As soon as I got to a computer, I typed the phrase into Twitter, giving Shawno full credit of course,  but claiming the phrase as mine now.   Shawno tweeted (twitter term) back that he actually stole the phrase from the TV series “Mythbusters” and wasn’t quite sure he got it right.  Either way, I still think it’s hilarious, I subjected my coworkers to it rather liberally.

In general, the more we repeat something, be it verbally, or physically, or whatever, the more familiar we get with it.  So I thought about this phrase quite a bit as I searched for places where I could throw it in when dealing with co-workers.  I discovered that, even though it was meant completely in jest, there is actually some real truth in this little phrase if we look deep down.

Our days are filled with incidents and people who either re-enforce our ego or push and pull at it in an effort to change it.  OK…OK…work with me here, folks.  Any thought or idea that you have that you verbalize, most people will either agree with you (support your ego) or disagree with you (diminish your ego).  For instance, if you say I think Dennis Kucinich is the best candidate for President, someone will either support you (“Yea…me too…I like his approach to education”) or not (“Are you nuts?  Kucinich is waaay too liberal.  There’s no way he can be a leader on the world stage!”).  OK…maybe that one was too controversial.  Let’s try another one.  “Whoa!  This jambalaya is WAAAY to spicy! (If you’re living in Louisiana, this may be more controversial than politics) Someone may agree with you or disagree with you.

So in our reality, the food is too spicy, but someone else is negating our reality and replacing it with their own.  “Stop being such a wuss.  It’s not that hot!”  In their reality, the food isn’t spicy at all.  So which one is right?  Once again we have come back to our ego painting our perceptions of true reality.  It’s those damn adjectives again.  And when we look close, we can see that at the root, they are trying to negate our reality and replace it with their own.  So what do we do in return?  We try to do the same thing.  They are wrong, we are right.  “It is, in fact, too spicy.  Your taste buds are just dead.”  Now we are negating their reality.

So I can hear you now.  “Lans, you’re kinda making a mountain out of a mole hill here.  It’s just different taste, not some philosophical negating of reality junk.”  Well, is it?  Remember that from our, un-enlightened point of view, our perceptions are what we believe to be true reality.  But to our friend Joe, his perceptions are true reality.  As long as our perceptions mesh, all is well for both our egos, but when our perceptions differ, egos have to defend themselves.  Sometimes it’s not really worth our effort, we just subconsciously tell ourselves that our reality is correct, the other party’s reality is a misperception, and let it drop.  But sometimes, our egos step into the cage for the no holds barred slug fest.  We can’t let it drop.  We must force someone else’s ego to bend to ours.  Our perception must be accepted as correct.  We have to use every trick in the book to force our opponent concede defeat.

“So what you’re saying is that people disagree?  Big news flash there, Buddha Boy. “  Ok…Ok…I may be taking too long getting to the point.  But in almost every situation, nobody’s PERCEPTION of reality is TRUE reality.  We’ve talked many times on this podcast about what enlightenment is.  It’s seeing things as they truly are.  Well, since most of us aren’t enlightened, we AREN’T seeing things as they truly are.  Looking at the simple food example before, one ego says something is too hot, while another says that it’s not.  But the food is the food.  It’s not too hot or not hot enough or whatever.  It’s just the food.  Everything else is ego assigning those perceptions again.

Don’t Misinterpret

Many people equate impermanence with suffering.  However, suffering is what occurs when our ego clings to something.  The truth is that whatever we cling to, or don’t for that matter, is not permanent and will change.  When we cling to something and it changes, this is what truly causes suffering.  So can we say that even though attachment is suffering, impermanence is one of the legs that it stands on?  Not really.  The reason is because it is our belief that things ARE permanent that causes suffering.

Although impermanence is not a leg for attachment to stand on, it is, in fact a leg for enlightenment to stand on.  Without impermanence, our view could never change and we could never touch ultimate reality.  Without impermanence, life itself is not possible.  How can we grow up?  How can there be change in the world?  Hope itself can’t exist without impermanence.

There are three views of impermanence, each deeper than the previous, that lead us on the path.  The first is the obvious, outer view that we all can see.  Birth, sickness, old age, death.  These are obvious views and proofs of impermanence.  This is obvious to all, but lets take a look at a couple of ‘less obvious’ things.  Confucius once said, while looking at a river that it “is always flowing, day and night.”  When the river flows there is impermanence.  The flowing water slowly erodes the rocks and the land.  It moves the leaves and debris in the current and obviously the water itself moves.  The Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said that you “can never bathe twice in the same river.”  How can this be true?  If you bathe in the river even one second later, the water is not the same.  Because what is a river if not the water.

This is true for our own existence as well.  We change moment to moment.  Every moment we are different from the moment before and different from the moment to follow.  Our thoughts and ideas are not the same.  Our feelings and sensations are not the same.  Our concepts aren’t the same.  Even our physical bodies aren’t the same.  It’s widely known that we are losing cells and growing new replacements all the time.  Our existence is never constant.  Our existence is somewhat like a movie, made up of individual frames that are different than all the other frames, but when played in succession with sufficient speed, appear to be solid.

And yet, we fail to see what’s right in front of our face.  We see death all around us and don’t believe that we will die.  Intellectually, we know, but deep down, we all cling to life as if it’s the last rescue ship from the Titanic.  We fail to grasp that there is nothing we can do because we see ourselves, our physical body, as something that will never leave us.

The second view is understanding from insight, from the intuitive, the direct seeing of the nature of things.  This is when we are able to break things down through careful observation and begin to see the individual frames, or small groups of frames, instead of seeing the whole movie.  This is accomplished through the practice of meditation.  As we watch our thoughts, we begin to see the small, individual components instead of the long, drawn out mental play that we normally perceive.  As we continue to observe our thoughts more closely and gain a better understanding, we can then broaden our observation and see that what happens in our minds follows the same patterns that occur outside of it.  With deep meditation, we begin to see all phenomena as being in flux.  We begin to see the lack of consistency in everything.

Finally, there is the way in which seeing impermanence can lead to liberation.  As we begin to see impermanence more and more clearly, we begin to see that there truly is nothing that we can cling to. Our habit of attachment is challenged and, after awhile, we begin to relax and become more comfortable with this.  We begin to see that things don’t fit into our little boxes, our ways of categorizing them.  They are much more fluid and in flux than we ever imagined. They are, as Suzuki Roshi once said, ‘Not always so.’

When we come face to face with impermanence in such a dramatic way, it begins to open us up to complete awakening.  Final liberation can occur when we can drop our most deeply held constructs of reality.  Totally letting go of this attachment is said to bring ‘The Great Happiness’ which is the only happiness that can ultimately be reliable.

OK…so let me now take a stab at some of the e-mail I’ll get from this post:

Dear Meditator Dude,

That was an interesting little post.  Lots of stuff about enlightenment and ultimate happiness and liberation and such.  That’s all cool, but what about something for me.  I’m nowhere near talking about enlightenment or liberation.  Hec, I’m not even sure I am a Buddhist yet.  How does all this relate to me?  I mean, wasn’t there something in the title about ‘Relevance here in the 21st century?’  If you wouldn’t mind, bring it down to the day to day for me. k?  k.

Sincerely,

Beginners Mind

Dear Beginners Mind,

You make an excellent point, so let me see what I can do for you.

We talked earlier about clinging.  That our big problem with impermanence is our unwillingness to accept it and to try to cling to things the way they are at a particular moment.  Well, as with most things, this is not only a problem we encounter following the path, but a problem we encounter in day to day life.  We just may not realize it as much.

We all have memories, little stories in our head about things that have happened.  This is cool, until we begin to give them way more solidity than they need.  For instance, once I remember that Mary did something that wasn’t very nice to me.  Now I always regard Mary as a bad person.  Maybe not even consciously, but we hold on to that memory and make it solid.  We have taken it out of it’s scope of time, and made it solid.  It’s no longer that ‘Mary did something that wasn’t very nice ONCE’.  We have clung to the story,and it has turned into ‘Mary is not a nice person.’  When we do this, we have completely colored a situation before it even occurs.

This stems from egos need to be in control and protect itself so it clings to something like a rock that it can use as a base to build on.   We take the memory of the way things appeared to be at one particular point in time, and made them solid on a permanent basis.  Ego will often even begin to add in a motive as to WHY someone did X or WHY Y happened.  We are now running into ego’s pure fantasy, cooked up to support it’s perception of the memory.  The more details and reasoning that ego adds, the more solid the memory appears and the easier it is to cling to.

But we must remember that it was just a thought.  It was our perception of a particular moment in time.  The moment was impermanent, actions were impermanent, the whole thing was impermanent.  Now we don’t have to try to erase the memory from our minds as a negative.  We simply need to recognize it for what it is.  We need to recognize when we are acting based on our clinging to it.  We have to take the story, give it an ending and be done.   ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is a good one, but doesn’t always fit.  Hmm…let’s see.  How about, ‘But things changed and life went on.’  That one seems like it would work most of the time.

This is not something that is limited to memories of the past.  Our thoughts of the future fall in the same boat.  We have an idea in our heads about how something will or should happen and we cling to that thought.  Instead of letting go and allowing things to happen, we try to push, mold and force our thoughts and ideas that we have solidified onto the situation.  Again, this leads to disappointment and suffering. We need to approach with an openness that includes very little in the way of pre-concieved notions, whether based on our memories of the past or ideas of the future.

Whether we are searching for enlightenment, an easier walk through this life or just an easier walk through this day, attempting to drop our clinging is always beneficial.

Some will say something like, “Well, I don’t get into that part of it, I just read and study.”

Others, when asked the same question may tell me how they sit for an hour a day.  “Very good!  What are you studying currently?”

“I try to keep it to the more practical side and just concentrate on the sitting.”

The struggle to balance practice and study is something that most, if not all meditators face.  I’m currently way to far on the study side and am slowly trying to work my practice to balance it all out.  It’s important for us to understand that these are two very necessary parts of a single process.  It’s somewhat akin to someone saying they are going to cook a hamburger, but without using both meat and fire.  While either can serve some small purpose on it’s own, you must have both to eat a hamburger.  Likewise, to follow a Buddhist path, you can’t JUST meditate and you can’t JUST read and study.

This is even pointed out to us, albeit subtly, when we take the refuge vows.  The vows have us repeat ‘I take refuge in the Buddha.  I take refuge in the Dharma.  I take refuge in the Sangha.’  But what are we actually talking about?  Taking refuge in the Buddha is looking to the Buddha as the example.  He is the example of someone who can practice, follow the path and attain enlightenment.  We are talking about the meditation part here.  The Buddha is the example to us of one who can attain enlightenment via meditation.

Taking refuge in the Dharma is talking about the teachings.  We have to study the teachings and gain that knowledge that they contain.  These two are two sides of the same coin (well, really three sides if you include the sangha, but who’s counting here, right?).  The Dharma, or the teachings, provide that foundation that we sit in when we meditate.  The meditation is the practical application of the teachings.  While meditation has some secular benefits to it, from the perspective of following a Buddhist Path, it is one of our main methods of working with the teachings.  Without the teachings, we are essentially working with nothing.

Likewise, simply studying the teachings without putting them into practice is at best mental gymnastics and at worst, futile.  There are many aspects to Buddhist teachings that, without allowing the mind to actively work with them in a formal mediation setting, will remain nothing more than a neat, but mentally confusing little saying.  You must take the teachings and work on experiencing them first hand.  It’s only through this experience that we can progress along our path.

By the same token, meditating without benefit of the teachings is like studying for a test without having a book or notes.  Pretty futile.  Of course, you will learn a little more about how your own mind works but there will be no context from which to work with this.  You could think of it as having a car with a really powerful engine but no drive shaft.  There is a lot of potential there, but without out the drive shaft, all you can do is rev the engine really loudly and waste gas and time.

Now, I am not saying that practicing meditation without benefit of the teachings is useless.  Far from it!  We have talked on many occasions about the secular (for lack of a better term) benefits of meditation (reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, improving concentration).  What I am talking about is the person trying to follow a Buddhist path.

Likewise, I am not saying that Buddhist teachings are not without merit in just reading what they have to say.  But to comprehend and apply much of what is being taught on anything more than a rudimentary level takes a trained mind.  And the way to a trained mind is on the cushion.

So the point here is that we have to strike a balance.  We must devote some of our time to study of the dharma and some of our time to sitting on the cushion.  After we study a teaching for a little bit, we need to ‘let it stew’, by sitting with it on the cushion.  Sometimes this can be an active contemplation, which we haven’t really discussed much.  But contemplative meditation changes the object of your concentration from the breath to a concept.  Thinking back, I guess we have talked about on contemplative practice, Tonglen, the practices of sending and taking.  In Tonglen practice, we are actually working with the concept of compassion during the meditation.  However, you would be amazed what insight can arise on a particular teaching when we are practicing our plain old, normal, daily meditation.

So I would suggest all of us on the path take a little inventory and see if we have a good balance between practice and study.  If not, maybe add or subtract a little here or there.  This is something great to do on a recurring basis because we can easily get caught up in one aspect over the other depending on where our life and path happen to be at the moment.  As I mentioned above, I currently find myself leaning far to heavily to the studying side, but after a quick inventory, the scales are beginning to even out a bit, back to the Middle Way.

…from the theistic religion’s point of view, if one believes that the entire cosmos, including the sentient beings within it, is a creation of one all powerful and compassionate God, the inescapable consequence is that the existence of faith traditions other than one’s own are also God’s creation.  To deny this would imply one of two results:  either one rejects God’s omnipotence – that is to say that, although these other faiths are “false ways”,  God remains incapable of stopping their emergence – or if one maintains that God is perfectly capable of preventing the emergence of these “false ways”, He chooses not to do so, then one rejects God’s all-embracing compassion.  The latter would imply that, for whatever reasons, God chose to exclude some – in fact, millions of his own children – and left them to follow false ways that would lead to their damnation.   So the logic of monotheism, especially the standard version that attributes omnipotence, omniscience and all embracing compassion to God, inevitably entails the recognition that the world’s many religious traditions are in one way or another are related to God’s divine intentions for the ultimate well being of His children.   This means that, as a devout follower of God, one must accord respect, and if possible, reverence to all religions.

Although I have tried to put this into words for years, I have never been successful because I have never been able to argue the point of view that ‘my faith tells me I’m right and you’re wrong.”  I just didn’t have the smarts to debate that argument.  Obviously, His Holiness is vastly superior to me in the realm of religious debate (not to mention several million other things, I’m sure).

Give it a shot yourself. (Best viewed in Large or Original on flickr. Just click the image.)

The Heart Sutra

We all examine this multi-colored rainbow that we can refer to as ultimate reality but we tend to shade it. It’s as if we were wearing colored glasses as we look at the rainbow because we can’t fathom the whole thing in it’s entirety. Each religion wears a different colored lens on the glasses so the glasses filter out part of the whole, amplify another part and distort still more. As a religion grows, that which was amplified is made more important and deemed more correct. That which was filtered out is not known and deemed incorrect and the distortions grow and get even more distorted.

In the small Arkansas town where I was raised, believe it or not there was a certain amount of religious tolerance, at least within the crowd that my family was a part of.  Although a practicing Presbyterian, my grandmother was a self taught student of world religions and was very open to the points of view of all religions, regardless of whether that point of view was positive or negative to her beliefs.  When I was very young and my grandmother would read to me, we were just as likely to be reading about the basics of Zen, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, or the life of Thomas Jefferson as we were about The Adventures Curious George or Babar the Elephant.  This not only gave me a wide breadth of knowledge, but a certain tolerance for things that were different.

When I became a Buddhist, there was a certain part of this attitude that I lost.  While I was perfectly willing to live and let live, I would get very defensive, to the point of going on the offense, if I was faced with a discussion comparing my religion with another.  Buddhism was my territory and thou shall not criticize my territory.  I jumped in and defended my territory at all costs.  But as time went on, I began to see that the problem wasn’t their reaction to my religion, but my reaction to my religion.

As I began to look deep within my own path, and at the same time try to understand theirs, in much the same way my grandmother had 40 or so years earlier.  I began to discover that at the source, there is not much difference.  In every religion, some things are emphasized, others forgotten about, and still others are probably just misinterpreted.  But we are all are looking for the same things.  Peace, happiness, respect and acceptance.  We have just chosen different ways of realizing it.  We are walking on different paths to the same goal.

Now when my spiritual path is criticized by another, I try to look at and emphasize what we have in common, not where the differences are.  This may not help the other person to realize where I am coming from, but it certainly helps me realize where they are coming from, and that’s made quite an effect.

I’ve heard a lot of people recently talking about karma, but I think they have some misunderstandings about it.  I’ve heard comments such as “He’s gonna get some bad karma for that.” or “Karma says he’s gonna suffer three fold for that one.” or “Something good should come to her, with all that good karma.” or “Wow!  She won!  She must have some really good karma.” First let me address the ‘three fold’ issue and put that one too rest. This is crossing from another religion/philosophy. This is from the Three Fold Law in Wicca. Now, first, I am no Wicca expert, but the law says “Ever mind the rule of three. What ye send out comes back to thee,” which basically means whatever you do, you will get back times three. Again, this is part of the wiccan belief system, not the Buddhist.

This brings us to something that can be confusing about the concept of karma. There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ karma. I have heard many advanced students and even llamas talk about “good” karma and “bad” karma and it’s just incorrect, plain and simple. Karma is like gravity. It just “is.” Good or Bad are adjectives we assign depending on how we perceive the situation that either generated the karma or the situation where the karma comes to it’s fruition.

“But Lans, I thought if I do something bad, karma will do something bad to me. And by the same token, if I do something good, I will get something good.”

Yes, yes. This is the common assumption. But good and bad are relative to your personal situation and the set of circumstances laid out before you. Let’s look at a simple example. A man throws a brick through a window. Is this good or bad? If he is breaking into a place to rob it, we would say it’s bad. If he were breaking in to rescue a child from a burning house, then we would say good. But the karmic act we’re discussing is breaking the window with the brick. It’s an action, that will generate other actions and situations. You can label them good or bad as you like, but in reality, they are just effects with no adjectives assigned.   It’s that simple.

More complicated is the karma generated by the intent. Yes, intent creates karma too. But once again, motivation, and the goodness or badness of it is still something that is something that is relative to how we perceive it. We are not perceiving things as they truly are. We are perceiving them colored with our own thoughts and opinions.

The underlying concept of karma, is very simple. It’s cause and effect. That’s it. But where karma get’s confusing to some is when we have to factor in all karma into the equation. Karma is not personal. Thinking that karma is personal reinforces ego and flies in the face of the teachings on emptiness which tell us that no one thing exists independently. This is not to say that karma you generate will not effect you. It most certainly will. But what I am saying is that karma you generate will have an effect on tons of other situations, many not directly related to you.  By the same token, karma generated by other beings will have an effect on you too.  Here is the mystery of karma.  In order to figure it all out, you have to be able to comprehend the intertwining of all the karma being generated by all beings and how it effects the specific situation you are being confronted with at the present time.  We can pretty much all agree this is impossible.  So the point to remember is that karma “is what it is”, nothing more, nothing less.