The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (6 page)

The second noble truth says that this resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering. Traditionally it’s said that the cause of suffering is clinging to our narrow view. Another way to say the same thing is that resisting our complete unity with all of life, resisting the fact that we change and flow like the weather, that we have the same energy as all living things, resisting that is what’s called ego.

Yesterday I began to be very curious about the experience of resistance. I noticed that I was sitting there with uncomfortable feelings in my heart and my stomach – dread, you could call it. I began to recognize the opportunity of experiencing the realness of the four elements, feeling what it’s like to be weather. Of course that didn’t make the discomfort go away, but it removed the resistance, and somehow the world was there again. When I didn’t resist, I could see the world. Then I noticed that I had never liked the quality of this particular ‘weather’ for some reason and so I resisted it. In doing that, I realized, I re-created myself. It’s as if, when you resist, you dig in your heels. It’s as if you’re a block of marble and you carve yourself out of it, you make yourself really solid. In my case, worrying about things that are going to happen is very unpleasant; it’s an addiction. It’s also unpleasant to get drunk again if you’re an alcoholic, or to have to keep shooting up if you’re a
drug addict, or to keep eating if you have overeating addiction, or whatever it is. All these things are very strange. We all know what addiction is; we are primarily addicted toME.

Interestingly enough, when the weather changes and the energy simply flows through us, just as it flows through the grass and the trees and the ravens and the bears and the moose and the ocean and the rocks, we discover that we are not solid at all. If we sit still, like the mountain Gampo Lhatse in a hurricane, if we don’t protect ourselves from the trueness and the vividness and the immediacy and the lack of confirmation of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way.

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By ‘cessation’ we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost. The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, ‘Thinking.’ Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and the discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe
you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know
that.
The only way you can know that is by realizing that you’ve been talking about it, turning it into worry about next week and next October and the rest of your life. It’s as if, curiously enough, instead of sitting still in the middle of the fire, we have developed this self-created device for fanning it, keeping it going. Fan that fire, fan that fire. ‘Well, what about if I don’t do this, then that will happen, and if that happens then this will happen, maybe I better get rid of such-and-such and get this and do that. I better tell so-and-so about this, and if I don’t tell them that, surely the whole thing is going to fall apart, and then what will happen? Oh, I think I want to die and I want to get out of here. This is horrible and –’ Suddenly you want to jump out of your seat and go screaming out of the room. You’ve been fanning the fire. But at some point you think, ‘Wait a minute. Thinking.’ Then you let go and come back to that original fluttering feeling that might be very edgy but is basically the wind, the fire, the earth, the water. I’m not talking about turning a hurricane into a calm day. I’m talking about realizing hurricaneness, or, if it’s a calm day, calmness. I’m not talking about turning a forest fire into a cozy fire in the fireplace or something that’s under your cooking pot that heats your stew. I’m saying that when there’s a forest fire,
don’t resist that kind of power – that’s you. When it’s warm and cozy, don’t resist that or nest in it. I’m not saying turn an earthquake into a garden of flowers. When there’s an earthquake, let the ground tremble and rip apart, and when it’s a rich garden with flowers, let that be also. I’m talking about not resisting, not grasping, not getting caught in hope and in fear, in good and in bad, but actually living completely.

The essence of the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path. Everything we do – our discipline, effort, meditation, livelihood, and every single thing that we do from the moment we’re born until the moment we die – we can use to help us to realize our unity and our completeness with all things. We can use our lives, in other words, to wake up to the fact that we’re not separate: the energy that causes us to live and be whole and awake and alive is just the energy that creates everything, and we’re part of that. We can use our lives to connect with that, or we can use them to become resentful, alienated, resistant, angry, bitter. As always, it’s up to us.

ten
not too tight, not too loose

T
oday we will talk about how to find one’s balance in life. When all is said and done, what in the world is the middle way?

My middle way and your middle way are not the same middle way. For instance, my style is to be casual and soft-edged and laid-back. For me to do what usually would be called strict practice is still pretty relaxed, because I do it in a relaxed way. So strict practice is good for me. It helps me to find my middle way. Very relaxed practice doesn’t show me as much because it doesn’t show me where I’m out of balance. But perhaps you are much more militant and precise and on the dot. Maybe you tend toward being tight. It might be easy for you to do tight practice, but that might be too harsh and too authoritarian, so you might need to find out what it means to practice in a relaxed, loose way. Everybody is different. Everybody’s middle way is a different middle way; everyone practices in order to find out for him-or herself personally how to be balanced, how to be not too tight and not too loose. No one else can tell you. You just have to find out for yourself.

In a poem in
First Thought, Best Thought
, Trungpa Rinpoche says something like, ‘Buddhism doesn’t tell you what is false and what is true, but it encourages you to find out for yourself.’ Learning to be not too tight and not too loose is an individual journey through which you discover how to find your own balance: how to relax when you find yourself being too rigid; how to become more elegant and precise when you find yourself being too casual.

It seems that it is a common experience to take extreme views; we don’t usually find the middle view. For example, we come to a dathun and we’re all just starting to practice. The first couple of days we think, ‘I am going to do this perfectly,’ and we practice with intense effort to sit right, walk right, breathe right, keep the silence, do everything. We really push; we have a project. Then, at a certain point, we say, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! What in the world am I doing?’ We may just drop the whole thing and go to the other extreme – ‘I couldn’t care less.’ The humor and the beauty of practice is that going from one extreme to another is not considered to be an obstacle; sometimes we’re like a drill sergeant, sometimes we’re like mashed potatoes. Basically, once we have some sort of joyful curiosity about the whole thing, it’s simply all information, gathering the information we need to find our own balance.

You’re sitting there and all of a sudden you see yourself as a South American dictator and you think, ‘This is ridiculous.’ You remember all the instructions
about lightening up, softening up, and being more gentle. Then some humor or insight, some sort of gentleness comes in. Another time you are sitting there looking at your fingernails, scratching your ears, fooling with your toes, discovering the inside of your nose and the backs of your ears, and you can see Gary Larson doing a nice little cartoon drawing of yourself. You think, ‘Well, you know, I could just be a little more precise here.’ Humor is a much more effective approach than taking your practice in a grimly serious way.

In 1979, at the Vajradhatu Seminary,
^*
Trungpa Rinpoche gave some extremely precise and brilliant teachings that were encouraging to everybody. For years we had received the straight teachings on
shamatha
(mindfulness) practice; these new teachings – the nine different ways of resting the mind – made that practice clearer and more precise because they gave us more sense of how to proceed. The basic idea in these teachings is to find your own balance between being not too tight and not too loose. I’ll go through them now; they are very helpful.

First of all, don’t regard these nine ways as linear, even though the last one seems to have more of a fruition quality than some of the others. They are not considered to be steps one through nine, but
simply nine different suggestions, nine different helpful hints on how to rest your mind in its natural state – how to keep your mind from going to one extreme or another. You could say these are instructions on how to find out what is the natural state. What is balance? What is a sense of equanimity? We’d all like to know that. The basic guideline is to see what’s too tight for you and what’s too loose for you, and you’ll discover it. Rather than trying to rest in the middle, just see what’s too tight and see what’s too loose, and then you’ll find your own middle way.

These nine ways have funny names; they all sound the same with a little bit of difference. The first one is called resting, the second one is called continuously resting, the third one is called naively resting, the fourth one is called thoroughly resting, and so on.

The first one is ‘resting the mind.’ We’ve already been instructed to ‘be one-pointedly with the breath.’ Even though there are colors and sounds and other people, even though your ears and your nose and your mouth and your tactile senses still exist and none of them goes away, nevertheless, when you sit down to practice, you somehow limit your awareness to the breath as it goes out. Perhaps ‘limit’ is not the right word. You put the main part of your attention, the main part of your mindfulness, onto the breath as it goes out. At the beginning of each session, there’s some sense of simplifying down to just that breath. The instruction is not ‘Blot out all the other things.’ There’s still just that twenty-five
percent awareness. Nevertheless, it’s very important that each time you start, you have some sense of remembering what you’re doing: you simplify your main awareness onto the breath. You are quite one-pointed that way. You can do this anytime during your sitting period. You may get all caught up during the session, and then you can just stop, rest, and start again, a fresh start. Always start with that sense of the main emphasis being on the breath.

In the second instruction, ‘continually resting,’ you are encouraged to prolong that sense of being fully with the breath. Sometimes it could be sort of a one-shot deal, and then the rest could be softer. But sometimes it happens naturally that you can elongate that sense of feeling the breath as it goes out, that sense of being fully with the breath. The instruction for continuously resting is to train yourself not to be distracted by every little thing, but to stay with the breath. So the first instruction is something you can do, and the second one is something that tends to be an attitude and an experience that evolves: you are not drawn off by every sound, not distracted by every sight, not completely captured by every movement of your mind. You are able to prolong that sense of sitting in the present moment, being fully here, just breathing.

The third one is ‘naively resting,’ sometimes called ‘literally resting.’ This instruction has to do with taking a naive attitude, a childlike attitude toward your practice, keeping it very simple. It’s about not getting
conceptual and intellectual about the shamatha-vipashyana instruction. It says: when your mind wanders off, without making any big deal whatsoever, simply come back. Usually we don’t just simply come back. Either we don’t even notice that we’re thinking and then we come back, or we’re very militant and judgmental. So naively resting says, ‘Just simply come back.’ When Trungpa Rinpoche talks about this, he uses the example of feeding a baby. You’re trying to get the spoon into the baby’s mouth, and the baby’s attention is wandering all over the place. You just say, ‘See the birdy,’ and the baby’s attention comes back, and you stick the spoon in the baby’s mouth. It’s very simple. The baby doesn’t say, ‘Oh, bad baby! I was thinking.’ The baby just says ‘Food!’ and comes back. I can give you another example. You’re brushing your teeth and your attention wanders off. All of a sudden you realize that you’re standing there with toothpaste frothing in your mouth, yet you’ve just taken a quick trip to Los Angeles. You simply come back to brushing your teeth; there’s no sense of big deal. That’s naively resting.

The fourth of the nine ways, is ‘thoroughly resting.’ The instruction here is to let yourself settle down, let your mind calm down. If you then find that things are somewhat simple and straightforward and there are no 3-D movies going on, then try to catch each flicker of thought, the tiniest flickers of thought. The example given is that sometimes your
thought is like a little flea touching you on the nose and jumping off, whereas other times it’s like an elephant sitting on you. The instruction is that you could try to catch just the tiny flickers of thought. In your practice, you’ll know when you are feeling settled like that and when you could try practicing that way. You’ll also sometimes find that it just comes to you and that’s how it is.

The fifth one is called ‘taming the mind.’ This has to do with the importance of a basic attitude of friendliness. Sometimes when our thoughts are like little fleas that jump off our noses, we just see the little flickers of thought, like ripples, which might have a very liberating quality. For the first time you might feel, ‘My goodness! There’s so much space, and it’s always been here.’ Another time it might feel like that elephant is sitting on you, or like you have your own private pornographic movie going on, or your own private war, in technicolor and stereo. It’s important to realize that meditation doesn’t prefer the flea to the elephant, or vice versa. It is simply a process of seeing what is, noticing that, accepting that, and then going on with life, which, in terms of the technique, is coming back to the simplicity of newness, the simplicity of the out-breath. Whether you are completely caught up in discursive thought for the entire sitting period, or whether you feel that enormous sense of space, you can regard either one with gentleness and a sense of being awake and alive to who you are. Either way, you can respect that. So
taming teaches that meditation is developing a nonaggressive attitude to whatever occurs in your mind. It teaches that meditation is not considering yourself an obstacle to yourself; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.