Tag: Bodhicitta

• Be Like Scrooge

  This path of awakening is a process. The truth we seek is not a concept or philosophical formula. It is a felt experience of living, of consciously joining our experience, whether it is grief or laziness or anger, feeling it and seeing it from the inside. The truth begins to appear in those moments when sink below our stories and judgments and just see what is happening. It is not an idea that we need to pay attention. It is glimpsing our inattention.

  Understanding that waking up is opening to what is happening inside and outside, we can understand Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol in a new light. At the start, Scrooge is a miserable and isolated. On Christmas Eve, he finds himself all alone in a gloomy house, fighting a cold. Life has hurt him and he has responded by shutting down, focusing on making money, dismissing the warmth of getting together with others and offering kindness of any kind as “humbug.” He falls asleep, thinking only of the work he has to do.

  The ghost of Scrooge’s business partner Marley appears, wrapped in chains made of cashboxes, ledgers, and other tools of his life-long trade.

  “You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

  “I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

  In Buddhism, the fetters are mental bonds, grasping habits of thought that limit our ability to relate to life. “In life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole,” Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge. By spirit he means his awareness, his ability to see and embrace what is happening. Scrooge doesn’t understand. He reminds his old partner that he was “always a good man of business.”

  “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

  If Marley was a contemporary of ours, he might have said this: “Humanity and all beings everywhere was my business; generosity, compassion, equanimity and loving kindness were, all, my business. My job and status were but a drop of water in the vast ocean of my possibility.”

  Slowly we begin to realize that possibility comes down to a capacity for presence. I once read that what the dying reporting regretting the most is that they weren’t present more often. Too late they realized that the seemingly small act of being present to life in the moment is actually something huge and essential. “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” writes Mary Oliver.

  Scrooge doesn’t get it. Marley moans and shakes his chains and tries to terrify Scrooge into seeing that he is not paying attention, but Scrooge can’t take it in. By long-standing habit he is as “self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” Seeing this will take more time. Three more spirits will come to help dare to have a felt sense of being “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous.” And he will feel under all that, remembering a time in boyhood when he was happy, remembering his basic goodness and generosity.

  Yet before he leaves, Marley’s ghost leads Scrooge to an open window where he sees “the air full of phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.” All of them are fettered. All of them suffer terribly. They realize that the way out of the chains that bind them is to open the heart and body and mind to life one moment at a time…but it’s too late.

  The good news is that for us, as for dear old Scrooge, it is not too late.

  December 12, 2017

  A Christmas Carol, Awakening, Awareness, Bodhicitta, Christmas, Christmas 2017, Christmas Eve, Dickens, Happiness, Inspiration, Liberation, Meditation, Scrooge, Seeing, Spirit, Tracy Cochran, truth, Waking Up, What Scares You

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• Angry Ghosts

  One night when my mother was a little girl growing up in the panhandle of western Nebraska, she was driving with her father when she saw, far off in the plains, a cross burning in the middle of a circle of Klu Klux Klansmen. The sight filled her with terror. Her parents came from Denmark and spoke with Danish accents and probably ate Danish food, those open-faced sandwiches on heavy rye bread, and other suspiciously foreign things. My mother was afraid the Klan would come for them with torches and guns.

  My grandfather worked hard and prospered, and some people in the community resented the whole family for this prosperity, fearing that it took away from their own possible good fortune. My grandfather built a big brick house for the family to live in (there were six children). Some local people hated this too, because it looked foreign somehow, different from the houses around it, as if it was a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale house transported to a prairie town. My grandmother once heard a group of women from the town saying what a shame it was that this beautiful if strange house was going to a bunch of Swedes.

  These women couldn’t tell the difference between Swedes and Danes. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that by flourishing these foreigners were stealing their possible happiness. The point was that happiness was a very scarce commodity and it had to be closely guarded. It was meant…not for Native Americans certainly, that was another sore point in this area…but it was meant for the white people who were here longer. The lion’s share of health and wealth and happiness was meant for the early settlers…white settlers. As a small child, my mother understood. She and her family were outsiders and interlopers. Somehow just by being there and daring to try to be happy, they were thieves, stealing from the common good.

  That night, seeing the burning cross off on the plains, seeing the ring of men in white robes, my mother asked her father if they were going to die. He told her in a heavy Danish accent that it was hard to respect men who had to cover their faces to express what they most deeply believed. He told her to note how all of them dressed like ghosts, not humans. Recently, I googled why the Klan dresses the way they do and one answer is that they dress like angry Confederate ghosts. In Buddhism, ghosts inhabit a hell realm, a lower world than our human world. They are much more captive than humans, stripped of the possibilities of liberation from the grip of their hatred, fear, and greed.

  Legend has it that the Buddha first gave the practice of metta or loving kindness to his monks because they were living in a forest full of frightening ghosts and angry and evil spirits. The practice of engendering an attitude of loving friendliness towards themselves was not to block out the ghosts but to liberate them from their fear. Metta and mindfulness remind us that we are powerful in a way that ghosts can never be. They remind us that we are alive.

  Mindfulness and metta, or the practice of cultivating a loving and kind attitude towards ourselves and others, is not a self-improvement technique but an act of quiet daring. As we let down our habitual guard, as we soften and relax, allowing ourselves to loosen the grip of the thoughts and fears that haunt us, we remember the life is here, quietly offering itself to us in this very moment. We remember that we inhabit bodies that come to us from ancestors who endured and overcame much. We remember our deep connection to the earth and also to the stars. We are made of earth stuff and star stuff. We remember that we belong to each other and to a greater living whole. We remember that we are not alone, not haunting the world but a living part of it. We are so much more than angry ghosts.

   

  August 17, 2017

  Awakening, Bodhicitta, Buddha, Buddhism, Burning Cross, Fear, Freedom, Freedom from Fear, Hate, Hate Speech, Hell Realm, KKK, Klu Klux Klan, Liberation, Lovingkindness, Mindfulness, Spiritual Practice, Tracy Cochran

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• Intention

  Why do you sit? Why are you drawn to the spiritual path? It can be interesting sometimes to ask this question when you sit–not pushing for an answer but making space for it, the way you would listen closely to a very shy or quiet person. Asking this question can be very useful as we set out on the path of meditation.  It takes patience but it can uncover a kind of inner compass that can guide us on the path.

  At first, sitting can feel as if you are entering a party in full swing–there can be self-consciousness, awkwardness, flurries of inner talk or planning or projecting little mind movies to entertain ourselves. Finally we grow tired of this, allowing ourselves to let go and sink into the deeper feeling and knowing of the present moment.  As we sink and open, we realize that the present moment offers a kind of truth that cannot be thought.  This is the truth of life itself, the life inside and outside.  It is a truth that must be perceived, received, attuned to.

  This is kind of patient listening, opening, and attuning that is needed  reveals our deeper intentions. As someone said to me the other night, it’s as if the ego is an ice cube bumping up against other ice cubes—there are sharp edges, crowding, a frustrated jockeying for position. Yet all this disappears when we melt into the oneness of water. As you sit, as the din and dazzle and ego striving of the party dies down, you may discover a secret aspiration to melt, to lose your sharp edges, to be soft and fluid and with life instead of frozen against it.

  The English word “intention” comes from a Latin root that means stretching or purpose. In Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist teachings, the expression samma san kappa means wise intention– sometimes also translated as wise thought. This is not the usual brain-spun cognitive thought but purposeful thought.  It is a thought that carries a deeper impulse or yearning, stretching towards something–a thought that carries the heart and the body with it.

  Ancient Buddhist teaching understood the power of conscious intention to influence views and behavior, and modern science concurs.   Both agree that we are conditioned but not completely determined. According to a recent article in Scientific American, for example, “a body of psychological research shows that conscious, purposeful processing of our thoughts really does make a difference to what we do.”   Wise intention uses the open awareness or open monitoring that is mindfulness to stretch towards something outside the loop of the known. Wise intention is itself the act of renouncing or opening, of kind awareness without judgment or grasping, of wishing to be part of life instead of seeking to harm or control it.

  In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who has awakened in heart and mind yet consciously intends to stay here in the thick of it all, offering all the kindness and understanding and patience and goodness that flows from the fully melted state of awakening to all the rest of us. Yet in a very real sense we are all bodhisattva’s in training, all capable of stretching and softening and opening towards what we deeply love.

  So I ask you again, why do you sit?

  “Sometimes you hear a voice through the door
  calling you, as fish out of water
  hear the waves, or a hunting falcon hears the drums. Come back. Come back.
  This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.”

  –Rumi

  

  Photography Credit:

  The Bodhisattva Suryabaskara
  Eastern Tibet; 18th century
  Ground Mineral Pigment on Cotton
  Rubin Museum of Art Gift of Shelley and Donald Rubin C2006.66.136 (HAR 95)

  The ideal of a Bodhisattva fits well with intention since as a bodhisattva one has a very specific intention for becoming enlightened: specifically to help all other beings become enlightened. Also this particular Bodhisattva is associated with the sun (Surya means sun in Sanskrit) so that fits well with setting a daily intention when the sun rises.

  August 17, 2015

  Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, Bodhicitta, Bodhisattva, Bodhsattva, Dallas, Eightfold Path, Intention, Mindfulness, Rubin Museum

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• The Power of Giving Up

  “When you can’t go up, down, or sideways, then practice really begins,” said the revered meditation master Ajahn Chah.

  Life is challenging. We can all agree on this. And sometimes the demands on us are so great that we go into commando mode. We plot and plan and mentally rehearse the operations to be executed, the trips from here to there and back again. Like Navy Seals, we strive to maintain a positive attitude and laser-like focus…but then…

  Something unexpected happens. A phone call or an email comes bearing news of a sudden and sometimes shocking change. Or a new demand is made of us that asks more than we are used to giving. The situation, already stressful, is suddenly so unknown and so fluid that we are thrown for a loop, as the saying goes. We are pushed out of our comfort zone, out of the brain’s smoothly running circuit of thought, into a wilder loop. Fear and the ancient impulse to protect ourselves by fighting or fleeing or freezing can be triggered.

  The moment before fear ignites, we can feel as if we are masters of life. We are sleek and nimble nijas, totally in control yet relaxed, open, and present. With our plans and self-image humming along in the background, we allow ourselves to feel the crisp fall air, see the beauty of the changing leaves, hear birds sing. We tell ourselves that life is good and we are good. Then comes the unexpected and possibly shocking news or demand. Instantly we contract, closing the doors and windows to intruders. Suddenly we are embattled little fortresses in a dark world.

  Suddenly we are very, very young. In the grip of fear and uncertainty, the thinking can be as repetitive and relentless as a frantic child. We become very self-enclosed. We want to be tucked back into our routines, into the known.

  There is a powerful undertow to fear. There are stories to it, in every sense of the word. It pulls us down to our earliest memories, down toward the primal fear of death, and not just physical death. When life asks more of us than we think we can handle, it can feel like being trapped in the white glare of a searchlight. After all these years, the ego is busted for spinning the straw that we are into fake gold, for passing us off as competent and worthy when we are really trembling, vulnerable beings.

  Here is a secret: under the mind that is freaking out, there is another mind, a vastly more quiet and responsive mind. A mind that is shining. We find this deeper mind when we let go. Here is another secret: letting go can feel like garden variety giving up. Meditation (and prayer and spiritual practice) has been called death in life. We die into a greater life.

  We need not be in a monastery or on a mountain top to experience this dying. Ordinary busy life offers us many opportunities to experience this dying in a small way. We fret and fret and fret about an event. Finally we get so tired of all the fretting and projection and tension that we just give up. At least for a moment or two, we die into the state Buddhists call non-self or emptiness. Other traditions may call it salvation or the quickening of the spirit or touching the higher Self. It is a state of great peace and simplicity. It is the state of slipping under the electrified fence of the ego. In such a state, we feel the crisp fall air and hear the birds without any background hum. We feel stillness. In such a state, we may find what we seek.

  “All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” – Helen Keller

  “The experience of Self is always a defeat for the ego.” – Carl Jung

  November 13, 2014

  Awakening, Awareness, Bodhicitta, Community, Giving Up, Letting Go, Mindfulness, Ninja

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• The Sunlight of Awareness

  “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty, “ taught Mother Teresa.  “Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.”

  Every year in Japan, the ancestors are remembered and hungry ghosts are fed in a ritual called Oban.  I once experienced a Western Soto Zen version of this practice, including among the hungry ghosts all those beings that society rejects and those parts of ourselves that we forget or abandon or try to hide.

  But how are we to feed the hungry ghosts? Early Buddhist tradition describes the use of spells and also service to the living.  Last week, after I had tea with an extraordinary Japanese woman named Masami Saionji, I realized that we greatest nourishment we have to offer, the salvation that we ordinary mortals can extend to one another, is the light of our own caring attention.

  The chairperson of three international peace organizations and a descendent of the Royal Ryukyu Family of Okinawa, Masami Saionji glowed with kindness as she looked at me, inviting me to see how everyone can make a difference, can be a force for peace and oneness rather than suffering and separation.  She described feeling surrounded by hungry ghosts in her ancestral homeland after the war, despairing that she could help them until there came a deep experience of receiving the light of a greater awareness, a greater force of wisdom and compassion.

  “Sati,” the word for mindfulness in Pali, the ancient language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, means to remember.  To re-member is to pull together or re-collect all our parts, all our members, to be one in all our diversity (including our inner diversity).  “Metta” or loving kindness has the quality of sunlight, shining on all without exception. “Bodhi” mind is heart and mind together, no separation.   May all beings, living and dead, inside and outside, be embraced by the sunlight of our own kind attention.   May all beings be seen, be met, be free.

  May 14, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Angels, Awakening, Awareness, Bodhicitta, Happiness, heart, Heaven, Seeing, Stillness, Waking Up

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• Life Preserver

  I dreamed I was being carried along by life like a leaf on a stream.  In the dream I was wearing the royal blue dress I wore at my daughter’s wedding in England last November, which seemed strange because moments before I was holding my daughter’s tiny hand as we walked down steep brownstone steps in Brooklyn.  As I floated by someone standing on the shore told me my hair looked good and that was nice but hardly enough to make a life.

  Here’s the kicker:  I woke up realizing that I hadn’t been dreaming and that I actually am—that we are—being swept along by life, being lived rather than living, helplessly reacting to circumstances and conditions vast and microscopic, outside and inside.  Interconnected and impermanent we may be, subject to ceaseless change, but I wanted to add my conscious “yes” to life.  I wanted to live deliberately, to actually read and sign the contract that bound me instead of travelling blind.  I wanted to feel it before it passed by.

  It turns out that being present is a courageous act. It involves discerning what we cannot change and changing what we can.  We cannot change other people or the forces that act on us—we cannot change the relentless force of change.  But we can change the quality of our presence here and now.  We can turn away from the old thoughts, pull ourselves out of the deep groove of habit, and be here now.

  We have a special potential the Buddhists call “bodhicitta.”   This isn’t a very graceful metaphor but think of it as an inflatable life raft or vest implanted in our hearts and minds (heart/mind).  “Bodhi” means awakening and “citta” derives from the Sanskrit root “cit,” which means “that which is conscious”—consciousness or mind.  Bodhicitta means “awakening or awakened mind” or “mind of enlightenment.  Bodhicitta is an expansive capacity of awareness and compassion, allowing us to be with change, connecting rather than being swept away.

  April 30, 2014

  a refuge, Allowing, Awakening, Awareness, be an island, Bodhicitta, Climate Change, Embodiment, Presence, Seeing, Tracy Cochran, Waking Up

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