Dharma Gleanings

January 17, 2004
As we practice, more and more we go through our days as if we were present for a wonderful, multidimensional movie. Only instead of a movie, this life is a real-ie. Sometimes the real-ie will be awesomely beautiful, like “Winged Migration”, perhaps, or one of those PBS specials where the camera lingers on a flower or a snake or a moth. Sometimes engaging with the real-ie of life is like watching “Marty” or “The Secret Lives of Dentists,” the absolute ordinariness of life seen with a new clarity and so new beauty. Sometimes the real-ie whose dimensions we enter into is more like “The Pianist” or “Monster,” with pain that spills out from our heart. Still, we do not turn away from that reality, we insist on it even as we stay in our seats, grateful for the luminous clarity of its truth.

April 10, 2004
I’ve reached a new phase in my practice, which is a pompous way of saying that for the last months I’ve been buffeted and pummeled by fear, anger, humiliation, anxiety, confusion, frustration. (There’s probably more if I chose to really re-experience it.)

But right now I feel that I’m in a new phase of my new phase. It feels right, if a little obvious to a more seasoned practitioner. After two days of wrestling with the sufferings here at the desert cabin, I’m feeling the relief of embracing the knowledge I’ve been fighting off—I will not be finding the train back to my earlier state of almost sustained equanimity, deep daily pleasure in self and in life. How I managed that for years, really—after Barbara’s Alzheimer’s dropped me into the present moment—eludes me, and maybe I exaggerate how sustained it was, but not that much. This morning, I am finally ready to tear up the ticket (worthless, anyway, I finally see) to my glorious past and to accept and love this struggling, disoriented small self—as long as she persists, as long as she is honest.

November 11, 2004
Most of us believe that the continuous presence of our thoughts is valuable—our planning, our speculations, our memories, our associations. If they’re a bit chaotic, we try to bring them into line to tell a more coherent story. If our thoughts were to stop, wouldn’t we be wasting our time?

As we continue our practice, we begin to realize that most of those thoughts are actually interference, like a background noise that prevents you from hearing what’s really going on. Imagine that you are trying to write a poem, or solve a quadratic equation, or have a serious conversation with your child about why she is unhappy at school, and the television is playing in the room. We can’t find the remote. Our minds are the television set that we haven’t learned how to turn off so that we can pay attention to our real lives. As we practice, over time, meditation is our remote.

Of course, there will be an occasional tv program we choose to listen to—maybe a news program or a good drama or a cooking show—but it’s a choice now. It’s not that constant noise.

November 12, 2004
I’ve been thinking about extreme responses—fear, intense anxiety, explosive anger, powerful cravings—that are part of many people’s daily lives. It’s not that something my boss said might not mean I am losing my job, and if so, I should probably pay some attention to that possibility. But how?

It’s a little like how we set an alarm clock. We need to get up at six, that’s a reality, and we need to be wakened. So we set the alarm to “loud,” and every day at six it blares, shocking us into the morning. We’ve become accustomed to that, and we think we need it if we are going to respond. But some people who have been used to waking this way come to discover that they actually need only the faintest buzz to waken them. Or even, amazingly enough, that they waken automatically at the right hour without any alarm at all.

That’s how it is with our reactions to events in our world. Maybe we don’t need to feel that blazing anger in order to correct an injustice. Maybe we don’t need that wave of fear in order to make sure our back door is locked at night. Maybe we don’t need that panicky craving in order to make sure we get lunch. Maybe the merest hint of these warnings would be enough. Maybe we would act appropriately just by thinking, “That’s unjust,” “I need to check the back door,” “I should get lunch now,” “It’s possible that the boss’ remarks about my work mean he’s thinking of laying me off.” If some people can wake up with no alarm at all, couldn’t we?

January 9, 2006
As I become more subtly tuned to the constant fluctuations of my mind, body and feelings, I begin to see another dimension to this practice. Awareness of impermanence is not merely about altering expectations so that we can watch with understanding the disappearance of a delicious state, or be calmed by the understanding that an unpleasant state can also pass. I begin to see the active pleasure in awareness of impermanence, the comfort and reassurance and enjoyment in the ebb and flow itself. It’s a little like being with your lover—you don’t wish her always to be laughing or always seriously absorbed or always weeping. There is the deep pleasure from watching her changes, from the intimacy that comes from taking in the many dimensions of her reality. The words that come to me are the same: I know who you are. Only in this practice, the you is the nature of life, and the pleasure is the delight of being on more than casual terms with her.

August 11, 2006
Groundlessness appears as terrifying until it occurs to us not just to accept it but to embrace it. The words for the terror are: “The rug was just pulled out from under me.” What we know when we embrace it is: “There never was a rug.”

December 24, 2007
We can celebrate our right to exist, and more. We can celebrate our buddha nature. It is as important to celebrate our own buddha nature as to celebrate when we see it arise in others. It isn’t arrogant, it isn’t a lack of humility, it isn’t a preening of the I, it has nothing to do with comparisons. It is simple, straightforward and as sweet as though one were bathing in a nectar. Because it is bathing in Buddha Nature, which is not really mine or yours or ajanh chah’s or the dalai lama’s or beverly next door’s.

February 29, 2008
Yesterday Bettina was talking about the vision she often returns to, a vision of how she would like to live--a simple life, almost like a shepherd, and she spoke about her days having rhythm. At first I didn’t quite understand rhythm, because I think more about flow, and that felt different. Then I saw that nature has a rhythm, is a rhythm, a rhythm that urban life disturbs, and I saw that the days I spent in the trailer on the desert had a rhythm.

It occurred to me that there are two elements that take us out of life’s rhythm. They are urgency and stuckness. They seem to be opposite: urgency says, “I must move right now!’ and stuckness says: “I can’t move, I’m not willing to move.” Truth is, they are the same conditioning, and whenever we experience either one we can know that we have temporarily left the place of wholesomeness, left the flow, left the rhythm of life.