"I don't know who I am any more. Nothing makes sense. I don't know how to go on. What do I do?"
A couple of months ago, I was leading an informal question and answer session, and after the meditation period, a young woman posed this question. She was clearly in distress about something, a loss, perhaps, a betrayal - she didn't say. Because it was a public forum I didn't ask for any details. Instead, I talked with her about how to meet experience.
Later, she asked, "Is there a way of out of the bitterness?" "Yes," I replied, "but if you look for it, you won't find it." She sat quietly for a few minutes, and then said, "So I have to experience it." "Yes," I said, "you have to experience it and not believe it."
Whenever a powerful experience arises, whether positive or negative, it triggers associations of all kinds, including deep longings and deep fears. The power of the experience says to us, "This is how things are" and we tend to believe it. If the experience is one of transcendence or insight, we may feel that we are one with the world, that we know the ultimate truth, that everything is love, that our search is over and our longings have come to an end, etc. If the experience is one of darkness or depression, we feel disorientation or despair, that all is hopeless, that we are forever alienated from the world, and we will never know joy, happiness, or love. The experience may even trigger both kinds of reactions at the same time. It's easy to fall into belief here, believing what the stories and feelings are telling us about the experience.
Instead, open to the experience and be where you are. Be aware of your body and your surroundings. Know that what is arising is an experience, nothing more, and nothing less.
A student excitedly told his teacher that he had had a vision of the buddhas of the ten directions gathering in the sky, initiating him into the mystery of life, while countless bodhisattvas and their consorts made offerings, sang songs and filled the sky with rainbows.
"Ah," his teacher sighed, "it's been many years now since I've been fooled by that kind of stuff."
As Rangjung Dorje wrote, in Aspirations for Mahamudra,
Since perception is experience and emptiness is experience,
Since knowing is experience and delusion is experience,
Since arising is experience and cessation is experience,
May all assumptions about experience be eliminated.
A couple of months ago, I was leading an informal question and answer session, and after the meditation period, a young woman posed this question. She was clearly in distress about something, a loss, perhaps, a betrayal - she didn't say. Because it was a public forum I didn't ask for any details. Instead, I talked with her about how to meet experience.
Later, she asked, "Is there a way of out of the bitterness?" "Yes," I replied, "but if you look for it, you won't find it." She sat quietly for a few minutes, and then said, "So I have to experience it." "Yes," I said, "you have to experience it and not believe it."
Whenever a powerful experience arises, whether positive or negative, it triggers associations of all kinds, including deep longings and deep fears. The power of the experience says to us, "This is how things are" and we tend to believe it. If the experience is one of transcendence or insight, we may feel that we are one with the world, that we know the ultimate truth, that everything is love, that our search is over and our longings have come to an end, etc. If the experience is one of darkness or depression, we feel disorientation or despair, that all is hopeless, that we are forever alienated from the world, and we will never know joy, happiness, or love. The experience may even trigger both kinds of reactions at the same time. It's easy to fall into belief here, believing what the stories and feelings are telling us about the experience.
Instead, open to the experience and be where you are. Be aware of your body and your surroundings. Know that what is arising is an experience, nothing more, and nothing less.
A student excitedly told his teacher that he had had a vision of the buddhas of the ten directions gathering in the sky, initiating him into the mystery of life, while countless bodhisattvas and their consorts made offerings, sang songs and filled the sky with rainbows.
"Ah," his teacher sighed, "it's been many years now since I've been fooled by that kind of stuff."
As Rangjung Dorje wrote, in Aspirations for Mahamudra,
Since perception is experience and emptiness is experience,
Since knowing is experience and delusion is experience,
Since arising is experience and cessation is experience,
May all assumptions about experience be eliminated.
3 comments:
Dear Ken,
I’ve enjoyed reading your last two blog entries. In the previous one you made a distinction between belief and faith that I thought was quite fine. In this one you point out how we tend to let experience inform our beliefs. Still fine.
But I am reminded of a reservation I have about a different kind of belief that tends to creep into practice. And I’d appreciate your response to it.
You say: ”Be aware of your body and your surroundings. Know that what is arising is an experience, nothing more, and nothing less”. The excerpted quote drives your message home effectively.
My reservation is about the tendency to take this advice and go the other way in practice, namely, away from the body/experience. Isn’t this also just a belief, for example, that the body is a defilement, impure or delusional?
When you say “open to the experience and be where you are” or I read “the middle way is union” (Aspirations for Mahamudra), I get a better sense of what it is to be at home in the Truth-Body.
There is a clip and quite from a workshop that Ken taught that addresses this question in a more comlete way.
http://umquotes.blogspot.com/2011/04/there-is-experiencing-and-experienced.html
The clarification of what an experience can bein terms of what is actually happening and what I bring to the experience to make it something different has helped me decipher more of my reactive behavior.
A student excitedly told his teacher that he had had a vision of the buddhas of the ten directions gathering in the sky, initiating him into the mystery of life, while countless bodhisattvas and their consorts made offerings, sang songs and filled the sky with rainbows.
"Ah," his teacher sighed, "it's been many years now since I've been fooled by that kind of stuff."
As Rangjung Dorje wrote, in Aspirations for Mahamudra,
Since perception is experience and emptiness is experience,
Since knowing is experience and delusion is experience,
Since arising is experience and cessation is experience,
May all assumptions about experience be eliminated.
Exquisite condensations of the self-realized mind. I especially like the teacher's response in the first one, perhaps because I relate to it so well.
I also like Bhikkhu K. Nanananda's description as expressed in his ground-breaking work Concept and Reality:
"The tranquil mind has no inclination towards conceptual distinctions of two extremes or of any middle position. This release from the bondage of concepts is itself the end of suffering."
As well, a quote from Gotama stands out with breath-taking simplicity:
"He who imagines, bhikkhus, is bound by Mara; he who does not imagine, is freed from the Evil One."
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