The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (5 page)

There’s another story that you may have read that has to do with what we call heaven and hell, life and death, good and bad. It’s a story about how those things don’t really exist except as a creation of our own minds. It goes like this: A big burly samurai comes to the wise man and says, ‘Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.’ And the roshi looks him in the face and says: ‘Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you?’ The samurai starts to get purple in the face, his hair starts to stand up, but the roshi won’t stop, he keeps saying, ‘I miserable worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?’ Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he’s just about to cut off the head of the roshi. Then the roshi says, ‘That’s hell.’ The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it, that he just created his own hell; he was deep in hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes and he starts to cry and he puts his palms together and the roshi says, ‘That’s heaven.’

There isn’t any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

When you want to say no to the situation you’re in, it’s fine to say no, but when you build up a big case to the point where you’re so convinced that you would draw your sword and cut off someone’s head, that kind of resistance to life is hell.

In the way we practice, we don’t say, ‘Hell is bad and heaven is good’ or ‘Get rid of hell and just seek heaven,’ but we encourage ourselves to develop an open heart and an open mind to heaven, to hell, to everything. Why? Because only then can we realize that no matter what comes along, we’re always standing at the center of the world in the middle of sacred space, and everything that comes into that circle and exists with us there has come to teach us what we need to know.

Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you’re blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.

So that’s why, this morning, even though I was very hungry and tired, I was also very happy. And I would like to express my gratitude to Trungpa Rinpoche for that.

eight
no such thing as a true story

I
n Taoism there’s a famous saying that goes, ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.’ Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is, ‘As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.’ The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way is our world created. In the Middle Ages, everyone accepted the idea, based on fear, that there was only one way to believe; if you didn’t believe that way, you were the enemy. It was death to all forms of creative, fresh thinking. Many things that people had been able to see, people just couldn’t see anymore because they didn’t believe in them. Once they began to think and believe in a certain way, there were all kinds of things that they literally couldn’t hear, see, smell, or touch, because those things were outside their belief system.

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn’t mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have
things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

Nowadays, some people are stepping out and exploring, but other people are becoming more entrenched in their beliefs. A polarization is occurring, and as a result, for example, we have some Christians getting hysterical about the film
The Last Temptation of Christ
because someone dares to say that Christ is not what a lot of people want to think he is. When a belief system is threatened, people may even become so fanatical that they kill and destroy.

An example is the response of Muslims to Salman Rushdie’s novel
Satanic Verses
, in which he suggests that Muhammad was not what they believe he was – and for that they would condemn Rushdie to death. Actually you see this situation everywhere. Protestants are killing Catholics and Catholics are killing Protestants. Hindus are killing Buddhists and Buddhists are killing Hindus. Jews are killing Christians and Christians are killing Jews. Muslims are killing Christians and Christians are killing Muslims. There are wars all over the world because people are insulted that someone else doesn’t agree with their belief system.

Everybody is guilty of it. It’s what is called fundamental theism. You want something to hold on to,
you want to say, ‘Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous.’ Buddhism is not free of it either. This is a human thing. But in Buddhism there is a teaching that would seemingly undercut all this, if people would only listen to it. It says, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.’ This means that if you can find Buddha and say, ‘It’s this way; Buddha is like this,’ then you had better kill that ‘Buddha’ that you found, that you can say is like this. Contemplative and mystical Christians, Hindus, Jews, people of all faiths and nonfaiths can also have this perspective: if you meet the Christ that can be named, kill that Christ. If you meet the Muhammad or the Jehovah or whoever that can be named and held on to and believed in, smash it.

Now we get to the interesting part. How do you do that? Although this approach sounds pretty aggressive, when we talk this way, we’re actually talking about the ultimate in nonaggression. People find it quite easy to have beliefs and to hold on to them and to let their whole world be a product of their belief system. They also find it quite easy to attack those who disagree. The harder, more courageous thing, which the hero and the heroine, the warrior, and the mystic do, is continually to look one’s beliefs straight in the face, honestly and clearly, and then step beyond them. That requires a lot of heart and kindness. It requires being able to touch and know completely, to the core, your own
experience, without harshness, without making any judgment.

‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’ means that when you see that you’re grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it’s called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.

It’s said in the teachings that if you hold on to your belief there will be conflict. There’s a wonderful story about this. There was a god who knew how men and women love to believe things to be true and make clubs and religions and political systems with the people who agree with them. They just love to make something out of nothing and then write its name on a big banner and march down the street waving it and yelling and screaming, only to have people who believe the opposite come toward them with
their
banner, yelling and screaming. This god decided to try to prove a point about the human condition so that people might, in seeing the absurdity of it, have a good laugh. (A good laugh is the best way to kill the Buddha.) He constructed a big hat divided right down the middle, the left side of which was brilliant blue and the right side flaming red. Then he went to a place where many people were working in the fields on the left side of a road and many other people were working in the fields on the right side of the road. There the god manifested in all his glory; no one could miss him. Big and radiant, wearing his hat,
he walked straight down the road. All the people on the right side of the road dropped their hoes and looked up at this god; all the people on the left side of the road did the same. Everybody was amazed. Then he disappeared. Everyone shouted, ‘We saw God! We saw God!’ They were all full of joy, until someone on the left said, ‘There he was in all his radiance and in his red hat!’ And people on the right said, ‘No, he had on a blue hat.’ This disagreement escalated until the people built walls and began to throw stones at each other. Then the god appeared again. This time he walked in the other direction and then disappeared. Now all the people looked at each other and the ones on the right said, ‘Ah, you were right, he did have on a red hat. We’re so sorry, we just saw incorrectly. You were right and we were wrong.’ The ones on the other side said, ‘No, no. You were right. We were wrong.’ At this point they didn’t know whether to fight or to make friends. Most of them were completely puzzled by the situation. Then the god appeared again. This time he stood in the middle and he turned to the left and then he turned around to the right, and everyone started to laugh.

For us, as people sitting here meditating, as people wanting to live a good, full, unrestricted, adventurous, real kind of life, there is concrete instruction that we can follow, which is the one that we have been following all along in meditation: see what is. Acknowledge it without judging it as right or wrong. Let it go and come back to the present moment.
Whatever comes up, see what is without calling it right or wrong. Acknowledge it. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this. As a way of becoming more compassionate toward yourself and toward others, as a way of becoming less dogmatic, prejudiced, determined to have your own way, absolutely sure that you’re right and the other person is wrong, as a way to develop a sense of humor about the whole thing, to lighten it up, open it up, you could do this. You could also begin to notice whenever you find yourself blaming others or justifying yourself. If you spent the rest of your life just noticing that and letting it be a way to uncover the silliness of the human condition – the tragic yet comic drama that we all continually buy into – you could develop a lot of wisdom and a lot of kindness as well as a great sense of humor.

Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world. It’s a chance to see that you’re holding on to your interpretation of reality; it allows you to reflect that that’s all it is – nothing more, nothing less: just your interpretation of reality.

nine
weather and the four noble truths

W
hen the Buddha first taught, he could have taught anything. He had just waked up completely. His mind was clear and he experienced no obstacles – just the vastness and goodness of himself and his life. The story goes, however, that it was difficult for him to express his experience; initially he decided not to teach because he thought no one would be able to understand what he was talking about. He finally decided that he
would
go out and he
would
teach because there were some people who would hear him. The interesting thing is that at first he didn’t talk about the unconditional; he didn’t talk about basic goodness, clarity, space, bliss, wonder, or openness. In the first teaching of the Buddha – the teachings on the four noble truths – he talked about suffering.

I’ve always experienced these teachings as a tremendous affirmation that there is no need to resist being fully alive in this world, that we are in fact part of the web. All of life is interconnected. If something lives, it has life force, the quality of which is energy, a sense of spiritedness. Without that, we
can’t lift our arms or open our mouths or open and shut our eyes. If you have ever been with someone who is dying, you know that at one moment, even though it might be quite weak, there’s life force there, and then the next moment there is none. It’s said that when we die, the four elements – earth, air, fire, water – dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we’re living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world. It’s very curious that because we as human beings have consciousness, we are also subject to a little twist where we resist life’s energies.

I was talking to a man the other day who has severe depression. When he gets depressed, he sits in a chair; he can’t move. All he does is worry. He said that all winter long he sat in the chair, thinking that he ought to go bring the lawn mower out of the snow, but he just couldn’t do it. Now that’s not what I mean by sitting still. Sitting still, or holding one’s seat, means not being pulled away from being fully right there, fully acknowledging and experiencing your life energy. So what happens? I can tell you my experience of it. I was sitting, doing the technique, when this bad feeling came along. Next thing I knew, I was thinking all kinds of things, worrying about something that’s going to happen in September, worrying about who is going to take care of the
minutest little details of something that’s going to happen in October. Then I remembered: sitting still in the middle of a fire or a tornado or an earthquake or a tidal wave, sitting still. This provides the opportunity to experience once again the living quality of our life’s energy – earth, air, fire, and water.

Why do we resist our energy? Why do we resist the life force that flows through us? The first noble truth says that if you are alive, if you have a heart, if you can love, if you can be compassionate, if you can realize the life energy that makes everything change and move and grow and die, then you won’t have any resentment or resistance. The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore, we don’t even have to call it discomfort. It’s simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothness of water, the gentleness of the breezes, and the goodness, solidness, and dependability of the earth. Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. The four elements take on different qualities; they’re like magicians. Sometimes they manifest in one form and sometimes in another. If we feel that that’s a problem, we resist it. The first noble truth recognizes that we also change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon.
We
do that, and there’s no reason
to resist it. If we resist it, the reality and vitality of life become misery, a hell.