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Don’t Waste a Moment

8/28/2017

Recently, the death of someone I knew brought home to me again the wisdom of living every day as though it were your last. Not in the sense that many people would make of that … whooping it up, granting your wildest wishes … but in a Buddhist sense: being at one with your heart, at peace, surrounded by people and things that nourish you.

Of course one can’t spend every moment of every day surrounded only by people and things that nourish you. The world is after all the dysfunctional place it is and you don’t live in a bubble. There are things you have to do each day, as part of your work or otherwise, that bring you into contact with that dysfunction and thus have the potential to disturb.

But you can each day through meditation and your spiritual practice ensure that you are one with your heart and at peace and happy, regardless what life throws your way. With a positive energy flowing outward from you to yourself and everything around you, you can create a virtual forcefield that negativity cannot penetrate. (See my post, “Changing Your Life by Changing the Direction of Its Energy Flow.”)

Critical to accomplishing this is being present and free of the control of your ego-mind for as many moments during the day as you can muster. This is critical because unless you are free of your mind, you are ipso facto not at peace and happy, you are not one with your heart. You cannot generate a positive energy flow.

To help maintain this positive ambience, in addition to maintaining a disciplined practice including daily meditation, make sure that at least when you’re in your home you’re surrounded by things that nourish you, that feed your soul. Whether it’s artwork, music, good food, whatever. (Hopefully no one in your home is an antagonist, who drains your strength from you.) And when you’re not at home, seek out things whenever and wherever possible that nourish your heart, for example nature, which when you look for it can be found in the most unlikely places.

Living each moment as though it were your last is not a morbid thought, at least it shouldn’t be for a Buddhist. It’s a prescription for life; it’s knowing how to live. Knowing what’s important, and what’s not.

And as for death, we know that it’s a natural part of life and can come at any time. Hopefully you’ve reached the point in your practice where one has no fear of death and is prepared and ready for it when it comes. If not you should meditate on death. See my post, “Death and Life.”

The point is that every moment we have is precious. Make the most of it. Don’t waste a moment.

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How to Love Yourself

8/20/2017

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I have often written that one of the greatest challenges we have in life, as well as in walking the path, is learning to love ourselves, unconditionally. One would think that the ego-mind would support this. But it doesn’t.

Instead, the ego-mind is trapped in all the negative labels that we have learned to apply to ourselves. Even those who think that they are pretty great in various ways, have areas that they feel very negative about and it is those areas that loom large. The same goes for people with big egos. And so we all suffer because we all feel insecure and in important respects do not value ourselves.

Someone recently asked me how does one love oneself, unconditionally. The question itself already indicates a point of confusion. If you love yourself but only conditionally, then you don’t really love yourself. It’s the same as when you feel someone loves you conditionally, you don’t really feel loved at all. It’s either all or nothing. It’s not that you don’t feel there is something about yourself that could benefit from growth or change, it’s that you love yourself unconditionally just as you are right now.

So the first part of the answer is understanding that you, meaning your ego-mind, is a product of your learned experience. You have been programmed by that experience to act and think in certain ways, both regarding yourself and the world around you. Your free will only operates within a very small range. It’s not the broad free will that our legal and moral systems assume we have. This does not absolve us of responsibility, but it does absolve us of guilt. Because guilt assumes a choice, a control, and that just we don’t have.

Better put, we only have control if we are present, aware, and committed to freeing ourselves from the control of our ego-mind. But even then, as I’ve often noted, all we can do is the best we can. We are not saints. Perfection, 24/7 awareness, is not the goal. And the ego-mind is very strong. As long as we are trying, as long as we are walking the path, there is never failure.

At this stage of your understanding, you learn to love yourself because you’re just the way your are. It’s the same as looking at all the things that push your buttons and saying, it’s just the way it is. You cannot change your ego-mind. You have limited control over what you think, do, or say. With that awareness, develop compassion for yourself.

So just do it! Love yourself! Even if you’ve done terrible things or think you are a failure, love yourself. And have the intent to act in a more spiritually appropriate way in the future.

The second part is becoming aware that the person that you don’t love, the image that you don’t love, is a hologram of your ego-mind. It is not your true self. Your true self is your Buddha nature, your heart. And it has none of the qualities or labels that cause you to not love yourself. It is indeed the polar opposite. It would never harm someone and would never label you a failure. What is there not to love?

None of this gainsays your actual talents or weaknesses, or the nature of your physicality. What I am saying is that when you connect with your heart you stop applying labels, whether positive or negative, to yourself. You realize you are just as you are. And love yourself as you are.

“But if my heart is my true self, why do I keep doing harmful things or thinking negative thoughts about myself?” the reader may well ask. This is a common question. Whether you’re just starting your practice or whether you’ve been doing it for years as I have, the ego-mind does not give us a rest. It keeps rising. Even though as our practice goes deeper, it rises less frequently and when it does it is not as strong.

And so it is very common for people to feel discouraged, to feel that they are weak, not committed enough. You get the idea. And actually the more committed we are to our practice, the more common it is to get down about these “failures.”

But we must always remember that the ego-mind is very strong and its roots go very deep. We have fed our ego mind throughout our lives. Whereas our true self has until now sort of been orphaned; it has not been nourished and so is weak compared to the ego-mind. It’s roots don’t go deep.

The point is that these aren’t failures. That is the ego-mind talking. This is just the way life is and we do the best we can in walking the path. Always with the intent of trying to be present and aware more moments of the day and so not fall under our ego-mind’s control.

When you understand that, then one is free to be one with your heart and to love yourself unconditionally … to embrace all aspects of your being and experience.

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There Is Nothing Wrong with You

8/11/2017

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The Sufi have developed a chart of nine personality types (the enneagram) and the “false core beliefs” that underlie each of the nine. These beliefs reflect the conclusions about ourselves we came to as the result of our early childhood traumas or experiences.

When I read the nine false core beliefs (all nine are listed at the end of the post), I knew which one was mine, “There must be something wrong with me.” In one way, this was not a revelation to me because I have been aware for many years that this belief had a major negative impact on my childhood. But it was a revelation in that I now understood why I did not feel happy despite all the progress I had made on the path, why my face has been in a perpetual frown. I had not “connected the dots.”

This false core belief was so deeply embedded in my ego-mind that no matter how far my spiritual practice had come, this belief still controlled the overall ambiance of my persona. Thus I always felt there was some grayness surrounding me.

When I was fighting my perpetual frown and trying to rid myself of it, it only made this false core belief stronger. As the ancient Chinese poem "Affirming Faith in Mind" says, "seek rest and no rest comes instead."

But after I read of this false core belief, knowing it was mine, and opened up my heart to embrace all aspects of my being, my heart took this aspect of my psyche which was so deep it was in my bones and removed all internal struggle. It sort of smothered this negative feeling with love. I was made whole.

Now I have added the following to my morning mantras: “I am aware of the suffering caused by feeling that there is something wrong with me, and yet I know that feeling is just a product of my mind. And so I say to it, ‘Not me!’ And in truth I know that there is nothing wrong with me. I am a normal human being with my weaknesses and strengths, getting through life as best I can.”

When I say these words it is cathartic. I feel a burden is being lifted from me. For the most part, I no longer feel grayness enveloping me; my face is not in a perpetual frown. Instead I feel the joyfulness of my true Buddha nature, the well-spring of loving kindness, flow outward from my heart to myself and all those around me. And when I’m not in that space, I usually sense it very quickly and return to it.

The nine false core beliefs:
1. There must be something wrong with me.
2. I am worthless.
3. I have an inability to do …
4. I’m inadequate.
5. I don’t exist.
6. I’m alone.
7. I’m incomplete, there is something missing.
8. I am powerless.
9. There is no love - it’s a loveless world.

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Teaching Only Points the Way

8/4/2017

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Many people walking the Buddhist path are disappointed, sometimes frustrated, because despite going to temple, reading, and meditating with some regularity, they just don’t seem to be making much progress in reducing, let alone ending, their suffering. They are still pulled by their ego-mind, their buttons are still pushed, as they have been in the past. They have a greater sense of calm, but they still suffer.

There are several reasons why this experience is not uncommon. The first is, most people read spiritual books or listen to teaching without then stopping and thinking about what they’ve read/heard, wrapping their heads around it, and applying it to their lives. They don’t engage what they’ve been taught. Without such introspection there can be no progress. Without truly understanding what it is that we’ve been taught and applying it to our lives, the teaching just goes in one ear and out the other.

The second reason is, most people do not have a disciplined practice, in that they do not meditate on a daily basis. When I have brought this up in sangha discussions, people have come up with all sorts of reasons, weak excuses, for why they don’t meditate daily … they’re tired, or something comes up, or they meditated twice already that week. People just don’t get the importance of a disciplined practice. (See my post, “Discipline - It’s Essential.”) Believe it or not, I was even admonished once by a senior sangha member for talking about this aspiration because, I was told, most people wouldn’t be able to do it and so would feel bad about themselves. Nonsense!

Finally, without a disciplined practice in which one is able to sit quietly and go deep within oneself, and without the deep faith that is part of that practice, one is probably not going to come to know the truths of Buddhism from within oneself. It’s very beneficial receiving good teaching and then learning, engaging, and believing in the various truths. That can take one far along the path. But without knowing them from within one doesn’t have the ability to go to the next stage and consistently be free of the ego-mind’s control. (See my post, “Proof of the Nature of Mind - Fear, Ego, and Buddha Mind.”)

When going to temple or reading a book, I have rarely encountered the lessons contained in this post. I truly think that most religious teachers underestimate the potential of their sangha members (as opposed to their personal “serious” students) and so they don’t challenge the sangha as part of dharma talks. Many temples don’t even have dharma talks. Only the Vietnamese Zen monks I encountered in Michigan constantly challenged all members of the sangha. It was rough for many, but I think that most benefited from this.

Many teachers say that no one should just adopt the structure or concepts they teach. That would just replace one external structure (our learned experience) with another, and conflict inevitably results, as indicated above. Krishnamurti states this more emphatically then perhaps any other teacher I’ve encountered (see his book, Freedom From the Known.) He says that we have to have an internal revolution to truly transform our lives and end our suffering, to be free from the known. And this internal revolution comes from knowing the truths from within, because the truths are the polar opposite of everything we’ve been taught.

These revelations or epiphanies can occur during meditation, they can occur when you wake up in the morning, or they can just come at you out of the blue. The point is that if you’ve been disciplined in your practice and if you’ve truly engaged the teaching you’ve received, you will come to the truths from within. You cannot force it; it happens when it happens. It may take years; that certainly was my experience. But that takes nothing away from your practice and your progress.

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