I had a dream last night after the empowerment where I was just going about my way, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this giant rat came lunging out towards my head. To evade it, I jerked my head fast and then accidentally banged it hard against a wall. My non-dreaming body also lunged and I woke up, and I could feel pain on my waking head briefly before I realized it was a dream and then it went away. The message that then came into my mind from this was, “significant negative karma can ripen quickly and out of nowhere, and even if we succeed in evading it, the quick rection of doing so often comes with its own pain. Karma that ripens at the subtle level can spill over into our waking state, even though it was never anything more than mere appearance to mind. But realizing it is all a dream makes the pain of what appeared go away. This is true for all of samsara.” Then I fell back asleep. When I awoke again this morning, I remembered the dream again and the thought that came was, “even when we purify our negative karma, we sometimes don’t get it all. We avoid the main consequence, but a residual of the negative karma nonetheless ripens (me banging my head). We should accept this residual as ‘catastrophe averted,’ and be happy.” I then thought this whole dream is a metaphor for the pandemic and our individual experience within it.
Author: Kadampa Ryan
Pure View as Compassionate Action
Abiding in a world without suffering right now
There is no doubt the world is hurting right now. Many of us very much want to do something to help, but are at a loss for what to do besides stay at home and perhaps say a few Tara or Medicine Buddha mantras. I would say our job right now is to quite literally construct and abide in a new world, free from all suffering. We can do this through our correct imagination. We can do this through our Tantric practice – not as some future attainment, but right here and right now. If we want to end the virus, we must end samsara.
Believing is Seeing
Sometimes people object, “yeah, it’s nice to dance with the Dakinis for a while in my mind, but when I come out of meditation, I’m right back in it. It was all a nice imagination, but the world continues to suffer and the virus continues to rage. Nothing has really changed, it’s not that much different from me watching some internal Netflix show.” This objection is completely wrong.
To understand why we first need to understand – precisely – how correct imagination works at the karmic level. Everything we perceive is a mere karmic appearance to mind. There is no samsara and there is no pure land, both are just different karmic appearances – one mistaken, one pure. But both arise from karma.
We create the karma for samsara by grasping at things existing from their own side, independently of our mind, and then living and acting as if that was true. When we do this, ALL of the karma we create is contaminated, and when that karma ripens in the future, it will manifest in the form of things that appear vividly to be existing from their own side. Then, through the force of mental habit, we will assent to these appearances believing they do in fact exist from their own side, and the cycle starts all over.
We create the karma for the pure land through believing our correct imagination. All of us are capable of generating correct imagination. We can go through the visualizations of the sadhana, and imagine all sorts of beautiful things, but we don’t really believe what we are doing, so it lacks any power. We think it is just a mental light show, and not real, and that nothing is really changing. We imagine, but we don’t believe our imagination. And we are right, if we don’t believe our imagination, then it is true, nothing is really changing.
But, if we do believe our imagination, then everything not only comes alive in our meditation, it actually works to karmically create pure worlds right here and right now. The key point is understanding that believing our correct imaginations is how we complete the karma of our mental action. If we accidentally squashed a bug, we did not complete the karma of killing because we didn’t have the intention to kill it. Our deluded intention is necessary to complete the karmic action. In the same way, believing our imaginations to be true (not inherently true, but union of the two truths true) functions to complete the karma. The same is true for the practice of taking and giving, which is really Sutra’s version of Tantra.
Creating Temporary Pure Lands
Now we might object, “OK, believing our imagination to be true functions to complete the karma, but the fruit of that karma won’t ripen until the future (otherwise effect and cause would be simultaneous) so I still haven’t actually transformed the world – everyone is still suffering.” There are three answers to this objection. First, if we have this doubt, we are not actually believing our imaginations – we are still hanging on to our doubts, so we are still not completing the karma. Second, this is still grasping at there being a world out there that exists independently of our mind. And third – and this point is subtle – if we are fully believing our correct imaginations, from the point of view of our experience, we quite literally abide in a world without suffering. Geshe-la sometimes talks about temporary emanations, such as when Lama Tsongkhapa enters into our teachers during teachings. In the same way, believing this correct imagination creates a temporary pure land.
Next, we might object, “OK, for me it creates a temporary pure land, but for everybody else, they remain stuck in samsara and the virus is still infecting people. So it is no different than you creating some happy place for yourself inside your mind, like being in a glass box while the war still ravages around us.” While it is true each one of us creates our own karma, and if others are not creating similar karma they will remain in their own karmically created samsara, this objection misses the point. First, it doesn’t matter if its “objectively true” (because nothing is), the point is the only way we can complete the karma is by fully believing it to be true without doubts. Holding onto the doubts means the karma is not completed, and so it produces few good results. Second, this objection still grasps at others’ minds as existing independently of our own. If we dreamt of somebody in a wheel chair, who put them there? Our mind. In the same way, if in our waking state, we “dream” of a world filled with disease and suffering, who put everyone there? Our mind. Others’ minds are also empty of inherent existence. The others that we normally see are the beings of our contaminated karmic dream. We can intentionally dream a different world, one in which there is quite literally zero suffering, we are the deity, and everyone else are Dakas and Dakinis.
Pulling our Head out of the Sand of Samsara
To this, we might object, “yeah, but isn’t this just burying my head in the sand, pretending there is no suffering? I will then do nothing to compassionately help those experiencing mental and physical pain.” Answering this objection is where we get to the punch line: from the point of view of tantra, pure view is compassionate action and our compassionate action is maintaining pure view. Wherever we imagine a Buddha, a Buddha actually goes. Wherever a Buddha goes, they accomplish their function, which is to bless the minds of others. When we believe our pure view, fully and completely believe it, all of the Buddhas enter into the other person (who is just a being of our karmic dream) and transform them into a temporary pure being. We should not doubt that they are not experiencing themselves in this way because doing so is still grasping on to some part of them existing from their own side independently of our mind and depriving them of receiving Buddhas into that part of them. We should also believe that they are experiencing themselves in that way. This is the most compassionate thing we can do because through this correct imagination, the Buddhas enter into every aspect of them without residual, thus maximizing the blessings we can bestow upon them and thus the benefit they receive from our pure view.
In truth, we currently are burying our head in the sand of samsara, and Buddha is trying to pull our head out into the pure lands.
But what if they still appear to our mind to be suffering? Shouldn’t we tend to that? Yes, of course we should. This appearance of them still suffering is our residual ordinary appearance which has not yet exhausted itself. With our residual ordinary appearance of ourself we compassionately tend to the residual ordinary appearance of the other person, exactly as normal; while at the same time, with our believing ourselves to be the deity, we believe our correct imagination of them being a Daka or a Dakini. We practice the union of sutra and tantra. When we are in the meditation session, we have dissolved everything we normally see into emptiness, and every appearance is a pure one – there is no residual ordinary appearance. In the meditation break, when residual ordinary appearances arise again, we practice this layered approach of sutra and tantra simultaneously. Doing so creates the experience that we are quite literally purifying all of samsara in real time, gradually dissolving it into our pure world.
Gaining Experience in the Meditation Session
To help us gain some experience with this, it is vital that we infuse emptiness into every aspect of our Tantric sadhana practice. Sometimes we can feel like, “I never seem to practice emptiness in my tantric practice, I’m so busy with all these complex visualizations that I don’t get any deep experience of emptiness.”
We should think of the sadhana like a spiritual buffet. Different people will take different items in different portion sizes at a buffet depending upon what they hunger for and what their body needs. In the same way, different practitioners will emphasize different parts of the sadhana depending upon their needs and desires. Each time, we do all of the sadhana, but we can pause wherever we’d like for as long as we’d like to emphasize those parts that move our mind the most. Our problem is usually just an issue of not having the time to pause for long because we have to get to work, but with the present lockdowns from the virus, this is not our problem.
It seems there are two places within the sadhana where we can do a nice, long emptiness meditation to get a good feel for it: In the very beginning before we start, we can dissolve everything into emptiness, bathe in the clear light for a while, and then out of emptiness generate the appearances of the sadhana. The second, of course, is bringing death into the path to the truth body where the final object of meditation is emptiness.
We need to be careful to not confuse nothingness with emptiness. It should not feel as if nothing is arising in our mind, rather it should feel like a shocking reminder that everything we thought existed – the virus in all its horrible glory – in fact does not. As Geshe-la says all the time, “the things we normally see do not exist.” We are so convinced there is an actual reality around us, when in fact, there is nothing actually there. It has always been nothing more than mistaken appearance. This awareness protects us once again from thinking our generation stage practice is like retreating into a “safe space” within our mind like a glass box while the war ravages around us. Instead, we bring about a deep transformation of reality itself, creating a world quite literally free from all suffering.
We should view the non-emptiness meditation parts of the sadhana as training in the union of the two truths. We should see each appearance of the visualization as the dance of bliss and emptiness – never losing that feeling of emptiness we got at the beginning and at the death meditation. The union of conventional and ultimate truth is actually deeper than emptiness itself. I sometimes think of it as I looked so deep into emptiness, I found mere appearance. Each appearance is a mere karmic appearance of mind, generated through the force of my compassion, to liberate all beings.
Faith is Emptiness in Action
From my perspective, “faith is emptiness in action.” Faith, actually, makes no sense without emptiness. How could we take refuge in something that is independent of us and exists outside of us? When children blow air into soap, it creates beautiful bubbles that they take great delight in. In the same way, when we blow the pure winds of our faith into the space of emptiness, we get the pure appearances of the sadhana visualizations. When we experience it this way, every word of the sadhana comes alive as an expression of our faith.
Yes, the world we normally see is currently hurting. The question is what can we do about it? Through believing our correct imagination in this way, we can quite literally karmically reconstruct this world of sickness and suffering into a pure land in real time. Because we fully believe our pure imagination, we experience the world right now as a pure land; and through the karma we create engaging in this practice, eventually everything will directly appear to us and everyone else as completely pure. But if we are doing the practice correctly, we won’t even notice that happening because, from our perspective, we will already have been abiding in the pure lands for some time, the same as everybody else.
The Lamrim of the Coronavirus
The outbreak of the Coronavirus has the potential to be the most devastating event since World War II. The toll in human life and economic and social collapse risks being beyond a scale of anything we have seen in our lifetimes. This quite naturally gives rise to a host of delusions within our mind. The outbreak is hard enough to deal with; adding uncontrolled, unpeaceful minds into the mix will only make coping with it that much harder.
The Lamrim, directly or indirectly, is the antidote to all delusions. If we can learn how to respond to the outbreak with Lamrim minds, then instead of generating delusions, we will gain Dharma wisdom. Then, instead of it just being suffering, the outbreak will become a powerful cause of our enlightenment. Only by attaining enlightenment can we free both ourselves and others permanently from all sickness. There is no lasting solution to the sufferings of sickness and disease other than Dharma.
What follows are my thoughts on how we can use the Lamrim to overcome the delusions that arise due to the outbreak, and how the outbreak teaches us the truth of Dharma. The goal here is simple: when we think of the outbreak, we want it to lead us to some conclusion of Lamrim. Then, instead of generating delusions, the outbreak causes us to generate Lamrim minds. These are simply my personal reflections. If you have your own thoughts, please share them so we can all learn from each other.
Precious Human Life: Throughout the entire world, others are terrified of this virus, many will become extremely sick or die. They have nowhere to turn and no means to transform this into something useful. I, however, through unbelievable good fortune, have found the Kadam Dharma. I have a precious opportunity to find permanent freedom from all sickness and disease, and be able to lead others to similar freedom. I must seize this precious opportunity while I still have the chance. I may never get such an opportunity again for aeons.
Death: This outbreak came out of nowhere, and in a few short months will change the world forever. Millions may die, and I could be one of them. And even if I am not, I could die from one of countless other diseases, or even in a car accident on the way to the hospital. There is no certainty in life, and we could lose this precious opportunity to escape from samsara at any moment. I must practice Dharma right now and not waste a single moment.
Lower realms: The outbreak is giving us a glimpse of the infinite sufferings of the lower realms. The world is about to descend into a resembling hell for potentially 6 months or longer. We are being shown, first hand, what samara is really all about. If I die today, I would quite likely fall into the lower realms and experience far worse sufferings than this. I am on the precipice, and could fall at any point. I must seek refuge and purify my negative karma while I still can.
Refuge: I have infinite negative karma on my mind, any of which could cause me to get the coronavirus and fall into the lower realms. The only lasting solution to this problem is to purify my negative karma and to attain liberation and enlightenment. If I don’t, it is just a question of time before the suffering I read about becomes my own. The Dharma of Lamrim is my ultimate refuge. Only it can provide lasting protection. To prevent my mind from becoming negative, thus activating my negative karma, I need a continuous stream of Buddha’s blessings. During these dark times, it is easy to grow despondent or fearful. But my spiritual family, my Sangha friends, can help show a good example and lift me up. I must make effort to transform this outbreak into powerful lessons of Lamrim, to receive Buddha’s blessings to stay positive, and to turn to my spiritual friends for inspiration. Through reliance on the three jewels, we will not only make it through this outbreak, we will spiritually grow from it.
Karma: All suffering arises from negative karma. In my countless previous lives – and in this life – I have engaged in terrible actions which have hurt others, deceived them, and sacrificed them for my own selfish purposes. In particular, being surrounded by disease is the environmental effect of sexual misconduct. Because I have killed, I may die. Because I have stolen from others, I may not have what I need if I get sick. Because I have neglected others, I may not get proper access to medical care. I have the karma to experience all of this and more. This karma is like millions of time bombs which could explode at any point. I am careful to wash my hands, but am I even more careful about not engaging in negativity? If I don’t purify my negative karma, it is 100% guaranteed I will get the coronavirus, and far worse, in this or my future lives. It is just a question of time. If I continue to engage in negative actions, I guarantee endless future misery. Once my negative karma ripens, not even Buddha can reverse it – I’ll have no choice but to ride it out. Therefore, I must purify my negative karma before it ripens while I still can. I must stop engaging in negative actions, but instead engage in virtuous ones that will lead to happiness in this and all my future lives. Karma makes exceptions for no one.
Renunciation: Samsara is the nature of sickness. For as long as I remain in it, it is inevitable I will get the coronavirus and much worse, again and again and again. For as long as I impute my “I” onto a samsaric body, I will be subject to its sufferings, including terrible sickness. I am very afraid of getting the Coronavirus, but I should be much more afraid of remaining in contaminated aggregates, the foundation of all sickness. Even if I avoid getting the coronavirus now, it is just a question of time before I get some other sickness, which might be far worse. The only way I will find lasting freedom from all sickness is to once and for all escape from samsara. There is no other way.
Equanimity: The Coronavirus is showing me just how biased my mind is. When I think of my own family getting the virus, I become very concerned and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect them. Yet, when I read about others getting the virus, it is just a statistic I am tracking on the Johns Hopkins map. When I read about people within the Trump administration or certain political leaders I dislike possibly getting the virus, there is this ugly part of my mind that thinks they are getting what they deserve. How horrible! Yet, that is the honest truth of how unbalanced and biased my mind is. We are all equal in not wanting to suffer. These biased minds disturb my inner balance and prevent me from truly being of service to others by transforming this outbreak into a cause of enlightenment. I must develop a balanced mind, caring equally for all without partiality.
Mothers: Every single person in lockdown is my mother. So is every person who gets sick, loses their job, is working the medical front lines, is stocking my grocery store or delivering my food. So too is every person who is dying.
Remembering the kindesss of others: These people have cared for me countless times in the past when I have been sick. They have stayed up to take care of me, blown my nose, cleaned up my vomit, and exposed themselves to my illness all to take care of me. If those still working would stop, I would starve, society would collapse into roving gangs, and quite literally all hell would break loose. They are risking their lives so this does not happen. I must repay everyone’s kindness by caring for them in every way I can.
Equalizing self with others. I am extremely concerned about myself getting the virus. Because I have diabetes, I am particularly at risk of having a severe reaction. Apparently also, if there was some sort of triage where they couldn’t care for everybody, I would likely be left to die. This scares me. I am doing everything I reasonably can to avoid that happening. Yet, there is nothing about me that makes me any more important than anybody else. If there were limited hospital capacity, I would want it to go to me. Why? I’m no more important than anybody else. I should cherish each and every living being as I do for myself. We are all different cells in the body of life, and the entire body of life is being attacked by this virus. What affects one of us, impacts us all.
Dangers of self-cherishing. The only reason why I am in danger of the outbreak is because in the past, motivated by selfishness, I engaged in the negative karma that would give rise to such suffering. If medical supplies or food or other basic necessities become scarce, I feel the need to hoard what I’ve got so I don’t run out, even though it is hoarding behavior that will trigger exactly the sort of shortages I fear. But because everybody else is hoarding, if I don’t, I will have nothing. If society breaks down, it will be because everyone resorted to an “every one fend for themselves” mentality. If this gets really ugly, that is exactly what might happen. The true root cause of this outbreak and all of the negative economic, social, and political consequences the flow from it, is selfishness. Thinking only of themselves, there are people going out and risking spreading the disease to others. I must abandon completely this evil mind.
Advantages of cherishing others. As a planet, as a nation, as a community, and as a family, the only way we are going to get through all of this is if we cherish each other. This outbreak could unleash the worst of humanity, or it could give rise to the best of it. I suspect it will do a lot of both. The common denominator of the worst will be selfishness, but the common denominator of the best will be those people, families, communities, and nations that cherished others, cared for others, and protected others. In these crazy times, the best way we can cherish others is to stay in our homes and place no demands on the system unless we absolutely have to. If somebody is there for me when I need them, it will be because I cherished others in the past. If others care for me, it will be because I cared for others. All the good there is in the world today struggling to pierce through the clouds of suffering come from cherishing others. When they write the history of my mental continuum, let them say at this moment of great peril, I stood on the side of cherishing others. Even if doing so costs me my life.
Exchanging self with others. It’s simple really: I need to impute my “I” onto all others, and impute “others” onto myself. Only then will my actions become correct, only then will I stop my selfish attitudes and walk through this crisis as the enlightened beings would. Look at me, then look at them. I remain trapped in samsara, fearing for my life and perhaps that of my family, preoccupied with what is happening in this world and in different countries. I’ve been getting mad at my family, at my colleagues at work, at political leaders, looking for somebody to blame for my struggles. Yet the Buddhas remain like the sun, shining the light of their blessings into the minds of each and every living being, emanating whatever they need, encouraging us to pray, and guiding us on how to transform this pandemic into the spiritual path. What is the core difference between them and me? I am seized by selfishness and they are driven by selflessness. I must become like them and cherish only others.
Great compassion. When I think of my own suffering, I naturally generate the wish to free myself, both temporarily and permanently from all sickness and suffering. Why? Because I love and cherish myself (even my true self, my Buddha nature), I wish to free my pure potential from all suffering. On the basis of exchanging self with others, wishing all beings could enjoy everlasting freedom from all sickness, I merely need look at the world today, and compassion will naturally arise. Everyone is gripped by fear, people are struggling to breathe, many are dying. Doctors and nurses are putting their own lives on the line to save others. They are being put in impossible situations of having to decide who will live and who will die. Millions are losing their jobs, companies are going bankrupt, people’s life savings are being wiped out. And this is just the beginning of what potentially could last months or a year or more if we are unable to get this under control. In all my life, I have never felt so close to the apocalypse. Perhaps it won’t come to that, perhaps it will all blow over. But perhaps it won’t, and we stand on the brink of a truly global calamity. The truth of the matter is this is only a taste of samsara’s sufferings. Everyone we see will suffer from this and far more for as long as they remain in samsara. Doctors can help us in this life, but they cannot protect us from having to experience the sicknesses of samsara again and again and again, for time without end. I wish everyone were free from their fears, sicknesses, and sufferings. The suffering of samsara is simply too great to even imagine, and we are seeing only a glimpse of its horrors.
Taking. It is not enough for me to merely wish others were free from the sufferings of the coronavirus outbreak (and all of the other sufferings of samsara), I must do something about it. I look around me, and many people simply don’t know how to mentally process all of this, and they become gripped by fear and paralyzed by worry, feeling there is no escape. It is up to me to assume personal responsibility to be the emotional anchor for those around me. If they can’t handle it, then I need to handle it because somebody has to. This is too serious. I look out into the world and see it becoming terribly sick. Most people don’t have the experience with Dharma that I have been blessed to have. I have been given Dharma tools that enable me to transform whatever arises into the path. I might struggle at first, but I know through blessings, I will be able to do so. I’m in a much better position to take on suffering and sickness than others are, so it only makes sense that all sickness ripen on me and not them. Please, I pray from the depths of my heart, may everyone’s Coronavirus ripen on me so that no one else need suffer from it ever again. May I alone suffer all of the economic and social consequences of this outbreak so others may live in freedom and community. May all of the fear and sickness of countless beings throughout samsara ripen upon me right now so that they may know respite. May I make this prayer in all sincerity.
Wishing love. It is not enough for others to be free from sickness and suffering, they need to enjoy good health, a sense of community, and an abundance of resources and care. They need to feel that their governments and their communities will come together, protect them during the storm, and then help them rebuild afterwards. They need to find the spiritual path that leads to everlasting freedom and joy. They need to know a life free from even the name sickness. They need to experience the bliss of wisdom bodies that have the power to emanate whatever living beings require. I wish all beings could enjoy such things.
Giving. Once again, it is not enough for me to simply wish others enjoyed this sort of happiness. I can’t just wait around for somebody else to help others, I need to assume personal responsibility for the welfare of all. I have been blessed with abundance, so it is up to me to give these things to others. May whatever resources I have flow to others. May whatever love I receive fall upon others. May whatever wisdom I have gained ripen in others’ minds. May whatever opportunities I have to practice Dharma manifest in the life of others. May whatever fearlessness I experience wash over others like a refreshing wind. May I send out countless emanations into the world, spontaneously manifesting for others whatever they require. May all of their food become medicine nectars, bestowing upon them immortal vajra bodies. May the light of my love shine like an eternal sun bringing joy to all.
Bodhichitta. As much as I would want to, I currently lack the ability to take on the suffering of the outbreak and give others back eternal good health. In truth, I can barely make it through my day without getting upset at somebody because I too am worried about what is to come. My diabetes makes me extremely limited in what I can do without exposing myself and potentially risking my precious human life. In truth, for as long as I remain in samsara, I am basically useless to others. If I want to help others, take on their suffering, give them back enlightenment, then I myself need to do whatever it takes to become a Buddha. I need to dedicate my life sincerely to the spiritual path because only it provides a lasting solution for those I love. Otherwise, I will just be swept away like everyone else, and they will have no hope. But if I become a Buddha, I will become untouchable by sickness. Even if my emanations appear to die from such sicknesses, in truth, I will never have left the pure land and can emanate some more. By becoming a Buddha, I can emanate pure lands where beings can take rebirth in safety, receive Dharma instructions, purify their subtle bodies, and themselves become Buddhas. Slowly but surely, we can empty samsara. I must do this. What other choice do I have?
Tranquil Abiding. My mind is completely distracted by the outbreak. Throughout the day, I am reading articles, checking up on the statistics, going through my facebook feed, and other things. If I am not careful, the more I consume information about the impending suffering of the world, the more distraught I may become, and the more irritable and useless I will become. Something is a distraction only if it is not thinking about Dharma. If every time I think about the outbreak it gives rise to a Dharma mind, then learning about the outbreak won’t be a distraction, instead it will be a fuel for my practice. While fantastic, even that is not good enough. If I am to realize my bodhichitta wish, I need to bring my mind completely under control. When I sit down to meditate, I need to fully absorb myself in my prayers and self-generation practice. If I don’t, I will never make the progress I need to make; but if I do, I can swiftly move along the path and put myself in a position to help others. They say time is of the essence in addressing the pandemic, that actions now have huge implications down the road by cutting down the exponential rate of growth. The same is true with us attaining enlightenment. The longer we take, the more living beings will suffer. The more distracted we allow ourselves to become, the longer it will take for us to accomplish our spiritual goals. We owe it to others to concentrate fully, without any distractions.
Superior seeing. Ultimately, this outbreak and the world in which it is happening is just a contaminated appearance to mind. It is a bad dream, but one we are trapped in. There is no permanent escape from the virus in the dream, the only lasting solution is to wake up from it. None of this is real, but we nonetheless suffer from it because we believe it is. When we connect with the emptiness of a phenomena, we purify the contaminated karma giving rise to its appearance. In ultimate truth, there is no coronavirus, there is no pandemic, there is no economic collapse, there is no political upheaval, none of it. Just emptiness – all of one equal taste in great bliss. We may not be doctors or nurses on the front lines, but all of us can meditate on the emptiness of all of this for the sake of the whole world, and thereby help purify the contaminated karma giving rise to it all. By realizing emptiness, we will be able to ourselves escape from samsara, build our pure land, and then be in a position to provide lasting refuge for all living beings. With emptiness, everything is possible.
Reliance upon the Spiritual Guide. If it were not for my spiritual guide, I would not even know of these Lamrim minds, much less have the opportunity to realize them. I, like everyone else, would be a leaf blown around from one suffering to another by the winds of karma. But with my guru’s blessings, I can accomplish anything. I can transform the arising of the coronavirus into a powerful cause of my enlightenment. Through his blessings, even if I get the virus myself and ultimately die from it, I will be able to transform that experience into the path. All around me, people are scared and suffering in different ways. I am completely incapable of helping them, I don’t know what to say to help, and am sometimes barely able to hold things together myself. Yet, by bringing my guru into my heart, he can act through me. His words and become my words. His thoughts can become my thoughts. I can completely get out of the way and let him work through me in this world. Geshe-la is in all of us, and he wants to help this world in its hour of need. How can he do so? Through all of us. We can become an extension of his body, speech, and mind in this world. Through practicing his Dharma, we can move our mind into his pure land from where we can help all being forever. Geshe-la, I beg you, please remain in my heart forever. Guide me through this. Help me know how I can be of service. Reveal to me the paths I should follow. Bestow upon me the wisdom I need. Touch my heart with your love for all beings.
Dedication. May all those who read this become free form all fear, sickness, suffering, and death. May all of the suffering in the world ripen solely on me, and may all others enjoy the bliss of Keajra. May every time we think of the outbreak and its aftermath remind us all of the truth of Dharma and the wisdom of the Lamrim. In this way, may all beings find eternal health.
How to Transform the Coronavirus Outbreak into the Spiritual Path
“Milarepa said that he regarded everything that appeared to his mind as a Dharma book. All things confirmed the truth of Buddha’s teachings and increased his spiritual experience.” – Joyful Path of Good Fortune
For the last several months, China and much of East Asia have been dealing with the Coronavirus outbreak. There was hope, at first, that the virus could be contained, but most public health experts now believe that is impossible. It is now breaking out in Europe, North America, and most significantly in developing countries that lack sufficient public health infrastructure or administrative means to contain it. Some have said the spring and summer heat will kill it, but they forget there is a Southern Hemisphere, where our summer is their winter. While nobody has a crystal ball, all reliable sources point to one conclusion – the Coronavirus, or COVID-19 as it is technically called, is now and will remain for the foreseeable future a fact of modern life.
The question we must ask ourselves is how can we transform this into the spiritual path Milarepa-style? As Kadampa’s, we may not be able to stop the spread of the virus (though we need to do our part), but we can use the Dharma wisdom we have been taught to help stop the spread of delusions associated with this outbreak. The nurses and doctors who are heroically on the front lines of the virus outbreak should be our role models. The difference is we as spiritual practitioners need to be the first-responders to the arguably more dangerous outbreak – mass delusions. At worst, the virus can kill us only in this life, but the delusions people are generating towards this virus will harm us in this and in all of our future lives. Delusions are the true pandemic.
Countering Mass Delusions
Transforming this outbreak into the spiritual path for ourselves is vital – more on that below. But let’s first talk about how to help others swept away by mass delusions – specifically irrational fear and racism. All delusions function in the same way – they mentally project a mistaken reality, and then we relate to that mistake projection as if it were actually true. Countering delusions – others’ or our own – is the essence of the Bodhisattva’s way of life. The outbreak is triggering mass delusions, delusions only function is to harm, and we need to become part of the solution.
Irrational Fear
Planet-wide, it is no exaggeration to say people are freaking out. Human psychology is not individual rational actors, but rather the mentality of a herd. It is very easy to be swept away by the herd. Fear can be divided into two types – rational and irrational. It is perfectly rational to fear delusions, negative karma, samsaric rebirth, and even solitary peace. These things can genuinely hurt us and others and are the deep causes of all of our suffering. Irrational fears are misplaced fears – fear of something we don’t need to fear. The reality is on the aggregate, the total human suffering from delusions about the Coronavirus FAR EXCEEDS the suffering from the virus itself. Delusions are the real virus.
Let me be clear in my meaning here. I’m not saying we should not fear the virus or take the necessary precautions advised by experts. This virus has the potential to be a global catastrophe. Experts are now estimating that if we do nothing, somewhere between 30%-70% of the global population will get the virus. Globally, that’s between two and five billion people, with between 200 and 500 million deaths worldwide. This has the potential to be as devastating as a major war. But humanity is not doing nothing, people are acting to minimize the spread, and we should encourage everybody to do everything experts are advising. Externally, we need to act exactly as normal and take this thing as seriously as we would a mobilization for a major war. Before a hurricane, it is calm and skies are clear. That is when we need to prepare. Once the storm hits, it’s too late. If we all do what we are supposed to do externally, we can mitigate enormously the impacts of all of this, and possibly escape with relatively minimal overall impacts.
What I’m saying is the bigger pandemic is the delusions humanity generates in response to this crisis. Doing what is externally required of us is good, but not good enough. As Kadampas, we need to deal with the inner outbreak of delusions.
The short version is while we should externally do what we can to avoid getting the virus, internally we should not fear it. We can take precautions without delusions. Aversion mentally projects some external thing to be a cause of our suffering, exaggerates its harmfulness, and then relates to that exaggerated projection as if it were true. Typically, aversions can be countered by rational explanations, deflating the exaggeration, and presenting a more balanced view of the situation. Here, the analogy of the toy snake is particularly useful. If it is dark and we are not looking too closely, it is possible we can see a snake on the path, and be seized by strong fear. But then, when we look more closely, we realize it is a toy snake, and our fear subsides. Even though in fact there was not ever an actual snake there, one nonetheless appeared vividly to our mind and we generated real emotional fear. The truth of the situation didn’t matter. But when presented with new information realizing it was just a toy snake, our fear went away. Right now, when people think about the prospects of getting the virus, they see a real snake; when we know we can transform it into the path, we realize it is a toy snake. The virus is still the virus, but our fear of it goes away.
In the early stages of the Coronavirus outbreak, especially when we consider some transmission occurs even if the person does not have a fever or other symptoms, we start to mentally project everyone around us is infected and every surface we touch is covered with the virus. It can get to the point where we feel like going outside is just dangerous, like the whole world is filled with gaseous disease. Every time we see somebody wearing a mask, it then reinforces our fear that the virus is everywhere. This is our toy snake. In actual fact, statistically speaking, very few people actually have the virus – at present at least, this could change very quickly if people do not take the necessary precautions – and almost none of the surfaces we encounter are dangerous. But danger appears vividly to our mind, and we relate to these projections as if they were actually true and become seized by fear.
This is not to say nobody is infected and no surfaces are dangerous, just that what appears to our mind is not reliable and much of our fear is exaggerated and irrational. As we become aware of these facts, just like realizing it is a toy snake, the majority of our exaggerated fears will subside and we can deal with the situation in a balanced way. What is a balanced way? Externally, we take every precaution experts advise; internally, we learn to patiently accept whatever arises.
But what if we get sick? Shouldn’t we fear that? First of all, not all sickness is the Coronavirus. We have gotten colds and flus our whole life, and it could be just that – a cold or a flu. No big deal. Second, not all infections of the Coronavirus are fatal – experts put the mortality rate at between 0.025% and 1.5%. Young people seem to not be too affected, but older people are dying at much higher rates. The overwhelming majority of cases will be no different than any other flu people get. Not pleasant, but perfectly endurable and survivable. Some people have been infected and showed no symptoms whatsoever – it simply passed through them with barely a blip. But for vulnerable populations, it is a real risk. Regardless, whatever happens, our job is to transform it into the path by responding to it with wisdom and compassion.
Samsara is the nature of sickness. It is an unavoidable part of human life. We transform it into the spiritual path like we do any other sickness we might get. Diabetes, heart disease, and cancer strike people all of the time. We will inevitably get sick many times in our life, and likely die of some sickness. It is just a question of when and which sickness. Sickness itself is a fact of samsara, whether it is a problem for us or a blessing depends upon whether we transform its arising into the path.
In many respects, it’s almost better to just assume now we will get the virus. That way we can mentally begin to accept it and start thinking about how we will transform it into the path. When we see how we will do so, our fear will subside. This does not mean we should not still take all the normal precautions to avoid getting it, it just means we accept even if we do get it – even if we die from it – it will not be a problem because spiritually we will grow from it. By staring into the worst case scenario and realizing it need not be a problem for us, our fears will subside. Wisdom brings fearlessness. We only fear that which harms us, but if we can transform everything into something that spiritually helps us, we have nothing to fear.
Racism
Exotic diseases that start out in foreign places leads to a natural fear of unknown others. In today’s political climate, so-called political “leaders” are none too happy to stoke racist fears of immigrants and others for their own narrow political gain. “We need to ‘keep them out’ because they are all ridden with disease,” is a popular refrain. As long as we allow irrational fear to remain in our mind, we make ourselves susceptible to becoming ensnared in racist tropes. We may even begin propagating them ourselves, thinking we are keeping people safe. Long after the Coronavirus has left the front pages, the racism will remain. It is far more destructive to human society than the virus itself, and if we are not careful, we too can become part of the problem. There is no wall strong enough to keep out microscopic germs. The germs themselves don’t care what race anybody is. We have a responsibility to push back against racist exploitation of human illness.
How to Transform the Outbreak for Ourselves
Having looked carefully at the mass delusions of irrational fear and racism, how can we ourselves transform the outbreak into the spiritual path? Transforming some difficulty into the path does not make the difficulty go away, it just makes it spiritually useful. If the difficulty can become a powerful cause of our own or others’ enlightenment, then on-net from a spiritual point of view, the difficulty becomes a good thing, it becomes rocket fuel for spiritual growth.
How would Milarepa look at all of this?
First, and most obviously, the outbreak is a good lesson in karma. Some people get it and others don’t. Of those who get it, some die and others don’t. Why the difference? It’s the same as why some people die in a plane crash and others don’t – it’s a question of what karma do we have and what karma is ripening. We all have the karma to get the Coronavirus and countless other diseases. Karma is the deep cause. If you don’t want to get the virus or any other sickness, then apply effort to purify your negative karma. Further, negative minds activate negative karma, positive minds activate positive karma, and pure minds activate pure karma. So just as we are careful to wash our hands and not touch our face, so too we should be careful to not let our mind become negative, because that is how we activate the karma of ourselves possibly getting sick.
Second, use the outbreak to strengthen your renunciation. The only reason why we get sick is because we are still identifying with contaminated samsaric aggregates that get sick. Humans experience human suffering because they identify with human bodies and minds. We might be able to avoid catching the Coronavirus, but for as long as we remain in contaminated aggregates, we will inevitably get and possibly die from some sickness. The only long-term sustainable solution to sickness is to escape from samsara once and for all.
Third, we can use this as an opportunity to practice cherishing others. Even if we ourselves are not likely to die from this because we are not part of a vulnerable population, we can still become a carrier of the disease and inadvertently infect somebody else who is vulnerable. So we should all be careful as an act of cherishing others. We can help people who are afraid by presenting things in a balanced way and showing them how they can transform it into the path if they ever did get sick, or we can teach them about the nature of samsara. If we come to know people who have gotten sick, we can care for them and help them (while of course protecting ourselves from getting sick as well). The possibilities for cherishing others are limitless when surrounded by suffering.
Fourth, we can use the outbreak to increase our compassion. Look at how much suffering there is – both physically from the virus and mentally from the anxiety – in the world as a result of the outbreak. Think of all of the other sicknesses there are circulating throughout the world. All samsaric beings are, in effect, being cooked in a giant stew of disease. None of us can escape it for as long as we remain in samsara. And this will go on and on and on for eternity until we stop it. Sometimes considering such a state of affairs can make us extremely sad and depressed. But this only happens because we lack sufficient faith that there is a solution. Through reliance on the three jewels, we can eventually help all beings escape once and for all from all sickness. Seeing their suffering will still be unbearable, but instead of dragging us down, it will energize us to realize the solution. This is not a game. Outbreaks such as this can help shatter our complacency in our Dharma practice, and become the forcing action to start to actually get serious about progressing along the spiritual path. What other solution is there? In this way, the outbreak becomes a powerful cause of our bodhichitta, and through that, we will eventually gain the ability to help each and every living being find everlasting freedom from all sickness. If only one practitioner generates a qualified bodhichitta as a result of this outbreak, and that bodhichitta eventually leads to their enlightenment, then on the aggregate we can say the outbreak will have resulted in more good than harm. Now imagine thousands of Kadampas develop such a bodhichitta. This outbreak could mark the turning point in the spiriutal fate of millions. Whether it does depends entirely upon us.
In Universal Compassion, Geshe-la explains the practice of taking and giving is the essence of transforming adverse conditions into the path, or Lojong practice. If we ourselves discover irrational fear or racism in our mind, we can imagine that we are taking on all the irrational fear and racism of everyone in this world and the fear and racism in our own mind is that which we have taken on. Then, we use our Dharma wisdom to overcome it within our own mind, and then give back our fearlessness and universal love. Taking on our own future or others’ suffering is one of the most powerful methods for overcoming our fears. This courageous mind willing to take on others suffering so they don’t have to experience it eradicates our selfishness and, paradoxically, actually purifies the negative karma that could possibly cause us to get sick in the first place. Likewise, we can mentally imagine we take on everyone’s Coronavirus and give them back immortal vajra bodies free from all sickness. We need not fear practicing taking, we should fear not practicing it and remaining burdened by our negative karma.
The outbreak is also an excellent opportunity to train in Tantra. Tantric practice, fundamentally, is a method for creating pure worlds. It is not enough to just wish to escape from samsara and sickness, Tantra is our spiritual method for constructing alternative pure realities. Heruka and Vajrayogini never get sick because their bodies are made of wisdom light. There is no sickness in Keajraland because there is no karmic basis for it to arise. China may be able to build a new hospital in 10 days, but once built, people still die from sickness within it. Through our Tantric practice, we can generate spiritual field hospitals where all of the doctors are emanations of Medicine Buddha and all of the medicine is pure healing nectar. We can purify the deep contaminated karma giving rise to worlds of sickness and replace them with charnel grounds in which all appearances teach the truth of Dharma. The body mandala deities of Heruka and Vajrayogini are the supreme nurses who can purify the subtle bodies and minds of all beings, resulting in a permanent healing of all sickness. Such results might not be instantaneous, but if we are persistent with our effort, they are guaranteed. There is no need to give in to hopelessness and despair, the solutions lay at our feet. We need merely pick them up and use them and never give up until all beings know everlasting freedom.
Whether this outbreak is a cause of mass delusion and pernicious racism depends, fundamentally, upon all of us. We each have a responsibility to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Dharma wisdom shows us how. We cannot control how others think, but we can control how we react to the outbreak. If we do the right things for long enough, this world will get better. Ultimately, this outbreak is a powerful lesson in the truth of Dharma and a unique opportunity for us to supercharge our spiritual life. If we succeed in transforming the outbreak into the spiritual path, all of the suffering associated with it will not have been for naught. We can make it meaningful, and indeed spiritually beneficial for the world. Now, the ball is in our court. The only question that remains is what will we do with our opportunity?
How to accept depression, anxiety, and mental illnesss
Depression is not fun. But it need not be a “problem.” Mental illness in general arises when our deluded mental habits become chronic, often leading to our mind – and even our body or nervous system – becoming injured. Often, there is some external trigger, such as an abusive childhood or some extreme emotional trauma from life events. Some people, for a variety of karmic reasons, carry even a genetic legacy making them more prone to mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, and so forth. In any case, it is not our fault that our mind reacts to adverse life events in deluded, negative ways. Nobody intentionally becomes deluded, rather delusions just arise uncontrolledly as our habitual response to difficult circumstances. The good news is we can learn to change our mental habits, and our current mental state gives us a great opportunity to train in doing so. But we will not be able to do so unless we first learn to patiently accept our current situation. To “accept” in Dharma terms means “to be at peace with how things are.” Things are as they are, and from a spiritual point of view, this is not a “problem” for us.
Unfortunately, there is tremendous mental stigma associated with mental illness. Society seems to accept physical illness, such as the flu, a broken leg, or cancer; but it judges mental illness as some sort of personal failure. We then internalize this stigma, and begin to judge ourselves, viewing ourself as a failure because we are not well. Excuse my French, but this is just bullish*t! Samsara is the nature of sickness, and if truth be told, all physical sickness actually arises from mental sickness from either this or previous lives. Mental sickness happens, just as physical sickness does. It is not our fault, and it is not a personal failure. Society is simply wrong, and we should ignore the views of the ignorant.
Before we get to how to accept our depression, anxiety, or other mental illness, first two words about medications: take them! Geshe-la is very clear about a Kadampa practitioner’s relationship with traditional medicine, doctors, etc. If we have a headache, we take an aspirin just like everybody else, and then we practice patient acceptance while we wait for it to take effect. When we suffer from strong depression, etc., we are sometimes so impacted we are simply unable to “practice Dharma.” Medications help put us back into a zone where we can once again train our mind, and then we use the Dharma we have learned to work through the rest. We should view our medications as karmic emanations of Medicine Buddha and strongly believe they have the power to heal our mind. If we are to transform our ordinary food into medicine nectar, then surely we should transform our medications in the same way. Similarly, we should see our doctors, talk with our psychologist, and take the time to rest exactly as normal.
Healing our mind from depression and anxiety takes time. It is during this time that we need to practice patient acceptance. I find there are three main obstacles to accepting our current state: hopelessness, fear, and impatience wanting it all to be over.
Hopelessness primarily arises because either we assume our current state will last forever or we lack confidence in our capacity to make it to the other side. Hopelessness causes us to think our efforts to get better will fail no matter what, so we give up even trying. Hopelessness quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. First of all, nothing is permanent. Everything is constantly changing, and as they say, “this too shall pass.” Second, the laws of karma are definite. If we create good causes for long enough, we will get better. Finally, all of us are destined to eventually reach enlightenment, the only question is when. So whether it is soon or in a future life, it is definite we will make it to the other side. Giving in to hopelessness is not only self-defeating, it is factually wrong.
Being mentally ill can give rise to all sorts of fear. It can be very scary when, as a result of depression or other mental illness, we lose our normal mental capacities. We fear it might be permanent or we fear something going wrong and not being able to deal with it. This can then lead to anxiety, which can become generalized, leading to a further erosion of our mental capacities in a vicious cycle. How can we overcome this? First, we need to remember our pure potential is indestructible. It is our Buddha nature, and it lies within all of us. No matter how terrifying the storm clouds, the sky always remains untouched. Second, our mind being ill gives us countless opportunities to apply effort to heal it, so our current illness is rocket fuel for our spiritual development and karma. Third, we can use our temporary state to develop compassion for those going through aging, whose loss of capacity is irreversible, at least in this life. Fourth, we can use our current state as an opportunity to practice taking – either taking on our own future suffering now, or taking on others’ suffering similar to what we are going through. The practice of taking is one of the most powerful means of purifying the negative karma giving rise to our current difficulties.
Sometimes when we have been mentally ill for a long time, we can become impatient wishing it was all over. People who suffer form physical sickness or injury often develop similar impatience. If we indulge this mind and allow ourselves to become impatient with our recovery, we will not speed up our getting better, we will simply make ourselves more miserable along the way. The bottom line is we have no way of knowing if our current state will last only a couple of weeks or a couple of years. This too, we must learn to accept. How? Faith in Dorje Shugden. Dorje Shugden is a wisdom Buddha who blesses our mind with the ability to see how our situation is in fact perfect for our swiftest possible enlightenment. In this way, nothing is an obstacle and everything is helpful to our spiritual development. We can think of our convalescence period as a special form of spiritual retreat where we can work on our mind. We don’t know how long it will last, but we do know it is exactly what we need and we are protected. Anybody who has done long retreat knows it is not bliss, rainbows, and unicorns; rather it is more like hard work cleaning out the grime in the deepest recesses of our mind. It can be quite unpleasant, but we know it is only by doing a deep cleaning that we will be able to enjoy a lasting freshness and purity.
In conclusion, while depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses may be “unpleasant to go through,” from a spiritual perspective, they are a good thing. We need to embrace them in this way. If we accept our circumstance, we will no longer experience it as “suffering.” It will still be there, we will just experience it differently. We will experience it as deep healing of our mind.
Looking in the Mirror of Dharma: Understanding how negativity functions in our mind
Many people make New Year’s resolutions, but it is not long before their good intentions are forgotten or overwhelmed by their negative tendencies. On the surface, it may appear that our mind is relatively free from negativity and for the most part we lead a morally healthy life, but we should not fool ourselves. When we lift the surface rock, we discover underneath all sorts of mental cockroaches or other disgusting creatures bustling about. Our normal reaction is to quickly put the rock back down and run away, but this just leaves the negativity to fester. We cannot bring impurity with us into the pure land, and we must eventually leave all negativity behind. If we are to once and for all root out the negativity from our mind, we need to have the courage to stare into the abyss of our mind and understand clearly how our negativity functions.
The heart of the matter is we are desire realm beings, which means we have no choice but to do what we desire. At present, we still have negative desires, so it is inevitable we will eventually act upon them. The solution is not will power, because if we still desire negativity and simply use will power to hold ourselves back, eventually our defenses will be worn down and we will succumb. Someone once said, “it’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done so at least a dozen times.” The only lasting solution is to change our desires, where we genuinely do not want to engage in negativity and we want to engage in virtue. If this is our desire, our actions will naturally follow. The main function of the Lamrim is to change our desires from negative to positive, from ordinary to spiritual. But this takes time. The question is how do we manage the transition when we have mixed desires – some negative and some virtuous? To answer this, we must have a clear and honest understanding of how negativity functions in our mind. Only then can we dismantle the mechanisms of negativity within our mind.
Gaining the ability to look in the Mirror of Dharma
Why do we find it so hard to look objectively at our negativity? It seems there are three main reasons. First, we don’t think what we are doing is negative, so we don’t find a problem with our behavior. Second, our pride refuses to acknowledge our mistakes because doing so would challenge our exalted view of ourselves. And third, for a variety of cultural reasons, we have internalized an ethic of guilt that beats ourselves up when we make mistakes, and being beat up hurts (even when we do it to ourselves).
To overcome these three obstacles, we need to engage in this investigation like a scientist. We need to objectively investigate any discrepancies between what the Dharma explains as negative and what we think is negative. We need to check if we are right and under what circumstances we are wrong. If we don’t know a behavior as negative, we won’t abandon it. We also need to objectively examine our own behavior and see how it stacks up against what is prescribed in the Dharma. Sometimes our downfalls are obvious – even epic – sometimes, they are very subtle. We need to be honest with ourselves, not exaggerating our negativity, but also not rationalizing it away as nothing. Perhaps most importantly, we need to stop blaming ourselves or judging ourselves for our mistakes. When we beat ourselves up with guilt, we reduce our confidence berating ourselves as an idiot for having engaged in the negativity, etc., or we feed a self-perception of being a failure, which undermines our ability to succeed next time. Just because we are not perfect doesn’t mean that we are bad. In the Dharma there is no bad, there is only good and even better. Just because there is something even better doesn’t mean we are failing, it simply means we have further room to grow.
Pride and guilt in particular are a dangerous combination. Our pride causes us to expect perfection from ourselves, or at the very least, it expects us to already be better than we are; but our guilt then beats ourselves up for any deviation from these expectations for ourselves. Trapped between pride and guilt, we cannot win and are never good enough – we are not as good as our pride expects us to already be and then our guilt makes us feel like a horrible person for not living up to these unrealistic expectations. This can get so bad, even looking at the negative tendencies in our mind can trigger some sort of breakdown. Because all delusions exaggerate, our pride exaggerates how good we should already be, and our guilt exaggerates our departures from our self-imposed expectations. We then see the negativity, feel we “should” already not be like that, and our guilt then judges us as a total incompetent failure incapable of confronting, much less overcoming our negative tendencies. We then see only our total incapacity in front of a monumental problem, leaving us with the feeling we are hopelessly doomed.
The solution to this trap is we need to have compassion for ourselves (otherwise known as renunciation). We have inherited aeons worth of negative tendencies, and swimming upstream against them is not easy. We do not need to already be better than we are, rather we are where we are at and we simply take the next right step. Negative tendencies will arise in our mind and mistakes will be made, but we never give up, and with persistent effort, step by step, we will definitely get there in the end. This is the mind of definite emergence – a deep feeling of joy knowing we are definitively on our way out and all of our suffering will soon come to a final end. We will emerge on the other side into an infinite expanse of permanent inner freedom from all suffering. The mind of definite emergence knows if we never give up, we will inevitably succeed.
Renunciation, I believe, is one of the hardest minds for Westerners to generate because we instantly interpret it through the lens of aesthetic-style deprivation of any joy and self-flagellating judgment and guilt. In truth, renunciation means self-care or true self-love. The difference between the self-love of the narcissist and the self-love of renunciation is the former loves our non-existent self of our ignorance and the later loves our true self or our pure potential.
Stages of the path to negative actions
Having hopefully gained the ability to look honestly (and happily) at the negative tendencies in our mind, we can now examine how they function.
Downfalls almost always begin with an impulse to engage in negativity. We have within our mind countless negative tendencies from our past lives to think, speak, or act in negative ways. We have spent the vast majority of our eternity in the lower realms where we engaged in almost exclusively negative actions. It is said it is easier to attain enlightenment once born human than to be born human once we have taken rebirth in the lower realms. Why? Because while we are there, virtually all of our actions are negative. These tendencies tempt us now to once again engage in negativity. If left unchecked, these desires grow and grow until they become unstoppable.
As they grow, we first rationalize why our negative desire isn’t really that negative. We might come up with some sort of justification for why we “deserve” to engage in the negativity, as if it was some sort of reward for our good behavior or as compensation for some past injustice we have experienced. To paraphrase Shantideva, we run towards negativity as if it were a pleasure garden and avoid virtue as if it were the plague. Why? Because we are still fundamentally confused about what are the causes of our happiness and suffering. In Request to the Lord of All Lineages, Geshe-la says, “the cause of suffering is non-virtuous actions and the cause of happiness is virtuous actions. Since this is completely true, I will definitely abandon the first and practice the second.”
While the negative desire is building in our mind, we will also find ways of minimizing the consequences of the negativity. “It’s not really that bad,” we convince ourself. Typically, we will only consider the immediate consequences, such as the contaminated happiness we might get from engaging in the negativity against the likelihood of getting caught or others finding out what we have done. There will definitely be times when we can “get away with” our negativity and nobody will ever know, so we think, “why not?” But we can never escape our karma – its laws are definite. We might think to ourselves, “who am I hurting?” Finding nobody, we then think it is OK, but we are forgetting about how it is hurting ourselves. Is the short-lived pleasure or benefit we are likely to get from our negative action worth it when we consider the long-run karmic consequences? Surely not, but we don’t really believe in karma that much anyways, and besides, we wrongly think, we can always engage in purification afterwards, so once again, “why not?” If we don’t think our action was wrong, we can’t generate genuine regret; and without regret, we cannot actually purify. Purification is not complete without the power of the promise, but if we think we can always purify later so it doesn’t matter if we engage in negativity, our “promises” lack any power and no purification will actually take place.
As our negative desires continue to build, at some point, we make the decision that we will engage in the negativity, but we will then try find ways of minimizing how negative it will be. “I’ll just do it this once,” or “I’ll only do this, but not that.” We then start rationalizing how that would be OK and not so bad, and eventually we execute on our negative plan. Whether this process from the initial impulse to the final deed is a matter of weeks, hours, or mere seconds, we almost always go through these stages.
Post-negativity self-deceptions
Once we engage in the negative action, it almost never works out in the way we hoped. We didn’t get the reward or benefit we were hoping for. At this point, usually one of two things happens. Either, we start to beat ourselves up about what a terrible, stupid person we are for having engaged in the negativity, and we go down the path of guilt thinking our punishing ourselves will somehow deter us from engaging in negativity in the future. But guilt never works because it erodes our capacity and confidence. Or we start to identify why we didn’t get the reward we were hoping for, and we start to plot how we can be more skilled in our negativity next time so that we do. We think, “I have already started down this path and got nothing, I want to at least get something out of it,” so we double-down on our negativity and start planning for next time. In this way, we start to chase the rainbow of our negativity until we eventually fall off a cliff into the lower realms. This is actually the most dangerous aspect of engaging in negative actions – each time we do so, we create the tendencies to do so again. Our checks on our behavior grow weaker and weaker until eventually there are no checks at all.
After we have engaged in the negativity, we will start to get flashbacks recalling what we have done. Our negative actions are often like ghosts that haunt us by reminding us of our transgressions. At such times, we engage in all sorts of evasive tactics. For example, we will just look the other way and shove it back under the carpet pretending it isn’t there. Or we will rationalize to ourselves why the negative action wasn’t that bad and it is no big deal. Or we start to beat ourselves up with guilt. Or we give in to hopelessness, thinking we will never be able to get out of our negativity, so why bother trying anymore. We might as well enjoy ourselves with our negativity since we can’t escape it. Or we revert to “will power” trying to consolidate our iron-clad determination to not do that negative action again, even though we still “want” to do so. All of these tactics inevitably fail. The worst of these is giving in to hopelessness, because then, quite obviously, we have no hope.
Or perhaps we genuinely do feel regret for our negative action, realize it was a mistake, understand its karmic consequences, and really don’t want to engage in the negative action again. But we grasp at our negative actions and karma as being inherently existent and immune from purification. We think our actions are so bad and our purification practice so weak and insincere, that it won’t ever be purified. We have total faith in the laws of negative karma, but none in the power of purification. This can then quickly lead to despair, hopelessness, and guilt. Worse, it can lead to us not even trying to purify, because “what’s the point, it won’t work anyways.”
Seeing all of our negativity and how it functions in our mind can very easily lead to us feeling discouraged, thinking it is simply too hard to overcome our delusions and negative habits. We then can conclude the spiritual path is just too hard, and we settle for some vague self-commitment to generally be a good person. Or perhaps we give up on the path altogether or find another spiritual path which seems less demanding. When we are at this stage, it is easy to develop negative views towards the three jewels, thinking they are judging us or punishing us or rejecting us. At such times, all of the hypocrisies and shortcomings of our Sangha friends and teachers become quite vivid. They are judging me, but look at what they are doing! What they are doing is far worse, yet nothing ever happens to them. This whole tradition is a big sham full of spiritual phonies. It’s not enough for me to just leave this evil tradition, I need to tear it down to “protect” others from being ensnared by it.
Let me spare everyone the surprise: we are all the same. We are all hypocrites and we are all making one mistake after another. But that is not a reason to abandon the path, that is a valid reason for redoubling our efforts to practice it purely and skillfully. The teachings themselves are flawless, it is our ability to practice them that is flawed. But that is entirely normal! We are practitioners, not Buddhas. Of course we are making mistakes. It doesn’t matter what mistakes others are making, it doesn’t even matter what mistakes we are making. All that matters is that we are learning from every mistake that appears to our mind. If we do, then no matter what appears, we will learn and grow. Our job is not to change others or expose their hypocrisies, our job is to change ourselves and overcome our own. But we need to be patient with ourselves, understanding this will take time. When we are patient with ourselves, then we will learn to be patient with others’ imperfections as well. But here too lies a potential trap. We think, “slowly, slowly, try my best,” but we understand this to mean I don’t really have to change, I can just keep telling myself I am trying my best when in reality I’m not really doing anything.
Cutting the power of negativity in our mind
So how do we escape all of the above? What is the solution to all of this? In the end, each wrong turn described above comes from believing our delusions. Our delusions tempt us, rationalize, beat us up, or leave us discouraged. But they are all lies. The solution here is simple: see through the lies of our deluded tendencies. We need to make a clear distinction between the arising of a deluded tendency in our mind and the mental action of a delusion. A deluded tendency is the ripening of a past karma in our mind that causes us to think in a particular way. A new mental action of a delusion only occurs when we assent to or believe the lies of the deluded tendency. In other words, deluded tendency + belief = delusion. If instead when our deluded tendencies arise we use our wisdom to see through their lies and we identify clearly their deception, then the power of that deluded tendency over us is cut. The deluded tendency is still there, but it has no power. In other words, deluded tendency + disbelief = moral discipline. Slowly but surely we break the hold our deluded tendencies have over us until eventually we are no longer their puppet. They flail about, but we remain not just unmoved, but un-fooled. Christians say the “devil” works through deception. He tricks us into believing that following him will lead to some happiness. We break his hold over us by no longer being fooled by his deceptions. This is exactly correct, we merely need to replace “devil” with “delusion” and the meaning is the same.
When we find ourselves being haunted by our negative actions in the way explained above, view it as an opportunity to once again engage in purification for the negative action. We generate a sincere regret, we rely upon the three jewels, we engage in some virtuous action as an antidote, and we renew our promise to not go down that road again recognizing it as – quite literally – the highway to hell. Our particularly strong negative actions may haunt us for many years, but that’s OK, each time they do, we again engage in purification practice. Eventually, they will haunt us no more.
It takes great courage to honestly admit our negativity. We don’t have to go around and publicly declare everything we have ever done wrong, but we do have to be honest with ourselves and with our spiritual guide in our heart. Purification practice is sometimes called confession practice. Confession is not just stating (even internally) our negative actions, rather it is done with a wisdom acknowledgement that they are indeed negative conjoined with a sincere promise to not repeat such actions. Again, the Christians are very close, they just sometimes get side-tracked in guilt or thinking some external God is determining their fate, when it simply comes down to the internal laws of physics, otherwise known as the laws of karma.
Staring into the abyss of our own negativity can be daunting, but it is worth the effort. We need to work gradually to dismantle the obstacles of ignorance, pride, and guilt which prevent us from doing so. We need to request wisdom blessings to be able to see how negativity functions in our own mind in a way that we can gradually disarm and deconstruct it. Our negativity is not an intrinsic part of our mind, it is rather merely a current of bad habits and their karmic waste. Ultimately, it is just a question of changing our desires, and Lamrim is the tried and tested method for doing so. With persistent effort, we can eventually clean up our mind completely. Then, we will know a freedom and happiness beyond all others.
Accepting our limits
It’s very easy to become neurotic. It’s even easier to disappoint others. We want to be a good person and our heart is bursting with compassion wanting to help in every way we can, but we are still incredibly limited in what we can actually do. Our attachment, pride, guilt, and misplaced sense of responsibility prevent us from patiently accepting our current limitations. The result is anxiety, burnout, and depression for ourselves and dependency, disappointment, and resentment for others. If we can learn how to accept our limits and communicate them to others, we can avoid all of these problems and transform our good heart into a qualified bodhichitta.
All of us want to be a good person. We want to help. We see those we love suffer and we want to rescue them. Our meditations on the faults of selfishness, the benefits of selflessness, and compassion drive us to want to commit our lives to serving others. We may even fashion ourselves as a bodhisattva dedicated to freeing all living beings from the ocean of samsara and leading them all to the everlasting joy of the Buddha lands. We read time and again that virtuous intentions such as these are supposed to lead to inner peace and happiness, but if we are honest we are miserable on the inside, useless on the outside and we seem inexorably headed towards some sort of dramatic crash. Perhaps that reckoning has already come. I would say much of this comes from an inability to accept and to communicate our current limitations.
Why do we struggle to accept our limitations?
First, we fail to make the distinction between attachment to others not suffering and compassion wishing others are free from their suffering. Attachment to others not suffering mistakenly thinks our happiness depends upon others not suffering, so when they go down, we go down with them. Our own well-being then depends on them doing well, and so we then feel others need to change or their problems need to stop for us to be happy. We then push ourselves to solve their problems out of personal necessity. Because we feel our happiness depends upon theirs, to accept we can’t solve their problems is to condemn ourselves to misery.
Second, our pride convinces us we are better than we actually are. We think we are this amazing high bodhisattva who can save everyone and we don’t want to admit – even to ourselves – that we are still just a beginner and are still quite limited in what we can do. This is especially a problem for teachers and parents and caregivers. Others are looking up to us and relying upon us, we don’t want to let them down (or have them realize we are a fraud), so we pretend we are more capable than we really are. Perhaps we have a unique opportunity to help others and make a difference, and so we keep taking on more and more responsibility, not considering whether we have the capacity to handle it all. Perhaps our own sense of self-worth is very much tied up with being the stable one who is there for others, and we feel if we admitted our limitations we would come crashing down.
Third, our guilt pushes us unhealthily beyond our limits. We know we are not supposed to be selfish, and we think we should be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others. They are suffering, they are struggling, and we can make a difference. To not do so is to be selfish, and so we beat ourselves up to push beyond what is sustainable. How can we just let them suffer when there is one more thing we can do? We generate this long list of things we “should be doing” if we were perfect, and then we judge ourselves against this, viewing ourselves as a failure if we don’t do it all.
Fourth, we have a misplaced sense of responsibility that it is up to us to solve others problems for them. Doesn’t superior intention tell us that we need to assume personal responsibility for the welfare of all? Doesn’t emptiness explain that ultimately we are responsible for everything that happens in our karmically created dream? Surely, it is up to us. If we don’t do it, who will? Because we think we are responsible for relieving others from their suffering, they then start to think the same thing about us, so they look to us to solve their problems for them, and then get mad at us when we don’t. They then make us feel guilty for not being there for them, setting in motion vicious spirals within our mind.
What is the result of all of this non-acceptance of our limitations?
In the beginning it leads to great stress and anxiety. There is so much we need to do, and we don’t have time or the capacity to do it all, so we become stressed. We fear the consequences of what will happen if we don’t do it all, and so we become anxious. Others place enormous demands on us that we feel it is our responsibility to fulfill, and so we become pulled in ten directions at once but find ourselves falling short on every front. We then push harder and harder to try meet all of these demands. The sustained stress on our system eventually leads to some form of burnout. Our system simply can’t take anymore and we crash. The slightest thing seems like an insurmountable challenge to our fried system. As our capacity to do things declines, the list of our perceived failures grows as we are no longer able to do things that before we could. Our pride tells us we “should” be able to do these things and can’t admit that we are burned out. Our guilt beats us up for being so incapable and supposedly letting down everyone around us. Eventually, we start to fall into a depression about our reduced capacity, which lowers our capacity further in a vicious spiral. We then think we need to push ourselves to get out of our depression, but our burned out system can’t handle that, feeding our sense of hopelessness, failure, and guilt.
And what happens to others when we fail to accept our limitations? In the beginning, it creates a dependency of others on us. Because we have constructed ourselves as responsible for solving their problems, they think it is up to us to solve their problems for them. We don’t want to let them down and we want (need!) them to be happy, so we make all sorts of promises that we will do things for them. They then think their happiness depends on us doing these things for us. We have in effect disempowered them to assume responsibility for their own experience. Their dependency on us creates a terrible dilemma for us. If we solve their problems for them or do their work for them, then we feed their dependency. If we don’t do these things for them, then they will sink or fail, which is something we can’t tolerate or accept. But inevitably, we commit to more than we can actually do, leaving others feeling disappointed by us. We didn’t live up to our promises to them, and now they are suffering the consequences. Their disappointment then feeds our guilt, and perhaps they even manipulate us through our guilt to get us to do more for them. Since they think their happiness and well-being depends upon us doing things for them, when we fail to do so, they feel like their suffering is our fault, so they become resentful that we didn’t do what they think we should have. This resentment then poisons our relationship with the person we so dearly love. They think we are not doing enough, and we alternate between feeling guilty or resentful ourselves at their lack of gratitude for all that we did do for them.
Genuine acceptance of our limitations is the answer
What does it mean to accept our limitations? To accept something in a Dharma context does not mean to simply acknowledge something as a fact. We could acknowledge our limitations, and still be miserable about them. Likewise, it does not mean we don’t try do anything about them, thinking it is somehow a fault to grow beyond them. To accept something means to be at peace with it. We can humbly acknowledge the fact of our current limitations without falling into the extremes of either guilt or complacency. Our mind, quite simply, is not disturbed, but is rather energized. What enables us to accept anything is our ability to transform it into the spiritual path. A difficult situation, for example, gives us an opportunity to train in patience. A needy person give us an opportunity to train in giving, and so forth. Helping other’s through their suffering gives us an opportunity to train in skillful means. Accepting our limitations gives us an opportunity to train in bodhichitta.
Like with so many things, Yoda said it best when he told Luke, “Heeded my words not, did you? Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.” Seeing our limitations is our greatest teacher because it shows us what we must work on to take the next step on the spiritual path. We would want to do more, but we accept that we currently can’t. We don’t expect ourselves to already be able to be perfect and do everything perfectly. We don’t beat ourselves up for not already being better than we are or for having limitations. Rather, we use this awareness to encourage us to improve our wisdom, skills, and capacity so that we can eventually not be constrained in these ways. Superior intention is beyond compassion because it takes personal responsibility for freeing all beings from their suffering, but it is only humbly accepting our limitations that transforms our superior intention into a qualified bodhichitta. A failure to do so causes Dharma teachings to make us neurotic in all the ways explained above; but doing so is the last major step to becoming a bodhisattva. Then there is no contradiction whatsoever between complete humility and soaring spiritual aspiration. Accepting our limitations is the difference between developing a Jesus complex and becoming a qualified bodhisattva. It is the difference between the miserable path of self-flagellation and the Joyful Path of good fortune.
We can accept we can’t save others now because we know their present suffering is fuel for our eventual becoming of a Buddha for their sake. One day, we will lead them to freedom. We don’t need to pretend to be better than we are because that blocks spiritual growth and prevents us from being the best possible teacher for them. Long before Yoda said “we are what they grow beyond,” Kadam Morten said the best teacher is not the one who shows the example of being perfect, but rather the one who shows the example of happily improving. The best parent is the one who helps their kids learn from the parents’ failures. We don’t need to feel guilty about our limitations because they are normal. Dharma doesn’t tell us how we should already be, but rather explains the methods for how we can do better. While ultimately, our mind is the creator of all, the same is true for everybody else and the laws of karma are definite, so no matter how much we might wish others not suffer, fundamentally it is up to them to assume responsibility for their own future. We can’t do it for them. A genuine acceptance of our limitations is the answer to attachment to them not suffering, pride, guilt, and misplaced responsibility. In short, accepting our limitations helps protect us from pushing too far beyond them.
Learning to communicate effectively our current limitations to others likewise avoids dependency, disappointment, and resentment for others. If we are at peace with our own limitations, then we will be able to communicate them to others in a way where they are at peace with them too. And even if they are not at peace with them, we will be at peace with that, and so our mind will remain undisturbed. We can tell people, “I would want to help, but currently I can’t because of this limitation. But once this constraint is lifted, I can help.” Or we can say, “it doesn’t help you for me to solve your problems for you or to protect you from the consequences of your bad choices.” They may protest, but because we see it is best for them for us to not help, we will have the inner strength to compassionately say no. Being honest with others about our limitations also helps break down their attachment, pride, guilt, and misplaced responsibility, thus setting a helpful example. Because we are not over-promising, they are not left disappointed. Because we are empowering them to solve their own problems, there is no basis for resentment. And again, even if there is, it is a short-term problem until eventually they accept our role and their own responsibilities. And even if they don’t, we recognize that is not our responsibility, and all we can do is find within ourself how we are making the same mistake and stop doing so.
It is not easy to dedicate one’s life to helping others. Sometimes we may miss the old days when we could be selfish without guilt. But such nostalgia is a dead end. As Shantideva says, “the childish are concerned only for themselves, and the Buddhas work for others. Just look at the difference between them.” Once we see this difference, the final hurdle for transforming our compassion into a qualified bodhichitta is learning to accept our own limitations. I pray that all those who read this may one day be able to do so.
Helping Others Who Struggle with Addiction
We live in an age of addiction. Porn, vaping, alcohol, marijuana, Facebook, video games, our phones, hard drugs, not to mention opioids which kill more than 30,000 people every year. Addiction devastates lives, but on a much more widespread level, it saps regular people of confidence and deprives us of any ability to gain control over our lives. More fundamentally, at a spiritual level, we can say all of us are addicted to samsaric life, and it is only this addiction which keeps us bound up in its endless sufferings. Virtually all of us know personally somebody struggling with addiction. The question is, how can we help? To answer this, I will first explain how addiction works and then offer some things we can do to help.
How does Addiction Work?
If we don’t understand addiction, we won’t be able to help those struggling with it. The best way to understand addiction is to identify it within ourselves. Addiction is a mental sickness, like depression, PTSD, burnout, bipolar disorder, etc. Addiction is fundamentally nothing more than a self-destructive habit of mind enforced, often, by physiological discomfort. It arises from a toxic combination of the delusions of strong attachment, pride, and lack of self-worth. Delusions are distorted ways of seeing things that we nonetheless believe to be true. Addiction persists because of an inability to keep the promises we make to ourselves, which then reinforces our sense of being a failure and of hopelessness. Let’s try unpack this.
Strong attachment. From a Buddhist perspective, attachment is a mind which mistakenly believes some external object is a cause of our happiness. We believe the object of our addiction – pick your poison – has the power from its side to make us happy. Attachment exaggerates this power and induces in us a desire to partake. We are “desire realm beings,” which means we actually have no choice but to pursue whatever we desire. If we desire to indulge in our our object of attachment more than to not, we will do so. Addiction is a particularly strong form of attachment that has reached uncontrolled proportions – in other words, even if we want to stop, and often part of us does want to – we feel like we can’t.
Pride. Practically speaking, pride is an exaggerated sense of ourself. Pride makes us feel like we are better than our lot in life, and makes us feel like we deserve better than what we have; but then feels slighted that we don’t have it. This sets us up for wanting a high. Our pride tells us we won’t get addicted, that we are better than others who have gotten addicted and we will be able to keep it under control. Then our pride prevents us from admitting we are addicted, telling ourselves all sorts of rationalizations and that we could quit if we wanted to, we just don’t really want to. Then our pride prevents us from seeking help when we need it. We have told everyone we don’t have a problem, and we don’t want to admit to them that we need help – we think we can break our addiction on our own. Then our pride feels attacked when others are just trying to help us by staging an intervention. At some point, our loved ones step in to try help us, but we then feel they don’t get it (we know better…), or that they are unfairly attacking us and we get defensive, thus grasping even more tightly to the rationalizations we have been telling ourself.
Lack of self-worth. The underbelly of pride is insecurity. Deep down, part of us knows we are not as good as our pride makes us out to be. But our sense of self-worth is bound up in our inflated view of ourself, so when it gets threatened, we feel attacked. Part of us knows we are addicted and that we have a problem. Part of us wants to stop, and perhaps we have tried many times, but we don’t feel we are strong enough. Knowing we have a problem we can’t fix makes us feel like a loser, and this grows into a feeling of hopelessness, which in turn makes us say, “screw it, my life sucks anyways, I might as well have at least some happiness from my addiction,” causing us to give in despite our earlier promise to not. Our indulging then fails to give us the joy we were after, and then we feel like a total loser and we beat ourselves up about how bad we are, thus feeding our lack of self-worth in a vicious spiral. The end of this path is a death of despair, either metaphorically by giving up on our life and ambitions or physically through overdose or suicide.
Inability to keep promises to ourself. The great Buddhist master Shantideva said fundamentally our ability to become a better person depends upon keeping the promises we make to ourself. Moral discipline is not something imposed from the outside, but something chosen from our own side. We decide for ourselves what behavior we want, and then make promises or vows to act in certain ways. Keeping those promises is how we grow internally. But, he cautions, if we make promises to ourself that we then break, we will lose confidence in ourself and our ability to keep our promises, and then they will become internally meaningless to us. Someone once famously said, “it’s easy to quit smoking. I have done so at least a dozen times.” When people start to try quit, they realize just how addicted they are. When they quit, but subsequently “fall off the wagon” and give in to their addiction, they lose confidence in themselves and make breaking their promises to themselves a habit. This makes it even harder to successfully quit next time because we know when we make the promise to ourself, we are likely to break it. Eventually, we don’t even try anymore, knowing our addiction is stronger than us until it eventually takes over our life.
Enforced by discomfort. Virtually all addictions are enforced by some form of discomfort, either mental or physical. In Buddhist terms, we call this “changing suffering.” We say there are three types of suffering – manifest suffering, changing suffering, and pervasive suffering. Manifest suffering is actual pain, such as a broken leg, cancer, or mental grief, etc. Pervasive suffering is suffering that is the nature of the body and mind we have taken rebirth into. For example, an animal experiences animal suffering because it has taken rebirth in the body and mind of an animal. The same is true for humans, hungry ghosts, hell beings, and everyone else in samsara. Changing suffering is what we normally think of as happiness. Drinking a cool glass of water is a temporary reduction in our suffering of being thirsty. The relief of sitting is a temporary reduction of our suffering of standing for too long. Indulging in our object of addiction is a temporary reduction in our suffering of withdrawal. We think indulging brings us happiness, but in truth it is just temporarily reducing some other suffering in our life – be it loneliness, helplessness, dissatisfaction, or even physical withdrawal symptoms because our body has grown dependent. Our inability to patiently accept these sufferings and discomforts makes us chase after some form of relief.
How to Help Those we Love
Ultimately, we can’t help those who don’t want to be helped. We need to accept this, and know it is not our fault. There is a fundamental difference between compassion, wishing others were free from their suffering, and attachment to others not suffering, thinking our own happiness depends upon them making the right choices. Making this distinction is one of the hardest parts of helping others, but it is vital. Why? If we are attached to others making the right choices, then when they don’t, we fall with them, rendering us useless. Further, the other person senses that we have a selfish desire for them to quit, and so they don’t trust our intentions trying to help them. This causes them to reject our advice, even if it is exactly what they need to hear. When we are attached to them making the right choices, we will begin all sorts of manipulation tactics to get them to change, which will just cause them to resist us and grasp even more tightly onto their wrong views because nobody likes being manipulated and we all know when we are being manipulated. Ultimately, they need to make the right choices from their own side or it won’t stick. As long as our pressure is in place, they might make the right choice; but then as soon as our pressure is no longer present, they will let loose. That’s not sustainable. Us thinking it is our responsibility to get them to break their addiction actually serves to disempower them to take responsibility for themselves, thus denying them of agency and causing them to become dependent upon us to get better. Then, when they don’t, they will blame us, feeding our guilt and misplaced sense of responsibility. This will then create a vicious spiral of dysfunction between us and the person we are trying to help adding yet another obstacle to the person getting better. We need to accept we can’t control the choices they make. We need to accept that they will make wrong choices and suffer the consequences of those wrong choices. We need to accept that they might need to hit “rock bottom” before they decide to dig themselves out. We need to accept we are not responsible for the choices they make. We need to accept that we might not ourselves be capable of helping them navigate out of their addiction, and perhaps they need professional help. We also have to accept we can’t make them admit they have a problem or to want to get help. Accepting all of these things is a prerequisite for our ability to help them. It is also a prerequisite for our own sanity and emotional balance in dealing with the situation.
One of the first things we need to do is stop enabling their wrong choices. Sometimes we are so attached to preserving a relationship with the person that we don’t tell them what they need to hear, and so we go along with their addiction, pretending that nothing is wrong. This can especially happen in the context of parents with their children or between spouses. There is no contradiction between speaking hard truths and wanting a good relationship. In fact, a lasting relationship can only be built on a healthy foundation, and a failure to speak truth inevitably dooms the relationship anyways. It is because we love them and want the relationship to work that we can’t enable them any longer. Along the same lines, we need to draw a clear line in the sand that we will not accept them making us involuntarily complicit in their wrong choices. This takes many forms, such as us protecting them from the consequences of their wrong choices or them doing things we don’t approve of with our money or in our house, or them asking us to lie or cover for them, etc. We can tell them, “I can’t control what choices you make, but I can control whether I am complicit.” We are under no obligation to make their addiction easier for them.
At the same time, we need to make it clear we are always there for them if and when they need help. Because we understand addiction is a sickness, not a failure, we don’t judge them for their addiction any more than we judge somebody who gets cancer. We need to communicate clearly we stand ready to help with open arms anytime. But we need to often wait until they ask for help, because if they don’t want our help and we “offer it,” they will just push it away, creating even more obstacles. It is possible that they want our help, but are afraid to ask. At such times, we can try skillfully just be there for them and show we are open to listening. Sometimes, they just need somebody who will listen, and them talking helps them come to some conclusions within themselves. If they see we listen with an open heart and without judgment, they might ask us for help or advice. Then, we can offer it. If they storm off on their own to go make wrong choices, as they go out the door, tell them, “Just know, I’m always here for you if you need me.” It may take many years before they come back, but knowing we are there for them provides a constant reassurance, and when they are in the dark parts of their addiction, they will remember us.
When we do ask for our help, we should begin by addressing whatever it is they perceive to be the problem, not what we think is the deeper problem. Oftentimes, they won’t be seeking our help on the addiction directly, but likely the consequences of some wrong choice they have made. Help them ethically navigate through those consequences while making it clear that they own them, but use these times to also address the deeper issue of why they got themselves into trouble to begin with. Don’t focus on the act of indulging in their addiction, dig deeper into the why they are addicted in the first place and what habits of mind lead them down such roads. If we address the deeper issues without directly saying “stop using XYZ,” then we are helping address the root causes while still leaving it up to them to make the choice to quit or not.
On addressing the addiction itself, help them identify for themselves how addiction works per the above. Fundamentally, all delusions are by nature deceptive. They promise one thing, but deliver the opposite. As explained, we are desire realm beings so overcoming addiction is NOT an issue of “will power,” rather it is an issue of changing our desires. If in our heart, we still want the object of our addiction, we might be able to use will power to stop for a little while, but we will just be repressing our attachment until eventually it grows in strength and overwhelms our will power. That is not a sustainable solution. Instead, we need to change our desires. There are two levels to this: not wanting the object of our addiction and not wanting to be addicted to anything. Both levels are addressed by “seeing through the deception of our delusions.” If we receive an email from a Nigerian Prince who wants to transfer $10 million to our bank account for safe keeping if only we send him our account numbers, it is dangerous only if we believe the lie. If we know it is a scam, we will correctly recognize the email as spam, and it will have no power over us. We simply hit delete and move on with our day. We can’t control whether the email arrives in our inbox, but we can completely cut its power over us by realizing it is deceptive. In exactly the same way, our delusions are the spam of our mind. These deceptive thoughts of attachment, pride, lack of self-worth, etc., arise in our mind, but they only have power over us if we believe their lies. We need to help the other person realize how their delusions are deceiving them. Mostly, you should just ask them questions which make them check their own experience to realize they have been burned by these lies again and again in the past, and they will continue to be burned for as long as they believe them. If they see them as deceptive, the thoughts will lose their power. In particular, all delusions exaggerate, so helping the other person break down the exaggeration in their mind will also reduce the power.
Oftentimes, reframing the choice of use or don’t use is helpful. If we are bored and think it is no big deal, indulging in our object of addiction seems like a good idea. But if we see that doing so strengthens the habits in our mind that sends us down the road of addiction, saps our self-confidence, causes us to eventually lose everything we hold dear, and makes us a puppet of their desires then it is a different choice. This is especially true when they are trying to quit. Let’s say they successfully go 10 days, but then are struggling. The pain of withdrawal seems so much more miserable than the relief they can get by indulging again. At such times help them realize that if they indulge now, all of the pain and misery they have accepted for the last 10 days will have been for nothing, and next time they quit they will have to go through all of this misery again to get to the other side. Help them realize if they make promises to quit, but then give in, then their inner promises will start to be meaningless, and if that happens, change becomes almost impossible – at a minimum, they will have to first reestablish the credibility of their inner promises before they start to get traction, and that will definitely mean they will need to go longer than 10 days next time. Help them see how these same habits of giving up show up in other aspects of their life, but if they learn to overcome it here, they will receive great benefit on many dimensions of their life. If they are spiritual, help them see the longer-term consequences of their choices. Help them understand it is not a question of will power, but of changing desires, and help them generate a larger, stronger desire that says no than the impulse to say yes.
One of the most important things is to stress the importance of keeping the promises we make to ourselves. First, help them realize that they have to decide from their own side to stop, not because of some pressure we apply. It is up to them. But that when they make a promise to themselves, they should keep it, come hell or high water. If we keep our promises, we can rejoice and our self-confidence grows. If we break our promises, we lose self-confidence as described above, until eventually our promises become meaningless and change impossible. Help them realize it is better to make small promises that they know they can keep than large promises that they know they will break. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they say, “one day at a time.” We make a promise to ourself, “I will not drink today.” And then they keep it. And then they repeat that promise tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that, until eventually they are sustainably sober. Making promises is easy, keeping them is the practice. While we have made a promise, thoughts and impulses will arise encouraging us to break our promises. When these arise, we need to “see the deception” to cut their power. We need to remind ourselves of our wisdom desires to quit, knowing real freedom and confidence waits on the other side. We need to rejoice when we succeed in keeping our promise, and then make the promise again.
When those we love do fall off the wagon, help them not become plagued by guilt and beating themselves up. Instead, help them view it like learning to walk. You identify what mistakes you made, learn your lesson, then get back up and try again. If we want to quit, we can if we are willing to persevere and keep trying again and again until we eventually succeed. Sometimes people can succeed on the first try, for others, it may take years. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, we remain determined to one day win the war. One of the main reasons why we fall off the wagon is our inability to patiently accept the discomfort associated with withdrawal. What enables us to patiently accept our suffering is our ability to transform it into the path of personal growth. When we see working through our suffering helps us become a better person, then we have a valid reason to accept it. It is fuel for our spiritual development. Accepting this short term pain will result in long-term freedom, so it’s worth it.
Ultimately, from a Buddhist perspective, the world we inhabit and all the beings within it are nothing more than mere karmic appearances to mind, like a dream. If last night, we dreamt of somebody in a wheelchair, who put them there? Ultimately we did because they are part of our dream. In exactly the same way, if we are surrounded by appearances of people who are addicted, it is because our mind is dreaming them that way. They are a reflection of the addiction within our own mind. Venerable Tharchin once told me, “when you see faults in others, find them within yourself, and then purge them like bad blood. When you do, like magic, they will gradually disappear from those around you because ultimately they are projections of your own mind.” If we look at the world through an orange balloon, we might mistakenly think the world actually is orange. But when we remove the balloon, we then understand where the orange was coming from. In the same way, when we look at the world through the lens of our own addiction, we will see a world filled with addicts and think that they are actually there. When we remove the addiction from our own mind, then eventually people who are addicted will gradually disappear. This may take some time as the karma giving rise to these appearances gradually exhausts itself, but it will come. This may be hard for us to understand if we don’t have a lot of prior experience or understanding of the wisdom realizing emptiness, but fundamentally, as Geshe-la says, an impure mind experiences an impure world, and a pure mind experiences a pure world.
At a minimum, if we want to help others overcome their own addiction, we need to take the time to identify the addictions we ourselves have and overcome those within us. When we do, we will set a good example of somebody overcoming their addictions, and in the process we will gain the wisdom others need to be able to help them overcome their own addictions. Venerable Tharchin also says that when we gain wisdom realization, those who need that wisdom will begin to appear in our life so that we can share it with them. It is not a coincidence that the most effective addiction counselors were themselves once addicts. They know how addiction works, and they are sharing their experience with others who similarly suffer.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, never underestimate the power of prayer. Buddhas accomplish almost all of their virtuous deeds through the power of their prayer. We often lack the ability to resist our delusions on our own, but the blessings of holy beings can fill our mind with the compassion, strength, and wisdom we need. The effectiveness of our prayers for others depends upon the purity of our compassion for them free from attachment, the closeness of our karmic connection to them, the strength of our faith in the Buddhas, and the depth of our realization of emptiness understanding they are not separate from us. Prayer works if done for long enough. Don’t expect immediate results, just keep improving how qualified your prayers are and keep praying. Results may not even come in this lifetime, but as Buddhist, we have a long-term view. Eventually, we will become a Buddha, and eventually we will guide all those we love out of their suffering and to everlasting peace and happiness.
I pray that all those who read this are able to help those they love, and that all beings eventually become free from all addiction.
Faith is emptiness in action
In the old days, the Lamrim cycle started with faith and ended with emptiness, but with the New Meditation Handbook, Geshe-la put faith as the last meditation after emptiness. Most people assumed this was done primarily to make it easier for newer practitioners who find faith hard, but I actually think there was a much more profound meaning in this change. Namely, that faith is emptiness in action. Technically, the final meditation is Reliance upon the Spiritual Guide, but we accomplish that primarily through faith. All of the paths of tantra are, fundamentally, practices of reliance upon the Spiritual Guide on the foundation of realizing emptiness.
First some definitions. In Joyful Path of Good Fortune, Geshe-la explains, “Faith is a naturally virtuous mind that functions mainly to oppose the perception of faults in its observed object.” There are three types of faith: believing faith, admiring faith, and wishing faith. Believing faith is essentially believing an object to be true without knowing it directly ourselves. Admiring faith is admiring the good qualities of holy objects, such as the three jewels. Wishing faith is wishing to have those good qualities ourselves. Emptiness is the way things are, as opposed to the way they appear. Fundamentally, emptiness explains that despite things appearing to exist independently of the mind, in fact they are all nothing more than mere karmic appearances to mind, like a dream, with not even the slightest trace of anything existing from its own side – in other words, everything is created by mind. According to Sutra, we say emptiness appears as conventional objects; and according to Tantra we say the emptiness of the very subtle mind of great bliss appears as conventional objects.
On the basis of these definitions, how can we understand faith is emptiness in action? Believing faith is a correct belief in any object that is conducive to our spiritual development. A lot of people have great difficulty with faith because they still have doubts whether what they are believing in is actually true, and since they cannot be sure, they err on the side of not believing the object. But if we understand everything is empty – in other words, nothing is objectively true (by this I mean truth being established on the side of the object) – then there is no basis for this hesitation, since nothing is “actually” true in the sense we mean it. But if there is no objective truth, how then do we establish truth in the Dharma? Technically, we say things are conventionally true if they are known to be true by superior beings. Practically, though, because there is no objective truth we establish truth by examining what is most beneficial to believe. Venerable Tharchin and Gen Losang frequently have said, “what is true or not true is not the point, the question is what is most beneficial to believe.” If believing in a certain way is beneficial, then we can “choose” to believe it to be true because doing so is “conducive to our spiritual development.”
But the relationship between believing faith and emptiness is much deeper – what is in fact true IS what is most beneficial to believe because what is most beneficial to believe is consistent with how things truly are, namely empty. The implication is profound – it means not only can we confidently believe in things that are beneficial to believe, but the North Star for being able to discern what is true is examining what is most beneficial to believe. This protects us from falling into the extremes of nihilism or relativism thinking because nothing is objectively true then either nothing is true or everything is equally true if people believe it to be. Practically, this enables us to let go of our crippling doubts about whether our objects of faith are true or not and allows our mind to play with the dance of beneficial belief. It is enough for us to see the benefits of believing in a certain way, and then we choose to do so on that basis. This is why in our Dharma books every meditation begins with an explanation of the benefits of that particular meditation.
Admiring faith is the ability to see and appreciate the good qualities of the three jewels. Admiring faith makes us marvel at the wonders of virtuous objects, which naturally leads to wishing faith to acquire those good qualities ourselves. But the teachings on admiring faith and pure view can sometimes lead to a great deal of confusion for people, especially when they see “Sangha Jewels” engaging in inappropriate action or they hear their teachers giving “wrong teachings.” Many people wind up abandoning the path as a result, and many centers or their administrators will try deflect blame away from their mistakes by saying the people at the center don’t have sufficiently pure view. Are we supposed to just look the other way and pretend we didn’t see the inappropriate actions or hear the wrong teachings? No, that would be repression of our doubts and the quick path to becoming cult-like in our relation to the Dharma. Are we then supposed to say what is incorrect is somehow correct because we are supposed to be maintaining pure view? No, because then we are believing things that are not beneficial to believe and we are following wrong understandings.
How does understanding the relationship between faith and emptiness enable us to escape these problems? The functional definition of delusion is our mind projects something mistaken onto an object, and then we mistakenly believe that projection to actually be true from the side of the object. The wisdom realizing emptiness completely undermines the premise of all delusions by showing nothing exists on the side of the object, it’s all just projection of our mind. So if we see fault in a holy object, the fault is necessarily coming from our own mind and not the holy object. Admiring faith uses the wisdom realizing emptiness to differentiate the perception of fault in the holy object from the holy object itself, which is without faults. The more we differentiate the two, the more we can appreciate the good qualities of the holy object and not be obstructed by the perception of some fault inherent in the holy object despite it appearing vividly to our mind. In short, we are able to say, “the fault I am perceiving is coming from my mind and not the holy object itself.” In other words, the faulty thing I am seeing is not the holy object, but my misunderstanding of it. To actually “find” the holy object, I need to find a way to see it without fault.
Sometimes when we hear a Dharma teaching, our understanding of its meaning leaves our mind feeling disturbed. This is a perfect sign we have misunderstood the teaching because all Dharma, if understood correctly, functions to make our mind peaceful and happy. So we can correctly say to ourselves, “I must be misunderstanding what is being said because this is making me disturbed,” and then we ask questions until we can understand the subject in a way that leaves our mind peaceful and happy. When somebody in the Sangha does something inappropriate, we can do the same thing. Obviously we don’t say what is inappropriate is somehow appropriate, but we can ask ourselves, “what is this inappropriate behavior teaching me?” Since it is teaching us what is appropriate, we are receiving a perfectly beneficial teaching from the appearance of the inappropriate behavior. This enables us to call out wrong behavior for what it is without it undermining our faith. Then, no matter what scandal befalls what teacher, our faith and conviction in the Dharma just grows stronger and stronger.
But there is a deeper level still to the relationship between admiring faith and emptiness. Sangha, by definition, is somebody who shows us a good example and inspires us to follow the path. So what do we do when they show a bad example? Emptiness is the answer – when they are showing a bad example, they are no longer “Sangha.” The label Sangha can only validly be imputed onto somebody showing a good example. When they are not showing a good example, they are no longer “Sangha.” Nobody is inherently Sangha, and there is no Sangha that exists from its own side. It is perfectly possible for the same person to sometimes show a good example, at which point they are Sangha; and at other times show a bad example, at which point they are not Sangha. Just as somebody can be a temporary emanation, so too somebody can temporarily be Sangha. In a similar way, when we hear faulty Dharma teachings, even from the throne, it can sometimes lead to great confusion. Should we believe the wrong thing to be correct? Or if we see the mistake, do we lose faith in the teacher as no longer being reliable because they made a mistake in their teaching? Of course not. We can either say, “the wrong thing they just said reminds me of the correct thing,” thus enabling us to receive perfectly reliable understandings even though what is being said is incorrect; or we can say, this wrong thing is not ‘Dharma,’ so I don’t have to take it on board and instead I should listen to and focus on what is Dharma in the other things they are saying. Temporary Dharma teachings. Emptiness enables us to differentiate what is to be relied upon and what is not, thus freeing us from grasping at inherently existent three jewels that somehow need to appear to be perfect from their own side. With emptiness, we understand the three jewels become perfect when we view them in a perfect way.
What is the relationship between wishing faith and emptiness? Wishing faith is wishing to acquire ourselves the good qualities our admiring faith appreciated. Wishing faith then induces effort, and effort leads to attainments. But, if we grasp at ourselves and our faults as being inherently existent and unchangeable, then we develop doubts about our ability to actually change, acquire these good qualities, and become a Buddha. Our grasping at ourself as being ordinary keeps us ordinary. When we realize the emptiness of ourself, we realize we become infinitely (and effortlessly) changeable. Ignorance grasping at ourself is like friction on the spiritual path, letting go of that ignorance creates a frictionless progression along the path.
But again, it goes much deeper. All of Generation Stage and Completion Stage of highest yoga tantra is essentially a giant exercise in the relationship between faith and emptiness. Fundamentally, Tantra is quite simple: we change the basis of imputation of our I from our ordinary samsaric aggregates to the completely pure aggregates of the Guru Deity. We mentally generate these pure aggregates, and then identify with them as ourselves. Our faith in our Spiritual Guide makes the aggregates imputedly “pure” and our wisdom realizing emptiness enables us to identify with them without any residual of our ordinary self. It is said all we need to practice Tantra is faith and imagination. We imagine pure worlds, then believe in them as being true. Because they are correct beliefs, with familiarity of believing in our pure imaginations, they become our living reality. Often times people get hung up on self-generation meditations saying, “this is just fantasy land, I’m not really Heruka.” This completely misses the point and comes from a grasping at us actually being one thing or another. To escape this doubt we need to understand the relationship between karma and emptiness. Karma is mental action. We don’t believe we are Heruka because we actually already are, rather we engage in the mental action of believing we are Heruka because doing so creates the karma for us to later appear to ourself directly as being Heruka. Again, what is true or not true is not the point, what matters is what is beneficial to believe. The correct belief of divine pride is a mental action that creates a karma which will ripen in the future of ourselves being Heruka. So we can believe in it fully and without reservation, even though we know we are not yet Heruka.
Further, we are not saying that our ordinary aggregates are Heruka, that would be a wrong conception. Our ordinary aggregates are a valid basis for imputing our ordinary self, but not Heruka. So if in our generation stage meditation, it is our ordinary aggregates appearing, we don’t say they are Heruka, they are the cloud-like obstructions obscuring the mentally generated Heruka we are trying to identify with. We again use emptiness to differentiate the completely pure object we are seeking to identify with and the self that we normally see. As Geshe-la says, without faith we could practice Tantra for a thousand years and never experience any results; but with faith, Tantra becomes the quick path.
For me, Geshe-la moving Reliance upon the Spiritual Guide to the last meditation of the Lamrim cycle is a profound teaching on the critical relationship between emptiness and faith. On the basis of realizing emptiness, we set our faith free to dance.
Repression is our worst enemy
When I left Los Angeles more than 20 years ago, I had a meeting with my teacher Gen Lekma to ask her for some parting advice. She said, “train in the first of the three difficulties.” For those of you unfamiliar with this, Geshe Chekawa gives various precepts for training the mind, one of which is to train in the three difficulties. They are: identify your delusions; apply opponents to reduce them; and finally eliminate them with the antidote, the wisdom realizing emptiness. Identifying my delusions seemed like such a basic practice, and I fancied myself as an “advanced practitioner,” so I felt kind of let down by this and didn’t quite see its value. Now, so many years later, I’m beginning to realize how we can’t even really get started with our practice until we do this first step right. It is the foundation of everything, and something a lot of us really struggle with. I know I do.
What does this have to do with repression? In Buddhist terms, we define repression as “pretending we are not deluded.” We basically don’t admit, even to ourselves, that our mind is deluded. There are lots of reasons why we do this, which I will get to below. But when we do this, we shove the delusions we have underneath the carpet where they grow and metastasize, until one day they blow in some dramatic fashion. But even before they blow, they eat away at our happiness under the surface, and drag us down like carrying around lead weight. If we have repressed attachment, we will never feel satisfied and will feel we are always lacking something; if we have repressed anger, we will be easily irritable and always blame outside things for our general state. If we have repressed jealousy, we will tend to grumble with bitterness when others experience some good fortune. Life will generally be miserable.
More profoundly, if we do not admit to ourselves we have delusions in our mind, then no matter how much we seem to be practicing Dharma, we will actually make no progress whatsoever. We will externally appear to be “doing Dharma,” but our mind will remain as deluded as ever, even after decades of so-called “Dharma practice.” Our failure to accept and admit the existence of delusions in our mind robs us of our spiritual life just a thoroughly and completely as distractions do. Worse, we can easily fall into the trap of religious self-righteousness of using our spiritual teachings as a lens through which we judge everyone else’s failures, instead of as personal advice for how we ourselves need to change. Repression can frequently lead to burnout as we push ourselves too hard, or to depression as we never deal with what is happening in our own mind, or to anxiety of fearing everything, but not really knowing why. Repression allows the enemies of our delusions to roam freely in our mind hidden from view, undermining everything. It is like entering into battle blind-folded, and then being surprised when we keep getting hit by surprise.
Why do we repress? Why do we pretend that we are not deluded? There are many common traps, and I have fallen into all of them at different times. The biggest is pride. We have an inflated view of ourself, and our sense of self-confidence and self-worth is wrapped up in this inflated view. When this view gets challenged – and admitting we are sick with delusions definitely challenges the view of our awesomeness – we feel threatened and then seek to rationalize away our delusions, deflect blame onto others, and feel we are being unfairly attacked. A prideful mind necessarily represses. It takes a humble mind to admit our mind is sick.
Another major cause of repression is guilt. When we identify delusions in our mind, we view it somehow as a major failure, and we then start beating ourselves up over it. Often times if our parents or teachers would try make us feel bad or guilty about our mistakes in an effort to get us to do the right things, we then adopt the same approach with ourselves – beating ourselves up over our mistakes thinking doing so will somehow get us to change our behavior. But self-hatred is still hatred and a delusion. And being beaten up hurts, whether it is others doing it to us or us doing it to ourselves. Guilt fails to make the distinction between “my mind is sick with delusions” and “I am a bad person who deserves to be punished.” Since guilt hurts, it’s easier to repress.
Misunderstanding of Dharma can also frequently cause repression. For example, the Dharma explains we should forget about ourselves and put others first, so we think it is somehow a fault to focus on healing ourselves. We are so busy “helping others” overcome their delusions, that we never bother to look at our own. Likewise, when we are sincerely serving others and helping them deal with their own crises, we can sometimes simply not have time to think about ourselves while helping others. For example, there was a time when there was a lot of emotional drama in my family and I was trying to be there for everyone to help them navigate through their delusions, but I was getting down and frazzled and burned out. I then wrote a very good Sangha friend, asking for his advice on how to help my family, etc., and he said, “you seem to be understanding quite well what is going on in their minds, but you are neglecting the real issue of what is going on in your own mind as you help them.” By reframing things in this way, I began to see how I was making the same mistakes in my mind that I was seeing them make in their minds. With mind as creator of all, the cause of the problem became more clear.
Dharma also tells us we should “never accept delusions,” and so when delusions arise in our mind, we feel like we need to either deny they are there because we are such a “good Dharma practitioner” or we quickly try shove them back under the carpet without deconstructing their power. Kadam Morten once made a wonderfully helpful distinction. He said we need to “accept the existence of delusions in our mind without accepting their validity.” So we accept, “yes, delusions are arising in my mind; but I know they are wrong ways of thinking.” Just as we can admit there are clouds in the sky, but realize they are not the sky; so too we can admit the clouds of delusions in our mind, but realize they are not our mind itself. This enables us to not pretend we are not deluded, while not assenting to the wrong views of our delusions, thus cutting their power over us. What gives our delusions power is we believe them to be true. When they arise, but we know they are wrong, they are no more dangerous to us than a spam email we know to be a scam. It is annoying, but it has no power over us. No matter how violent the storm, the sky remains equally untouched.
Dharma teachers and advanced practitioners also can develop a very peculiar form of repression. They know that their ability to help others depends upon others having faith in them. We tell ourselves, if others knew just how deluded we are, then they wouldn’t have faith in us anymore, and then they would not receive benefit from us. So we need to pretend we are somehow more advanced or more holy than we are, and we put on this show of being such a great and advanced practitioner. Ridiculous!!! But it is actually quite sad because many very experienced teachers have fallen into this trap, and then eventually spiritually imploded in some way when their repressed delusions caught up with them. Because we are desire realm beings, we do what we want. If our desires are deluded but we hold onto the outer appearance of Dharma, our delusions will then hijack our Dharma understanding to rationalize getting what our delusions want. This most commonly manifests as sex scandals of teachers misusing the teachings on tantra to justify satisfying their sexual attachments, but it can also take the form of abuses of spiritual power such as our anger hijacking our Dharma understanding to try control and change others or our pride hijacking our Dharma to encourage others to venerate us.
Most cult-like behavior fundamentally comes from repression by teachers and senior leaders. Such cult-like behavior then undermines others faith in the tradition as a whole, thus harming the Dharma in this world. Because of repression, when others point out our mistakes as a tradition, we feel unfairly attacked, deflect blame, and make those we have harmed feel like it is their fault because they lack sufficient pure view. Cult-like behavior, and we all have traces of it, arises directly from repression. If we fail to admit the extent to which we are making these mistakes, we will continue to do so and thus undermine our fundamental wish to help spread the Dharma for the benefit of all. But it can also come from influential practitioners in a Dharma center. There are all sorts of manipulative tactics people in Dharma centers use to try get people to come back to the center or come to the teachings or go to festivals, or whatever. On the surface, it is because they know the value of the Dharma and want others to enjoy its healing power; but that pure motivation is easily mixed with an attachment to people coming to the center or others recognizing us for all the work we have done to spread the Dharma. We then start getting upset at everyone in the Sangha for not coming enough or not doing enough to help out, and quickly the harmony of a center is destroyed. Because we can’t admit we are the problem, we blame the students and those who come to the center. They sense that, and may do more in the short-run, but over time they will grow resentful themselves and say, “I’m out of here.” The center administrators might even feel relieved that the person leaves since they were just a trouble-maker anyways and that was secretly their desire that the person leave because they are a “cause of our unhappiness.”
Distractions are often called the thief of our spiritual life, and this is true. But I’m increasingly of the view that repression is the real thief of our spiritual life. Repression and Dharma practice are actually mutually exclusive. If we are pretending that we are not deluded, then our “practice” of Dharma just becomes another way of repressing our delusions by shoving them back under the carpet without actually addressing them. Distractions are, fundamentally, repressed attachments. Why does our mind keep going to our distractions? Because we still mistakenly think our happiness can be found by thinking about them. Why do we think that? Because we haven’t acknowledged our attachment and then used our wisdom to deconstruct it.
Gen Lekma was right. Train in the first of the three difficulties.
Kadampa Working Dad 