and fears that you are blind to the beauty of existence. All you feel by being caught up like this is misery, as well as enormous resentment about life in general. How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.

There was once a woman who was arrogant and proud. She decided she wanted to attain enlightenment, so she asked all the authorities how to do that. One said, ‘Well, if you climb to the top of this very high mountain, you’ll find a cave there. Sitting inside that cave is a very wise old woman, and she will tell you.’ So the woman thought, ‘Good, I’ll do that. Nothing but the best.’ Having endured great hardships, she finally found this cave, and sure enough, sitting there was this very gentle, spiritual-looking old woman in white clothes who smiled at her beatifically. Overcome with awe and respect, she prostrated at the feet of this woman and said, ‘I want to attain enlightenment. Show me how.’ The wise woman looked at her with her beatific smile and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to attain enlightenment?’ And the woman said, ‘Of course I’m sure.’ Whereupon the smiling woman turned into a demon, stood up brandishing a great big stick, and started chasing her, saying, ‘Now! Now! Now!’ For the rest of her life, that lady could never get away from the demon who was always saying, ‘Now!’

So often Rinpoche would talk about nowness. The chapters ‘Nowness’ and ‘Discovering Magic’ in his
book
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
are all about what I’m saying here. If you want to attain enlightenment, you have to do it now. If you’re arrogant and stubborn, it may take someone running after you with a stick. But the more you open your heart, the more you make friends with your body, speech, mind, and the world that’s inside of your circle – your domestic situation, the people you live with, the house you find yourself eating breakfast in every day – the more you appreciate the fact that when you turn on the tap, water comes out. If you have ever lived without water, you really appreciate that. There are all kinds of miracles. Everything is like that, absolutely wonderful.

Now. That’s the key. Now, now, now. Mindfulness trains you to be awake and alive, fully curious, about what? Well, about now, right? You sit in meditation and the out-breath is now and waking up from your fantasies is now and even the fantasies are now, although they seem to take you into the past and into the future. The more you can be completely
now
, the more you realize that you’re in the center of the world, standing in the middle of a sacred circle. It’s no small affair, whether you’re brushing your teeth or cooking your food or wiping your bottom. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.

Our life’s work is to use what we have been given to wake up. If there were two people who were exactly the same – same body, same speech, same mind, same mother, same father, same house, same
food, everything the same – one of them could use what he has to wake up and the other could use it to become more resentful, bitter, and sour. It doesn’t matter what you’re given, whether it’s physical deformity or enormous wealth or poverty, beauty or ugliness, mental stability or mental instability, life in the middle of a madhouse or life in the middle of a peaceful, silent desert. Whatever you’re given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That’s the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already – your body, your speech, your mind?

Here’s something that’s very helpful to know about now. The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us. The more sensitive we become to this, the more we realize that when we start getting angry or denigrating ourselves or craving things in a way that makes us feel miserable, we begin to shut down, shut out, as if we were sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon but we had put a big black bag over our heads.

You can experiment with this. You can go out there to the cliffs overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the first hit is always, ‘Wow! It’s so big,’ and your mind opens. But if you stand there long enough, you’ll start to worry about something. Then you realize (if you want to do this as an exercise) that it feels as if everything is closing down and getting very small. The trick about nowness is that you can let go and open up again to that space. You
can do that at any moment, always. But it does take making friends with yourself. It does take coming to know your anger, coming to know your self-deprecation, coming to know your craving and wanting, coming to know your boredom, and making friends with those things.