The cult of productivity.

If you could choose, would you be more productive or more present?

Can you be more productive so that you can be more present?

Are the two always at odds against one another?

The cult of productivity has a large following. There is a profound loss of presence and understanding in our world.

Where do we need to direct our attention?

When the cult of productivity requests an offering of your effort and attention, how can you say no to the alms bowl that has made its way to you?

Is it possible to stay in the community and not worship at the altar of productivity? Must you be sent out into the desert with no future to look forward to?

What happens when presence sets foot in the temple of productivity and refuses to bend the knee to false gods?

Can presence fulfill the same work yet attend to different rules and metrics?

There is no easy answer to these questions. Most important is to know that you are in the cult and to decide if that is the place you want to be.

Contributor.

Don't worry about what you can accomplish.

Don't worry about your status, or your role, or how this next thing is going to get you ahead of where you currently are. Don't worry about the results, the strategies or the tactics. 

Are you a contributor?

It's a simple question.

What can you do, right now, to contribute? It doesn't have to be amazing. It doesn't even have to be noticed. It won't be your last contribution, and it won't even be your best.

Notice the posture that this question begs. You either contribute, or you don't. You are either engaged, or not. There is no value assessment to the result of the contribution. What or how you contribute isn't even in the question.

When you make up your mind that you are a contributor, everything changes. Your intentions and actions naturally lend themselves to abundance and generosity. Your interactions and relationships change and enter into realms of possibility. You might even discover an inner sense of joy and contentment.

You don't need to contribute to everything, but figure out those couple of things that are really important in your life. Then ask yourself if you are being a contributor, and choose to take generosity as your compass.

Not there yet.

Your practice will have certain goals and endpoints.  There are going to be practices that you accomplish.  You will finish some things.

But the defining characteristic of an authentic practice is that you are never done.

Never a time to hang up your shoes.
Never a time to retire for good.
Never a time to say that's it.
You will never arrive at the destination.  

Your practice will always require you to find a delicate balance between being overwhelmed by conditions or withdrawing your presence.  The more our minds grasp to situations the more we get sucked in and eventually overwhelmed.  On the other hand, without compassion and the intention to benefit others, we will often find ourselves being stagnant and withdrawn.

The balance is difficult to find. It is enjoying peace and fulfillment, but always standing up and moving forward.  It is being open and responsive, yet calm and stable.

Open and responsive.  Calm and stable.  Those you can identify in your meditation.  Those you can carry forward into the world.   

Progress through wisdom.

The common method of achievement and accomplishing your goals is by force.  Push harder, put in more time and effort, show up early, stay late. 

A lot can be accomplished through effort and exertion.

Another method is to progress through the wisdom of selflessness.  As you cut through ego and self-cherishing, you eliminate possessiveness and suffer less.  Not fixating on your own agenda and perspective, you become more open and generous. 

As wisdom deepens, you don't feel so overwhelmed by situations or problems.  You don't feel the need to turn back or give up.

As wisdom deepens further you can work with adverse conditions and circumstances with great patience.  The impulse to shut down gradually fades further and further from view.

Deeper still, your wisdom overwhelms whatever arises in your experience, allowing you to continue forward with your intention.  Even amidst great hardship and adversity, you continue unafflicted.

Deeper and deeper into the wisdom of selflessness, further and further along the path you progress.  Wisdom unearths accomplishment, yet what have you to gain?

Preoccupied.

We are rational, reasonable people.  We make choices and chart a course based on the best information available.  We use critical thinking, we weigh the pros and cons, and we make a decision knowing that we are the ones responsible for our path.

We know this, but what really motivates our decisions?

Often we have goals for the future.  We have bigger plans for ourselves and try to make sure that we can enjoy our future.  We think that the underlying motivation for our decisions is based on our future goals, but what if it was actually from our present fear?

What if our decisions are influenced by a fear lurking in the shadows of our mind that we haven't even acknowledged?

What if all of our goals and plans are based on this unspoken fear?  

We live our lives charting a course, thinking that we are making our way to happiness, but what if every choice and every action is really just another maneuver to escape our fear?   If we never turn and face it, will we ever truly be free?

What does it mean to be self-reliant if our minds are always preoccupied by fear?

You could probably figure this out on your own.

Given the time, the discipline and the effort, you can learn and master anything.  You can start with curiosity, learn, study, read and reflect.  You could make mistakes, false starts and follow dead end paths.  You could make outlines, throw them out, rewrite them, correct them and then go back to what you read and try to see if it all matches up.

You could do all of those things, and in the end you might succeed.  You definitely would make progress and learn something.

Or you could consult an expert.

The expert could direct your efforts and attention to what is most worthwhile.  She could give you a foundation of knowledge and understanding so that you can easily build a fortress of knowledge and experience.  She would let you make mistakes, and then point out through your own experience how to improve.

Do this.  Don't do that.  

She will teach you how to connect the dots, draw out the implications.  When you are focused on the what and how, she slips in the why.  When your focus is narrow, she gives you the big picture.  When doubt and uncertainty creep in, she makes the unreasonable seem reasonable.  

You still need to put in the time, discipline and effort.  You still need to make mistakes, go back and learn, reflect and contemplate.  But you don't need to do it all by yourself.

Find yourself a good mentor.  Ask questions.  Listen.  And do the work. 

The best experts start out as amateurs. 

Ratnasambhava

OM AH HUNG RATNASAMBHAVA TRAM

Ratnasambhava is one of the Five Family Buddhas.

His pure land is Gunavyuha, the Array of Qualities, representing the wealth of complete and perfect buddhahood.  His color is yellow, representing the activity of enriching and increasing, like the bountiful increase in crops just before the summer harvest.  His right hand is in the mudra of supreme generosity, completely purifying egotism into the wisdom of equality, equalness.  His left hand holds a precious jewel- radiating peace, prosperity and fulfilling his own benefit and the benefit of countless others. 

He rides a precious horse possessed with all the major and minor marks.  The horse is fearless, never startled.  His composure is perfect with a soft mane and flowing tail.  His tireless hooves are silent, light and unfaltering.  The horse rides on the wind, the natural vehicle of movement and change.  In Tibet, it is believed that prayers are carried on the wind.  Prayer flags are often known as the 'wind-horse', and making aspirational prayers and prayers of dedication give energy to that horse.

In regard to our own mind and self, Ratnasambhava represents the aggregate of vedana, which is often translated as sensation.  But sensation here really refers to how we experience the world and mental events.  In the Abhidharma-samuccaya:

What is the absolutely specific characteristic of vedana? It is to experience.

So the way in which we determine our experience (or our life) as being positive, negative or neutral is the aggregate of vedana.  We are presented with a situation and we determine it is positive while someone else might determine it is negative.  Who is correct?

When we deeply contemplate and integrate the wisdom and symbolism of Ratnasambhava, we can learn how to transmute any situation into one of great wealth and purpose.  Whatever we are presented with, if we meet the situation with the mudra of generosity we can overcome the narrow confines of our ego.  We can approach the world with openness and tenderness.  We can transmute selfishness into the wisdom of equality.  That precious jewel you are holding in your left hand, that is bodhicitta, the intention to awaken from your own darkness and delusion in order to benefit others.

So you ride your horse, you train in fearlessness (which doesn't mean there is no fear).  You train in composure, in honesty and integrity.  You ride the wind by making heartfelt aspiration and dedication prayers.  Give voice to the wishes of others.  Give voice to your own wishes. 

If you practice in this way, you will come to experience the wealth of Ratnasambhava.  Summer is coming.  Are you ready?  

No lasting effect.

When searching for consummate meaning in our lives,
time and time again we go outside ourselves,
always asking ourselves what we should do now-
travel, food, friends, job, volunteer, family, kids-
all these goals once achieved have left us unfulfilled.
Why change now?

We either seek out escape-
spa, vacation, lazy Sunday, the new.

Or we seek out illusion-
food, fun, goals, experiences.

Neither have lasting effect. Both are conditioned.

Neurotic.

Oh, how we love distraction.

It makes us feel normal again.  The constant busyness, the doing.  It makes us feel secure, in control, like we run this show.

The compulsion to move- itch that finger or ear, check our email, our phones.  Check Facebook, check the news, watch a show.  Call, text, move, shift, sort.

All this because we are uncomfortable.  Uncomfortable.  We are irritated, this baseline subtle irritation that never really goes away.

But we feel good when we keep moving.

We might complain about always being busy.  All the things we have to do or should do.  But really this is what we want, to keep doing.  Because the opposite is scary.

When we are not doing, all the irritation rises up.  It shows its ugly face. 

When we are not doing, we realize how uncomfortable we are.  We become aware of how painful our life is.  Likely we don't know how to deal with this situation, so we enter flight or fright mode.  And we run.  Or at least we move. 

Our society wonders why we suffer from so much anxiety, depression, loneliness and sadness.  Why are our lives unfulfilling, why do we feel like we are being constantly bombarded from all directions?

Because we are.  And we are running. 

Stop running.  Train your mind.  That is what it means to have a spiritual practice.
Clarify your practice.  Let your practice clarify you.

Commit not a single unwholesome action, 
Cultivate a wealth of virtue,
To tame this mind of ours, 
This is the doctrine of the Buddha.
Buddha Shakyamuni

Blank Slate

Clear you space, your table or desk.
Sit down with a blank piece of paper in front of you and a pen.
Don't do anything else, just sit with that piece of paper.
Sit in the moment with presence, with openness.

After awhile you'll find that the paper starts to fill itself up.
To-dos, ideas, poems, notations, sketches, reminders.

The to-dos come with schedules and deadlines, the poems are tweaked, the notations are expanded upon and clarified, the sketches are refined, the reminders have names and times and the ideas snowball into projects.  All of that comes with their attendants of work and effort, a calendar of events and short and long-term goals.

The list goes on. Your page is full.

So much of the Buddha's teachings focus on the way we exist, on what is the true 'self'.  The Buddha taught that we do not have a truly existing, independent self.  Much can be said about this, but it really comes down to the fact that we do not exist the way we think we do.

We associate ourselves with what we do, how we appear, with our thoughts and ideas.
We associate ourselves with our culture, our credentials, what we like and dislike, with our name.

But that is not our true nature.  That is all writing on the paper.

It is not that we don't exist at all, that we are nothing and nothing matters- that's nihilism.

Our true nature is like the blank piece of paper.  The blank paper is pure potential.  Not being any thing at all, it can appear in any way whatsoever.  It is all-accommodating, completely open and unobstructed, and its nature is to arise in various forms.  Actually, the arising is unceasing, but therein lies the problem.

In the manner of arising we cling to the forms that it takes.  We associate with the content.  We fixate on the to-dos, the ideas and sketches; on what we do, what we think and how we feel.  Then we need to maintain and elaborate those until we are all filled up and there is no more room to doodle.

And it sucks.  We are too busy, overworked, have few moments of opportunity and too many responsibilities and demands to take the time to rest.  Unless resting is passing out in mindlessness.

That is why you meditate.  That is why you need a daily practice.

Meditation is a space to sit and abide in our potentiality, our true nature.  We can wipe the slate clean, rest in its nakedness.  Rest in openness.

And yet there is still arising.

Stuff continues to come up, to appear on our page.  But we don't need to fixate on that, it simply arises, does its thing, and exhausts itself back into our pure potential.  Our whole life is like that, it arises in various forms, does its thing and then exhausts itself and takes a new form.  The problem is that we are usually so bound up to the forms that we hate to see them go, and when they do exhaust themselves and depart we often don't recognize or abide in our pure potential but rather end up just feeling exhausted ourselves.  That is why we need to recognize our true nature.    

Not being anything at all, appearing as anything whatsoever.

ps. the Buddha described this pure potential as our buddhanature.  We all have it, it is fully manifest, right there.  We just need to recognize and abide in it to let it blossom.  Cheers!