Time for Lift Off
Listening to Anam Thubten Rinpoche speak on the Buddhist path as he teaches it, I reflected on how his words resonated with my own life these days. He spoke of the many reasons that people go to spiritual teachers and admonished us that all he was offering was the path to enlightenment, not another type of "ground" for people to try to get their feet planted on when it feels like they are losing everything. He spoke of the tendency, when life has torn up the ground beneath us with an earthquake, to try to find some stable ground to re-establish a firm and reliable sense of safety. So we lose our job and become obsessed with improving our romantic relationship. Or a relationship ends and we throw ourselves into our work, each time thinking that the new focus is what we should have been focused on all along and that only it can deliver us out of suffering. Selecting a spiritual teacher can be just such an effort, looking for someone to make us feel safe in the world instead of someone to tear our world apart and give us no refuge within the illusion of samsara.
The key thing he mentioned that resonated with me was that when we have lost 99% of what we cherish, that is the most painful time. We react by trying to get back what we've lost, or create something better to take its place, but really what we need to do in order to end our suffering is to let go of that last 1%. Hanging out at "99% groundless" is an excrutiatingly painful place to dwell. And yet so many of us do that repeatedly. After a while the flow of enlightenment gives us a break and let's us have some illusion of safety again, but it can't last because the fundamental truth is that all security within a realm of birth, old age, sickness and death is inevitably ephemeral.
Recently the ground was torn out from under me, and I can already see that it has allowed me to soar. I was sailing along, preparing to buy a house this summer, when all the sudden my regional director decided to quit and my East Coast based company decided not to replace him, eliminating its Western division and my job in the process. There went my house. But then it turns out that I get to not only keep some of the clients, but to also start doing the work the regional director once did, only without having to give a cut to the East Coast company. My pay rate just doubled! This also lays the ground work for a number of long range plans I had forgotten about in my quest for a mortgage at 3.75% interest.
Of course, the moral of this story is not that my true refuge all along should have been self-employment instead of home ownership. That would just be ego doing its normal thing again. No, the teaching is that I have a choice to keep dancing as fast as I can to stay erect as an earthquake rages about me, or to finally let go of the one ground that has always been my final 1% refuge. And that refuge is my consciousness as this separate person I think of as "me."
Today I had the clarity that reality was ready for me to lift off and soar, and that it was therefore pulling the ground out from under me to give me the opportunity to do so. And I also realized that the manner in which I might do so is to shift my perspective from that of an I looking out at a world that is other, to that of an is that is experiencing the flow of itself in many forms. It actually isn't so hard to do once you have clarity about what you are intending to do. It's just that it's hard to integrate into the habits of daily living, because the strongest habit is to completely interact with life from a point of view of separateness. So it takes the same commitment that breaking any bad habit takes.
Ever quit smoking? Stop drinking? Foreswear any daily habit you knew was going to do you in if you didn't do it in first? Well that's the same approach to take to freeing oneself from the habit of seeing the world through the eyes of "me, me, me." Repeatedly interupt the acting out of the bad habit (self-referencing all perception) and deliberately repeat the desired behavior (experiencing the wholeness of the moment), again and again and again and ... Until it becomes the new habit. Then you don't do anything. You just live and don't make a new habit of thinking of yourself as someone who has achieved something. When you achieve having truly let go, there is no one left to congratulate himself for having achieved it.
So how about you? Could you put down that last X that's been killing you? Would you like to be free of the need for any type of security blanket? Are you doing it right now? Who is there to do it or not do it? Is awareness happening right now? Ahhh. What a nice place to rest, in a glide on the wind.
The key thing he mentioned that resonated with me was that when we have lost 99% of what we cherish, that is the most painful time. We react by trying to get back what we've lost, or create something better to take its place, but really what we need to do in order to end our suffering is to let go of that last 1%. Hanging out at "99% groundless" is an excrutiatingly painful place to dwell. And yet so many of us do that repeatedly. After a while the flow of enlightenment gives us a break and let's us have some illusion of safety again, but it can't last because the fundamental truth is that all security within a realm of birth, old age, sickness and death is inevitably ephemeral.
Recently the ground was torn out from under me, and I can already see that it has allowed me to soar. I was sailing along, preparing to buy a house this summer, when all the sudden my regional director decided to quit and my East Coast based company decided not to replace him, eliminating its Western division and my job in the process. There went my house. But then it turns out that I get to not only keep some of the clients, but to also start doing the work the regional director once did, only without having to give a cut to the East Coast company. My pay rate just doubled! This also lays the ground work for a number of long range plans I had forgotten about in my quest for a mortgage at 3.75% interest.
Of course, the moral of this story is not that my true refuge all along should have been self-employment instead of home ownership. That would just be ego doing its normal thing again. No, the teaching is that I have a choice to keep dancing as fast as I can to stay erect as an earthquake rages about me, or to finally let go of the one ground that has always been my final 1% refuge. And that refuge is my consciousness as this separate person I think of as "me."
Today I had the clarity that reality was ready for me to lift off and soar, and that it was therefore pulling the ground out from under me to give me the opportunity to do so. And I also realized that the manner in which I might do so is to shift my perspective from that of an I looking out at a world that is other, to that of an is that is experiencing the flow of itself in many forms. It actually isn't so hard to do once you have clarity about what you are intending to do. It's just that it's hard to integrate into the habits of daily living, because the strongest habit is to completely interact with life from a point of view of separateness. So it takes the same commitment that breaking any bad habit takes.
Ever quit smoking? Stop drinking? Foreswear any daily habit you knew was going to do you in if you didn't do it in first? Well that's the same approach to take to freeing oneself from the habit of seeing the world through the eyes of "me, me, me." Repeatedly interupt the acting out of the bad habit (self-referencing all perception) and deliberately repeat the desired behavior (experiencing the wholeness of the moment), again and again and again and ... Until it becomes the new habit. Then you don't do anything. You just live and don't make a new habit of thinking of yourself as someone who has achieved something. When you achieve having truly let go, there is no one left to congratulate himself for having achieved it.
So how about you? Could you put down that last X that's been killing you? Would you like to be free of the need for any type of security blanket? Are you doing it right now? Who is there to do it or not do it? Is awareness happening right now? Ahhh. What a nice place to rest, in a glide on the wind.
posted by Indigo @ 2:21 PM
