When we do retreat or intensive periods of practice, we will often have very deep and profound realizations that are sometimes earth-shattering.  This is, of course, a wonderful thing.  But sometimes what can happen after we have had such experiences is we can grow bored or dissatisfied when progress is being made little by little with small increases in our understanding.  It is kind of like the trap of taking your kids to Disneyland – once they have been there, then the old smaller parks you used to go to no longer seem as great.  This is a mistake because the reality of our spiritual path is cummulatively speaking we make far more progress with the drop by drop than we do with the occasional spiritual breakthrough.  So we should learn to appreciate and highly value these mini-realizations as the bread and butter of the spiritual path.  This is why I periodically publish posts that contain a list of some small insights.

So here we go:

1. If you knew you were going to die very soon, would you spend your day in the same way?  I think if we realized death, we would.  We normally assume this means we would quit everything and go into retreat, but I am not so sure that this is what it would imply.
2. We should get in the habit of always bringing our “A-game” to whatever we do.  As my grandma always said, “a job worth doing is a job worth doing right.”  While simultaneously making this our habit, we should strive to always do more and more meaningful things.  If we adopt these two life habits, how can we not make swift progress along the path?
3. I sometimes make the big mistake of thinking that I will not eventually have to pay for my negative actions.  We cannot escape our karma.  We know what we have done wrong.  If we don’t purify, it is just a question of time before we will have to face the music.   The fact that the negative consequences are not ripening now does not mean “we got away with it.”
4. Life is full of very hard trade-offs.  I am working harder now than I ever have in my life, both at work and at home.  I am really pushing things to the limit, and if I don’t take the time to rest and relax and do nothing (which yes, often times me vegging for about an hour in front of the TV every night) I run the risk of burning out and then being less effective at everything I do.  But this comes at a cost – I could be spending more quality time with my kids.  Sometimes they feel I push them away when I am having my veg time.  It is difficult for me to watch TV with them because they ask all sorts of questions and their goal is not to watch the show, but to hang out with me – which is then more work for me and then I can’t veg.  Difficult to balance these two.  I think I need to take the time to explain to them why I need my veg time and make it up by blocking some real quality time in other contexts.
5. I think the biggest enemy of my spiritual practice is distraction.  I have very little time for formal practice, but I do make a point of doing about an hour every day.  But very often what happens is my mind is so busy that when I do find time to sit down and do my practice, I quickly get distracted and start thinking about other things going on in my life.  The more deeply and single-pointedly we mix our mind with virtue, the more healing effect we will enjoy in terms of it making our mind peaceful and clear.  It is because I am so busy that I simply can’t afford to not set aside my distractions.  It is hard not because I want to think about these other things, but just I have so much mental habit and intertia of doing so, I am easily swept away by my distractions.

Your turn:  What are some small insights that you are working with now?

Before I found the Dharma, I believed others were the source of my problems, thus to solve my problems I felt like I needed to change others around me.  I especially did with my partner and family.  After I found the Dharma, I believed it was my spiritual duty to lead each and every being to enlightenment, so I still felt like I needed to change others.  Very often, if I am honest, my real motivation for wanting to change others continues to be my core believe that they are the source of my problems, but I fool myself into thinking my wanting to change others now is motivated by great compassion and bodhichitta.

Another reason why I seek to change others is doubt and insecurity about my own views.  Perhaps I am doing something wrong but don’t want to admit it to myself, so I will try try get others to share my view so that they don’t force me to confront that I am doing something wrong.  Or perhaps I am not sure if I am right, and so if I can convince others of my view then if enough people view things the same way I do it will help reassure me that I am right.  Of course this is a flawed reasoning, since a majority of people believing something doesn’t make it right.  Everyone believes in an inherently existent world, but that doesn’t make the view correct!

Trying to change others is, from a pragmatic point of view, self-defeating.  People are not stupid, and they know when we are trying to change them motivated by our own attachments and aversions, and so they naturally resist the change we are trying to bring about in them.  So instead of helping them change, our trying to change them actually just causes them to cling more tightly to how they are.  If we try change others through overwhelming them with force, we may bring about the external appearance of them changing, but internally they just harbor resentment towards us and the change we want, and as soon as our threat of force subsides, they will revert back to how they were.  Trying to change people in this way also creates the causes for others to try change us in this way in the future, so we just set ourselves up for being manipulated and controlled in the future.

I am gradually learning that the best way to get people to change for the better is to leave them completely free to change themselves.  We just focus on changing ourselves – honestly identifying our faults and applying effort to overcome them.  We can seek to change ourselves to gain the realizations necessary to help others who seek to change themselves, but we must wait for them to come to us asking for advice and help.  Offering unsolicited and unwanted advice rarely, if ever, works unless the person already has a lot of faith in us.  Generally speaking, we try to change others because we see faults in them, so when we see faults in others we make them defensive, they feel judged by us, and then they seek to internally justify why we are wrong.  So trying to change others actually causes them to lose faith in us, not increase it.

Even though intellectually I know I should just focus on changing myself and how trying to change others is counter-productive, what I now often times find myself doing is talking indirectly where it is not immediately obvious from a literal and direct reading of my words that I am directing them against somebody, but anybody with knowledge of the context knows who and what I am talking about.  So externally, I maintain plausible deniability, but internally I am really saying somebody else is wrong and I am trying to change them by trying to be all skilful by talking indirectly.  This rarely fools anybody, and just results in them talking indirectly back.

It is a very fine mental balance to write a blog and not have it be trying to change others.  I see faults in others and in my tradition, and my motivation is often a mix of wanting to genuinely cherish others by helping them do better and good old fashioned attachment or aversion.  I could fall into the extreme of not doing a blog at all until my motivation is completely pure, but how will I ever be able to do things perfectly unless I do things imperfectly and learn from my mistakes?  So while I know I am doing things imperfectly, I try nonetheless to do better each day.

I think the middle way between trying to change others and doing nothing for others is to do our best to change ourselves with the intention of gaining the realizations necessary to help others who seek to change themselves.  We then share what we are learning and hope others find it helpful in their own demarche.  If they don’t, then we keep trying, and at a minimum our sharing helps us clarify our own understanding by forcing us to express it in words.  This is how Shantideva began his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.  I always read it as a false humility, but actually, like everything else in his Guide, it is profound advice and an immaculate sincere example.

Your turn:  Describe some (funny?) failure you have had trying to change others?  What did you learn from the experience?  

Kadam Bjorn once said there is not a single Dharma mind is narrow or closed, they are all open and vast.  Most of our daily problems and wrong attitudes come because we are too tight, too narrow, too closed in our thinking and outlook.  I have had several experiences over the last 24 hours, all of which have pointed to the same conclusion:  “always take the broader view.”

First, yesterday I attended a conference by a group of young Muslim activists here in Belgium.  They are putting together an umbrella organization of all of the different Muslim associations that target empowerment of the Muslim community, whether it be for the young, for women or for entrepreneurs.  We brought in some really high-calibre American Muslim activists to exchange experiences, etc.  What really impressed me was how each time they took the high road.  One of them was a woman who founded a chic Elle-style magazine for Muslim women.  The goal of the magazine is to help break the stereotypes and show there is no contradiction between being a fully empowered woman and being a Muslim.  She said something that really struck me, she said, “Excellence is the best defense against discrimination.”  She encouraged them to strive for excellence in everything they do and in doing so, all wrong stereotypes will fall away with time and by force of the example.

Later in the day, I was debating with somebody about the Eurozone crisis, and they were looking at it purely from the German national view, and from that view, everything the Germans are saying makes some sense.  But when looked at from the broader European and macroeconomic view, their conclusions no longer make sense.  Then later I was thinking about those who work on issues related to international organizations.  At that level, you are thinking about things from the perspective of the planet as a whole, so again, have a higher view.  And then this lead me to think about how Buddhas have the highest, broadest view of all because they look at things from the perspective of what is best for the enlightenment of all living beings.

Then later in the evening, I was watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he had the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development on.  He was talking about the millions of homeless people in America.  He talked about people “losing their home”, not just single kids on drugs, but whole families.  When we think about it, having the appearance of a “home” is incredible karma.  When many people look at the homeless, they think “its their fault, they need to work and get a job.”  Yes, people need to take responsibility for themselves, but that does not mean we do not, as a society, also need to assume our responsibility to our community and others.  Many times people try to justify not helping others on the grounds that helping them doesn’t actually help them.  They say, “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.”  But then they use this phrase as justification for not giving him a fish, but they also don’t teach him to fish either!  When an earthquake, flood or tsunami wipes out an area, we can all see it is not their fault and we rush to aid.  But a financial crisis, like we had in 2008 and are continuing to have with the Eurozone crisis, is also like a natural disaster, it is a financial disaster which wipes out everyone, the guilty and innocent alike.  Imagine how you would feel if for no fault of your own your employer went bankrupt due to the crisis, you lost your job, couldn’t find another job, and lost your home and found yourself on the street with your family with nowhere to turn for help?  The Secretary took the broader view.  He said they have found that in the long-run it is actually cheaper to eliminate homelessness than it is to allow it to continue.  It costs society about $40,000 per year for a homeless person between shelters, clinics, etc.  Of course most of that money comes from charitable donations, but it is much cheaper in the long run to take them in, help them get back on their feet, give them training and help them find a job than to year after year keep them homeless.  In the old days, they told homeless people “if you sober up, we will find you housing.”  This seems like wisdom, but it fails to understand the trauma of being homeless.  When they reversed this and pursued a “housing first” policy, the people then had enough societal support to begin the work of sobering up and those with psychiatric problems started taking their medicines again.

In Europe, there is a whole community of homeless called the Roma.  It is incredibly sad and anger-provoking at the same time.  You see these mothers on the street with their very small children, and they are teaching their kids how to look pathetic and how to beg and even how to trick people into giving by pretending to be doing Red Cross petitions.  You can’t help but get angry at the parents, why aren’t they putting their kids in school.  But then when we take a broader view, you see a different story.  Is it the kids fault that they were born into such a family?  They grow up and are raised in such an environment so they never learn how to do anything else.  As a people they face tremendous discrimination and are never trusted, so they are never given an opportunity to get on a different track.  If all you have ever known how to do is scrape by on the streets, when later you have kids, you will do the same thing.  So it perpetuates generation after generation.  Those who do manage to escape never look back and try to hide the fact that they are Roma because there is so much discrimination, so all the best escape and only the least capable remain without any support.  They become enculturated into crime and begging, which then causes people to discriminate against them even more in a vicious cycle.  It is very sad, and there is no real solution that I know of other than massive investment in retraining.

I think in any situation, we will find the wisdom view by taking the broader view.  When our mind feels spacious and has space for both wisdom and compassion for everyone, then we know we are on the right track.  If we find ourselves judging, being defensive, feeling tight, narrow, stressed out, etc., then we should try take the broader view.

Your turn:  Describe some problem in your life, and how by taking the broader view you realize a wisdom view of that situation.

Every once in awhile, I have a whole bunch of ideas, each one of which could be a column, but the conditions are not such that I can do a whole column on each.  When this happens, I just post a list of the main point of each of the ideas.  Perhaps later these can become full posts.

1. The Dharma is in perfect accordance with and perfectly describes how things actually work.  The laws of physics are able to describe and govern physical reality to an incredibly high degree of accuracy.  But the laws of Dharma, most notably karma and emptiness, describe and govern all of reality, physical, mental and the relationship between the two.  They describe and govern the relationship between all phenomena and beings.  Bodhichitta is the synthesis of all Dharma, so living our life in accordance with bodhichitta is to live in perfect alignment and harmony with all things, past, present and future.  With our tantric practice, we actually build our enlightenment, and thus practically fulfil the bodhichitta intention.  So first we learn all Dharma, then we synthesize it into bodhichitta, then with bodhichitta we build our pure alternative self and world for all.  Because the Dharma describes and governs all of reality, it reveals itself perfectly and equally in all circumstances.  Our job as a practitioner is to become in tune with how the Dharma is revealing itself in our lives.
2. When great spiritual masters like Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, etc., come they speak the perfect truth in the context of the world of their time.  But the context of the world changes all of the time.  Religious fundamentalists seek to mold the world back into the context that reigned at the time of their respective spiritual master so that the perfect truth can be realized.  Such an attempt is hopeless and ultimately will result in behavior completely contradictory with the teachings of that religion.  The better approach is to realize that perfect truth is equally true in all contexts, so instead of trying to shape the world back into a long-gone context, we should strive to express and realize that same perfect truth in the context of the world we inhabit today.  This is the true meaning of lineage – a lineage keeps the truth of the teachings fully alive and perfectly expressed in a constantly changing external context generation after generation.  We do not need to invent new traditions, rather we need to express and realize the truth of the tradition in the modern context.
3. The mind of extended vacation.  Even though one is working very hard, there is no reason why one cannot always be on vacation.  If you have the mind of vacation, you will experience your life as a vacation, even while working.  For example, we can view our time in each country we are posted at as an extended vacation in different places of the world.  Touring is only part of vacationing.  The best and most meaningful vacations are working vacations, where you take the time to live and work in a different country/culture.  This shapes you far more and so therefore you get much more out of your “vacation.”  When you are on vacation, the goal is usually to explore and appreciate the best of an area.
4. The mind of building a home.  Home is your home base, where you are able to retreat to, recharge, relax and grow.  In our fast paced, highly mobile socieites, we often times neglect building a healthy and happy home.  The environment that is our home shapes our kids and ourselves tremendously.  If we create a clean, healthy, happy, harmonious, hard-working, generous home then this is what our kids will become socialized into and revert back to when they create their own homes.  So even if we are traveling all of the time to different countries, we also need to make a point of building our own home environment.  We may not own the physical home we live in, but that does not mean we cannot make it home.  We may move to other places, but that does not mean we can’t bring our ‘home’ with us.
5. Investing in your family relationships.  The relationships we have with our families are extremely important for our overall well-being and happiness.  Very often people start entering into conflict with their families, and then they avoid them by doing other things, then because they are not investing in their families the relationships grow worse and the people enter into a vicious cycle.  We need to take the time to invest in our family life, building harmonious and mutually supportive relationships with our family members.  We need to take the time to hang out with, appreciate, enter into the lives of and love those in our families.  The relationships we have with our family members are often amongst the deepest we will have in this life, so it is through those relationships that we can work on the deepest delusions within our mind.  A happy family life very often leads to a happy everything life.
6. The extremes of arrogance and playing dumb.  One extreme people fall into is arrogance, pretending they know things they do not.  Another extreme people fall into is playing dumb, pretending they know and understand less than they actually do.  Both are extremes and need to be avoided.  The middle way is accepting that you know what you know, but always wishing to learn more.  You take this approach with yourself and with others.
7. The essence of German culture.  We have visted Germany a few times in the last few months and obviously Germany is calling the shots on the Eurozone crisis.  My observation is as follows (and yes, it is a gross generalization, so not too much should be read into this):  The essence of German culture is “precision quality.”  They are are culturally focused on this in all that they do, in all spheres.  The problems come when they have a moralistic chip on their shoulder looking down on all those who do not do things as well as they do.  Different societies value different things, and so therefore will organize themselves differently.  We cannot say one is right and the other is wrong, they are just different.  The Frech maximixe “living well.”  Americans maximize “comfort and efficiency” (though our best side maximizes making the American dream accessible to all).
8. We saw “The Iron Lady” recently.  Thatcher was powerful because she firmly believed in and was willing to work for her principles no matter what the price, and there was a certain degree of truth to the principles she believed in.  She failed because she did not realize that her principles were not the only ones worth valuing, including respecting the validity of the points of views of others.
9. We saw “the Descendents” recently.  George Cloney lived in perfect paradise, had money, beauty, fantastic surroundings, power, etc., yet even in paradise samsara is unrelenting.  He confronted an almost impossible situation which just kept getting worse and more complex.  But no matter what came his way, he more or less responded by doing the right thing.  In doing so, we won back the respect of his kids.
10. Even though it may sometimes/often do so in unskilful ways, the driving force of U.S. foreign policy is to spread and protect freedom in all of its forms – relgious freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and social freedom.  It does so because it believes in freedom as a matter of principle and because it believes its interests are best served in a free world.  It shoots itself in the foot when the sometimes self-righteous means it employes in the advance of freedom engender resentment causing people to reject the message of freedom and when it forgets that there is an institutional foundation and context necessary for freedom to flourish for society as a whole.  The same is true for religious traditions in the world.
11. Much of history can be understood through the lens of the history of religion in this world.  Problems come when one imposes one’s own views on others.  The truth will reveal itself in many different ways and many different contexts.  We don’t need to mix all of these different truths for ourselves, but we do need to respect that the truth will reveal itself and express itself differently to different people.  Respect for religious freedom is an essential ingredient for world peace.
12. In this new world we are entering, one which will largely take place within a virtual world, we need to create an environment of internet freedom.  But freedom is different than anarchy.  Freedom is underwritten by clear institutions which balance and protect the equal rights of everyone, not just the most powerful.

Your turn:  What are some key ideas you are working with now?

I have been having a debate at my work about a policy question.  Even though I am right on the substance, I am losing the debate because the others involved in the discussion do not like me.  This has been a very valuable lesson for me.  It is not enough to be right, you have to be likeable first.  The reality is people will reject what you have to say if they don’t like you, even when you are right.  It is useless to be right if your message is rejected.  I could bemoan how unfair it is and become indignant about the whole thing or I can accept that this is how things work and do something about it.

So why don’t they like me?  Several reasons.  First, I am new so I have not yet proven myself to them.  Second, I am stepping beyond “my place” by doing things that normally somebody in my position would not do.  Third, I am publicly taking positions that run counter to their positions, and so therefore I am undermining their message.  Fourth, I made the mistake of calling into question others’ intentions, blaming them, and accusing them of arrogance (not the people I am actually debating, but those they are defending.  But since they are defending those people, indirectly it is as if I am questioning those I am debating with).  So I actually come across as the one who is arrogant and unprofessional.  Because they don’t like me, they then are motivated to find reasons to reject what I have to say or they are more inclined to believe arguments against me because they don’t want to see me win the argument.

In situations like this, it is sometimes best to just accept defeat and offer the victory.  But when the question being debated is important and affects the well being of many people, sometimes you have to continue and make your case.  But before people will re-engage you on the substance, you first have to address the likeability question.

How do you make yourself likeable?  You have to first admit your mistakes as perceived by the other person without being heavy or dramatic about the whole thing, then demonstrate your pure intentions, then acknowledge where the other person is right, then recontextualize your arguments in a different light, then take a position that fully accounts for all the different ways the other person is right yet you have a bigger view on the question.  So they are right from one narrower point of view, you are right from the larger point of view.  Oh, and it helps to make arguments that are irrefutable!

Another very useful tactic is to change the nature of the game from being a debate between two or more sides to being a common project aimed at reaching a consensus.  In Tibet, apparently spiritual debate was quite common and everybody knew how to relate to it as a process of finding deeper truths.  But here in the West, debate usually becomes about a clash of egos with clear winners and losers.  I believe it is for this, and many other reasons, that Venerable Geshe-la eliminated spiritual debate as such from the tradition and replaced it with more of a consensus driven discussion.  The goal of our discussions during the foundation program, teacher training and international teacher training programs is to reach a consensus that we can all agree to.  This changes the goal of the exercise from being conflictual to being useful and consensual.  Then, instead of fighting with people, you can work with them on a common project, they can realize your nature, come to appreciate and like you, and thereby become more amenable to your point of view.  If you acknowledge and fully incorporate their insights and point of view into your own, then they will be far more open to do the same towards you.

Your turn:  Describe some situation where because you were likeable somebody gave you the benefit of the doubt and let you have your way.

Every moment of every day, there is one fundamental question we need to ask ourselves:  “are we adding value or are we consuming merit?”  If we had even the slightest understanding of how precious our current human life is and how we have spent countless lives accumulating only negativity, we would not waste a second of this life using up our merit.  We have arrived at the treasure island – now is the time to gather up riches and resources for the future, not indulge ourselves in whatever pleasures we can find.

Every moment of every day we should be seeking to add value to the world.  Every situation we encounter, we should leave it better than we found it.  Every person we meet, we should leave them better off than we found them.  If there is something to be cleaned, clean it.  If there is something that needs doing, do it.  If there is someone that needs caring for, care for them.  If there is something that needs saying, say it.  If there is someone who needs help, help them.  If there is a job nobody else wants to do, do it.  If there is someone in your company, engage with them (get off the computer or your phone).  If there are commitments or promises you have made, keep them.  If there is work that remains to be done, do it.

When it comes to what needs to be done, I usually fall into one of two extremes.  The first extreme is I leave things for other to do.  One thing we all do (or at least I do) is I leave things undone in the hope that those around me will do it instead of me.  For example, if the kitchen needs cleaning or a diaper needs changing, I might go do something else and leave it in the (sometimes unconscious) hope that someone else will clean it or do it.  One of the commitments of training the mind is to not transfer your burdens onto others.

The other extreme I fall into is I will do what needs to be done, but I will do so with a resentful and bitter mind, like some martyr who sacrifices himself for others.  Yes, I am doing what needs to be done, but I am upset or unhappy about it – bitter that I am doing all of the work while others are lazily indulging themselves.  This is really stupid of me to do!  Anger functions to burn up whever undedicated merit we might have.  So here I am, accumulating merit onlyto burn it up immediately afterwards.  Karmically speaking, it is as if I get no benefit or credit from doing the work I am doing.  At the very least, if I am doing the work I shouldn’t then sabotage it with my anger!

We all know when we are actively adding value to the world versus when we are consuming our merit.  We just ask ourselves:  “am I making the world a better place right now?”  If the answer is no, then you have your answer.  We also always know when we are consuming our mierit.  We just ask ourselves:  “am I having somebody else do something for me that I should more appropriately be doing for myself?”  If the answer is yes, then you have your answer.

We should also be careful about the passive burning up of our merit through taking the favorable conditions we have around us for granted.  There are two tests we can check our mind with.  First, are we imputing “mine” on anything in our possession?  Do we think “my house”, “my car,” etc.?  If we do, that thought functions to burn up our merit when we experience our house, car, clothes, etc.  We should view everything we have as being temporarily in our keeping.  It has been given to us so that we can improve it to pass on to the next person.  We are like an asset manager who seeks to optimise the value of the assets of their clients for the sake of the clients.  It is not my house, it is the house I am providing my kids.  It is not my car, it is the car I use to drive my family around.  These are not my clothes, they are for others do they don’t have to look at my ugly body.  This is not my soap, it belongs to others do they don’t have to smell me.

A second test we can use is are we feeling grateful to those who provided us with what we enjoy?  We did not build our house, make our car, grow our food or sew our clothes.  When we enjoy these things, our focus should be on mentally generating a feeling of gratitude towards those who provided them.  The fact that we paid for these things is irrelevant, others still provided them for us and if we had to make them ourselves, we couldn’t.

Now none of this means we should not rest.  Of course we need to rest, but only so that we can work more.  We do not rest for rest’s sake.  We rest  because we understand if we do not then we will burn out and be able to work even less in the long run.  We rest not to waste our precious human life, but so that we can make the most out of it.  Again, if we are honest with ourselves, we know when we are resting to be lazy versus resting up so that we can get back to work fresh.

This precious opportunity will end very soon.  We do not know how long we have before our time on the treasure island comes to an end.  Everything we do should be aimed at gather up resources and good conditions for the future, not sacrificing our future on the alter of our present needs.  It does not get any better than what we currently have, so we need to stop making excuses, stop lying to ourselves, stop justifying our delusions and just joyfully get on with the task at hand of gathering up riches for our future lives.  The spiritual road in front of us is long, we don’t want to run out of provisions along the way.

Your turn:  Give one example of how you are adding value to the world.  Give another example of how you are consuming your merit.