by Joan Gattuso
We can learn through pleasure or pain. Unfortunately most of us choose pain. And it was then that through loss, chaos, cheating and deception my friend was forced to learn her lessons. In time it did bring her closer to her core, the love and goodness that was and is in her.
May the profound words of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche resonate in your heart: “Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.” What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.
Impermanence Exercise
In meditation do a life review of the 10 Destructive Actions. These ten break down as three physical, four verbal and three mental.
THE THREE PHYSICAL 1. Killing—Most of us are not murderous, so we need to expand and examine how we have harmed others physically. This first point reaches beyond physical combativeness. Have you killed an idea? Another’s dream?
2. Stealing—How and in what ways have you ever stolen? Perhaps you have lived out of integrity and have “stolen” the self-esteem of another, or even stolen a colleague’s idea.
3. Unwise sexual behavior—Maybe you have been involved in promiscuity, adultery or unkind sexual behavior such as self-gratification with no regard for your partner.
THE FOUR VERBAL 1. Lying—Have you been untruthful in your verbal communications, even just a little? A Hindu teaching is that if one never tells even the tiniest of lies for twelve years, he will achieve enlightenment. How close are you? Why not start today?
2. Creating disharmony—You may have done this through slanderous speech or stirring a pot of discontent that did not need to be stirred.
3. Harsh speech—You do this through the unskilled action of judgmental words by criticizing others, ridiculing others, cursing, swearing, yelling or hurting others’ feelings with unkind words.
4. Idle talk—Do you gossip about others, spreading unsubstantiated tales for no reason other than self-aggrandizement? There are spiritual communities that view gossip as one of the most destructive actions of human behavior.
THE THREE MENTAL 1. Coveting—You become the hungry ghost by never being satisfied with what you have, desiring another’s good fortune.
2. Malicious or hateful thoughts—We sometimes think in ways that are not only harmful to others, but very deleterious to ourselves.
3. Wrong views—Bigotry and prejudice fall under this category, as you deem people inherently angry, evil, unkind, bad, selfish, etc. (See the chapter on Right View.)
These ten destructive actions lead to great mental confusion and distress. To do this meditative practice properly with adequate focus on each action, you may need to do it in three parts over three days. Practice releasing them until you feel a positive shift in your consciousness and sense your perceptions clearing.
Look at each one of the ten and ask: How has this shown up in my life? How does this apply to me? It may be helpful to have a notepad and jot down whatever arises in your mind.
To deepen this practice you can on another occasion explore how you feel others have directed these ten destructive actions toward you. Practice forgiving yourself and others for whatever arises in order to free yourself from its karmic hold on you.
Repeating this meditation frequently clears out these destructive factors from our minds and the other person’s and leads us into having a pure heart. This is particularly beneficial to prepare one to be conscious at the time of death.
NON-SELF
Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully communicates in The Heart of the Buddha Teachings: “As long as we see ourselves as the one who loves and the other as the one who is loved, as long as we value ourselves more than others or see ourselves different from others, we do not have true equanimity. We have to put ourselves ‘into the other person’s skin’ and become one with him if we want to understand and truly love him. When that happens there is no ‘self’ and no ‘other.’”
Like certain other Buddhist teachings, non-self is a difficult concept initially for the Western mind to grasp. I generally think of non-self as oneness, although my Buddhist friends tell me it is not exactly the same. It can be more fully explained as emptiness. There is no self that remains the same.
There is no permanent self. We can understand this, because we know every second countless cells are dying and others are replacing them. Thus, we are not exactly in the same form from one moment to the next. This is non-self. Nothing is ever separate.
I can understand the concept of separation. Believing we are separate keeps us from knowing the depths of the great spiritual teachings. One can adamantly believe that he is separate from you, from the annoying relatives, from the homeless man on the subway—but the truth is, he is not. This is non-self. Personally I think something has got to be lost in the translation of the word “non-self.” Healing the Divide is a Buddhist organization founded by Richard Gere. As the name implies, it is dedicated to assisting us in seeing the oneness of us all.
Those I call annoying are in me. You are in me. I am in you. The homeless man is in me. The radiant child is in me. The flower, the tree, the sky, the ocean is in me. We are all interwoven in the same fabric of life.
Non-self is not a Buddhist philosophy, it is an insight. In our Western thought, when we grasp non-self it is an “aha” moment, a great and profound insight into the fundamental nature of life.
To explain this challenging concept of non-self more fully, I have adapted a teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh in which he explains non-self in a family construct.
Our families are in our consciousness. We carry all the seeds of our particular families in our “store consciousness.” We can deny them, attempt to shut them out of our lives, but there they are, lurking in our store consciousness.
I know a number of families in my work and world where an adult son has pulled away and completely rejected his family of origin, usually for no apparent reason. A minor upset or infraction occurs, and “Joey” is gone. It makes no sense whatsoever to everyone in the family. It seems unreasonable. Joey has left no forwarding address. This is not a rare or random occurrence. I know of at least six families where this has occurred. Such family dysfunctions show up everywhere. Oh how we wish it was not so. But it shows us, if we are willing to see, that when we run away we are still carrying our family in us.
Impermanence and non-self can open the doors to reality for us, as we begin to touch all things and all aspects of life deeply. We come to understand that one thing is all things, that one person is all persons.
Many years ago I learned this wonderfully insightful exercise from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I have taught it to numerous folks:
“Just Like Me” Exercise
Whenever you cast a judgment upon another person, you train your mind to instantly respond by saying, “Just like me.” Examples:
What a cunning person . . . just like me.
What a phony person . . . just like me.
What an egghead . . . just like me.
What a thoughtful person . . . just like me.
What a generous person . . . just like me.
What a terrible driver . . . just like me.
What a self-centered egomaniac . . . just like me.
What a loving person . . . just like me.
A truth I have long endeavored to live and have taught is that it is not possible for us to observe, witness or judge a behavior or trait in another person unless it lives in us. People generally resist this teaching, and some even raise bitter objections. No matter how adamantly they argue, it does not alter “Just like me.” If anything, it brings the teaching into greater clarity.
I teach this concept in my first book, A Course in Love. There was a woman who was in my congregation years ago who really loathed me (we know she actually loathed herself, even though she focused her venom t
oward me). For the longest time I could not get a grasp as to why she was in my life. I’d practice forgiving her, blessing her, letting her go, sending her on to meet her good, and she would still be there snarling at me from the front row and taking notes. I later found out the notes were about my wardrobe, not my teachings. She was vitriolic in her hateful words toward me, but she would not evaporate or go away no matter how much I prayed.
Finally I remembered “Just like me.” How I was like her was very difficult to fathom initially. So I made a list of her hostile and annoying characteristics, and after each I would say, “Just like me.” After a number of repetitions the light began to dawn. She was the outer voice of my inner critic. “Aha, just like me.” She would criticize loudly for anyone within earshot to hear, just as I criticized myself at times silently within my own mind.
Through the years I have made enormous strides in that area and have silenced and released the inner judge, resulting in increased freedom and much greater peace and happiness.
“Just like me” is a wonderful and profoundly aware insight to make. We are not separate from our nemesis, no matter how distasteful they are or how much we dislike them.
She was I. I was she.
She finally did go away, but not until my inner work was done and my own inner critic went into retirement.
Years later I was co-officiating with an Orthodox rabbi at the funeral of a member of my congregation who had been raised in Orthodox Judaism. It was very uncomfortable, because several of the family members were literally yelling at one another. At one point, when I was at the podium speaking, the elderly rabbi began raging at me because I was a woman, and no woman had a right to speak at a funeral. The entire situation was ugly and certainly not what the deceased deserved.
Afterward, when the funeral directors and sane family members were apologizing to me profusely, out of my past came this same woman who had been in my congregation. I almost laughed out loud. Okay, God, I thought, is there anything else that could happen today? Bring on the locusts! Amazingly this formerly angry woman said kind and thoughtful things to me and said not to take on the ragings of the old rabbi. For me that encounter was a miracle.
She is I. I am she.
The raging Orthodox relatives and the rabbi are me, and I am them.
Some races and cultures and religions are completely into separation and the sense of a separate self, never to find any connection with others. Other races and cultures and religions look for the similarities and seek to recognize the inter-being, the non-self.
“Just like me.” What we perceive, we are.
What I saw in the rabbi was fear, fear that his tightly controlled world was coming unraveled by my presence as the leader at that time. I knew the deceased well. The rabbi had never even met him. The rabbi is an Orthodox Jew. He saw me as a Christian (not how I define myself) and female. From his viewpoint it was absolutely blasphemous that I would be present, let alone leading the service. It was inconceivable to him that the deceased, one of my favorite congregants, a precious elderly man, would be attending Unity with his son. So he was in fear. “Just like me.” When in fear, attack is a common response. My presence became like a lightning rod. By my very presence I was saying, We are one.
With non-self we are all waves in the great ocean of life. Non-self helps us begin to see all as our brothers and sisters—from the Dalai Lama to Uncle Ed, to your mother-in-law to the grocery store clerk—as one. This in turn gives us not only great insight but also great compassion for others.
When we have developed the ability to look deeply, we can begin to see that there is no separate, independent self. We see how we are interconnected with all beings. Many people live just to satisfy themselves, not realizing that in living to bring happiness and joy to others, they will attain happiness and joy themselves.
I visited my mother’s cousin Margie, who lives about twenty miles from where I was writing and whom I had not seen for a number of years. She is a tiny, sweet, dear woman, now a widow living alone and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. When she first saw me, she thought I was my mother. Throughout our visit at various times she thought I was all of the women in my mother’s family, including my grandmother, who left this life forty years ago.
She was very chatty remembering with joy all kinds of tales from the past, saying, “You remember Theresa. We all went to school together.” Gently I’d remind her, “No, that was my mother.” Then we decided to call my mother, who she soon thought was my mother’s mother.
As we continued to visit, I began to see the energy of non-self dancing about the room and within our conversation. Cousin Margie’s brain had the female lineage of her family intact, but the individuality was no longer discernible to her. She didn’t introduce females from the old neighborhood or relatives from her father’s or husband’s side. There was simply a fading and a blending, and in her mind my grandmother, aunt, mother, her sister and I became one person.
If we all could see life that way and then multiply it by a billion, then we would be getting close to non-self, oneness, emptiness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of our “grasping at self existence,” that this is “an erroneous belief that keeps us imprisoned in the cycle of existence,” which is to say, samsara—birth, life, death, rebirth, again and again. All of life is impermanent and without self. We can eventually develop profound insight to deeply touch all of life without self and become free from birth and death. We can become free from impermanence and permanence, as well as free from non-self and self. Only then do we arrive at the Third Dharma Seal, Nirvana.
NIRVANA
A wanderer spoke to the venerable Sariputta: “Reverend Sariputta, it is said, ‘Nirvana, Nirvana.’ Now what, your reverence, is Nirvana?”
Reverend Sariputta replied, “Nirvana, it is said, is formless. It has always been. It was not created in man. It cannot die. The way to Nirvana can be pointed out, but it would be impossible to show a cause for the production of Nirvana.”
Nirvana is our true, ultimate expression of being. I heard Thich Nhat Hanh teach that Nirvana means “extinction.” Now this is where the Eastern mind and that way of teaching is very different from the Western mind.
How can it be defined as “extinction”? All normal beliefs, concepts, ideas, perceptions become extinct with Nirvana. Our perceptions fill our minds and keep us in ignorance. On our way to awakening, we have to rise above our notions, concepts and perceptions.
In Nirvana we touch our real self, our non-self, our profoundly spiritual nature. This true self is what we can learn to touch—the ultimate nature of reality. Nirvana is the ground of being of all that is. In metaphysics this profound state of being is called Christ consciousness, illumined consciousness, when we are truly at our essence. We are in our Buddhahood.
Nirvana is the extinction of suffering. It is our notions, concepts, attachments and perceptions that cause us to suffer. When we give these up and silence our monkey mind, our suffering begins to diminish, our joy increases, our state of awareness is clearing, and we are waking up and reaching Nirvana.
In Nirvana we know we have already had all along what we were searching for. We are what we have always been. We touch our true nature.
The greater truth is that we need do nothing. What in the world can that mean? It is absolutely a Buddhist principle. We do not need to run here to there, rushing about in our quest for enlightenment. We do not need to search anywhere. All we need “do” is turn within. Here lies the vast reservoir of our true self. Just being our authentic self is enough. And yet there are many paths and methods and schools and practices to get us in touch with our authentic selves.
I perceive all of the above as a means of discarding our unknowing to reach our knowing. We can carry around a shipload of unknowing, false knowings, mistaken concepts, beliefs and perceptions.
A Buddhist term that is used here is “aimlessness,” again difficult for the Western, educated mind to understand. O
ften the meaning is lost in translation and convoluted in its character.
From the Dhammapada: “There is no fire like lust, no sickness like hatred, no sorrow like separateness, no joy like peace. No disease is worse than greed, no suffering worse than selfish passion. Know this and seek Nirvana as the highest joy.”
Says American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, “. . . realization of Nirvana transforms the ordinary, relative world into an extraordinary, perfect environment or ‘Buddhaverse’” (Thurman’s term for what is generally called Buddha-land). Imagine living in a Buddhaverse. How would life be different for you? For all of us?
In Nirvana we are free from all concepts and notions. In Nirvana we have had and continue to have our own direct experiences of blissful reality. Theory does not result in Nirvana. Actual experience and deep practice is what can bring one to this remarkable state of being. No one person or teaching can take your experience from you. It is now your very own. You own it.
We know what we know, and we do not know what we do not know. An example I often use to illustrate not knowing what I do not know is that I’ve never had a baby. I have not given birth. It does not matter how many times I have seen actual births on video or in person. I DO NOT KNOW what giving birth is like psychologically, physically or spiritually. There is not a man on the planet, including all male ob-gyns, who knows what giving birth is really like. One has to have the experience to know. So therefore we can only truly know what we have experienced and do not know what we have not experienced.
Entering the Threshold of Nirvana
Nirvana is the state of awareness of all that is. One of my remarkable, blissful experiences came in the mid-1990s while studying with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles. It was several days into the teaching when my dear friend Linda and I arrived at the UCLA auditorium early in the morning to be present when His Holiness would be doing his morning chanting aloud.