4. Practicing in Daily Life

Taking refuge in deceptive things

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

Let’s face it, life is hard!  All day, every day, we are confronted with problems and difficulties.  At home, at work, in the family, within our bodies, in the environment or in the world.  Yes, there are occasional moments of luck and good fortune, but for the most part we spend most of our life dealing with problems, and it wears us down.  This is definitely true with parents of small children.  It is very hard work taking care of kids, especially little ones.  It is definitely much harder and more demanding to take care of kids than it is to work in some office.  And in most families nowadays, both parents work and take care of their kids.  So both parents essentially have two full-time jobs.  From the early morning hours of getting everybody ready for the day until when the kids finally go to bed, it is non-stop work.  And even after the kids go to bed, you then need to deal with paying bills, chores around the house, and that mountain of administrative paperwork required in modern life.  Usually by the end of the day, the only thing we can do is collapse!  This is the reality, and indeed the very nature of, modern family life.  With such demanding days, people quite naturally need some means for decompressing and for taking a break.  We also feel that for all of this hard work we do, all the struggle, we need to have something ‘good’ in life that makes us happy.  We feel like if we don’t have some means of relaxing we will literally go insane.  It is true, we need a break, and it is true, we need to have something good.  But how we take that break and what good thing we turn to is the central question.  In a future article, I will discuss home healthy ways of relaxing, but first I want to discuss some of the unhealthy ways we do.

Modern life is full of options for how we can entertain ourselves and “treat ourselves” to something “good.”  The problem is we usually seek refuge from life’s challenges in the wrong things and with the wrong mental attitude.  We, generally speaking, seek refuge in things that promise to give us happiness but in reality harm us.  Normally, we say something is “deceptive” if it promises one thing, but delivers the exact opposite.

There are some things which are just “the wrong things” to take refuge in.  These days, for most people, the three “wrong things” which give us the most trouble are taking intoxicants, being obsessed with sex and entertaining ourselves with violence.  I think we can also add to this list lying and gratifying our sense powers, such as with “luxury” goods and services.  What follows is an explanation how each of these things is “deceptive”.  If we no longer believe the hype, we will no longer be fooled into taking refuge in these things.  In fact, the more we see clearly their deceptive nature, the more we hear or think of the lies the more we will become disgusted at how deceptive these things really are!

We will now try identify how and why these objects are deceptive.  When we see their lie, we cut their power over us and from there we can break free of their influence.

  1. Taking intoxicants.  Here, the ones that give us the most difficulty are alcohol, cigarettes and soft drugs like marijuana or ecstacy.  Alcohol promises to help us relax and let go of our inhibitions (so we can have fun), cigarettes promise to make us look cool and give us a buzz (they also promise ‘a break’ from our normal work), and soft drugs promise a funky experience.  The reality, though, is alcohol makes us do stupid things, cigarettes are slow-motion suicide/cancer sticks, marijuana attacks our mental factor intention where the only thing we want to do is more marijuana at the expense of everything else, and ecstacy gives us an intense surge of pleasure the result of which is for the rest of our lives everything else seems bland and boring (so for one moment of pleasure we get a lifetime of ‘blah’ experience of everything else).
  2. Being obsessed with sex.  There is nothing wrong with sex per se, but let’s be honest, as a society we are obsessed with sex.  Hollywood and Madison Avenue know that nothing sells better than sex.  Have a can opener to sell?  Have a hot babe hold it, and it will sell!  Young men (and old) feast on endless sexual images, warping their views to the point where women cease to be conceived of as anything other than a sex object.  Porn used to be back alley and brown paper bag, now it is mainstream.  Our society is so sexualized, that young girls today voluntarily transform themselves into sex objects as a means of fitting in and living up to society’s expectations, thus robbing themselves of any sense of self-worth beyond their sexual attraction.  How much money do we spend on dates and exotic vacations just so we can get laid?!?  How many relationships have been destroyed by infidelity?  Obsession with sex makes us crazy, where we are willing to risk everything for it, our reputation, our position, our family, and sadly our spiritual life.  Think about Bill Clinton, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Wiener, some Catholic Priests, and many a spiritual leader – all brought down by obsession with sex.
  3. Entertaining ourselves with violence.  Few of us ever commit violence ourselves (except against insects, which we don’t give a second thought to…), but most people in modern society rejoice in it and are entertained by it all the time.  From the Gladiators of ancient Rome to action “heros” of Hollywood, violence has always been one of our favorite forms of entertainment.  Here’s the problem:  from a karmic perspective, there is little to no difference between engaging in violence ourselves and rejoicing in it being committed.  We essentially create the same karma from rejoicing in violence as committing it ourselves.  If you really take this in, this is a very scary thought.  Video games that glorify violence or enable kids to enact it leave powerful impressions on the mind about how to solve problems while also giving them a similitude of the karma of actually committing such violence themselves.
  4. Lying.  This seems a strange one to add to the list, but it is actually quite common.  Because life is so hard, we are very often willing to lie to make our life easier.  In this sense, it too is an attempt by us to relax or escape life’s challenges.  From early childhood on, we lie to avoid getting in trouble.  We lie to our partners, we lie to our bosses, we lie on our taxes, we lie to ourselves.  Lying and cheating (and stealing) usually go hand in hand (in hand).  We may even “get away with” our lies externally, but karmically we never do.  When we lie, we not only create the causes for others to deceive us in the future (thus guaranteeing we will always be led astray in the future), we also create the causes for nobody to ever believe us (thus robbing us of our ability to ever help others in the future when we are well intended).  It only takes one lie to destroy somebody’s trust in us forever.  Lying also destroys our self-confidence like a cancer.  Inside, we know we are a sham and do not feel like we are capable of anything ourselves.  Cheating and lying can become such a way of life that we will often put more effort into cheating than it would take to actually succeed.  When we lie we sacrifice our dignity and integrity, and when we lose these there is nothing holding us back from all other forms of negativity.
  5. Gratifying our sense powers.  For the very rich, this has always been common.  Surrounding ourselves with every luxury and indulging ourselves in every pleasure.  But lately, this has gone mainstream.  Luxury soaps, creams, towels, sheets and scents fill our malls.  “Spas” which promise to indulge our every sense pleasure have become quite common.  We spend obsence amounts of money for luxury cars, homes, vacations and entertainment systems.  The debt crises in both Europe and the U.S. have been fueled by consumers borrowing against their future to satisfy their desires for luxury today.  But no matter how much luxury we ever indulge ourselves in, there is always something more luxurious over the horizon.  We endlessly chase the end of the rainbow, but like ecstacy, the only result is more and more of the world becomes bland and boring for us.  Yesterday’s luxury become today’s banal.  From a karmic perspective, we burn up our merit like a blazing inferno.  In the future, we will have no karmic provisions left for the long road ahead.

Virtually all of society is organized around the pursuit of the five deceptive objects discussed before.  They are our modern gods, and we sacrifice everything for them.  But they are all deceptive.  The test of a reliable object of refuge is simple:  the more you have of it, the more protection and relief it gives you.  All of these things are the opposite.  In the beginning, it takes only a little of these things to give us great ‘pleasure’, later it takes more to get the same amount of pleasure, later still it takes even more to get less pleasure, penultimately it takes even more still just to feel normal, and finally it takes a tremendous amount to just not feel awful.

In an ultimate sense, of course, everything is empty.  All things are equally empty and so equally transformable, so why do we say certain objects or things are to be abandoned?  Let’s get real here!  Just because in theory something can be transformed doesn’t mean, at our current level of spiritual development, we ourselves can transform it!  More likely than not, we use the fact that in theory something can be transformed as a rationalization for indulging ourselves in something we know we shouldn’t do.  Doing so is to completely misuse spiritual teachings, and creates the cause to never meet pure spiritual instructions again in the future.  Without access to qualified spiritual instructions, how can we ever hope to attain real freedom for ourselves or be able to help our loved ones do the same?  The honest reality is this:  at the early stages of our spiritual training, we are not even remotely capable of transforming these objects and to even try is either self-deception or simply too dangerous.  At the later stages of our spiritual training, these things no longer tempt us at all so we have no interest in even turning to them in the first place (not to mention, how turning to them would set a bad example for others).  So I think we can safely say, if you feel tempted to turn to these things you are not yet able to transform them, so don’t lie to yourself and risk destroying your one shot at spiritual freedom.

The foundations of Buddhist moral discipline are the pratimoksha and refuge vows.  Quite simply, these say “don’t take refuge in the wrong things (pratimoksha vows) and do take refuge in the right things (refuge vows).”  The pratimoksha vows are to abandon killing (and by implication harming), stealing, lying, sexual misconduct and taking intoxicants.  It’s interesting how the list of the pratimoksha vows pretty much sums up the five things listed above…  Venerable Geshe-la explains in Modern Buddhism that the essential meaning of the refuge vows is to “make effort to receive Buddha’s blessings, to put the Dharma into practice and to receive help and inspiration from your spiritual friends.”  Moral discipline in a Buddhist context is not externally imposed, rather it is internally adopted.  It is an inner wisdom that protects us from going down roads we know are self-destructive and sends us along correct paths that lead us to where we really want to go.  We do not resent our moral discipline any more than we resent street signs pointing us in the direction we want to go.  But before we can adopt any form of moral discipline, we must take the time to examine and realize how we are taking refuge in deceptive things and instead we need to seek our respite in that which is indeed reliable.

Your turn:  What is a deceptive thing that you have taken refuge in.  Describe how and why it proved deceptive.

Do not waste a single moment of being a parent

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

There are many many people who ‘wanted to have a baby’, but didn’t necessarily ‘want to be a parent.’  There is actually a huge difference between the two, and it is this difference that usually determines one’s experience of being a parent.  For the former group, once the novelty of having a baby wears off and the work starts, being a parent is essentially a perpetual source of frustration.  As a parent, you essentially have to put ALL of your own wishes and desires on hold.  All of the things that you used to be able to do, such as travel the globe, go out dancing, intimacy, etc., all of these things come to screeching halt (or at least really slow down and become much harder).  Financially, having a child these days is an enormous expense and you will feel financially strapped basically for the next 25 years at least.  No sleep, no travel, no going out at night, etc.  So many wishes frustrated.  The parents then become generally resentful towards their kids because of all of their frustrated desires, and then it winds up where the general emotional state parents express towards their kids is one of frustration and annoyance.  The kid of course doesn’t understand at all what is going on, and doesn’t understand why their parents are so upset at them all the time when they are just trying to play.  So they conclude their parents are mean or don’t love them, so they start acting up and misbehaving.  This then reinforces the parent’s frustration and they enter into a vicious cycle.  Then the teenage years come…

When you think about it, we have very few opportunities as human beings to actually care for another person, I mean really care for them and assume personal responsibility for their welfare.  Normally, this is not even the slightest bit a problem for us because we normally think having to look after others is such a bother!

The way to break this cycle is for the parent to realize how incredibly lucky they are to have the opportunity to be a parent, and to really be able to care for another living being.  As we progress in our spiritual training towards becoming a Buddha, we will realize that caring for others is what gives our life meaning.  We will want more and more to have opportunities to care for others and we will realize how rare it is that somebody will even let us really help and care for them.  When you think about it, it is only with our kids and with our elderly parents that we have such opportunities.  These times of our life are incredibly precious from a spiritual point of view.  During such times, there is no space for selfishness, and we are pushed to our absolute limits in terms of giving our time and love to others.  Is it hard?  Yes, very hard.  But that is why we are growing in capacity.  Will their be times when our selfishness and frustrated desires will raise their ugly heads?  Yes, of course there will be.  But these are times where we can train in recalling how lucky we are to have such opportunities to care.

In Buddha’s teachings, it talks about having a precious human life.  The word precious here is not an automatic give away.  Our human life becomes ‘precious’ only if we use it to train in spiritual paths (Buddhist or otherwise).  If we only use our human life for the sake of this life and engage in actions not much different than those of an animal, then our life is an ordinary human life.  In the same way, our parenting only becomes precious if we use it as an opportunity to train in spritual paths.  If we have such an attitude, every moment is like a spiritual bonanza.  Otherwise, it is just an ordinary parental life, full of frustration mixed in with the occasional joy.

Our opportunity to be a parent really doesn’t last long. When our kids reach 8, they become largely self-sufficient.  After 12, they don’t want to have anything to do with us since they are in their early teen years.  Later, we just become an ATM.  When we cease to be the ATM, we become the object of blame for how hard their lives are.  Later they discover modern psychology, whose sole conclusion is our parents are to blame for all of our screwed-up-ness!  Then we are really the object of blame!  Then our kids have kids and don’t want us controlling what they are doing or looking over their shoulders, and their primary objective is to not make all of the mistakes that we made!  Then we become old and a burden on our family, and our kids then ‘have’ to take care of us.  We are grateful for their help, but are a bit miffed that they are so ungrateful as to be resentful about the fact that they are having to take care of us now when we did so much to take care of them when they were kids.  But then we recall (or perhaps we choose to forget) that we too were resentful about our wishes being frustrated when they were kids – it all has come full circle.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Instead, create a new cycle by embracing the opportunity to work 24/7 for the sake of others.  Be grateful for the opportunity to smash your selfishness and break the chains of your worldly desires.  Welcome the countless annoyances as opportunities to purify.  Understand that it is in dependence upon the love and virtue you create with your family that you will eventually become a fully enlightened being.  Our opportunity to be a parent can be spiritually very precious and it won’t last long, so we need to remind ourselves again and again to not waste a single moment of it!

Your turn:  Describe some selfless task in your life that you normally try to avoid.  How are you going to act differently towards that task now?

Dealing with in/laws and family members who think you are in a sect

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life, Cultivating healthy relationships with others

We live in a post-religious society, where in general people have little or no interest in spiritual matters.  Most of our families, likewise, have few spiritual inclinations, at most going to church on Christmas or Easter.  So when we start to develop interests in spiritual matters, it naturally raises a few suspicions or concerns.  Doubly so if we show interest in something non-traditional, like Buddhism.  When our family members see us becoming very interested, then their radar goes up and their immediate assumption is we have joined a sect.  This dynamic in particular comes out from our parents (who naturally assume we have no idea what we are doing) and from our in-laws (who fear for their loved one that is now linked with us).  Once they start becoming concerned, there is really no limit to how far they are sometimes willing to go to create obstacles for us in our practice.  They may resort to all sorts of blackmail, ultimatums, threats, insults and general mayhem.  I personally have experienced all of the above.

So the question is how should we deal with this?  I suggest the following as a multi-layered approach (if the first one fails, try the second; if the second fails, try the third, etc.):

  1. Appreciate how they are coming from a position of loving.  At the end of the day, their main concern is for our happiness.  They are not trying to create problems for us, they think they are protecting us.  When we assume they are being hostile and we respond defensively, then it feeds their narrative that we have been brainwashed, and then they redouble their determination to deter us from the wrong path we have taken.  If instead, we respond with understanding and appreciation for their concern, then we disarm the hostility and conflictual nature of the exchange and there is a chance we can have a healthy, rational discussion about the matter.
  2. Show them you yourself have already had all of the doubts and questions they raise, and then even show you have gone farther.  Explain to them how you too were skeptical at first, and how you too had many doubts and questions.  Show them that you are going in with your eyes open with a healthy skepticism.  Talk about all of the questions you yourself have asked and explain to them the satisfactory answers you have received as to why this is the real deal and not some sect.  When they see that you have already taken their objections into account and come up with reasonable answers to them, then they know that you are not being blinded.  It is important to even go further than they did in your doubts and concerns that you have addressed.  Show them that you have done even more due diligence than even they call for.  When they know that you have checked things out, their concern will be less.
  3. Completely and totally abandon trying to get them to appreciate Buddha’s teachings themselves.  Sometimes we fall into the mistake of thinking they need to appreciate the power of Buddha’s teachings for themselves, and then their resistance will go away.  But if we start to try to do that, they will feel us trying to ‘convert’ them and it will only feed their view that we have gone off the deep end.  Rather, you should take the approach of saying, “to each their own, you have your food, I have mine.”  You need to show total respect for their views, even if their views are completely hostile to you having your views (“it is your right to think like that”).  When you show respect for the diversity of beliefs people can adopt, and they show intolerance, then it becomes apparent to all who is being reasonable and who is not.
  4. Figure out what they want from you, and show with your actions (not your words) how the more you practice Dharma, the more they get what  they want from you.  For example, imagine your mother-in-law is creating trouble for you.  Why?  Because she is concerned about her daughter.  What does she want from you?  She wants you to be a good husband, who treats her daugher with respect and makes her daughter happy.  So use your practice to become a better and more loving husband.  While it may take time, you will become a better husband, your spouse will become happier, and your mother-in-law will come to see that actually your practice has made you better for her daughter, not worse, so she will come to accept it and even appreciate it.  But you should never say what you are doing because that ruins the whole thing.  Just let your actions speak for themselves.
  5. Patiently accept the obstacles that come your way.  Why are others creating obstacles to your practice?  Because you have created obstacles to others’ practice in the past and now it is coming back to haunt you.  You created the karma for this and you have not purified it, so now you must patiently accept it.  If you accept it as purification, then you will gradually purify this negative karma until eventually it exhausts itself.  If you start to retaliate and create obstacles for or fight with your family members, then the cycle starts all over again.  It may take years, even decades, even lifetimes before people come to accept, but if you sincerely accept the obstacles as purification, eventually the obstacles will pacify.  Two useful things you can do to help speed the process:  first, generate a specific bodhichitta motivation towards whoever is creating the biggest obstacles for you (I need to become a Buddha so I can help this person in the future).  If done sincerely in a qualified way free from any attachment, this will very quickly purify the negative karma you have with that person.  Second, make sincere requests to the Dharma Protector that he arrange whatever is best with respect to these obstacles – if they are harmful, may he pacify them; but if they are helpful, may he make them worse!  Then, whatever happens, accept that this is what has been emanated by the Dharma Protector as being what is best for your practice.
  6. If all else fails, don’t give into the blackmail, but don’t rub their faces in it either.  If your family members blackmail you saying ‘if you don’t quit, then I will … (insert emotional penalty)’, and then you give into that blackmail and do what they say, then you will remain forever trapped in their manipulations, you will lose your practice, and you will allow them to create the karma of successfully creating obstacles to the spiritual practice of another person.  This will then be bad for them in the future when they experience similar obstructions.  Yes, we are supposed to cherish others and fulfill their wishes, except when their wishes are wrong.  Assuming you have done your due diligence and you are on a qualified spiritual path, then their wish for you to abandon it is wrong.  To indulge them in that wish does not help them, it does not help you, and it does not help all the countless beings who you would otherwise help if you were to become a Buddha.  So you need to let them throw whatever emotional penalties they want at you, but you still keep going – you never abandon your practice.  Eventually, they will realize that no matter what they do, you will not give in and they will give up trying.  But you should also avoid the extreme of rubbing their face in it – “ha, ha, I am going to practice and you can’t stop me, na ni na ni na ni”.  Dharma practice is, above all, an internal thing.  We don’t need ostentatious external displays of our spiritual-ness!  Be skilfull so that they are not forced to confront it, but just quietly do your thing.  There are no rules with this, just be skilfull.

Your turn:  Describe some obstacles you have had with those close to you and how have you overcome them?

Dealing with temptation

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life

We all have things we are tempted by, whether it is cigarettes, alcohol, porn, drugs or even just wasting time watching too much TV or playing video games for hours on end.  It could be any number of other things.  The thought arises in our mind that it would be great to indulge ourselves in one of these things.  We think it would bring us happiness and there wouldn’t really be any negative reprecussions.  We think back to times when we did these things in the past and we romanticise how great it was, somehow forgetting the bad that came with it.  We think we can get away with it and nobody would ever know.  We try rationalize to ourselves why doing so is not all that bad.  We start to make plans for how we will do these things to test them out to see if they are workable and if we can find a way to do them that has minimal fallout or chances of getting caught, but that still enables us to get what we want.  Since we know we can’t and we shouldn’t, but we still want to, we experience a good deal of mental pain wrestling with this.  We feel pain at not being able to have what we want and we feel pain of the struggle within ourselves to not execute on our plans.  We think the way to eliminate the pain is to say ‘screw it’ and to go ahead and indulge ourselves.  We tell ourselves we will just do it once (or twice, or three times…) to get it out of our system, and then “that’s it”, afterwards we will be good (even though our past experience has taught us that giving in now just makes it that much harder to say no next time, so we keep giving in again and again).  Sometimes we will have unique circumstances where we can do these things with minimal external impact, and we tell ourselves “if I don’t do it now, the window of opportunity will close on me and then I won’t be able to do it again for a long time, if ever.”  It starts to become the only thing we can think about, and every time we have a spare mental moment we start thinking about this again.  If we are already a Dharma practitioner, when we go to sit down to meditate and our mind starts to become more quiet, it seems as if these calls become even louder (they don’t, we are just becoming more aware of the deep currents running underneath the surface).  We might even try rationalize things with the Dharma, such as by misusing the tantric teachings.  Even though there can be extraordinary risks of losing everything we hold dear, we think the risk is minimal and it will be OK.  Does any of this sound familiar to anybody?

Here’s the thing:  all of this is completely normal.  This is the normal struggle faced by anybody who has chosen to adopt some form of personal moral discipline.  Here’s the other thing:  there is a way we can turn this process to our great advantage!  But our ability to do so depends on one thing:  we have to have more faith in the law of karma than we do faith in our object of attachment.

One of the laws of karma says that the practice of moral discipline is the cause of higher rebirth.  In particular, there is a practice of moral discipline called the “moral discipline of restraint.” Basically it says we restrain ourselves from giving into our negative impulses.  Everytime we successfully practice the moral discipline of restraint, according to the law of karma, we create the cause for a higher rebirth.  In other words, with one moment of saying no (and yes, this means “depriving” ourselves of the “happiness” we think our object of attachment will give us), we create the causes for an entire lifetime in the upper realms.  Even at an ordinary level, we will have far more happiness in an entire lifetime in the upper realms than we will in that one moment of indulging ourselves.  So the choice is a little bit of enjoyment now or an entire lifetime of enjoyment in the future.  It is like a dollar today or a million dollars tomorrow?  The choice is not a hard one.

The reason we use to say ‘no’ is very important in determining the karmic consequences of our having said no.  If we say ‘no’ because a lifetime of enjoyment is better than a moment of enjoyment, then that is what we will get – an ordinary upper rebirth (still, not bad…).  But if the reason we say ‘no’ is a spiritual reason, the karmic consequences are far better.  If we say ‘no’ because we want to avoid falling into the lower realms, then we create the causes to have not just an ordinary upper rebirth, but a precious human life in which we will encounter instructions on karma and moral discipline and we will have an interest in practicing them.  If we say ‘no’ because we have made the decision that we are going to get out of samsara and indulging ourselves in this object of attachment takes us in the wrong direction (back in vs. getting out), then we not only create the causes for a precious human life where we can continue with our practice of moral discipline, but we also create the cause for a rebirth outside of samsara as a liberated being.  If we say ‘no’ because we have made the decision to transform ourselves into a Buddha so that we can liberate all countless living beings from samsara then it really starts to get good.  Not only do we create the causes for a rebirth as a Buddha, but we create countless such causes.  Engaging in moral discipline for countless living beings is karmically equivalent to engaging in moral discipline for one being countless times.

The point is this:  each time the temptation to break our moral discipline arises within our mind, it provides us with an opportunity to create the causes for up to countless precious human lives and even countless causes to become a Buddha!  If transformed in this way, each time temptation arises within our mind it is like we are winning the spiritual jackpot.  If temptation arises in our mind 20 times every five minutes, if we stay with our practice we just won 20 spiritual jackpots.  You can even go so far as to say without these temptations arising in our mind we would not be able to engage in this practice.  So instead of fearing and suffering from the internal struggle of moral discipline, like a seasoned warrior, you will relish the battle!

If we have more faith in the law of karma than we do faith in the ability of our objects of attachment to give us real happiness, then we will succeed in our practice of moral discipline because we will clearly know there is more to be gained from saying ‘no’ than by giving in.  How do we develop such faith?  You can read the chapter on Karma and the faults of attachment in Joyful Path of Good Fortune.  How do we improve the scope of our spiritual reasons for saying ‘no’?  You can engage in a daily practice of lamrim as explained in the New Meditation Handbook and once again in Joyful Path of Good Fortune. 

If the doubt arises, “if I only need one cause to be reborn as a Buddha, why do I need countless of them,” the answer is because we need to get that one seed to ripen at the time of our death.  If we have countless negative seeds and only one pure one, statistically speaking which one is more likely to ripen?  If we have the doubt, “saying no is just repression of/suppressing my negative impulses.  Won’t the desire to indulge just come back even stronger next time until eventually it overwelms me and I give in,” the answer is there is a difference between repression and a qualified practice of moral discipline.  Repression says “I want to indulge the negative impulse, but I shouldn’t”, whereas a qualified practice of moral discipline says, “I do not want to, because it is just not worth it.  I have much more to gain by saying no than I do by giving in.”  If we have a qualifed practice of moral discipline, the tendencies to indulge in negativity will grow weaker and weaker until eventually they have no hold over us at all.  It takes time and it is a long training, but it is doable and if we perservere we will get there in the end.

Your turn:  Describe a temptation that you have struggled with and how have you overcome it?

Reflections on emptiness

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life
Since all things are equally empty, it does not make any sense to be happy about one appearance but unhappy about another.  Every appearance is, from this perspective, equally neutral.  Instead, each appearance is what you make of it.  It is a form of laziness to just allow our opinions and experiences of different appearances to be that which naturally arises when we encounter them.  Our natural reactions are attachment and aversion, and if we assent to these reactions we will remain forever trapped within them and we will never know real freedom.  If instead we realize that all appearances are equally empty, then we are free to do with each of them what we wish.  We can equally use all appearances, and come to equally enjoy all appearances.  Then nothing will have the power to interfere with our freedom of perfect happiness.  In explaining this to kids, or to anybody else for that matter, it can be reduced down to a very simple phrase which can be repeated again and again:  “life is what you make of it.”  Every situation is “what you make of it.”  If kids and people can learn this fundamental lesson, then everything else will take care of itself. 

Reflections on skilful means

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life
My ability to help anyone first and foremost depends on my not needing them to be any different.  First I need to get rid of my own delusions about how they are before I will be able to help them change.  This need for them to be different will obstruct the wisdom I need to help them from coming through.  When I do try help them it will not be well received because theyw ill sense my attachment to changing them and they will reject/rebel against my advice.  
 
It is my own inner realizations of Dharma that functions like a force of gravity drawing people in so that I can help them and invite them into my pure land.  I need to create a sun of realizations within my mind to draw people into my orbit.  Even more so, I need to create a black hole of Dharma realizations within my mind, at the center of which is a wormhole to the pure land (Heruka’s heart).
 
I should not blind copy people on very private correspondance.  This causes them to not trust me and to not confide in me.  If they cannot confide in me, then I cannot help them.  People need to be able to trust in me, and when I do this it weakens that trust because they assume I will do it to them as well.  My intention in doing so is I want the other person to skillfully help or to learn how to deal with different situations so they become more helpful to others.  I guess it is a balance, but one that I should err on the side of not doing.  

Reflections on observations of other cultures

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life
(This was written when I was in Texas)

Texas is a place with high pride, low capacity people.  Need to channel pride into a confidence that if you work hard you can accomplishing anything combined with equanimious humilty accepting where you are at.  You can do what you can do, work hard to learn the rest.
 
American culture is based on individualism, so show how practicing Dharma is a natural conclusion of that.  Self-made Buddhas.
 
One of the reasons I am here in Texas is to help build within my mind the bridge between Kadampa Buddhism and the Christian world I inhabit.  To be able to express the meanings of Kadampa Buddhism in terms Christians can understand, and ultimately to show how the essential meaning of Christianity is Kadampa Buddhism.  If I do become a diplomat, and come to abide in different worlds (Islamic, Hindu, etc.), then I will have the opportunity to build similar bridges.  In this way, I will gain the realizations necessary to be able to transmit Kadampa teachings effectively to this whole world.  One of the biggest Western conceits is to grasp at their point of view as the universal one.  I need to break free from this uni-cultural straight jacket and do as VGL is doing, namely learning to transmit the essential meanings of Kadam Dharma through the different cultural logics of this whole world.  When we take the larger, more broad understanding of JTK in this world, we see he has many different bodies sent throughout the world bringing the essential meanings of Kadam Dharma and learning how to transmit them in different cultural contexts.  It is a limitation to require others to adopt my cultural logic before I can then explain to them the essential meanings of Kadam Dharma.  Rather, I need to come to understand their cultural logics, meet them where their minds are at, and then through these logics transmit the meanings of Kadam Dharma.  I am not talking about mixing here.  I am talking about remaining centered within the hub of the essential meanings of Kadam Dharma and from this hub being able to radiate out into the spokes of every religion and every culture this meaning in a way they can understand, appreciate and put into practice.  In this way, I can draw them in and deliver them to freedom.  This is what VGL is trying to do in this world, and it is amazing.  May I do the same.  

Reflections on overcoming fear of abandonment

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life
“Just because certain delusions are big within our mind does not necessarily make them complicated to understand or overcome.  We have a tendency to rationalize our failures to overcome certain delusions by over-complicating and over-dramatizing them.  In the end, the problem is not that our delusions are particular complicated or dramatic, it is just an issue of them being currently stronger than the opponents we have built up within our mind to oppose them.  We basically need to ‘bulk up’ our opponents through repeated exercise until eventually they are strong enough to overcome our delusions.  We need to be patient with this process.  It can take a long, long time for us to build up new sufficiently powerful virtuous mental habits to overcome our aeons-old deluded mental habits.  The Great Pyramids were built one stone at a time through back-breaking labor of thousands.  When it comes to building our own Great Pyramids of virtue within our mind, we work alone, and must place the bricks one at a time ourselves. The Buddhas can help give us strength, but we must do all of the work ourselves. 
 
While we are in this building process, we must accept that there will be times that our delusions will overwhelm us, arise within our mind and there will be nothing we can do to stop them.  We are simply not there yet.  We should not feel guilty or beat ourselves up when this happens, but we should also not fall into the other extreme of allowing this to happen unopposed or think that it doesn’t matter.  It does matter that delusions are running rampant in our mind, and this must eventually stop.  We lose many battles, but we use each defeat to strengthen our resolve that we must win the war.  If we never give up trying, eventual victory is assured.
 
As far as opposing the delusion itself, it primarily comes from two things.  First a very strong ignorance of grasping at an independent existence of our self.  If we realized that we are in reality an universal membrane of which each appearance is an inseparable aspect, then we experience first hand the impossibility of abandonment.  The fear of abandonment is the quite natural pain we feel arising from the false view of our separateness.  When the iron cage of our self-grasping melts away, we feel ourselves merge inseparable into an infinite ocean of everything from which we have, in reality, never been separate from.  It was only our ignorance that tricked us into thinking we were separate.  But we never have been.   We then rest comfortably in the knowledge that abandonment is an utter impossibility, a painful reflection in the distorted mirror of our self-grasping.
 
Second, it comes from plain vanilla attachment that, despite everything we know intellectually about the Dharma, still believes that our happiness depends upon ‘being with’ certain others.  We feel their presence provides us with some security against being alone.  We do not need anything from others, we need to do things for others.  When we  are becoming attached to somebody, especially as a Dharma practitioner, we tell ourselves all sorts of lies that we are not becoming attached, somehow everything is pure this time, etc.  In the beginning that may be true, but when we start to get those good feelings coming from being close to somebody, we start to grasp at them, consider them to be valuable, and mistakenly believe that they are coming from our relationship with the other person.  Since these feelings are good, and they are temporarily relieving the pain of our insecurity (coming from our grasping above), we then start to fear losing the other person, and with them our good feelings.  As soon as we assent to this mistaken view, we are doomed.  This is the pivotal turning point in the process.  If this lie arises in our mind, but we recognize it as wrong and deceptive, it will have no power over us.  But if we are not mindful and allow it to arise and we unconsciously assent to it, then it will sneak in and come to possess our mind.  The sad reality is when this happens, it is this very view that will 100% guarranteed destroy the very relationship we are so desperate to protect.  We then become high maintenance and needy, and nobody likes that.  It becomes annoying and a pain to be around us, and eventually people will leave us.  When we are in such a state, it really doesn’t matter what others say or do, nothing will convince us or prove to us that they love us, and the more we insist on such proof, the more annoying we become and the more quickly we bring about the very thing we fear – them leaving us.  
 
 
How do we convince ourselves that they love us.  Some would say it comes down to just choosing to trust them.  Certainly that is better than trying to have them prove it.  But the best solution is to give up even trying to convince ourselves by realizing it does not matter at all what they feel.  They do not need to love us, we just need to love them.  Full stop. 

The importance of receiving teachings

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life, 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden

Another fundamental thing I was reminded of at this Summer Festival is the importance of receiving teachings.  Unfortunately, due to the absolutely crazy karma that I have had over the last several years, about January 2010 I stopped doing my correspondence FP classes.  I have consistently been on FP or TTP since 1995, so this marked a major milestone on my spiritual path.  If I check honestly, I stopped for two reasons – one valid, one not valid.  The valid reason for stopping was given all that I had going on, I simply couldn’t keep up with it, even at a very slow pace.  Sometimes this may happen in life, but if we are lucky it will only be for very small patches of time.  The not so valid reason is since I felt like I could successfully transform my every day into a teaching through my “faithful mind of a student” (to the extent that I had one), I didn’t feel like I needed it any more.

The problem with this second reason is it is very short-sighted.  The only reason why I didn’t feel like I needed it was because I was riding high on the mountain of merit and blessings I had accumulated and received from the previous 15 years of intensive study.  But how did I get that merit and those blessings in the first place?  By receiving teachings and putting into practice what I was learning.  Eventually this merit will exhaust itself and the blessings will dissipate and then I will fall back.

Additionally, when you are not receiving new teachings, you are not being exposed to new ideas and points of view on the Dharma.  What happens then is new experiences bounce around the structure of Dharma you have already built within your mind, revealing new things about the interactions of what you know, but it doesn’t take you beyond your narrow understanding of the ocean of Dharma that has been revealed to us by our Spiritual Guide.  When we are exposed to new ideas and points of view on the Dharma, the structure of Dharma within our mind not only deepens it broadens.  So without new teachings, it is very easy to stagnate on the path.

Further, in general new understandings of the Dharma only arise in our mind in dependence upon oral transmission blessings. The importance of these is often under estimated.  We think, yeah, they are important, but they are not that big of a deal.  This view is not correct.  We can understand why by considering the emptiness of receiving Dharma teachings.  The Dharma is transmitted mind to mind, like a Vulcan mind meld, almost.  Literally, at a profound level, what is happening when we receive teachings is the teacher is transferring/transmitting their own personal experience of the Dharma into the minds of the students.  Conventionally this happens through “listening”.  The mental realizations of the teacher take on a grosser form of speech.  When the student “listens” to the teachings (as opposed to merely hearing them), the realization then gets transferred into the student’s mind.  The more faith the student has, the more fully and deeply they “listen”.  When we don’t listen to Dharma teachings, we don’t receive these oral transmission blessings, and as such we are largely on our own without a teacher.  We might think that if we have a faithful mind of a student we can receive teachings directly from our guru through our daily lives.  This is true, we can do this.  But surely the teachings of our Spiritual Guide pass through “the sound of Dharma” more fully than they do through other sounds (due to their nature being pure).  So receiving teachings through our daily life is good, but it is no substitute for receiving traditional teachings.

And this points to an important relationship.  One one hand, we have the extreme of thinking that we can only receive teachings through attending traditional teachings.  This view arises from a limited understanding of how the guru can reveal the Dharma to us.  On the other hand, you have the extreme of thinking you don’t need any traditional teachings at all.  This view falsely derives from the observation that it is possible to receive teachings through everything, therefore thinking that because that is the case I no longer need teachings.  But just as the sound of Dharma carries more Dharma than non-Dharma sounds, so too the entire experience of attending teachings teaches more Dharma than our non-teaching experiences.  The middle way between these two extremes is to attend as many traditional teachings as your karma allows while maintaining the faithful mind of a student in all of our daily activities so as to receive teachings through everything.

In my personal case, this means attending as many of the major festivals as my karma allows and starting up again my FP studies.  I was fortunately able to make it to this Summer Festival.  I can’t do the Summer Festival next year because I will be back in Washington on a mandatory training.  But, since I will be in DC next Fall, I should be able to take maybe 2-3 days to attend the Fall Festival in Portugal where Venerable Geshe-la will be granting the Prajnaparamita empowerment and giving an “oral transmission” of the his new book, “The New Heart of Wisdom.”  So I should really do everything I can to try attend, especially since this very well might be the last teaching Venerable Geshe-la gives before he passes on.  This is a must.  As far as my FP studies are concerned, what I can do is substitute one day of my normal daily practice with listening to a teaching by correspondence.  This I should normally be able to do.  I can also use this time I have this Summer when the family is in the U.S. to listen to as many teachings as I can.  I feel very fortunate in that I am able to receive teachings from Venerable Tharchin, arguably the most experienced meditater in the tradition.  For those who don’t know him, he teaches the entire tradition how to do retreat.

The point is this:  each one of us has our own karmic circumstance.  All of us, however, can follow the same principle – namely we receive as much traditional teachings our karma allows while viewing the rest of our experiences as teachings being revealed to us through our daily lives.  This, to me, seems to be the middle way.

Reflections on overcoming laziness

Kadampa Ryan 4. Practicing in Daily Life
Non-activity is a bottomless pit.  The less you do in order to ‘relax’, the less you want to do, the more tired you become.  Then you do even less, which causes the whole cycle to start over again.  The final destination of this is doing nothing.  This is the cycle of laziness.  It is good that our lives are so demanding because it keeps us on our toes and engaged.  It leaves no space for laziness to take over.  
 
Two good sayings that came to me today:
 
1.  Don’t leave for others things what can be done by you.  (similar to why put off until tomorrow what you can do today.)
 
2.  Every day, make the decision to become a better person.
 
The ocean of omniscient wisdom is created drop by drop.  I need to be content to add little drops of wisdom every day.  Little by little, these drops grow and gradually fill the ocean.  Sometimes they come together for something earth-shattering, but usually wisdom arises from the gradual cummulation of little insights over the course of a lifetime.  I gain these insights by applying effort to use the Dharma to solve my daily problems, or to learn the Dharma that my life reveals.