Moving through the four noble truths.

Fully understand suffering.

Let go of arising.

Realize cessation.

Cultivate the path. 

Adapted from the Dhammacakkappavattana sutta
translated by Stephen Batchelor

The Dharma is vast and complex. There are various philosophical traditions and practice lineages, as well as various presentations of the path. The challenge of deciding how to start can seem daunting. 

Start where you are. 

The four noble truths can be interpreted as a process that we move through. 

Fully understand suffering.

Look at your current situation. Look at the ways in which you are unhappy. Look closely at your body, how does it feel? Where is there discomfort and pain? Look at your emotions, where do you experience sadness or fear? Look at your perceptions, how do you view your self and the world around you? Look at your habits and inclinations, where are you stuck? 

Fully understand your suffering. This is the first noble truth. It is not a Truth, but the truth of your experience. Understand it. Embrace it. 

Let go of arising. 

What are you holding onto in your experience? What are you accepting or rejecting, holding onto or pushing away? Fixation and grasping are subtle and pervasive, you won't even realize what you are holding onto until you can calm your mind and look. Meditation is the practice of creating a calm and clear mind, so that you can see the various levels of your fixation and grasping. When you see your fixation, whether it is feelings, appearances, concepts, whatever, let it go. Relax. Release the tight knot of grasping and reactivity. 

This is how we train. This is the practice. This is the truth of the arising of suffering.  

Realize cessation.

Cessation means attachment, aversion and ignorance have ceased to control your experience and understanding of your self and the world. What is left in the wake of the cessation of ignorance, attachment and aversion? Is it a void, a blank nothingness? What do we realize in the truth of cessation? 

A vast equanimity. All that appears and exists is naturally present and free in its own place. Nothing to accept, nothing to reject, we abide in complete openness. 

Cultivate the path. 

You thought you were done? Cultivate the path. Do the work. Walk, share, be present and kind in the world. It takes effort and patience. 

You will fall back into suffering and confusion, and you just keep on repeating the process by contemplating your suffering. Give yourself a break, failing means your making progress. (Unless of course you are just skipping over the first three truths and just cultivating the path, in which case you are avoiding the truth of your situation and living a fantasy.)

This is the truth of the path.

Object permanence.

Object permanence is a big development for an infant. 

Prior to the development of object permanence when things leave their field of perception they cease to exist.  Hide a toy, who cares- still happy and content.  Mother leaves the room, no worry here. 

Around six months of age children start to understand that things do exist when they leave the room.  Mom is gone, and that is a problem.  Why did you take away my toy, I was happily enjoying chewing on that.

This is a key development because it allows the child to develop an understanding of causality and learn to problem solve.  Object permanence allows for a rational, logical interpretation of reality.

What no one talks about is that object permanence also brings with it a host of emotional baggage. 

Hope and fear, attachment and aversion, gain and loss are all dependent on our expectation that things we want will stick around and things we don't want will go away.  The problems is that things that we want don't stay for long, and situations that bother us tend to stick around longer than we like. 

Our rational mind has little power over these strong emotions.

Object permanence is a big development for an infant, but many adults still struggle with the implications that it brings to their life.

When was the last time you were really well prepared with your plan, had it all worked out in your head, and then it fell apart.  How did you react?  How fixated were you on that object?

What is it that you are really hoping for?  What happens if none of it works out?

Are you going to be able to talk your way through it?  Do you really know how to work with your emotions when the going gets tough?  Or is anger and disappointment going to spill over into your day and your relationships?

Object permanence. 

What's the alternative?

Time to care.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you are just too busy to care.  Maybe you are dealing with a different problem and it is not convenient right now.  Maybe this is something that you should care about, but right now it is too hard.  Screw it, toss in the towel, ruin it, who gives a damn.  Right?

Do you only care when it fits your schedule, when you've had time to prepare, when it is on your terms?  Is that really caring at all?

What about when people aren't part of your tribe, your group, your religion or party?

Caring means you put aside your trip and your agenda for this person in front of you.  Caring means you are here, when you could easily be somewhere else.  Caring means you showed up.  Caring means you put in the effort, you gave something, you actually listened.

Caring is never easy, it is emotional heavy labor.  You need to muster patience, fortitude, perseverance and grit.  You need to know how to work with your own anger and aversion.  You need to be comfortable being open and receptive.

If you are looking for signs of accomplishment in your practice, look at what happens the next time you are in a situation where it is too intense to care. 

Hard to fight the urge.

It is hard to be patient when you have a full bladder.
It is difficult to focus and do your best work when you haven't eaten all day.
It is a challenge to be kind when you are stressed out and running short on time.

No one ever plans on getting angry.  It just happens so fast and it is hard to fight off the urge.  It is usual and customary to prepare ourselves by going to the bathroom, making sure we have eaten and giving ourselves the time we need to do things right.  We prepare our bodies and our environment, why don't we prepare our mind?

Practice.  Meditate.  Generate compassion and kindness.  Set your intention.  Focus. 

These will enable you to fight off anger and aversion.  They'll even help with a full bladder and an empty stomach too!

#DoNoHarm

Where does clarity go?

Clarity is a natural characteristic of our mind.  In its natural condition it is like a mirror in which we can see perfectly without distortion.  Clarity is by its very nature vivid and unobscured.  It has a transparent quality, allowing us to see connections and draw out implications. 

When we meditate, we are trying to cultivate a calm and clear mind.  Many people are drawn to a calm mind, because it is peaceful and provides a respite from the normal turmoil and stress of our day.  When we calm the mind in meditation we discover its natural clarity, just as when clouds disperse the clear and open sky is revealed to be naturally present. 

So where does clarity go?

We lose clarity in two ways.  Dullness and agitation.

The first is dullness.  We sink into darkness, laziness and the murkiness of ignorance.  Clarity becomes shrouded in narrow views and biased perception.  We experience this loss of clarity as a sinking dullness and sleepiness.  It is something to be abandoned. 

The other way we lose clarity is in agitation.  When clarity becomes too intense it leads to restlessness and agitation.  We can experience this as a proliferation of thoughts or dialogue in our heads.  We may also experience this as physical and emotional agitation, such that we want to turn away from the intensity, get up, get away. 

That subtle level of aversion is the basis of anger. 

When the situation gets too intense we often don't know how to sit with it.  We have lost that transparent quality of clarity and now things seem real.  Very real.  We start to struggle.  We push back.  We react.  We want to know the answer, but often we don't have time to think.  We can't see the answer and sometimes even if we can it is too risky.  Better to be safe, better to run and hide. 

What other option do we have?

Train your mind.  Learn to work with clarity.  As we become more aware of the transparent aspect of our own mind we won't fixate so heavily on our experience.  We will cultivate a little wiggle room, a little room to keep working.  At first it might not be much, but it might be just enough.  Enough to make a difference. 

#DoNoHarm

How do you sit with irritation?

Irritation follows us like a shadow throughout the day.  Often we do not even know it is there, but it finds its way into our work, our relationships, our commute, our responsibilities and even our free time.  

A critical component of meditation is learning how to relate to irritation. 

Do you try to get away?
Switch your posture?
Shift your focus?
Reach for your phone?
Check your email?
Turn on the television?
Turn on some music?  Change the station?
Do you recognize it as being impermanent?
Do you take the opportunity to practice patience?
Or do you let it fester, growing into agitation and anger?
When you experience irritation, does it overwhelm you?

Irritation is a subtle level of aversion.  We don't really like what is playing out in our experience, it could be coming from outside of us or it could be in our own heads.  The result is a state of discontentment that we wish to avoid.

And this is a universal human experience.

It is why we like to be entertained, why we like to eat good food and why we like to build things and do things. 

We all want to avoid the suffering and discontentment of irritation.  We all long for an inner peace and fullness, contentment and happiness.

So how we relate to irritation is important, because we can either run away, let it grow into a monster, or we can use that irritation for growth and spiritual development.  We can learn to hijack our adversity and our problems, to use them as catalysts for change.

And we can start right now, right on our meditation seat.

Akshobhya

OM AH HUNG AKSHOBHYA VAJRA HUNG

Akshobhya is one of the Five Family Buddhas.  

His pure land is Abhirati, Manifest Joy, representing the great joy and happiness experienced by the awakened ones.  His color is deep blue, like the depths of the ocean representing his activity of pacification.  His mudra is the earth-touching mudra symbolizing mother earth bearing witness to his victory over Mara.  His left hand rests in his lap in meditative equipoise holding a five pointed vajra.  The vajra represents the indestructible, immovable and impenetrable awakened mind which is the enlightenment of buddhahood.  

In regard to our own mind and self, Akshobhya represents the skandha of consciousness.  Consciousness serves as the basis for all of our experience, whether it is our experience of sense perceptions or our experience of mind and mental states.  Consciousness can be both non-conceptual knowing or experience or it can involve concepts and thought constructs.  It is important to recognize that the skandha of consciousness is not the forms that appears (the first skandha), it is not sensation (which is the second skandha), it is not perception (which is the third skandha) and it is not judgement or concepts themselves (which are the fourth skandha).  Consciousness as the basis of experience focuses on what is useful or what validates our sense of self and ignores whatever conflicts with what we perceive as our 'self'.  Our constant struggle to find 'who we are' involves this never ending play of the skandhas with consciousness serving as the stage in which these stories play themselves out. 

Akshobhya is the Buddha that represents completely purified aversion or aggression.  As our sense of self hardens we become more self-righteous, more opinionated and critical of others.  We become very authoritarian and assertive.  These mental states naturally encounter conflict and problems in our world and relationships which provoke anger and aggression.  This is much like being on the surface of a great ocean, the winds of change stir up great waves of emotion and we are constantly struggling to stay afloat.  Akshobhya represents the transformation of that aversion and aggression into mirror-like wisdom.  A mirror is crystal clear, empty and luminous.  It perfectly reflects whatever is placed in front of it without any distortion, manipulation or contrivance.  It holds everything but is not stained by the defects of whatever appears.  A mirror is like a completely placid ocean in which everything is perfectly reflected but you can also peer into the profound depths. 

Akshobhya rides an elephant possessed with all the major and minor marks.  A wild elephant represents the undisciplined mind and is very difficult to control and can easily cause a lot of damage.  A trained elephant is able to withstand much trauma and hardship, it can easily remove obstacles and can make its way through a thick jungle by clearing a path with its tusks of mindfulness and vigilance.  An elephant has great endurance and is unassailable by its enemies, yet it is also wise and dignified, moving with great majesty and beauty. 

When we deeply contemplate and integrate the wisdom and symbolism of Akshobhya, we can learn to transmute aversion into mirror-like wisdom.  Rather than getting caught up in situations and reacting to them, constantly fighting them like the waves of the ocean; we can relax into the depths of the ocean and experience the immovable and unshakeable depths of awakened mind.  Water seems fluid and ethereal, but it is extremely powerful and can carve out rock without requiring violence or aggression.  When we realize the indestructible nature of mind, like a mirror we can hold whatever hardship and adversity we experience, we can work with whatever problems and obstacles Mara conjures up and we can gain complete victory in the impenetrable fortress of the true nature of reality.  In this way all obstacles and negativity are naturally pacified and abiding in Abhirati, one experiences great joy and happiness at this triumph. 

It is easy for others to bear witness to this victory, because it is not stained by self-righteousness or egotism.  The holders of the indestructible awakened mind ride elephants, blazing paths where the way seemed too fraught with danger.  They move with majesty and poise and tirelessly carry others to the far shore. 

The Mechanics of Aversion

Normally things aren't too bad.  We are doing our own thing, working on our projects or catching up with friends and family.  Life is busy.

We spend a lot of our time keeping ourselves busy.

Busy feels good.  It is comfortable.  We may complain about being busy to others, but secretly we know we want to be busy.  Doing something.

What can I do?

Aversion keeps a pretty tight rope on our mind.  Aversion really pervades most of our day, but we cover it up with being busy. 

Don't believe me?  You don't need to.  Go stand in line at the post office for thirty minutes.  Or get behind a slow driver who makes you miss the green light.

Lots of aversion going on, right?

Aversion in its coarsest state is anger.  Full-blown, get the f outta my way, I got shit to do.  Nobody really likes to be angry.  They don't like the way it makes them feel and they don't like the impression it leaves on others.

A more subtle level of aversion is irritation and uncomfortableness.  It is the habit to react and do.  To fix and adjust.  We have so much agitation and irritation going on in our body and mind that we need to keep moving just to avoid it.

Generally when people think of meditation they imagine a peaceful state of samadhi.  Sitting blissed out in a state of ease.  That might be true, sometimes, but in order to get there we need to get through all the irritation first.

When we sit in meditation, fully present and open, we notice the uncomfortableness of our body and feelings.  Don't react.  Don't fix.  Don't judge.

Letting our body and feelings remain as they are, our irritation and agitation liberate themselves.  We can hold onto that agitation and irritation and let it give rise to aversion, or we can let those feelings remain as they are, resolving themselves and freeing them in their own place.

So the next time you experience irritation or agitation, who is holding onto what?  Are you moving just to keep moving, to keep escaping the irritation?

Rest in openness.  Free yourself of this unnecessary burden.  

Gods and Demons.

Attachment and aversion.
Hope and fear.
Gain and loss.
Fame and blame.
Happiness and suffering.
Good and bad.

Which side do you feed?

We all have our gods and demons, both serve as hindrances on the path of liberation and prevent us from accomplishing our own aims and the aims of others.

We get attached to the gods, reinforce them.  Maintain them and they become the status quo.  Our path has stalled due to our own fixation.

We hide from our demons.  We run whenever they show their face.  Our hiding and fear entrap us and prevent us from going deeper, from moving on.  Our path has stalled due to our own fixation.

Cut through fixation and you liberate gods and demons simultaneously.  Shall we?