The Taste of Freedom

Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, even so this Dhamma has one taste too: the taste of freedom.

~ The Buddha, Uposatha Sutta

Freedom

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.

~ Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Carrots

Nasrudin was sent by the king to investigate the lore of various kinds of Eastern mystical teachers. They all recounted to him tales of the miracles and the sayings of the founders and great teachers, all long dead, of their schools.

When he returned home, he submitted his report, which contained the single word "carrots."

He was called upon to explain himself. Nasrudin told the king, "The best part is buried; few know -- except the farmer -- by the green that there is orange underground; if you don't work for it, it will deteriorate; and there are a great many donkeys associated with it."

~ from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin by Idries Shah

Skandhas

Experience is comprised of five groups (skandhas) of experience: sensations, feelings, thoughts and emotions, impulses, and consciousness. The sense of self is a projection of continuity and independence onto experiences which are actually impermanent and dependent, arising and disappearing depending on causes and conditions.

The reactive emotions that lead to suffering are part the self’s habitual emotional and behavioral attempts to cling to pleasant experiences, push away threatening experiences, and ignore neutral experiences.

Attachment, aversion, and ignoring are the traditional three poisons that push the cycle of reactivity. Reactive patterns, since they are based on false projections of independence, permanence, and control, never deliver the satisfaction they seek.

Fully experiencing sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts, and impulses in attention, knowing them to be experiences and not facts, breaks the cycle of reactivity, and gradually dispels the confusion and projections that result in cycles of suffering.

~ for a graphic depiction of the five skandhas, click here
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Eyes

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

To Ease the Pain

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work --
and what's the work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else,
drunken dumbshow.

~Allen Ginsberg

The Essence

Everything changes

Struggle and suffering arise

The essence of what ends suffering: compassion and awareness

Awareness: knowing what is arising

Compassion: feeling and caring
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You Can't Win & You Can't Lose

"Then the path of peace depends on being patient with the fact that all of us make mistakes.  And that’s more important than getting it right.  This whole process seems to work only if you’re willing to give yourself a break, to soften up, as you practice patience.  As with the rest of the teachings, you can’t win and you can’t lose.  You don’t get to just say, “Well, since I never can do it, I’m not going to try.”  It’s like you never can do it and still you try.  And, interestingly enough, that adds up to something, it adds up to appreciation for yourself and for others.  It adds up to there being more warmth in the world.  You look out through your eyes and you just see yourself wherever you go -- you see all these people who are escalating their suffering just like you do.  You also notice people catching themselves just like you do, and they give you the gift of their fearlessness.  You begin to be grateful for even the slightest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know it’s not so easy.  Their courage increases your trust in the basic goodness of yourself and all beings throughout the world -- each of us just wanting to be happy, each of us not wanting to suffer."

~ Pema Chodron, Practicing Peace in Times of War, p. 53-54
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Come Back

Will you seek afar off? you surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best,
   or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place,
   not for another hour but this hour...

~ Walt Whitman, A Song for Occupations

Calm and Clarity

"Because by cultivating concentration and inquiry together, you are then going to develop creative awareness and creative engagement. And that’s why personally I don’t worry so much about the exact technique because I am more interested in them developing samatha and vipassana, whatever way it is. Because what I think is important is to develop the calm and the clarity.

"But I believe that the way concentration works is actually by returning, not by staying with the thing all the time. So that each time you return you’re not feeding your habit, and you dissolve [its] power. And that’s what will create some spaciousness. And then with the questioning what I believe is that by cultivating the questioning, you’re dissolving the tendency we have to permanentize, by becoming more aware of change."

~ from an interview with Martine Batchelor at Buddhist Geeks

Examining Experience

Attention in the breathing body, aware of the rising and falling of sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, impulses, actions... asking of any experience that I seem to grasp at or reject:

Is this experience not changing?

Is this experience not made of up other sensations, feelings, and thoughts?

Is this experience not dependent on many causes and conditions which are coming together and falling apart?

Is this experience in my control?

Is this experience me or mine?

Is this experience ultimately satisfying?

Is this experience worth grasping or rejecting?

Creating A Path

by Stephen Batchelor

"As we learn to play this complex instrument of bones, flesh, nerves, impulses, thoughts, and feelings, we trace a path that weaves its way like a channel through the landscape of our experience. It is guided by an intuitive yearning for what we value most deeply; its space is the openness we are able to tolerate within our hearts and minds; it is sustained by the networks of friendship that inspire us to keep going. The path follows the contours of our life as one day turns into the next. It is found amidst the most mundane of circumstances as well as the most sublime...
To create a path is to become intimate with the space opening up withing, around, and before us. This intimacy comes from the mindful awareness of what is unfolding in our body, feelings, minds, and worlds from moment to moment. We get used to the taste, the feel, the texture of the path. It ceases to be something to which we self-consciously aspire.. When we stray from it, we feel its loss as an act of self-betrayal."

~ Stephen Batchelor, Living With the Devil, p.79-80

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

by William Stafford

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot -- air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.

Verses of Kindness and Compassion

I've put together a revised collection of verses and phrases for the four immeasurables (brahama-viharas) that you can find online here.

Buddhist practice is closely associated with insight, which is said (or implied) to be the highest practice, leading to everything good, including kindness and compassion. Hopefully insight into how things are, and how they work, does lead to kindness and compassion. Unfortunately, it's not always true; half-developed or unbalanced insight can lead to clarity and power that are not connected to kindness and compassion.

And insight leading to compassion is not the only way to go. It works the other way round as well: compassion, when engaged and cultivated in a balanced way, leads to insight.

Sometimes Buddhist practice is said to be the uniting of compassion and insight. I think this is best. But if I had to put one practice above the other, it would be compassion, because the motivation for insight ought to be compassion: to know how to free ourselves and others from suffering.

May all beings be safe, healthy, happy, at ease in their body, at home in the world.

Weasel, Crow, and Coyote on the Dharma Trail

by Sam Hamill

A weasel went out
one day and saw a large crow
dancing in the dust.
"Ha-ha," the crow cried, "Ha-ha."
Poor weasel, not speaking Crow,

thought the old crow
was humiliating him.
"I'll get you for that!"
he barked, "I'll gnaw on your bones!"
Weasel crouched low in the grass

and slowly crept close.
But when he made his great leap,
he came up with dust.
"I'll get you for that!" he barked,
retreating into shadows.

Crow bobbed on his bough.
"Ha-ha, ha-ha," he bellowed.
Weasel leaped again,
snapping the air with his jaws,
"You arrogant prick!" he screamed,

"I'll get you for that!"
Far off, another crow called,
"What's all the ruckus?"
Crow chuckled and replied, "Just
stupid Weasel eating dust.

I tried to warn him
about Coyote," Crow called,
"but all he wanted was to eat me, then got mad
when I escaped. What a fool!"

Weasel slunk away
with his tail between his legs.
Crow called Coyote,
"Hey, old friend, there comes Weasel,
all tried out from meanness.

I tried to warn him,
but he's too mean to listen."
Coyote grinned. He
licked his chops and sniffed the air.
"The angry ones are easiest."

~ from Dumb Luck by Sam Hamill

The Simplest Things

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I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulty.

~ Charles Olson

If You Come Back

Gandalf: You'll have a tale or two to tell when you come back.

Bilbo: You promise that I will come back?

Gandalf: No. And if you do, you will not be the same.

~ from the trailer to Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit

How Many of You Expect to Die?

The three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario, from a New York Times blog post from Jane Gross:

Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline, according to Dr. Lynn’s data. The 20 percent of Americans who die this way need excellent medical care during the long period of high functioning, she said, and then hospice support for both patient and family during the sprint to death. 

Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course. These patients’ lives are punctuated by bouts of severe illness alternating with periods of relative stability. At some point rescue attempts fail, and then death is sudden. What these patients and families need, Dr. Lynn said, is consistent disease management to head off crises, aggressive intervention at the first hint of trouble and advance planning for how to manage the final emergency.

The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone’s worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course, said Dr. Lynn, and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.

These are the elderly who for years on end must depend on the care of loved ones, usually adult daughters, or the kindness of strangers, the aides who care for them at home or in nursing facilities. This was my mother’s fate, and she articulated it with mordant humor: The reward for living past age 85 and avoiding all the killer diseases, she said, is that you get to rot to death instead. 

Those suffering from physical frailty, as she was, lose the ability to walk, to dress themselves or to move from bed to wheelchair without a Hoyer lift and the strong backs of aides earning so little that many qualify for food stamps. These patients, often referred to as the old-old, require diapers, spoon-feeding and frequent repositioning in bed to avoid bedsores. Those with dementia, most often Alzheimer’s disease, lose short-term memory, fail to recognize loved ones, get lost without constant supervision and eventually forget how to speak and swallow. 

What all of these patients need, Dr. Lynn said, is custodial care, which can easily cost $100,000 a year and is not reimbursed by Medicare. The program was created in 1965 when hardly anyone lived this long.

Source: Jane Gross, How Many of You Expect to Die? 

New York Times, July 8, 2008

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/how-many-of-you-expect-to-die/

Easier Said Than Done

Return & rest: abide in experience as it arises.

Open: vividly experience the whole field.

Look: know the nature of experience.

Do: respond and be free.

Care: help others as much as possible.

Stable Attention

Stick to the body like a shadow. Body is where stability is. Relative stability, of course--in this world, everything, everything changes. But the ground of experience, if there is one, is the body--the flesh and bone and nervous system and biochemical soup in which every perception and experience arises.

We can abide, present in our experience, by alternating and mixing and eventually uniting three increasingly-subtle efforts: focusing, resting, and opening. Focusing means returning to, placing the attention upon, and staying with one aspect of experience: the passing of air at the nostrils, the rise and fall of the abdomen, a visual object in front of us, a sound we make. Resting is resting in that experience: air flow, sensations in the body, color and shape, or sound. Opening means opening to the rest of experience as it rises and falls, while centered and resting with that one aspect of experience: thoughts and emotions come and go while I rest in the breathing body. Focusing, resting, and opening lead to stability that is not narrow or difficult to maintain. With flexible, vivid, resilient, encompassing attention we begin to see the actual nature of what arises.

Regular Exercise, Practicing on Our Own

"Practicing the dharma in our day to day lives is in a way similar to exercise. The oral instructions of the gurus, as well as the scriptures of the Buddha, merely provide a general understanding of what true spiritual practice is. The real details are filled in by our actual life experiences, meeting them face to face. It is important to understand the dharma in this way. In my case, I don’t have many opportunities to spend time with my teachers, so it is up to me to practice the dharma as best I can as much as I can. Sometimes there will be things that we really do not understand and need more clarifications about. But the real practice of dharma is relating to our emotions. Practicing in this way is similar to the need to have regular exercise in our lives."


~ from an interview with the 17th Karmapa Orgyen Trinley Dorje in New York, July 2011

Thoughts Self-Liberated

Thoughts don't come from anywhere and they don't go anywhere, so how could they be anything other than self-arisen and self-liberated? Just like waves on the ocean. That's how it is.

From an interview with Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche 

Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Spring 2004

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All Responsibility, No Control

A bodhisattva takes full responsibility while seeing that there is no control. No control is a fact; taking full responsibility is a choice.

The fact of no control arises from the reality of constant change and interdependence. Everything arises as innumerable causes and conditions come together; everything passes away when the causes and conditions fall apart. There is never a single cause, and never a controlling agent.

The bodhisattva sees how struggle and suffering arise when change is resisted or ignored. From knowing comes the natural wish not only to free oneself from suffering, but to free oneself and others from the confusion and turmoil that lead to struggle and suffering.

The bodhisattva's aspiration is neither a blind craving for pleasure, nor a naive belief that experience can be made to order. One can choose to take responsibility, to respond to the constantly-evolving situation, in ways that tend toward balance and happiness and freedom. Response-ability requires stability and clarity, generosity, patience, and all the rest: a never-ending and joyful training and extending of compassion, capacities, and skillful means.

May all beings be safe, healthy, happy, at ease in their bodies, at home in the world.

Sky and Water Merging

Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary, beyond direction, magnificently one entity without edge or seam. Further, when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs. Right at the time of entirely dropping off, deliberation and discussion are one thousand or ten thousand miles away. Still no principle is discernible, so what could there be to point to or explain? People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in samadhi. Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces.

~ twelfth century Ch’an master Hongzhi
    from Cultivating the Empty Field
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Dream of a Dream

Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade...


Cornfield by Moonlight with Evening Star
by Samuel Palmer
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