But I didn’t. And so, even though I was in excruciating emotional pain, I didn’t suffer. The pain was just a fact, like the weather or the color of grass. And the fact of the pain didn’t have anything to do with my happiness.
I’m not strong. I’m not brave and I’m not wise. It wasn’t any unusual virtue that kept me from suffering—it was the years of watching my thoughts and feelings come and go, watching them with compassionate detachment as I observed their fleeting nature. When my relationship ended, there was a period when I cried every day, and a couple of times I hurt so badly that I actually screamed. But, during that, I observed it, and asked the question, “Who is it that hurts?” And, of course, when I looked for that person, I couldn’t find him anywhere. Just a passing, changing aggregate of emotion and neurosis. I didn’t pull away from the pain, but I didn’t welcome it either. I watched it carefully, with compassion and respect, and didn’t judge it. And it came, and went, and came, and went...
Like everyone, I have a huge amount of pain and sadness. I feel it every day. But I am always happy, and my life is full of joy and wonder. This is not through good or bad luck, but through paying attention, through knowing that to attach to things I want is to buy into a gigantic hoax.
We confuse pleasure with happiness. Books, movies, TV, and popular songs all tell us that if we get what we want we’ll be happy. If we pay attention, though, we see that it’s not true. Pleasure and satisfaction are just prettied-up manifestations of pain and dissatisfaction. As soon as you get what you want—a job, a relationship, whatever—you worry about how to keep it, and you fear losing it. As soon as you feel satisfied, you worry about maintaining it, and you fear losing it—and so you have immediately lost it. Pleasure reveals itself to be pain, and satisfaction reveals itself to be frustration and fear.
There’s a good reason that movies end with the hero getting the girl, or winning the world championship, or climbing to the top of the mountain. If we saw the rest of his life, we’d see that he wasn’t any happier.
We have a choice. We can make things about our selves (note the two words), locking ourselves up in the prison of ego, separate from all things, from the entire universe—and so we suffer. Or we can let go of the illusion of self, become intimate with myriad things, paying close attention to things as they are—and then our happiness is absolute. We don’t experience any less pain and sadness, or any less pleasure and euphoria, but we see it for what it is, and we feel it when it comes, without attaching to it, and we watch it as it goes.
Even a songwriter as self-obsessed as Joni Mitchell understood that suffering is caused by our belief in the self—“You know I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some—oh, I love you, when I forget about me.”
When you think your happiness is in the hands of another person, or set of circumstances, you attach. And when you attach to something, you try to control it. When you experience a person without attaching, without clinging, there’s more, not less, intimacy, because you’re no longer separate.
Some people make the mistake of thinking that letting go of the self—forgetting about me—means putting other people first. But that’s the exact same poison as putting yourself first, because your thinking is still dualistic. The antidote to suffering is compassion, and compassion by its very nature isn’t specific or discriminating. The self/other view is illusory. I’m not you and you’re not me, but we’re the same thing. So you can’t have compassion for one and not the other.
You already are where you need to be, and already have what you need—because you already are the person you have always wished you could be.
READING YOURSELF AS A MAP
There was a man I used to hike with in Scotland. He was a map enthusiast, and I told him that maps didn’t seem to help me to avoid getting lost. He told me, “That’s because you want the map to show you where to go, but that’s not what maps do. What they do is show you where you are.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but, more than twenty years later, I think I finally have an idea of how knowing the route to where we think we want to go is not the same thing as knowing where we are. We might know where we’re trying to go, but we rarely know where we are.
Nearly all of our thoughts are comparative—comparing how we’re doing to how we perceive other people to be doing, comparing life to how it used to be, or how we hope it will be in the future, or how we think it ought to be now. We compare ourselves, who we are and how we are, to who and how we think we ought to be, or we compare ourselves to other people. We’re not reading the map skillfully, and so we’re lost.
What if we stop thinking about where we should be, and just read the map? What if we let it show us where we are right now? Can we take that instruction as it is? What if we look at who we are, how we are, the situation we’re in, without comparison or story? Then we might find that we have what we need. If we look at what is, rather than what isn’t, at who we are rather than who we’re not, it may be interesting and it may be wondrous and it will certainly be perfect, because we find out where we are. We are no longer lost.
LEAVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP
You make me happy through and through,
The way the sun lights up the sky
— Wendy Cope
Relationships don’t work... There never was a relationship that worked.
— Charlotte Joko Beck
There is a song by Jackson Browne in which the narrator declares himself to be “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.” This song, like most so-called love songs, misses the point. The longing for love and the longing for money are the same thing. They are both materialistic desires.
We want material things to make us happy, and they never do. We want relationships to make us happy, and they never do. They can’t—because the selfish desire for personal happiness or personal salvation is precisely what prevents our being happy. Relationships are exploitative by their very nature.
Think about any “love story” you have ever read, or watched on a screen. Have you ever seen one in which two people meet, fall in love, and everything goes well? Of course not. There would be no story to tell, and besides, that has never happened and never could happen in any relationship. Instead, love stories, whether comedy or drama, follow a formula—two people meet, everything is wonderful, then something goes wrong. One becomes angry with the other, who then has to find a way to make it okay again. Once that is achieved, the story ends, commonly with a kiss.
It has to end there, because, of course, the pattern is going to be repeated. The reason one partner becomes angry with the other is that they are not getting their way. The other person is not doing what they want them to do, and so the relationship is not providing them with the pleasure it did before—and it is this pleasure that we mistake for happiness.
And so, all relationships fail. Some fail by breaking up, while others fail by bringing lifelong misery to the people who share the relationship. This is true of marital relationships, work relationships, political relationships, relationships in communities, relationships between siblings, between parents and children, between friends. Every relationship fails.
They fail because they are about one person, or one group, wanting something from another. Relationship is about separation; there is me, and there is a person or thing or experience that makes me feel good. If it is a person, then the words “I love you” can be applied. But we can also say “I love rum” or “I love steak” or “I love cocaine.” Whether the subject of the “love” is a person, a drink, a food or a drug, what we are saying is that we love the pleasurable feeling we get. And, as soon as we stop getting that pleasure, “love” turns to frustration, anger or indifference—because it never was love in the first place.
I am not suggesting that we should split from our partners, families, friends and colleagues to go and live alone in remote caves. If we did that, we would still be in relationship—relationship with ourselves, and with th
e caves. Our view would still be self-centered.
An authentic love, an authentic happiness, does not arise from relationship, but from union. Union with each other, so that we no longer think or feel terms of self and other. Union with what we are doing, so that we no longer think in terms of us doing something, and the thing that is being done.
This can be seen in koan practice. If we are asked, say, “What abides outside of the realms of existence and non-existence?”, and we try to work on it, try to figure out the answer, we will get farther and farther away from any understanding. It is only when we give up working on the koan, abandon a relationship with the koan, and actually become the koan, that we awaken to its meaning.
Life itself is a koan. The people we love, the people we do not love, the people we find interesting, the people we find dull, all of it is a koan. When we fall into relationship, a dualistic view, we suffer. When we move out of relationship and into union, we move into understanding, compassion and love.
THE ANTIDOTE FOR HATE
Some people say that the antidote for anger and hate is love. I think that’s too easy, because the word is almost meaningless.
You can say that you love someone. You can also say that you love the mountains, or you love music, or books, or movies. You can say you love doughnuts. All of these statements may be true, but they don’t mean the same thing.
So, with love being so hard to define, it doesn’t seem to follow that it’s the antidote to anger or hate. In fact, a certain type of “love” can easily and quickly turn into hate—romantic love, which can be the most egocentric state, because it’s all about you, not the person you purport to love. It’s all about how they make you feel, what you want from them, what you expect from them. And when your expectations are not met, anger arises, and love is replaced by hate, because love with attachment is not different than hate. They are both manifestations of passion.
It’s not love that will free us from anger and hate—it’s compassion. Without compassion, it’s possible to be cruel to people we love; with compassion, cruelty becomes impossible, because compassion closes the gap between us and other people, other beings, the world and the universe.
I used to know a person who told me that she hated me. She probably had good reason. We would have preferred never to see each other, but circumstances sometimes required otherwise. I did not reciprocate her hatred—I wished her well—but I often found myself reacting angrily to her aggression.
When I felt anger taking hold of me, I remembered a time when I had to leave her in a hospital. I remembered how small and broken she was. I remembered how she cried as I left her there, and how I cried as I drove away, because I was and am as small and broken as she was. When I remembered her face as I left her there, any feelings of anger toward her were gone, and I just wanted her to be happy.
That was not love. Nor was it pity, which is just contempt with a soft voice. It was compassion, a recognition of the suffering of all beings, which was also a recognition that the hostility shown toward me by her small, deluded ego, and the angry reaction of my small, deluded ego, were irrelevant.
Compassion is not about the self. Compassion has no expectations or attachment to outcomes, so it does not seek to control other people, because compassion does not see enough separation for there to be anyone else to control.
NO TRANSFORMATION
How do you transform the Three Poisons (greed, anger and ignorance) into the Three Virtues (compassion, wisdom and enlightenment)?
You don’t. There is nothing to transform. The Three Poisons and the Three Virtues are the same thing. Whether they are poisons or virtues depends on only one thing: whether they are experienced by the awakened mind, or seen through the fog of ego.
When you see things as they are, instead of telling yourself a self-centered story, greed is not greed, but compassion. Anger is wisdom, and ignorance is enlightenment. Note that I’m not saying that the poisons become virtues—I’m saying that they are the virtues, they always were the virtues, and it’s only the self-centered view that made them sick. The ego is the disease that prevents clarity. Let go of your story and you see things as they are.
Greed without ego is compassion, wanting all beings to be well. Anger without ego is wisdom, the sword of Manjushri that cuts through delusion and falsehood. Ignorance without ego is enlightenment, the clear eyes of the Buddha who knows that there is nothing to be ignorant of or separate from, who is perfect and complete and naturally experiences that completeness and perfection without self-consciousness, because there is no self to be conscious of.
Why do so few people experience such clarity, experience their Buddha-nature? Because we don’t want to let go of our story. We spend years or even decades on what we tell ourselves is a Buddhist practice, but we’re lying to ourselves and others. What we’re hoping is that Buddhism will make us better, will improve us, will enlighten us.
The desire for enlightenment is no different than the desire for a lot of money, or fame, or any other materialistic attainment. It’s the whiny, grasping little ego that demands this and rejects that. It’s a story about you, your journey, your goals, your desires, what you want and what you don’t want. When you don’t get what you want, you’re unhappy. When you do get what you want, you’re unhappy—because you’re afraid of losing it, and of course you will lose it, because every conditional thing passes.
The story we tell ourselves is a tragic story, and it always has the same ending.
THE EMPTY BOAT
There is a Zen story about a man who repaints his boat. Once it’s done, he’s so pleased with how it looks that he decides to take it out on the lake, even though it’s a foggy day. As he steers through the fog, another boat slams into his, damaging the new paint job.
The man is furious. Why the hell didn’t the person in the other boat pay attention and watch where he was going? The man turns to yell at the person in the other boat, and finds that there is no other person. It’s just an empty boat, drifting on the lake.
The other boat is always empty, even when there’s someone steering it. There is never anyone to get angry with. Even if the person steering the other boat deliberately rammed our boat, his behavior had nothing to do with us. Anything anyone else does is done for their own reasons, and much of the time they don’t even know the reasons. When we see life as it is, rather than our thoughts about it, we see that every time we look for an enemy, someone to hate, someone to blame, there’s never anyone there. Just an empty boat on a foggy lake.
AT HOME IN HELL
Someone forces a month-old baby to drink acid. We see the pictures, and sadness for the baby turns into rage against the person who did it. But rage, hatred, all of the ego’s poison, is what lets a human being do something so monstrous.
When we feel pity, we are already separating ourselves from the baby’s suffering, because pity is one more ego-reaction, as is anger and hatred. When we attach to such reactions, we are making it about ourselves, our separate selves.
What can we do in this world of horror? Respond with compassion rather than react with pity. Be present to the horror with compassionate detachment. Such detachment doesn’t mean not feeling, not caring—it means not making it about yourself. It means fully experiencing the hell, and with that experience comes the realization that such stupid awfulness will always happen for as long as people attach to the self and believe they are separate from other beings.
Though it’s hard to do otherwise, if we allow ourselves to hate the person who did this, we validate his or her cruelty, and, by hating, we pour gasoline on the flames of our own cruelty, and so it goes on. Such awfulness can only stop happening when we replace hatred with compassion. Who would you rather be—the baby whose body is so horribly maimed, or a person who would do such a thing to a baby?
KARMA IS NOT A BITCH
I know someone who says, whenever anything bad happens to someone whose behavior she doesn’t like, “Karma is a bitch.”
&n
bsp; In 6th Century China, Emperor Wu had built Buddhist temples and financially supported monks. He thought this must have earned him good karma, so he asked Bodhidharma, the First Ancestor of Zen, what merit his actions had earned him.
“None,” said Bodhidharma.
The Emperor didn’t like this. “Then what’s the meaning of the Buddha Dharma?”
“Vast emptiness, nothing holy,” said Bodhidharma.
“Then who are you?” the Emperor asked.
“No knowing,” said Bodhidharma.
People who come to Buddhist practice, but still like to make everything about themselves, love to talk about karma, their own and other people’s. To a mindset conditioned to believe in an omnipotent parent, karma is a system of punishment and reward—do bad things, and the deity will punish you; do good things and the deity will reward you.
This is what psychiatrists call “magical thinking.” It is not karma.
The law of karma is this: every action has a consequence. The action itself is called karma; the consequence of the action is called vipaka.
What happens to you is the result of something that has preceded it. If you jump out of a top-floor window (karma), you are most likely going to be splattered all over the sidewalk below (vipaka). This is not because someone or something is punishing you for jumping out of the window—rather, hitting the sidewalk is a result of the fall, which is a result of your jumping out of the window. Your decision to jump out of the window is a result of previous karma and vipaka.
Kill Your Self Page 3