(originally on the Huffington Post 8/30/2010)

Sometimes I wonder if religion would exist at all if it didnt address the most daunting fact that we human beings are faced with: that we are going to die and that everything we experience in life is impermanent.

I think most spiritual traditions take this fact into account and try to prepare us for death and whatever is beyond, while also attempting to teach us how to live an ethical and meaningful life — either for its own sake, or because it will prepare us for the next life, or because it will prepare us to go to heaven or someplace perhaps better than this world.

At the intellectual level everybody knows we are going to die, but what does death really mean? In Buddhism, the idea of death and the idea of impermanence are strongly connected and in some sense interchangeable. One interpretation of the truth of suffering (the “first noble truth”) is that we suffer because we do not understand or fully relate to impermanence.

Change is happening all the time — when we physically die, that event has actually been foreshadowed by a myriad of “mini-deaths” of all kinds. We lose our hair, our lover, our strength, our vitality, our money — or we lose our poverty, our weakness, our impatience, our headache, our tooth, our memory… you name it. A careful look at our life shows that death or impermanence is a constant companion. Because we are out of synch with how things are constantly changing, we cling to things, resist change and impermanence and therefore suffer.

Of course you could say, “I will deal with death when it comes but come on, it’s likely a ways off and I have a life to live here and a family to raise, and creativity to express, and contributions to make to society. Also I’m planning carefully for my retirement when I can cash in on all that hard work. What’s the point in talking about old age, sickness and death now? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Or one could adopt a nihilistic attitude about it and say, “it’s all impermanent, we’re gonna die, what’s the point of any of it? Let’s just eat drink and be merry or let’s just curl up into a ball and try to make the whole thing go away.” Another approach is “this life is just a prelude, a warm-up drill for what comes after — a much better and permanent place called heaven. If we pass our entrance exam here we will go there and then everything is going to be wonderful forever.”

But who really knows how things work? Can we really trust somebody else’s description of what is going to happen or do we actually have to find out for ourselves? The Buddha said you have to find out for yourself. Actually we can’t even take Buddha’s word for it.

But if we really really seriously examine impermanence, I think we can learn a lot about the nature of our reality. If we can experience the “mini-deaths,” the letting go in each moment as it moves into the next moment, we quite possibly can get a major clue about the meaning of impermanence and death, and see for ourselves what it is that we experience as continuity for that matter.

The Buddhist approach is to look directly at our experience and see first hand what is happening. That is the ultimate meaning of meditation — a direct look — not just at what our concepts are, not just what we’ve been told is true by some wise (or not wise) person, not just what our parents told us, but a direct look with the eyes of prajna (unbiased discriminating awareness).

So when we look in that way, without hope of gaining or losing, what do we see? How do we experience impermanence? How do we experience continuity? As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, “your guess is as good as mine.”

Your thoughts, comments?
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(originally on the Huffington Post 8/18/10)

The essence of Buddhism, I think most Buddhists would agree, is to cultivate awareness and compassion and to explore our existence in an open and unbiased way. In some sense Buddhism has always been what we Westerners would consider a fusion of religion and science. There are no articles of faith, there is no dogma, nothing to believe without verification. Buddhism is considered a non-theistic tradition, and from that point of view it should mix well with scientific, technological and rationalist thought.

Over the past 50 years or so, the Buddhist teachings have taken root (to a certain extent) in our Western culture. Many great teachers have worked hard to translate these teachings and practices into English and European languages and into forms that are accessible to Western students. Within some Buddhist schools, on the other hand, the students have been required to learn the traditional forms in their original language and cultural setting.

The process of transplanting the Buddhist teachings in the West seems to have evolved in several different ways:

1. The traditional form is transplanted, takes root and grows (e.g., a Zen monastery in the West where the chants are recited in Japanese and to a large extent the original forms are copied precisely).
2. A hybrid plant, a mix of the original Asian culture and language and the “host” culture and language, grows. For example, the Shambhala Buddhist lineage (which I am part of) has mixed certain elements of Tibetan Buddhism and Bon with certain uplifted aspects of European and American traditions.
3. Complete transformation of the original traditions into Western modalities (e.g., well-being, medical, psychological, holistic, new age, healing, stress management, relaxation, mindfulness, etc.) where the language and cultural flavor is overwhelmingly Western with perhaps only a faint trace of the Asian traditions that perhaps inspired these approaches.

Despite exhortations of the Buddha himself and, in fact, many great Buddhist masters — that the student should verify everything that he or she learns based on direct personal experience — Asian Buddhism (or at the very least Tibetan Buddhism) evolved toward a very high degree of respect, devotion and even subservience to the teacher. This devotion is actually found in many other Asian teaching systems. It would not be unusual for a sitar student of a great Indian master to bow to her teacher and place the teacher’s feet on her own head, but it’s hard to visualize that happening at Juilliard or Berklee!

Despite their emphasis on encouraging critical intelligence and open exploration, most Buddhist teaching systems are autocratic and very much oriented toward the establishment of hierarchy and proper decorum in relating to that hierarchy.

In Vajrayana Buddhism, the guru is considered to be enlightened and equal in value to the Buddha — in some sense even more valuable than the Buddha because you have not had (nor will you have) the good fortune to meet the Buddha in person. The guru is completely identified with enlightenment, and his or her instructions are to be carefully followed.

At the same time, the guru is telling you to use your own intelligence to find out the truth. Even within the Asian Buddhist system this dichotomy can catalyze a creative tension in the student’s learning process, but mixed with our Western democratic bias, there can be at times an almost insurmountable dissonance in the student, who is now struggling to synchronize two very divergent leadership models, democracy and monarchy.

It might be too early to talk about “American Buddhism.” History tells us that it could take several hundred years to really have some perspective on this kind of evolution. But it is intriguing to look back over the last 50 years and also look at the current situation.

The fact is that many Western students who have moved into the teacher role within their Buddhist communities have been able to manifest as mentors, guides, teachers, or “spiritual friends” for newer students. It is safe to say that there are many very highly qualified Western dharma teachers serving in this capacity. But it is also worth noting that there are few who would make the claim to, or would be acknowledged by others as having achieved the level of, the kind of mastery that would warrant the unflinching devotion, respect and subservience that is directed at many of the Asian teachers. Just visualize a Western teacher sitting on a high brocade throne (upon which the Dalai Lama looks so natural to us), and everybody taking that in stride. It is still a difficult image to visualize for many of us.

Either the time has not yet come for Western Buddhist gurus to manifest fully, or we have a major culture clash on our hands here.

Your thoughts, comments?

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(originally on The Huffington Post 8/4/10)

My taiji teacher, Sat Hon, is a virtual lexicon of sage and colorful phrases. One of my favorite expressions of his is “embrace uncertainty.” There is always uncertainty in our lives, but this saying seems particularly relevant these days. Whether we freak out or make friends with uncertainty seems to be up to us.

When we embark on a spiritual path, we are trying to learn from our lives, rather than just trying to survive or thrive on a purely materialistic level. When we see our lives as that kind of journey, it can be a good thing, periodically, to look back to see where we’ve been and look forward to see where we’re going. This kind of “view” can add valuable perspective to our journey. You take a look and then you continue along your way.

In some sense our life is like a koan — a Zen puzzle. A koan is something to think about that your mind cannot easily wrap itself around — you have to mull it over and chew on it like a dog chewing on a bone. In a way our whole life is like that — all the pieces don’t exactly fit together: “Where’s my career?” “Where’s my mate?” “Where’s my peace of mind?” “Where am I?” “Who am I?” It’s like somebody took the pieces of a puzzle and threw them on the table and now we’re supposed to put it all together.

As we work with the puzzle of our life we face so much uncertainty. We can try hard to hold everything together or we can relax further and allow some space to listen to the melody of circumstance. We can become poets of uncertainty — poetic in the sense that we don’t just curl up into a ball and start crying for our mommy — instead we express ourselves.

We’re not sure about love, or relationships, or enlightenment, or what we should be doing with our life, but yet we can express something anyhow and we can create some poetry that is open and adventurous. The best poetry has an element of uncertainty, right? We take a leap in and start to express something and then are willing to see where it goes. Our basic creativity somehow comes through.

Our path is really the path of not-knowing in some sense. We don’t have to solidify everything too much. Sometimes you become the pathmeister grandflash — you have your journey all mapped out. You’ve become a cartographer of experience, a mapmaker. But someday somebody might come along and say, “excuse me but you’re not quite living, you’re not fully living.” You say “Oh but I know what I’m doing — I’m doing this, I’m doing that.” You have developed a solid, fixed and stable program. You have finally got it together!

But it’s possible that when we have mapped out our journey so carefully, that the whole thing might become too theoretical, too tight, too rigid. In reality we actually don’t know what’s going to happen next, moment to moment. We really don’t have a clue. According to the Buddha, our life is marked by impermanence and change. When we become a poet of uncertainty we are developing the art of moving with the dance of life and learning how to be creative within that movement.

In any case, we have to start from somewhere. You could say, “well then there’s nothing, there’s no basis for anything” — you could say “what’s the difference? It doesn’t really matter what I do.” But somehow that kind of nihilistic approach doesn’t really work.
Buddhism’s a little more precise than nihilism — it says start with what you have, start with the uncertainty — or even more precisely, the sense of discomfort about that uncertainty. That is what is underlying our whole field of experience — start there. We notice then that there’s a little bit of an edge in our lives.

Even as we try so hard to get comfortable with our world, with our whole situation, there always seems to be that little edge. So all we are saying here is — “Good! Wake up! It’s good! It’s not bad — that little uncertainty, that edge. It’s who we are, it’s our situation, it’s totally workable.

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(originally on the Huffington Post 7/26/10)

In the old days in Japan a spiritual aspirant would kneel in the snow at the gates of the monastery for several days before either gaining entrance or being turned away.

These days in the West, we have weekend enlightenment intensives promising realization by Sunday night or your money back.

There must be a middle way in there somewhere, but it might be interesting, since we do live here in the West, to have a closer look at our own values and processes.

We do live in a culture where faster, more and easier seem to govern a lot of our choices. Fast food, bigger cars, five easy lessons and you can learn to play guitar like the masters.

But what about thorough? Are there any advocates of doing something fully, in depth and completely mastering the subject, whatever it is?

Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche said, “I’ve noticed through my own experience with the West that the new student gets very excited, hoping for immediate results. In Buddhism one is required to go through various stages, it is a step by step process in which you receive teachings from your teacher and follow his instructions one by one. If you rush up a ladder in order to get to the top more quickly there is a chance that you might fall and break your head. When you study Buddhism you have to go in a gradual way, not hoping to get enlightened the next morning when you wake up.”

Lately we have the slow food movement and even slow sex has some advocates.

What about slow enlightenment?

What about going through whatever steps, whatever practices, whatever processes that would enable us to know ourselves completely, that would allow us to penetrate whatever obscurations, delusions, and dark corners we might have and illuminate our most authentic being completely and fully? Who would sign up for that program — “enlightenment in 10 – 20 years, but only if you put your body, heart and mind into it completely? “Who would sign up for that?
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(originally on The Huffington Post 7/19/10)

I think that many of us these days are trying to figure out how to be more compassionate — both toward ourselves and others, while also realizing that it’s sometimes not that easy to accomplish. It can often feel “easy to be hard,” and it seems to really require focus and discipline to be genuinely helpful to others.

Even with the solid intention to develop a more compassionate attitude it can be difficult to know what the most skillful and truly helpful action is in any given situation. I’m sure everybody has had the experience of reaching out and trying to be compassionate only to have the gesture fall flat or actually even backfire.

Perhaps we genuinely want to help someone else but are also interested in maintaining our own comfort or are concerned about how our behavior may appear to and be judged by others. In fact, it is possible that our attempts at compassionate action may actually revolve around our own need for confirmation and comfort and never actually benefit anyone else at all!

An obvious example would be enabling someone to continue to develop destructive habits in exchange for a temporary feel-good moment — like a parent avoiding a conflict with a rebellious teenager, giving a known drug addict money for “food,” or overlooking someone abusing a child to avoid making a scene.

One time a man came up to me on 75th Street and asked for $3.65. He said he needed that exact amount for a bottle of formula for his baby who was at home with his sick wife. If I didn’t believe him, he invited me to walk four blocks with him to the nearest pharmacy and buy the formula for him directly. Of course most people in NY have neither the time nor the inclination to take that walk so we are left with basically three choices — keep walking, call the guy out as a scam artist, or feel guilty and give him all or some of that money.

My teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche coined the phrase “idiot compassion” to describe our attempt to be compassionate when it is not accompanied by wisdom and skillful means. Giving a junkie money for “food” is most likely idiot compassion. Taking him to the store and buying him and handing him real food might not be. The point is that there is no safe, secure and easy way to be compassionate. It’s really hard work, time consuming and requires us to be awake and intelligent in each and every situation. There is no compassion button we can just push and forget about.

In the Buddhist tradition compassion can have a wrathful or even ruthless component, maybe comparable to the western notion of “tough love” — where we summon the courage to deliver that which is actually really helpful in a situation. This kind of love and compassion often can take us well beyond our comfort zone and could be described as opening our heart without hope of gaining merit, gratitude, or any kind of confirmation in return. That kind of selflessness is the way of the bodhisattva, or awakened heart being.

It’s always intriguing to hear about real life situations that stretch and test our notion of our “spiritual” values. What would the compassionate thing to do be if this happened… or that happened… Inviting you all to join the conversation — all anecdotes and compassion conundrums welcome!
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(originally on The Huffington Post 7/1/10)

Last Wednesday night I completed a 12 day silent meditation retreat at Karme Choling, Shambhala International’s Buddhist Meditation Center in Vermont. Literally as soon as it was over at 11:30 p.m. I said my goodbyes, got in my car with a friend and drove the six hours back to New York City. After driving all night I arrived home at around 6 a.m. I slipped into bed with Cyndi and Leroy Brown (our chocolate toy poodle) and took a nap for an hour, then got up, re-packed my bag, put on my black suit, and grabbed a taxi to go to JFK Airport at 10 a.m.

Landing in LA, I picked up a rental car and drove straight to the Beverly Hilton just in time for the ASCAP Film and TV awards. The very next night I headed over to the Westin Bonaventure for the Daytime Emmy Awards. I was up for one for the music we composed for One Life to Live.

This trip provided perhaps an unusually stark contrast coming out of retreat, but even in less stressful circumstances, the experience of participating in an intensive meditation retreat and then returning to our ordinary life can provide an extremely vivid transition, and with that a chance to see our habits and patterns in high relief.

On this occasion my perception was that people are just people — we are all basically living in a dream of expectation and disappointment, with an occasional moment of wakefulness shining through. In the retreat, the awake moments were accented; at the Emmys the expectation and disappointment felt thick and solid and heavy by comparison. Anyhow that was my perception in transition.

From a certain point of view, going on an intensive meditation retreat is a radical thing to do. There are so many ways we can spend our time, so many vacations we still want to take, so many places to go, things to see and do. The idea of dedicating a weekend, a week, or longer to practicing meditation can easily slide to the bottom of the “to do” list.

It can be so helpful to understand the “view” of any particular practice we undertake, particularly retreat practice — what are we going to be working with, how are we going to go about it and how can we manage whatever dramas unfold, both internal and external.

The essential quality of meditation practice on retreat is that by simplifying our world to the bare essence of simply being present, we have an unparalleled opportunity to see how our own mind works — to actually see the lenses and filters through which we experience our reality.

It is the one activity we participate in that is reductive rather than additive. There may be some techniques involved — we may be cultivating mindfulness or loving kindness and compassion, but essentially we are simply resting naturally in our present awareness and seeing whatever arises with an open impartial mind.

Along the way we may experience intense boredom, frustration, emotionality, peace, happiness, spaciousness and all the rest of it, but the one thing that is clear is that whatever we are experiencing is being generated by our own state of mind. The practice is a mirror so we can see ourselves more clearly and accurately, and hopefully develop more compassion for ourselves and thereby for others as well.

Re-entering our everyday world after a period of 20 minutes or two weeks of meditation practice, we have the opportunity to see ourselves entering the action. Of course, we may also have a heightened sensitivity to the obscurations, fear and cloaking — what we call in Shambhala the “cocoon” — the web of habitual patterns and manipulation that passes for authenticity but is really a kind of camouflage.

Unlike short bursts of meditation, retreat practice allows us to go much deeper into our exploration of what is really going on in our mind and heart. Coming out of retreat is an equally challenging and important part as we begin to integrate what we have gleaned into our everyday reality.

If you’ve done any kind of retreat practice and feel like chiming in about it, let’s hear what it was like for you!

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(originally on the Huffington Post 6/8/10)

Three separate but synchronous conversations led me to explore the topic of contentment in today’s post.

The first was with childhood friend and fellow Beyman Brother, Christopher Guest. Chris is an avid environmentalist and is socially and politically astute — we often talk about the state of the world, culture, our lives, etc.

In this particular conversation, the idea of the American vision of “All You Can Eat” being presented as the basis for bringing people into a restaurant struck us both as funny and telling. It seemed to sum up our American obsession with “more, better, faster!” as the pathway to true happiness.

As counterpoint, I mentioned that Kripalu Institute (a holistic learning center in New England) has a sign in it’s dining room that shows the size of a person’s stomach as being about the size of a human fist. The sign goes on to suggest that eating more than that volume of food at a particular meal actually bloats the stomach and creates poor digestion and ill health!

The second conversation was with my son (and dharma brother) Ethan, founder and director of New York’s wonderfully creative Interdependence Project. He pointed out in passing that if everybody on planet Earth consumed at the level of the average American, we would need three to five planets to provide the necessary resources.

And finally, I was chatting over lunch with Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and a wonderful friend and dharma brother. Daniel is very active in the ongoing exploration linking Buddhist practice with modern science. He was explaining how repetition of particular patterns actually burns in new neural pathways to reinforce that behavior i.e. if you want to establish a particular behavior, just repeat it over and over and it will become the new norm.

So coming back to “All You Can Eat” — is it possible that we have, by constant repetition in our culture, created a social norm in which gluttony and craving have replaced contentment and satisfaction?

In the Shambhala Buddhist tradition within which I study and teach, practicing contentment is considered the ground of the spiritual path. Contentment is symbolized by a tiger — the tiger represents the dignified quality called Meek. In this case Meek doesn’t refer to being a pushover or a doormat but embodies a humbleness and gentleness that comes from being content with the way things are in the present moment. The tiger walks with steadiness, confidence and mindfulness.

“Moving through our life with the steady vigilance of (the) tiger, we no longer feel the need to prove ourselves, because we are anchored in the truth of our own peace. Beautiful new clothes, a promotion at work, or climbing Mount Everest might bring pleasure, but they are not going to make that peace any bigger…
“…If we don’t know how to be content in our mind, we can’t even be content with our food. Eating at the best restaurant in the world wont make a difference. There is someone in a village in India eating curry out of a clay bowl, more content than we are.”

– Sakyong Mipham (Ruling Your World)

I think it is safe to say that the notion of contentment, of being satisfied with what we have, of reducing craving and lusting after more, bigger, better, would be a powerful and revolutionary development in our American culture. We just need to explore and repeat this new behavior to burn it into our neural pathways! Maybe we can create a new norm in which enough can be enough.

Your thoughts?
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(originally on the Huffington Post 5/23/10)

The practice of cultivating loving kindness (maitri in Sanskrit and metta in Pali) is a Buddhist approach toward opening one’s heart to others. It is very ancient, very simple, very direct and very effective.

The heart of the practice is generating four positive wishes for all beings:

• May you be safe

• May you be happy

• May you be healthy

• May you be at ease

We include beings we care for, those we don’t care for, and those we don’t care about. We even include ourselves!

Naturally it’s easier to generate these positive wishes for our parents (in most cases), our children, our pets, our teachers, our friends. In that case maitri or loving kindness flows unimpeded.

It is challenging to generate that kind of attitude toward people we are indifferent to and it is very challenging indeed to generate it toward people we don’t like.

To prepare the ground for practicing maitri, it can be helpful to consider that the way in which we categorize other beings will change over time, sometimes very quickly, sometimes more slowly. Whatever we experience is subject to impermanence.

For example an anonymous person we meet in the supermarket can become our lover and later on can become our wife and later on become our not so welcome (in some cases) ex-wife! We have gone through all three categories with one person.

Also we can recognize that the way we look at people is very much related to causes and conditions. It is not absolute. If we are having a bad day it is much easier to get irritated at somebody, maybe even somebody we fundamentally like. If we have had an abusive childhood, we can feel that the whole world is against us and we want to strike back. On a beautiful sunny Spring day, sometimes everybody looks great and we are in love with everything and feeling groovy!

So causes and conditions set the stage for our attitudes toward the world and we can and do affect those causes and conditions. It is practical to train our minds further so that we are not governed by our negative habitual patterns.

And finally it is worth noting and tuning into our most fundamental nature. What are we like when we are open, clear and fully present? What is our true nature? Do we really really actually wish others to suffer? Do we really really wish to create the causes and conditions for our own suffering? What is wrong with cultivating open hearted and positive wishes for ourselves and others? Have we really become that cynical?

So practicing maitri is simple. Just take a comfortable seat in a quiet place and close your eyes. First think of somebody you love. Send them the four wishes. You can either repeat each for a time with that person in mind or just think about how those wishes might manifest and affect that situation. You can be creative about it.

Then move on successively to yourself, a “neutral person” (somebody you don’t know well or already have strong feelings about), and then finally take the plunge and send the wishes to an “enemy.” You may even notice that the choice of who the enemy is moves around and that’s fine. As mentioned already, yesterday’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally. Also it’s fine just to notice what comes up for you while you are trying to do this practice and simply allow space for that as well.

At the end, conclude by simply radiating out your loving kindness, your kind, sweet, loving open heart to all beings and send your good wishes to all of them (friends, oneself, neutrals, enemies, humans, animals, ghosts — anybody you can think of). Then simply dissolve the meditation and sit quietly for a moment or two.

This practice might feel too “touchy-feely” for some of us. At first I thought maybe it was too innocent, too sweet. But it is an ancient practice dating all the way back to the Buddha and it can be surprisingly powerful. It would be great if some of us who actually try it can write in and share their experience. Or, if you wanna be grouchy and just say something about it without actually trying it that’s okay too!
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(originally on the Huffington Post 5/21/10)

More and more these days, our minds are actively engaged and stimulated, both with actual events going on around us and with data constantly streaming in and out. It’s like we have become a gigantic I/O port with a fantastically high baud rate and no down time. Like any machine that is running all the time, there is the danger of overheating and wearing the moving parts down!

The idea of regeneration, of a receptive cycle following an active cycle, occurs everywhere in nature. Even our own human structures of week and weekend, work and holidays, being awake and then sleeping, career and retirement — all follow this pattern. In our modern world we are increasingly in danger of driving in fifth gear all the time, never downshifting, never coasting in neutral, let alone parking the car at a rest stop and turning the engine off.

Gehlek Rinpoche has pointed out that there are two forms of laziness — one kind in which we are sluggish and procrastinating, and another kind in which we are so busy that our world becomes completely gap-less. Within that speed we shut down our awareness of ourselves and our environment.

Meditation practices are meant to be antidotes, so that our habitual patterns don’t take over our existence and choke the life out of us. These practices are comprehensive and have many different facets. There are meditations to cultivate compassion, insight, mindfulness, awareness, even those that will stimulate our energy and vitality.

Perhaps the most basic meditation practice is simply allowing the mind to take a break from it’s hyperactivity and relax and rest in present awareness. This approach can be seen as the most fundamental meditation technique, but also in some sense it is the most advanced.

When we practice yoga, meditation, qigong, or any kind of relaxation/regeneration, sometimes we even make a project out of that. We create an agenda, schedule, goals and objectives, and all kinds of expectations regarding the practice.

What we are recommending here, as part of The Huffington Post’s unplug marathon, is a kind of meditation that could be called non-meditation. It is based on the barest kind of instruction orienting us toward downshifting and relaxing our very active agenda-driven existence.

I am suggesting a 30 minute per day regimen (if you could even call it a regimen) that we can try for one week of our very busy lives, as a way of slowing down, easing back and seeing what a little space feels like. This assignment might seem simplistic and maybe even a little bit corny, but I think that many of us have lost our ability to slow down and re-connect with the direct, natural and basic quality of being alive. These exercises are meant to help us find our way back to simplicity and contentment:

1. Rest in Noble Silence and Natural Awareness

Sit, be still, breathe naturally, and do not have any project whatsoever, even meditating. Do not meditate. Just be there with whatever arises. Whenever you make a project, in your mind, for your life, or about the meditation itself, just release it and allow whatever arises in your mind to simply come and go. Notice that you are not in danger, nothing harmful will happen to you — you have simply stopped creating agendas for a brief time and are resting in noble silence and natural awareness.

10 minutes per day.

2. Take a Walk

Go for a short walk. You are not allowed to be going somewhere to do something! There should be a kind of spontaneous quality to it. You do not have to have a particular route or any objective or agenda at all.

15 minutes per day.

3. Have a Cup of Tea or Have a Glass of Water

Just sit and drink the tea without any other agenda at all — no conversation, no internal project management, no reading, no internet, no tweeting! Just enjoy a nice cup tea as my grandmother would have said.

Five minutes per day.

All told that’s a half hour a day for one week. To make it workable, let’s do it for only five out of the seven days for that week, taking off two days to relax even this agenda. It would be great to hear back from everybody who is game to unplug in this way and who wants to share some aspect of what your experience was like. Feel free to chime in!
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(originally on the Huffington Post 5/6/10)

“The entire Buddhist path is based on the discovery of egolessness and the maturing of insight or knowledge that comes from egolessness.”

— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche / Journey Without Goal

I have heard many times from students and spiritual practitioners of all kinds, shapes and sizes, that if they could only “get rid of their ego,” then they could have some peace and taste enlightenment. There are also many “self-help” teachings and gurus who are promoting techniques to “strengthen” the ego — to ripen and develop one’s sense of power, accomplishment and tangible assets — make you skinnier, more assertive, richer, happier, etc. etc. etc.

But the approaches of getting rid of OR strengthening the ego may both share a similar delusion: that it actually exists in some solid and fixed way in the first place.

According to the Buddhist teachings, the fundamental mistake we make (which causes all kinds of trouble and suffering) is the assumption that we exist as a permanent, unified, independent being. What causes our most fundamental suffering and anxiety is that we are ignorant of the true nature of our existence. Because of our assumption, we cannot fully understand or relate to impermanence (including our own) and the interdependence of all phenomena.

Just like the king of a sand castle, from ego’s limited point of view, we tend to freeze the world and categorize it’s inhabitants as friends (who support our campaign), enemies (who threaten our campaign) and neutral people (who do neither).

In contrast to our habitual role as Lord of the Sand Castle, the essence of Buddhist practice is to open our mind and perceptions to the dynamic, fluid and continuously morphing quality of our world and ourselves.

Egolessness is not a product of our effort — it is a discovery. We look and look and cannot find a solid self anywhere. We can look at our name, our body, our mind, our experience and nowhere in there can we find a single thing that is not subject to change. Try it and see what you come up with.

As Lord of the Sand Castle, there is tremendous energy and work that goes into creating that structure and inevitably a certain attachment to the forms and shapes it develops. But from the ocean’s point of view, it is a temporary structure, very relative in nature. In this analogy the ocean represents a larger, more encompassing reality — one wave from the ocean and the sand castle is dramatically altered, several big ones and it is gone completely.

As an intriguing contrast, we have the sand mandala of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Highly trained monks take several weeks to construct an exquisitely detailed arrangement using colored sand — a symbolic portrait of the entire universe. After certain rituals are performed, the mandala is dissembled with an equal amount of care and mindfulness.

Probably in Western traditions, the mandala would be lacquered and put in a museum. But the creation of a sand mandala, while vividly portraying the dynamic energy and elements of our world, is, at the same time, demonstrating impermanence and illuminating the space that always surrounds, penetrates and ultimately dissolves all forms.

It sometimes happens that the initial discovery of egolessness can lead to a nihilistic view of things — emptiness being seen as the absence of anything substantial — nowhere to hang our hat, nobody home, “nothing to get hung about” in the words of the Beatles. Why bother to build or create anything if it will be gone sooner than later?

But penetrating into the actual exerience of egolessness further, it seems that we can discover a world that is open, highly communicative, energetic and without beginning or end — our energy can shift from defending a sand castle to exploring a vast, profound and magical world. We can create our own vivid, fully present, ornate sand mandala without clinging to its form as if it will last forever.

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