Thankfully, the conditions were finally right for me to receive a game-changing instruction: don’t fight the monkeys, but instead learn to co-exist with them.

Of course, I’m talking about monkey mind.

As I approach the 10th anniversary of my first exposure to the Dharma, I find myself reflecting on my progress along the Buddhist path.  I am, in a very literal sense, a different person than I was ten years ago, and my understanding of the teachings and practices of Buddhism has evolved a great deal.  For example, I remember being filled with great optimism after studying the Four Noble Truths for the first time, as they seemed to so perfectly sum up our state of being.

Unfortunately, like many people (I suspect) who are new to Buddhism, I thought the Truths were an invitation to bypass the duhkha (Sanskrit for “suffering”) that pervades our lives and instead to focus on the path that ends suffering.  Early on, I struggled for several years with the fact that my actions didn’t seem to reduce other’s suffering quickly enough, almost ignoring the First Noble Truth, which states that to live is, in fact, to suffer.

In the last few months, I’ve found myself picking up texts and teachings that seemed too difficult to absorb in the past.  Among these are the works of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  In the beginning, when I would come across his writings, I would be lost after just a couple of paragraphs.  I struggled to digest the first few chapters of his Myth of Freedom, and I always felt that his Cosmic Joke was an indecipherable riddle.

The causes and conditions for me to understand these teachings simply weren’t there yet.

I’m now reading “Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practises,” by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. I am filled with gratitude that I can start to understand (and not be offended — or worse, turned off by) his logic about the purpose of Buddhist practice:

“The aim of far too many teachings these days is to make people ‘feel good,’ and even some Buddhist masters are beginning to feel like New Age apostles. Their talks are entirely devoted to validating the manifestation of ego and endorsing the ‘rightness’ of our feelings, neither of which have anything to do with the teachings we find in the pith instructions. So, if you are only concerned about feeling good, you are far better off having a full body massage or listening to some uplifting or life-affirming music than receiving dharma teachings, which were definitely not designed to cheer you up. On the contrary, the dharma was devised specifically to exposure your feelings and make you feel awful.”

In accepting the truth behind Rinpoche’s words, I find myself overflowing with gratitude, not only for the fact that I am on this path, but that I have had the incredibly good fortune to find a teacher of my own who has helped me start to understand the real purpose of the Dharma and of my practice.

In 1974, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche addressed a group of students about the importance of meditation.  I am blessed that those words, reprinted in the March 2012 edition of Shambhala Sun magazine, have found their way to me at a point when I am able to appreciate the depth of his seemingly simple instructions:

“This is what we are doing in the practice of meditation: constructing a staircase toward enlightenment.  It requires very precise measurement of the boards to build the steps properly…Shamatha practice is building a staircase very deliberately, according to the Buddha.  A staircase to what?  To enlightenment?  What is that?  It doesn’t really matter.  Just building the staircase may be good.  No promise, no blame.  Let us simplify the situation.  Let us build this staircase very simply and directly.”

I honestly believe that this moment — this precise instant in time between the last second and the next — is the result of a set of interrelated causes and conditions that can not be separated from my past experiences.  Everything I have done and thought, and every past action, word and deed have brought me to this exact point in time and space.

With that in mind, I honor the monkeys.  I celebrate the mental chaos and suffering that has brought me to this place in this life.  For without it, I would not have the earnest desire to undertake the work required to transform my mind and hopefully engage in lifetimes of action that will help bring an end to suffering for all sentient beings.

I dedicate the monkeys to that effort.

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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, shares a light moment with Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the courtyard of Tsug-la Khang during a public welcome ceremony held in honour of Archbishop Tutu's first visit to the Tibetan exile headquarters of Dharamsala on February 10, 2012. (phayul.com photo by Norbu Wangyal)

From today’s Hindustan Times, these words from fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu as he visits His Holiness in Dharamsala:

“I want to say to the Chinese government that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the most peace-loving person on this earth. I want to say to the Chinese government that the Dalai Lama has no army, he cannot command his people with guns, he’s not a separatist,” Tutu said at a public ceremony organised by the Tibetan government-in-exile on his visit.

“Please, you leaders in Beijing, we beg you, allow Tibet to be what the constitution of the People’s Republic of China commits. The constitution allows for autonomy and that is all His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his people want.

“We beg you and at the same time remind you too that this is a moral universe. There is no way in which injustice, oppression and evil can ever have the last word.”

To the Tibetan people, he said: “We will visit you in Tibet. We will enter a free Tibet.”

Additional coverage from phayul.com is here.

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First, it’s important to remember that this existence of ours is called ‘samsara’ for a reason. Rinpoche reminded me that there are three types of suffering, and that we can’t simply hope or wish for suffering to vanish. “We’re speeding along, trying to get rid of suffering, but only experiencing more suffering as part of that process.” Duhkha, or “suffering” in Sanskrit, has also been translated by some of the teachers as “frustration” or “stress,” which seems quite apt for the modern world.

My own experience has taught me that the first step in dealing with my current situation is to acknowledge the universality of suffering. “Suffering is our constant companion,” Rinpoche said. “…As long as you’re in samsara, it’s never where everything is right.”

I’m amazed that the recognition of this fact sometimes evades me. I occasionally retreat into a mindset where I daydream about the world as I think it should be — a place free of suffering, where every being willingly lives life to his or her full potential. Civility abounds, and right always triumphs over wrong. The good prevail, and the guy who runs the stop sign and nearly hits your car will find punishment that leads to wholehearted redemption.

His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche

But that’s not reality. No matter what I do, there will always be someone running the stop sign, or doing things that create deep frustration in my professional life. “Once you accept, actually, that suffering is a natural part of samsara, once you accept this then it is better. When you don’t accept, then it becomes really aggravating,” Rinpoche said. As proof, he offered the story of Garchen Rinpoche, a Kagyu master who spent 20 years in a Chinese prison during the Cultural Revolution. Rather than letting this experience break him, Garchen Rinpoche accepted that his suffering was part of his karma, and in fact attained a great deal of wisdom insight as a result of the imprisonment. As Sogyal Rinpoche explained,

“If you face the suffering, you think, ‘It will become worse.’ But no, it will become better. …There is a certain part of [samsara] that you just have to accept. Accept, accept and then you … rise above that, and not be depressed by that. You simply accept [samsara] as a natural part [of life].”

Now that I’ve been reminded for the umpteenth time that I have to stop resisting the fact that suffering is an innate part of existence, what should I do? He told me not to focus on my frustration, but to instead put my mind on something positive, or even inspiring. Clear the crap you are dwelling on out of your head and put something better in there to replace it. “Just as fire and water cannot exist at the same time…if you have a positive thought, the negative thought cannot exist with it.”

Quoting Buddha, Rinpoche reminded me of the relativity of how we perceive our existence. “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. Speak or act with pure mind and happiness follows.” To put that another way: Mind is pure; whatever you occupy it with, it becomes. Period.

Enter meditation practice. Through meditation, I am learning to create the mental space required to be in the present moment — to detach myself from the non-stop play of stories and dialogues in my mind. To recognize that I am not my thoughts, and that I am not my emotions. It is, as Rinpoche says, all a matter of mental training.

Watching these teachings, I have a few ideas about how to ensure that I focus on the positive during the work day, accepting the turbulence that is part and parcel of human life with a sense of forgiveness for myself, and smile for those around me and a real sense of hope for my future. And rather than beat myself up for getting stuck in the same rut every time I wind up in this situation, I remind myself that the beginner’s mind is always full of possibilities, and that few things can be better than to approach life with that mindset.

(The teachings I reference in this post are available from the Zam America bookstore online by clicking here.)

The anatomical structures of the brain, according to Dr. John Medina.

I’m reading a fascinating book by Dr. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, about the physiology of the human brain.  Aptly called “Brain Rules,” the book provides insights into how the various areas of the brain function and makes recommendations about how to adapt our daily work and school routines to better exist within this evolutionary framework.

For instance, according to Dr. Medina, the human brain evolved under a set of circumstances that required it to: a) be in a state of near-constant motion, b) forage for sex and food non-stop, c) do so in unpredictable weather conditions, and d) to constantly evaluate whether or not  an object within its field of awareness would either eat it or could be eaten.  Through the process of natural selection, only those brains that could meet each of these conditions survived to pass genetic material forward to the next generation.  Is it any surprise then that, generally speaking, the human ego is so darn strong?

Until this point, I’ve always taken ego for granted, never stopping to consider that it could be part of the very DNA that makes us human — that we are, perhaps, “hard-wired” at a cellular level for ego.  And if that is the case, is there a similar physiological explanation for the innate Buddha-nature  that resides within each sentient being?

Across the entire spectrum of life on this planet, a mother’s (loosely stated) “love” toward her offspring is instinctual, so could there be another series of sub-cellular processes at work that creates the innate compassion and loving-kindness associated with  Buddha-nature?  And would a better understanding of the underlying science help us to reduce the influence of ego and magnify the power of Buddha-nature in our daily actions?

In my spiritual practice, I work to completely free myself from all attachment to this life, even at the most subtle of levels.  My instincts, formed over the last 200 millennia that Homo sapiens have walked the earth, tell me to only act in my own self-interest.  At what point will evolution catch up with the teachings that tell us we must cease all grasping and instead embrace the concept of sunyata, or emptiness?

Perhaps the next step in human evolution — enlightenment, maybe? — is one that we must take alone, as individuals.  In the words of Sogyal Rinpoche, “Samsara is mind turned outward, lost in its own projections. Nirvana is mind turned inward, recognizing its own true nature.”

While I’m quoting the masters, this beautiful passage on Buddha-nature comes to mind, courtesy of the fourth Shechen Gyaltsab, Gyurme Pema Namgyal:

Buddha-nature is immaculate. It is profound, serene, unfabricated suchness, an uncompounded expanse of luminosity; nonarising, unceasing, primordial peace, spontaneously present nirvana.

I realize this is a big topic to try and wrap one’s brain around (no pun intended), so what do you think?  Could the keys to human happiness lie with the study of the brain’s structures?  Could scientific study tell us something about sunyata?  Or is all of this bigger than science?

All was well as I tried to grasp an explanation of the correlation between emptiness and form (In the Heart Sutra, Buddha said “Form is empty, emptiness is form”). I was reading with a level of single-pointed focus that, admittedly, is not the norm for me. That’s when it happened.

Did I bring business cards?

I maintained my focus as I quickly tapped out a message to my assistant on my iPhone. I’ll have her send them to me via FedEx. Good enough. Back to reading…or so I thought. When I turned back to my magazine, I struggled with a paragraph on what the Dalai Lama calls the “mere ‘I,’ ” or the concept of “me” after it is stripped away from our innate identification as human beings.

And then, right in front of my mind’s eye, chaos broke out in my head: first, I realized that I had also forgotten the power supply for my laptop. No worries, I thought, I’ll ask my spouse to drop it off at the office so that it can go into that FedEx package. But now the floodgate had been opened…emotions started to run alongside the torrent of words pouring through my brain. Cue some anxiety about the fact that I can’t pick up the phone — at this very second, no less! — to call my office and make it happen. Here comes frustration…followed by restlessness. How about I mentally kick myself for losing my focus, too?

I look back down at my magazine, a quarter-page photo of His Holiness staring back at me. It’s as if his gaze is saying that I shouldn’t blame myself, that I’m only human, that I should keep working at creating space in my mind to put some distance between me and the monkeys in there.

That’s when I realized how frequently I’ve been in this same situation lately — the situation where I find myself aware of the subtle inner workings of my mind, as they are actually happening. A few days ago at work, a co-worker who frequently irritates me e-mailed a document, and as soon as I opened it, I saw that he (again…grrr) did the thing that drives me crazy.

But this time, as if it happened in slow motion, I saw the frustration coalesce in my chest and then boil upward when I realized it would take a good deal of extra time to edit his work. I actually had a moment in there to decide how I would react. And that’s just one example of many over the last couple of months from both work and home. Last night, after my spouse didn’t respond in the way I wanted after I said something, I again saw a sliver of space between thoughts, giving me a moment to make the decision against my typical instinctive reaction.

I’m still stunned each time it happens — after all, I’m 40 years old (think “old dog, new tricks”). I attribute the creation of this “internal space” to the fact that I’m blessed to have an extremely wise, powerfully effective teacher. I consider his entire lineage, in fact, to be my teachers — his masters are, in a very real and special sense, my masters, all the way back to the literal Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava. The profound changes I have seen in my life during the past year, since I started studying intensely under my teacher, are amazing…and yet there is so far still to go!

I’m writing about these changes not to boast, but to provide some personal evidence that practice coupled with study and instruction can bring about positive changes in your mind and in your life. The path is laid out pretty clearly for each of us, and the toughest part for me has always been gaining enough traction to see results.

While my motivation will always be the end of suffering for sentient beings, the direct experience of these subtle changes in how my mind operates gives me a renewed commitment. This, in turn, seems to “unlock” parts of the masters’ teachings: reading His Holiness’ explanations of the profundity of the human mind is a different experience today than it would have been a year ago.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche at Thubten Choling. Photo credit: Marilyn Silverstone.

Like tonight, for instance.  Just wrapping up a 16-hour day at the office.  Wiped out.  Can’t possibly go upstairs and sit before bed.  So instead, I spend a few minutes, reflect on Dilgo Khyentse’s words and find peace.

When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating.  It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity.  We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation.  Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything.  Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.

Therefore we should simply sit.  Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is.  Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think “I am meditating.”  Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become “peaceful.”

He says that we, as sentient beings, are already symbols of our own enlightenment.  Liberation is already here — we don’t need to sit on a cushion to find it.  ”The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself.”  Such amazing clarity contained within his words.

The full essay is posted on nyingma.com.

Enjoy!

༄ཨོཾ་ཨཱཿ་ཧཱུྃ་བཛྲ་གུ་རུ་པངྨ་མ་སིདྡྷི་ཧཱུྃ།

Oṃ Āḥ Hūṃ Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hūṃ

A tweet from @KarmaTengye
“Imagine the desperation one must feel to kill yourself in protest, knowing it is totally against your Buddhist philosophy. #saveTibet”

I keep seeing people on various Internet forums ask the question: why are Tibetan monastics taking the radical step of making a political protest via self-immolation? The latest incident, according to the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg, happened Thursday in Tibet proper – the 12th in the last nine months.

One only needs to read Richburg’s dispatch on the Post’s Web site to get some insight into the situation. Government officials asked about the trend say they aren’t allowed to comment on “state secrets.” Hospitals claim to have no information about the victims, despite the fact that reliable sources on the ground in the Tibetan areas of China have seen these men and women taken to specific facilities for treatment or handling of their remains. And now, Chinese troops are apparently carrying fire extinguishers as standard-issue riot gear.

So, the question remains: Why?

I’m not sure I have the proper context to ask myself the question.  But…look at the current situation in the United States, where a huge majority of citizens are fed up with the system and have lost faith in their government. Case in point: more Americans now approve of polygamy and porn (11 percent and 30 percent, respectively, in a recent Gallup poll) than Congress (9 percent in a New York Times/CBS News poll).  From my perspective, I feel incredibly frustrated with the polarization, political gridlock and near-complete inability of our government to solve our national problems.

Despite that frustration, I simply can’t imagine Americans feeling so bad about our current situation that they would be willing to set themselves on fire in the streets of our cities and towns as their fellow citizens watched, wailing and calling out for relief.   I have to think, then, that in exercising the most radical form of political protest, the Tibetans are at a point of indescribable desperation as they watch what’s left of their unique cultural identity get crushed by the Chinese communists.

What’s worse, the Tibetans’ most sacred institution – their 1,000-year-old faith – is being dismantled, twisted and corrupted to serve the means of the Communists and the Han ethnic majority in China. Spies are everywhere; monastics are subject to “political education” and non-stop observation. Monks, nuns and lamas disappear in the night – or in broad daylight. The Dalai Lama is branded as a terrorist and the mere mention of his name can mean immediate imprisonment, torture or worse; the Panchen Lama was kidnapped and replaced by a Communist-approved stand-in.  And all of this is in the shadow of the great Communist holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, which brutally dismantled so much of the Tibetan people’s legacy.  As I write this entry, new photos leaked from China show the humiliation that Tibetans and Tibetan monastics endure at the hands of the Chinese communists.

It’s a hard concept to wrap one’s mind around…and as I keep turning this question over in my head, I had the unexpected opportunity last week to see a clip of video smuggled out of the Tibet Autonomous Region. In the clip from November 3, the Tibetan nun Palden Choetso was burning on the side of a street, the result of a self-immolation.  The video showed the nun standing calmly – almost serenely – as the flames engulfed her body and swirled some 10 feet above her head. Nearby, other Tibetans offered prayers to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The nun’s body finally collapsed as someone tossed a white offering scarf toward her body.  I was, simply put, stunned.

As a student of Tibetan Buddhism, I have a deep appreciation for the gift of this lifetime as a human being — a lifetime when I have the opportunity to study the Dharma and make a heartfelt commitment to living the Bodhisattva vow.  In light of this, the trend of monastic self-immolations is even more confounding because I know that these men and women have an even deeper realization of the importance of this precious human life.

At the very least, I imagine these acts are bringing the world’s attention back to the Tibetan issue, and, perhaps, sending a message to people within the Tibetan areas of China. But it seems that the Chinese communists are holding too many of the proverbial cards.  Countries that should closely identify with the Tibetan issue, like South Africa, now kowtow to the Chinese, whose growing global economic influence holds sway in points far-flung across the globe.

If anything, the issue of monastic self-immolation begs the broader question: how will China respond when the Tibet issue reaches a true boiling point and the military can no longer contain the matter?  And perhaps more troubling, how will the rest of the world respond?

Image from Wisdom Quarterly

What I didn’t realize at the time is that a proper meditation practice should actually create an almost literal space in the mind between one’s awareness and the non-stop, erratic stream of thoughts that I often describe as the monkeys.  Bernie Schreck wasn’t telling me to ignore them, but was instead helping me clear the space necessary to see past them, and in doing so, to separate them from my awareness and, in fact, render them powerless.

Yes, you heard that correctly: the monkeys. have. no. power. over. me. Period.  Talk about an eye-opening realization!  While it sounds like a new-age mantra (“My thoughts do not control me, my thoughts do not control me…”), the fact of the matter is that my meditation practice has allowed me to realize that it’s possible to detach the person I am right now, in this present moment, from the mind that is constantly projecting my storylines outward.

A good example: I have a recurring  professional issue at the office that isn’t likely to change.  During the two or three times each month when I have to work directly with this situation, I get easily frustrated, and sometimes that frustration can turn to anger — the type of anger where you can actually feel your blood pressure rise as the level of frustration sinks in more and more deeply.  The situation has been so challenging that I actually lost my temper in front of two co-workers.

When I am in the heat of that moment, I consciously (and subconsciously) pass judgement on the people involved.  I think to myself, they don’t get it, they don’t work hard enough, their actions force me to work harder, they are wasting my time, etc.  It’s really almost endless, the things my mind can churn up to help justify my anger!

But shouldn’t have I learned by now that the situation isn’t changing?  Or, if I were able to completely release these ideas and approach the matter with a fresh perspective, could I possibly find a way to make the situation better?  Truth is, my mind isn’t fully, openly and spaciously engaged because so many strong thoughts and emotions are blocking my ability to do anything other than react.  What I need is the same sense of space in my mind that I described earlier — I need to create the space that will allow me to stop grasping these negative thoughts and instead see the situation in a more realistic light.  And if the situation can’t be fixed?  Then I can stop grasping at ego and realize that this is, plainly and simply, a job.

I am making a commitment to start practicing consistently on a daily basis — call it an early New Year’s resolution.   I have the power to take a simple instruction from realization to reality, but it’s not going to happen on its own.

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.

— Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche (1932-1999)