Blog Archives

The 3-legged Stool of Spirituality

4/28/2016

When you turn your will and your life over to the care of your true Buddha nature, when you go deep inside yourself and connect with your heart, what is it precisely that provides the foundation for experiencing your natural state of peace and happiness? What is it that allows you to ward off the efforts of the ego-mind to drag you away from this spiritual space and back into the land of samsara?

I think of this foundation as being a 3-legged stool. The first leg of the stool, the entrance into a world filled with light, love, faith, compassion, gratefulness, and happiness is to open your heart and embrace all aspects of your being and experience. As I describe in my post, “The Heart’s Embrace,” when I did this, besides the immediate cathartic impact of the process … when was the last time you embraced all aspects of your being and experience? … it removed the internal struggle between what my ego-mind wants and the reality of what the external world offers, between what my ego-mind wants me to be and what I am. The result was that for the first time I truly felt from within what Pema Chodron teaches … that we have everything we need inside ourselves to be at peace and happy.

Note that the heart’s embrace includes not only all aspects of your being, but all aspects of your experience … both the “good” and the “bad.” It all just is. Many have a hard time accepting the idea of embracing the “bad” things that have happened to them, the things that cause them suffering. But everything that happened to you in the past has made you who you are today … not just the samsara-filled self that suffers … but the self who is seeking to return to your home, your heart, and walk the path of Buddhism.

And when you embrace all aspects of your being and experience, you come to the realization that contrasts are essential to finding the meaning in life. If we didn’t experience winter, we wouldn’t experience spring and take joy in it in the same way. If we didn’t experience pain, joy would not have much meaning. The same is true for sorrow and happiness and all the contrasts in life. One needs the contrasts both to make progress on the path and fully understand life. The saying, “no pain, no gain,” applies here.

The second leg of the stool is for the mind to rest undisturbed, for nothing in the world to offend. That state follows naturally once one has embraced all aspects of your being and experience. When you embrace something, it can’t offend. And when nothing in the world offends, as the ancient Chinese poem, “Affirming Faith in Mind,” says, “all obstructions cease to be, thought objects disappear because things and things because of mind.”

Again, this does not mean that you aren’t aware of things or people in the world who harm others or yourself, but you experience them with dispassion. They no longer agitate you. Which, if you choose to work in some way to improve the situation, makes it more likely that you will do so productively, exercising good judgment.

When you have embraced everything and so nothing offends, the catalyst for your ego-mind being activated disappears. The ego-mind feeds on all the things that offend it. Whether it’s fear, anger, negativity … whatever emotion … they all arise in response to something that offends the ego-mind. When those catalysts are removed, the ego-mind starts to wither because it is not being fed.

Ah, but you say, “What about lust? That doesn’t arise because something offends.” But actually it does. We are offended that we have no power or we fear we have no power, that we are not needed and desired. At bottom we are offended by our insecurity. And so lust, as opposed to love, is an effort to wipe out that insecurity. That is why lust is strong and so problematic.

The third leg of the stool is faith. Faith … not in someone of something outside of you, not that something in particular will happen … but faith that regardless what life throws your way, all will be well because you will always return home to your unborn Buddha mind and be at peace and happy. Faith that you have everything you need inside yourself to be a peace and happy.

When you have embraced all aspects of your being and experience, when your mind rests undisturbed and nothing in the world offends, then true faith pervades your life naturally because you are seeing yourself and the world around you through your true Buddha self, through you heart. For however long that space lasts … initially brief periods and as your practice deepens longer periods … you will thus be at peace and happy.

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You Are Not Alone

4/7/2016

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We all at times have felt that we are all alone. That there is no one else out there who understands us, who is interested in helping us, or who can help us. And we feel dependent on someone to help us. Some of feel this way more often than others. And it is a feeling that is reflected in books and movies. It is a devastating and anxiety-producing feeling.

The other night, I attended a Shambhala meditation and dharma session, and the talk was given by Joe Mauricio, a senior Shambhala teacher. At the end of the talk, someone asked him what he should say to himself when he is experiencing a panic attack or other strong emotional moment.

Joe said that what he should say is, “I’m here for you.” Don’t try to say anything complex, no dharma truths, because the mind in that state won’t hear anything you or anyone else says. All the mind wants is some comfort and there is no better comfort that saying to yourself that “I’m here for you.”

When I meditated the next morning, I realized the deep wisdom of Joe’s advice. It goes back to this feeling that we are all alone. We are really all alone only if we are not there for ourselves. If we are there for ourselves, we are never alone. That is a simple lesson that we would all benefit from.

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Ego - Changing Your Relationship With It

4/6/2016

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In a post, “What’s the Real Challenge - Life or the Ego?” I made the following comment:

“Life is a constant challenge for us only because we have to deal with our ego and its neuroses. It is our ego that is our biggest challenge. Not life. We can never loose sight of that truth. The ego is not our friend, it is not our protector. The ego’s thoughts are not in our best interest; they cause us suffering. I would not call it our enemy, because it is part of us, but it is clearly an antagonist, THE threat to our peace and happiness, our well-being.” If peace and happiness is what you seek, read on.

Before going further, I need to clarify the word “only” in the first sentence above. There is no question that the world in which we must function is a disturbing, hostile place much of the time. There is no shortage of evil and self-centeredness in the world. But even given all the acknowledged dysfunction of the world we live in, the reason why we experience mental suffering in our interactions with it is our ego. To the ego, the world is an opponent over which it wants control, it wants power, it wants … The ego does not accept that the world is the way it is because it just is. The ego is the antithesis of the teaching that we have everything we need inside ourselves to be at peace and happy. And so we suffer.

Once one accepts this truth, the biggest question we face is how do we change our relationship with our ego. There is no shortage of advice. From the mild, “let go of the ego,” to the sterner, “conquer the ego,” to the advice in an otherwise wonderful Sufi book to, “crush the ego,” the advice is to rid oneself of your ego or at least disassociate yourself from it.

The problem is that we cannot rid ourselves of our ego. Our learned experience is part of us, of who we are. And as the Buddha’s teaching makes clear, any attempt to fight something just gives it more power. So conquering or crushing the ego is not something that promises a good result.

In the teaching I received from Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monks in Michigan, and which I expanded upon and call “The Fourfold Path to Freedom” in my books, the idea instead is to surrender your ego to your true Buddha nature, or to turn your will and your life over to the care of your true Buddha nature. This is not ridding yourself of your ego, nor disassociating yourself from it, but it does drastically change your relationship with it. It is not calling the shots. It is not determining how you react to yourself and the world around you.

But what does this surrender or turning your life over actually entail? How is it accomplished? First it is helpful to identify the locus of your true Buddha nature. As I explained in my post, “The Heart/Mind Divide,” that locus is your heart. Throughout the ages, the heart has been identified as the emotive force in man. As the life force in man, the heart, which is unblemished and unadulterated, is the symbolic source of all goodness. The heart is your true self, not your ego-mind.

What we need to do is rewire ourselves so that we see things directly through our heart (our symbolic “third eye”), rather than through our brain/ego-mind. And so observe ourselves and the world around us from another plain, above it all. Part of it, and yet above it. To do that, we have several tools in our spiritual practice.

The first, which may sounds counter-intuitive, is to open your heart to embrace your ego. As explained in my post, “The Heart’s Embrace,” this does not mean catering to it, following it or anything like that. It just is an expression of compassion, which actually weakens the ego’s strength, as opposed to fighting it which strengthens it.

Once your have embraced your ego, you should renounce it. Again, this is not inconsistent action. This does not mean calling it bad names, seeing it as an enemy, or getting rid of it. It’s just our saying that we don’t need the judgment and emotions or our ego-mind to protect us. Quite the contrary, it causes us suffering and is a burden. Instead, it is our heart that is capable of protecting us and giving us good guidance, thank you. By renouncing your ego, you are no longer its slave.

This will allow you to rise above your ego, to be on a different plain. But be aware that the moment you come down from that plain, you will be under the control of your ego. So until residing in the spiritual plain becomes second nature, you must be disciplined in applying any of several methods to keep you on the spiritual plain for as much of the day as possible.

Again, the question is how. The reason why meditation is effective at setting your ego aside is that in meditation your mind is focused, whether it’s on your breath, a spot on the floor before you, chanting. Your mind cannot be two places at the same time, and so when it is focused in this manner, you are free of your ego mind.

What you must learn to do is apply this lesson throughout the day. Stop and focus your mind in one of these ways. But you can’t just go through the motions. You must really focus your mind, otherwise it won’t work. And when you do, you will be brought back to a spiritual plain.

If despite renouncing your ego, it still arises, then you need to be aware and when it does say to it compassionately but firmly that you will not engage it, you will not go where it leads. Instead, you will go deep inside yourself and seek guidance from your heart.

Remember that at all times, it is very important that you keep clearly before you what is it that you most value, what is most important to you. If it is your peace and happiness. your freedom from suffering, then there will be no faltering each time the question arises whether to follow the ego or follow your heart. Because you have acknowledged the truth that the ego is the source of all your suffering.

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