So we know that letting go is the answer to everything, but this is not always easy. As with everything, we need tools to practice with. The Buddha taught four ways to let go, and Ajahn Brahm presents this teaching in a wonderfully engaging manner.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to benefit from this teaching, everyone can understand it and put it into practice. As with so many things, of course, to be a practitioner of the Buddhist meditation technique will make it much easier to do.

and thanks to Colin in Singapore who posted this video. The feed from his site is in the sidebar to the right, Awakening the Buddha in Us. I don’t know him but I’ve long enjoyed what he posts to his site.

The full thought that makes up my title to this post came out of a planning meeting I took part in a few days ago. We are developing sustainable practices to fight the effects of climate change, and I mentioned that personally I have no hope that the human race can change its habits in time to save itself from massive catastrophe.

How then, some wondered, could I remain motivated?

Practitioners will readily understand that hope is not necessary at all for compassionate action to manifest. There was no time in the meeting to go into this, but I did post a short rallying call on the project blog the next day (proclaimed of course also to Twitter):

Lift up your hearts, because although the planet and our species are in great peril, all is not lost so long as we work constantly to seek solutions.
– Beyond Hope and Despair Lies Duty

That link will explain the project if you care – and it’s a wonderful project, another 350.org global demonstration and wakeup call. But it’s not why I’ve been so absent from this place, even though my time is consumed right now because of it.

I’ve lately started on the vajrayana by my own volition, beginning ngondro without a guru, and this has shaken up my life beyond any ability to write notes along the way. But now I think I can offer some findings.

~~~

I asked an acharya of my Shambhala lineage about this shortly after I’d begun and he supported what I was doing, but he felt impelled to tell me that I wouldn’t get very far without a living, human guru.

And I know this, but I don’t expect to get very far. Getting far was not my purpose.

From a book I was studying I had incidentally been practicing a little bit of Guru Yoga, and I found myself falling in love with Guru Rinpoche. I just wanted to be with Guru Rinpoche more. I realized that without intending it I had strayed into the vajrayana already, and I wanted to set some formality to it.

I started to practice The Dakini Heart Essence ngondro, falteringly of course, and the first time I went all the way through it and let it carry me I wept to realize I had come home.

It felt to me as if I had been hiking for several months already in the rocks and ridges of the high mountain country, on my own in wilderness with no human mark anywhere – and suddenly a makeshift wooden signpost appeared saying this is the border to the land of vajrayana. And the other side of the sign, the same rocks and ridges.

You could break a leg in such terrain, or fall an unimaginable depth, regardless of what they called the country.

~~~

It will take me another 2-3 years to arrive at the vajrayana in the Shambhala path. And the Sakyong, Mipham Rinpoche awaits my coming with boundless generosity. I don’t know if I’ll get there. My acharya doesn’t know. Many days my heart cries out for a teacher. But I feel that I can at least get on with some of the work while I wait.

When I am worthy of a teacher’s time, my teacher will appear. And if this never happens in this lifetime, it doesn’t matter. Let me tell you why.

I’ve realized in just the last few days that none of this is about me. It’s finally starting to sink in that this is about all sentient beings.

I’ve been reading a lot of commentary during this time, and the wonderful, glorious Chagdud Tulku with his heartwarming reality reminded me that no one will get anywhere (even with a teacher) without the aspiration to practice for the sake of all beings.

And this closed the circle for me.

I’ve been struggling so much to get this new thing right. There have been many days when I’ve felt pretty worthless. My ambition has run smack into my laziness and this has thrown my self esteem into ruin. I had never been accustomed to missing practice, or failing in discipline, and now I’ve seen many days when I’ve slunk off to bed without ever having practiced that day. Worthless.

I couldn’t just go back to shamatha and give up Guru Rinpoche. And I could feel the blessings in my life. And yet it was so hard to go forward.

Mama never said there’d be days like this.

But everything is karma. And wheels are made for turning. Time and tide bring new days. And Chagdud Tulku sure helps. And finally I see that it’s not for the perfection of me that I could practice, it’s for others.

It seems to me the only purpose of the path is to generate merit to dedicate to the enlightenment of all beings.

There is no other purpose.

And one can be an instrument, and pass the rain of blessings through oneself, back out into the three realms, until samsara is empty.

And so coming to the cushion and the floor, or not coming to the cushion and the floor, need not be a reflection of how strong I feel in my purpose or my practice. I don’t have to be very good at what I’m doing. Because anything I do will be better than everything I don’t do. Some merit will arise. Some merit can be dedicated to the enlightenment of all beings. If I practice.

And this has changed everything.

~~~

It turns out, then, that the title of this post applies all the way from the beginning of the post to the end, which this is

If there is merit here, I dedicate it to the enlightenment of all beings.

I love these clips, and maybe I can find the whole DVD somewhere. The narrative I find beautifully articulate and expressive of teachings familiar to practitioners.

(With gratitude to the original poster at YouTube.)

Clip 3 is an ocean of practice accomplishment, face after face of mind on the path of perfection. The final three faces in clip 3 are:

• His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche
• Venerable Kalu Rinpoche
• His Holiness the 16th Karmapa

 

When I watched these clips the meaning of “self-secret” seemed very evident to me. Especially when I read the comments at YouTube – always an exercise in generating the optimism necessary to prevail over despair. One person thought the practitioners in clip 3 were just stoned. But practitioners recognize mind intent on practice.

I thought about self-secret, how wisdom and knowledge present themselves to us when we open to them. When closed to the discovery we can stare for an eternity at what’s in front of us and never see it.

How wonderfully accomplished these people are! I wish I had the karma to have the fortune to meet the circumstances to follow this path, and then to have the character to follow it with such devotion. I have neither.

But the wonderful thing about understanding karma, and the teachings of the Dharma, is knowing that we can get the karma we don’t have. So I can aim my path with faltering steps towards the accumulation of merit sufficient to bring me to this terrible and auspicious stage.

Ah, may we all soon become enlightened together

This is a nice clip, obviously made with devotion. It’s a softer sound than you normally hear the mantra recited. Beautiful images.

On Sunday afternoon I was there for a couple of hours, contemplating the cold body on ceremonial display, marveling as always at the nature of appearances, the mysterious essence of life that animates matter – the difference between the alive and the not alive. I was thinking, even if Lord Yama takes the body, he can’t take the regard we hold this person in, that endures forever.

And yet – where is there that anything endures? There is only interdependent arising.

Funny how soon the presence of a person disappears, how rapidly the context of a person recedes into memory, how memory shows itself as thought, all thoughts fading as they will, and all the business of knowing someone having had the nature of dream all along.

It’s as if, whatever was left after dying, that was all there ever was, in the reality of this person to me. Everything else was elaboration out of the endless river of thoughts.

There’s only ever the essential presence of a moment, and everything else is empty thought, curling upwards and away like smoke.

I contemplated this very thing last Sunday, but the comparison came to me accidentally, backwards from experience so to speak. I was trying to experience a certain freedom of mind, and yet at the same time to be very physically present in the shrine room, with floors and people and light through the windows – in other words, not just caught in a concept of freedom, not just lost in focus, if I can say it that way.

This was what showed me how Guru Rinpoche’s revered statement applies. One is more here than ever before, and one’s mind is empty. And the practice of this is possible.

I had a bit of an answer recently during a Sunday morning sit at Shambhala. After working really hard for three hours and making some headway, as it were, I perceived that my ordinary self was struggling to catch up to the tastes of liberation experienced, and was very tired.

So it’s really perhaps just as simple as one has always perceived since starting to meditate: it’s not the being in the moment that takes energy, it’s having to start over again an instant later. It’s the firing up of the motor again. It’s the sadness at seeing ourselves cover the moment over with glue. The stickiness of our grasping. Seeing this again and again.

~~

Duality, duality. All answers to questions such as these must come in relative truths. And as Anam Thubten Rinpoche has made clear to us, we’ll have our ego with us every step of the way towards enlightenment – the ego is very spiritual, always ready to buy more time outside of liberation, with answers that keep the ego intact.

Even so, to share this or even consider it I have to use relative terms. As practitioners we have to think in terms of making progress, and even sometimes in terms of experiencing setbacks, although we don’t let such things hinder our practice. These are all just the appearances that arise and give us the material of realization. And as is taught, we use relative truth continually to switch our grasping away from samsara and towards liberation.

~~

The Shambhala Sunday sit for me is when I work the hardest all week. I really enjoy these three hours of meditating every week, I’ve been going since I started meditating four years ago. They help my practice through the rest of the week, and the longer sessions let me build a focus for things I don’t always attempt during my shorter sessions at home: things like guru yoga, contemplation of karma, death or compassion, and dwelling briefly in more subtle experiences perhaps.

In recent months during these longer sessions I’ve been working harder, raising windhorse frequently, supplicating Guru Rinpoche, really aiming for the clear mind of the master. I’ve found in certain blessed moments that I can experience a mind that is mine, yes, but which I can only approach through the mind of Guru Rinpoche. The great ones lift us higher I think, and I’ve heard it said that only the rain of blessings from them enables any of us to progress along the path.

~~

But I wonder if I should be so weary after this practice. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Am I going anywhere, or just digging a deep groove in the wrong place? This seems to be the thing to do, to chase after objectives, to aim for practice targets. But shouldn’t more energy flow into me? Shouldn’t there be less striving, more surrender?

Ah, practice. I don’t know these answers. It seems we move from one set of answers to a new set of mysteries.

And I call this a glad thing.

When something makes us happy we forget, or don’t notice, that all that’s happened is we’ve allowed ourselves to lift the pressure off our happiness button a little bit. The happiness that arises is a function inside ourselves, or we could better say, a quality of ourselves that exists always.

We can flash on memories, dreams, little instances of joy and exuberance and happiness – call it freedom perhaps? – and we can actually see that this feeling, this function of feeling, has been a faculty that we’ve possessed all along. It just needed a reason to come awake.

So the goal of practice in general is to pull back from the things we call events and circumstances, and draw closer to the faculty of ourselves that’s doing the experiencing. Drawing back from the reasons and the circumstances, drawing closer into ourselves purely as experiencers, we find the happiness faculty, and witness our own foot pressing down on it, keeping it choked back, while we wait for perfection to occur, to give us a reason – an excuse – for joy.

It’s basic mindfulness to all you seasoned meditators, but it’s always worth the reminder that we have to keep practicing when appearances arise and seem good, just as much as we do when coping with fear and the lowlier emotions.

Let’s always remember how well Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explains this in that post I made a while back, called When the Pain Gets Small Enough We Call It Happiness

Now a new era begins for me, and I find myself with four blogs that speak about things that matter to me. One is about the local politics of the small American town I live in. One is my business blog, dealing with public policy at the national level, economics, and sustainability. A third, a new one, is about local farm markets, surviving through the practice of eating good food (a radical notion). And there’s this one, Sacred West.

I’m going to try to post to all four, although by no means equally – each in due season one would say. We’ll see how it goes. One day I’d like to merge all four into one, and somehow have a coherent theme. The theme would be sustainable world / sacred world. We’ll see how THAT goes