Activating the inner Spiritual Guide: How to fulfill our vajra commitment to others?

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

In the last post we discussed making a vajra commitment to others.  In this post, I will explain how we actually fulfil our vajra commitment to others.  We can fulfil our vajra commitment to others by practicing for them as if we were them.  We are prepared to take on all their delusions and negative karma and work through it for them.  With total faith in Dorje Shugden and like Shantideva explains in Chapter 8, we offer ourself to others and are willing to become whatever they need us to become to be able to provide them temporary and ultimate benefit.  We are ready to endure whatever we need to endure.  We are ready to go through whatever we need to go through.  Soldiers are ready to give their lives to protect others and go through difficult training and situations to be able to do this.  We are the same, except we are seeking to protect them from samsara.  We are ready to work through their obstacles for them so that they do not have to.

How do we do this?  We view our delusions and negative karma as those we have taken on (from our vajra family).  When a delusion arises in our mind, we imagine that it is one that we have taken on – that of our vajra family/future students.  We then imagine that as we overcome it in our mind, we are eliminating it in their mind.  Quite simply, we completely exchange ourself for others, where we impute “self” onto others and “others” onto what we previously considered to be ourself.  Shantideva explains this practice in Chapter 8 of his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.  For example, when we are sick we can imagine that as we are overcoming our delusions related to being sick, we are actually overcoming all of the delusions of others related to them being sick.  Literally, like Christ, we feel like we go through others suffering for them so that they don’t have to.  We have taken their suffering upon ourselves and are working through it for them.  We take on the delusions of our vajra family because we realize we are in a better position to work through them than they are.  Our mind becomes like a TV screen which reflects the aggregate nexus of the delusions arising in the minds of our vajra family.  We become like a contaminated mind treatment facility.  We bring in delusions and negative karma, we treat it within our mind and then return it back purified.

Technically speaking, how can we do this?  We essentially take on the contaminated karma of our vajra family.  This includes all negative karma, deluded tendencies similar to the cause and their obstructions to omniscience.  We can also accomplish this through requests to Dorje Shugden.  We have on our mind the contaminated karma for virtually any experience.  So we are essentially requesting Dorje Shugden to activate the karma in our mind that corresponds with the delusions and negative karma of our vajra family.  We make requests to Dorje Shugden and dedicate:  may the delusions that arise in my mind be those of my vajra family; and when I overcome them in my mind may they be eliminated from their minds.  Since ultimately, the world is a creation of our mind, if we eliminate these delusions from our mind, their effects will also gradually vanish from our world as the karma giving rise to these appearances exhausts itself.

How does it feel to practice in this way?  We can imagine that we are the ‘resultant’ Vajra Family, and we engage in the practice.  We view ourself as the ‘resultant person’ of our vajra family, and seeing ourself in this way, we try gain the realizations of the stages of the path of Sutra and Tantra.  This is really the highest form of King-like bodhichitta, and can easily be understood as Christ-like bodhichitta.  Even though the delusions are arising in our mind, we don’t feel them as “our delusions.”  Rather we experience them as the delusions of our vajra family that we have taken on.  When we work through them, we feel like a spiritual surgeon directly healing the minds of others.  We feel ourself as the Dharmakaya performing spiritual surgery on the minds of our vajra family.  As the Dharmakaya, we imagine that we are accomplishing the function of the various practices on the minds of your vajra family (purifying their subtle body, etc.)

The benefits of this practice are limitless.  By doing this for others, we create the causes for the Spiritual Guide to do it for us.  Doing this gives us enormous power in our practice, because we feel like we are directly practicing for all living being.  We feel, “if I succeed, they succeed; if I fail, they fail.”  If our superior intention is genuine, this will really motivate us.  This practice gives our suffering meaning, so we gladly accept it.  It helps cut our identification with the delusions arising within our mind.  They are not our delusions, they are the delusions of others that we have taken on.  With this practice, bodhichitta comes naturally.  We see the direct connection between overcoming our delusions and negative karma and benefiting others.  This practice creates a special karmic connection with these beings which will ripen in the form of them being our disciple in the future.  It will karmically draws us closer to them in the form of a special relationship with them as our disciple.  If we think deeply, it is nearly a miracle anytime somebody turns to us for spiritual advice.  Dorje Shugden does not activate the karma for others to come into contact with us before we have the realizations necessary to actually help them.  When we overcome their delusions in our mind, then we know exactly how to help them.  On this basis, then Dorje Shugden can safely activate the karma for them to appear.  It is in this way that Dharma centers grow.  Venerable Tharchin said that all we need to do to make a center grow is for ourselves to gain realizations.  Ultimately, by eliminating others delusions in our mind, we are actually eliminating them from their minds.  This is so because their faults and delusions come from our mind anyway, they are the reflection of our own faults.  If we eliminate the fault in our own mind, we will no longer project it into others.  In this way, we can directly engage in the actions of a Buddha liberating all beings right now simply by working on our own mind.  Venerable Tharchin said every step we take towards enlightenment, we take all beings one step closer as well in proportion to their karmic connection with you.  With this practice, we can understand how this is so.

Activating our inner Spiritual Guide: Aligning our mind with that of the Spiritual Guide

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

The next several posts we will talk about how to align ourselves completely with and ultimately totally surrender to the spiritual guide.  First we will talk about how to align our wishes, then our thoughts, then our actions and finally ourselves.

We align our wishes with our Spiritual Guide by asking ourselves when we look at or think of somebody, “what is your [the Spiritual Guide] plan for this person?”  His ultimate plan for everybody is to deliver them to the Dharmakaya, where they will be completely free.  His temporary plan is to gradually lead them along the path to enlightenment.  Our job is to align our wishes with his – where his wishes are our wishes and our wishes are his wishes.  We want to get to the point where our wishes are in total alignment, we work for what we want (which is what he wants).  When our wishes are not in total alignment, we work on changing our wishes so that they are in alignment with his by considering the benefits of his wishes versus our own.  We need to examine whose wishes are better, and when we see his are, we change our wishes to be his, we adopt his wishes as our own.

We ask what does he wish for us?  What does he wish for others.  He wants to get us and everyone else out because he understands the danger we are in.  We want to stay.  The principal method for aligning our wishes with those of our Spiritual Guide is our regular practice of Lamrim.  Lamrim functions to make our aspirations pure – it changes our desires and makes them spiritual.  At this point we might object, “but I don’t naturally desire spiritual things, I want worldly things.  So adopting his wishes is artificial.  Gen-la Losang explains what is natural is simply what is familiar.  Worldly wishes are natural for us because we are more familiar with them.  Through training our mind in new wishes, they will become more familiar and eventually even more natural.

The best way we can align our intention with the Spiritual Guide’s is by making a vajra commitment to others.  A vajra commitment is a commitment to take personal responsibility for the eventual enlightenment of somebody else.  We promise somebody that we will do everything we can to help them attain enlightenment as quickly as possible.  We promise that we will continue working for their behalf for as long as it takes, even if that means countless lifetimes.  We will never abandon them.  We don’t have to directly do this with them, but internally we make such a commitment.  One powerful shortcut for being able to do this with everyone is try view others as your future disciples and organize all of your relationships around this idea.  Right now, they are just our colleagues, friends or family.  But one day they will be our spiritual students and it will be our responsibility to be their Spiritual Guide.  Knowing this is where our relationship is going with the person, we then naturally know what direction to take things.  We will naturally feel we are responsible for them right now.

Why do we make a vajra commitment to others?  Because doing so puts ourselves in perfect alignment with the Buddhas.  Their power then flows through us, and we naturally and easily have self-confidence.  We can accomplish anything.  Doing this is the best possible thing for our practice.  It changes everything in our life, like somebody having a child.  But it is much more than being a parent, because this is their spiritual welfare and it is for all their future lives.  Vajra commitments make our bodhichitta real, not abstract.  Bodhichitta is the wish to become a Buddha for the sake of others.  When we have others who we are personally responsible for, we easily feel the need to get serious about gaining realizations to be able to help them.

 

Activating the inner Spiritual Guide: How do we practice with the guru’s mind?

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

Our Guru is a much better Dharma practitioner than we are.  He knows how to enagage in all of the meditations perfectly and he knows how to resolve all of the doubts or problems that can arise.  He has perfect concentration, perfect wisdom and just the right motivation.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could just use his mind to meditate instead of our own?  Well, we can.

To understand how we can consider how there are three different types of mantra recitation, verbal, mental and vajra.  Verbal recitation is when we do mantra recitation with our mouth, mental is when we do the recitation with our mind, and vajra is when we do by listening to the Spiritual Guide do it in our mind for us.  Mental is more qualified than verbal, and vajra is more qualified than mental.  In exactly the same way, we can engage in all of our other Dharma practices in these three ways.  For example, we can recite a Sadhana with our mouth, in our mind, or we can have our guru do it in our mind for us.  We can do this with our meditations as well.  When we engage in vajra recitation, sadhana practice of meditation our ordinary mind is completely still and silent.  In this space, we allow our guru to take control of our mind and guide is through our recitation or meditation, filling our mind with each of the realizations implied by the words or lines of thought.  He enters into us, does our practices for us but with our mind – his mind doing them with our mind, so we get all the benefit as if it was him doing our meditations for us.  Once we have a taste for how to practice in this way, we will have no desire to practice in any other way.

So how do we actually engage in vajra recitation or meditation?  What do we need to do to start the process?  First, we need to make our ordinary mind completely still understanding it is just static, contaminated noise.  We then try align our motivation with our guru’s motivation.  We ask ourselves, ‘why does my guru want me to engage in this practice?’  We then try feel that same motivation itself – this is why we want to engage in this practice.  Then, we dissolve our guru into our root mind, strongly believing he is there and understanding that all of our subtle and gross minds arise from our root mind.  Then, make the request that he engage in the practice for you inside your mind.  The feeling is not that his mind is somehow separate from your mind and he is doing it with his mind and you are just watching.  No, the feeling is he picks up your mind and begins his enlightened dance with it, and you go along for the blissful ride.  Each time you recite a word of the sadhana or consider a line of reasoning from the contemplation, transform that recitation or thinking into a faithful, well motivated request that your guru generate within you the appropriate spiritual understanding.  You still say each word of the sadhana, but here you understand the recitation to be a faithful, well-motivated request.  As you do this, keep your ordinary mind completely still and inactive to create the space for the guru’s dance with your mind to take place.

Once we gain some experience of this, we can learn how to accomplish all our daily activities through making requests to our guru to do it through us, for us, for others.  We can do this for every activity, right down to brushing our teeth.  Because we are directing all of our requests to the guru, we naturally have a spiritual motivation in everything we do.

Of particular importance is learning how to fight our delusions with our guru’s mind.  This has several different aspects.  First, we make request that he reveal to us our delusions in a way we can overcome them.  Then we request him to reveal to us what we need to do to overcome them.  Finally, re request him to help us to actually overcome them.  We can learn to overcome all difficulties with our guru’s mind.  One of the easiest ways is to make requests to Dorje Shugden that he pacify all obstacles.  Gen Togden once told me the story of how he dealt with almost all of his obstacles.  An obstacle would arise, he would request Dorje Shugden, “if it is best, please pacify this obstacle; if it is not best to pacify it, please help me transform it.”  After making the request, sometimes the delusions would just go away.  Other times, they wouldn’t.  He would then train his mind in response.  Either way, it was all perfect for him.

We can also make requests to Medicine Buddha that he heal our mind of the difficulty.  We need to break our identification with the delusion by identifying it as the fruit of our ordinary mind.  We generate a strong desire to be free from the delusion or distraction by considering how much misery it causes us.  We then make requests to Medicine Buddha that he heal our mind of this delusion by reciting his mantra.  We imagine that infinite healing light rays radiate out and permeate every aspect of our mind but in particular healing this delusion/distraction and we strongly believe that our mind is becoming completely healed of this particular delusion.  If we have faith as we do this, we will literally feel our mind being healed.

Once we see how this works with a few of our practices, it is not difficult to extend it to all of our Dharma activities:  teaching, working for the center, writing on Facebook, emails or a blog, caring for our family, doing our normal jobs, etc.  We can literally set aside our ordinary self and from this day forward have our guru live our life through us, for us, for others.  It makes travelling the path literally effortless.

 

 

Activating the inner Spiritual Guide: Leaving behind our ordinary mind

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

The most transformative conclusion I have ever come to in the Dharma is “the most intelligent thing I can do is rely upon the guru’s mind alone.”  I have always taken great (deluded) pride in being smart.  When I realized this conclusion above, it changed literally everything.  It showed me I had everything exactly backwards!

We often say in the Dharma that we have choice of mind.  Normally what we mean is we have choice over how we respond to situations, but here the meaning is much deeper:  we literally have ‘choice of mind.’  We can choose our ordinary mind or we can choose our guru’s mind.  Given that we have choice, we need to investigate what is the best choice.  Once we have decided what is the best choice, we simply choose to identify with and use the mind of our choice.

The essential argument for relying upon the guru’s mind alone is it works better.  We need to overcome our pride with respect to our contaminated aggregates.  We think that we are quite capable with our contaminated aggregates, and we rely upon them for all our actions.   Contaminated minds are limited at best and deceptive at worst.  When they do help us, they only make our samsara better which doesn’t help us.  Pure aggregates of the Buddha are omniscient, possess universal compassion, employ perfect skilful means, and immortally do so for the rest of eternity. No matter how clever and skilled we think we are, the guru’s mind is infinitely more developed and reliable.  We have a total and complete understanding that if given the choice between relying upon (using) the guru’s mind and relying upon (using) our ordinary mind, it is absolutely foolish to use our ordinary mind and what we should do is rely upon his mind alone.  Once again, the most important conclusion I have come to in my Dharma career is the most intelligent thing I can do is rely upon my guru’s mind alone for everything I do.

We need to come to a definite decision to permanently unplug/turn off our ordinary mind.    We realize that following/listening to our ordinary mind is endless.  It takes us nowhere, it spins endlessly.  Seeing that, we simply give up on it.  There is nothing left to figure out with it, nothing left to think about with it.  We realize its uselessness, we understand its harmfulness, and we just leave it behind.  It is like in a Beautiful Mind when Russell Crowe says good bye to the little girl, understanding that he will never speak with her again because he understands that if he does it will just make him more sick and that she is not real.  It is like saying goodbye to somebody on their deathbed knowing you will never see them again.  It is like deciding to remove the TV from your house, not simply say you aren’t going to watch it anymore.  It is like throwing away the final pack of cigarettes, quitting knowing you are never going go smoke again because it kills you.

How is it possible to rely upon the guru’s mind alone?  To answer this, we need to understand how is it possible to have choice over which mind we use?  The guru’s mind is not separate from our own – his mind is inside our mind.  It is a part of our mind.  Normally we think that his mind is somehow completely separate from our own mind, like there is this wall between them.  The only thing separating our mind from our guru’s mind is grasping at an inherently existent guru’s mind and an inherently existent mind of our own.  When we realize the emptiness of our mind and our guru’s mind then we can mix directly with his and use his mind as if it were our own.  The guru’s mind is actually an aspect of your own mind, its completely purified part.  It is in us, we simply start to use it.

To understand how, we can examine the process of thinking.  The process of thinking is actually a process of making requests to a mind.  We pose questions to the mind, it gives us answers.  The only difference between thinking with our ordinary mind and thinking with the guru’s mind is not the process of thinking – which is making requests – but the mind to which we direct our requests.

Concretely, how do we practice this?  The goal here is to completely turn off, silence and still the ordinary mind.  Ordinary thoughts crowd out the guru’s mind from being manifest.  Here we try to completely eliminate them so that we are left with only the guru’s mind functioning.  If we use our ordinary mind, we feed it.  If we don’t use it, we starve it and it dies. By silencing the ordinary mind it creates the space for the guru’s mind, until eventually we completely shut it off and are left with only the guru’s mind.

The practice is every time our ordinary mind becomes active, we identify it as our ordinary mind, and then ask the guru’s mind to resolve the question by dissolving it back into the Dharmakaya.  By dissolving it into emptiness, we purify the contaminated karma giving rise to it.  The feeling is a bit like playing Space Invaders where every time an ordinary thought comes up we vaporize it into emptiness and thereby keep the space of our mind completely pure and free from ordinary conception.  The main function of this practice is to completely destroy any and all barriers between our own mind and the guru’s mind.  Two of my teachers suggested this as the main way of being able to rely upon the guru’s mind alone.

Step by step, the practice can be done as follows:

  1. We identify with the conventional nature of the mind itself (according to Sutra or Highest Yoga Tantra).  A shortcut is we simply “listen to the silence/experience the stillness of our ordinary mind in the infinite expanse of the unobstructed clear light.”
  2. Meditate on the union of this bliss and emptiness.  Shortcut here is we withdraw all the projections of our mind and realize that nothing is left.  We experience this absence as supreme inner peace, or bliss.  Main point is to rest within the Dharmakaya, understanding this to be your mind mixed inseparably with the mind of your Spiritual Guide.
  3. When a delusion/distraction arises:
    1. Become aware that a delusion/distraction is present – that your ordinary mind is projecting something or is active.  It could be a particular delusion or distraction.  It could be a question that you don’t know the answer to and you want to try figure out.  It could be some situation that you don’t know what to do, etc.
    2. Remind yourself that this is not your object of meditation.  Label it ‘not my object.  This is my ordinary mind which I have completely turned off.’
    3. Mentally make the request to the underlying Dharmakaya that the spiritual guide resolve this problem, answer this question, heal this delusion, etc, by directing the implicit question to the Dharmakaya.  Every thought has an underlying request to be made, such as work this out for me, give me an answer to this, etc.  We essentially hand over the question to the Spiritual Guide that he work it out for us. The dissolving the question back into the Dharmakaya is the posing of the question to the Dharmakaya.  By connecting with the emptiness of the delusion, distraction, situation, etc., you purify the contaminated karma giving rise to the situation itself so you treat it at the most profound level.  In this context, we are purifying the karma that gives rise to the ordinary mind.
    4. Then once again, meditate on the union of this mind and emptiness, then rest once again in the union of bliss and emptiness as above until the next delusion/distraction arises.  Keep doing this again and again and again for as long as it takes to completely purify/destroy our ordinary mind.

Activating the inner Spiritual Guide: How to get our relationship right with the outer Spiritual Guide

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

Relying upon the outer spiritual guide is actually quite simple.  All we need to do is regard him as a living Buddha and then put his instructions into practice to the best of our ability.

How can we regard him as a living Buddha?

Whether somebody is a Buddha from their own side or not is irrelevant, what matters is our view.  If we understand deeply the emptiness of a Buddha, we realize that nobody is a Buddha from their own side because nothing exists from its own side.  Beings become Buddhas for us when we karmically construct them as such.  If we viewed an ordinary being as a Buddha, we would receive a Buddha’s blessings; if we viewed a Buddha as an ordinary being, we would receive nothing.  The way this works is wherever you imagine a Buddha, a Buddha actually goes, so when you regard somebody else as a Buddha, a Buddha enters that person.  Wherever a Buddha goes, they accomplish the function of a Buddha, which is to bestow blessings.  A blessing is the activation of a karmic seed that directs our mind towards enlightenment.  Through our viewing this person as a Buddha, we receive the blessings of a Buddha and what we understand is directing our mind towards enlightenment.  We can do this with anybody, but it is easiest to do this with our Spiritual Guide.

When it comes to pure view, it is very important to make the difference between attachment to perfection and pure view.  Attachment to perfection is when we project our own expectations of how a Buddha should supposedly act, and then we judge the other person against this standard.  They inevitably don’t, and then we see only faults in this person and we lose faith.  The outer spiritual guide will never appear pure and perfect from their own side, because no such being exists.  Because our mind is impure we project something impure.  If we want to see the outer spiritual guide as completely pure, it depends upon our own practice. Sometimes we think pure view is something we have or we don’t.  Usually in the beginning we see only good qualities, but then over time we see only faults.  This is just the exhaustion of our imprints of having practiced pure view in the past.

Pure view is a practice.  The practice of pure view has two parts.  With respect to the qualities that appear, we rejoice in the good qualities of the outer spiritual guide.  We practice appropriate attention with respect to their good qualities.  We admire their good qualities and allow ourselves to be inspired by their example (the good parts).  With respect to the apparent faults that appear, we practice pure view by asking ourself the question, ‘how can I receive perfect benefit from what this person did, from this apparent fault?’  When we receive perfect benefit, the person functions for us as a Buddha with just extremely skilful means.  We need to train ourselves in this view.  One of the main functions of the spiritual guide is to create situations that kick up our delusions so that we can identify them and then work through them.

But pure view does not mean we say everything the Spiritual Guide is doing in a conventional sense is perfect and can’t be questioned.  We will, for example, see our teachers doing something which is not correct – they make a mistake.  If we have a wrong understanding of pure view, we think we are supposed to say that the mistake was correct in a conventional sense.  But if it is a mistake, it is a mistake, so we get ourselves tied in all sorts of knots.  The resolution of this is actually very straightforward:  view the mistakes as teachings.  Who says a Buddha’s teaching methods are limited to declarative direct transmissions of meaning?  We learn many valuable lessons learning from the mistakes of others, why can’t our Spiritual Guide also teach us in the same way?  So their mistakes are just another form of teaching, one that makes us learn to think critically for ourselves.  Ultimately, pure view doesn’t mean viewing the object itself as being pure, rather it means we receive perfect, pure benefit within our mind no matter what appears conventionally, be it a mistake of a skilful deed.  Pure view does not mean we view objects as objectively perfect, rather it means we know how to look at everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, in a perfect way.  Everything our Spiritual Guide, our teachers, our sangha, our friends, our family, and eventually everybody do teaches us something.

Putting the instructions into practice to the best of our ability

What does it mean to put their instructions into practice to the best of our ability?  It means to use the Dharma as a solution to our problems.  The point of departure on the spiritual path is a redefinition of the problem to be our own mind, not our external circumstance.  Seeing that our problem is our mind, we then use the Dharma we learn from interacting with our Spiritual Guide to change our mind in a way consistent with the Dharma.  When we do so, we are putting the instructions into practice.  Through training in Lamrim, we can gradually realize and feel like we actually have these problems.  Then our practice will be sincere.

I wanted to talk about a specific instance I have struggled with a lot, namely thinking that the Spiritual Guide or a teacher thinks badly about us.  We need to identify the attachment/aversion in our minds, where we think our happiness and suffering depends upon what others think.  This is a mistaken mind, our happiness depends only upon whether we respond to the situation with virtue.  When we feel our Spiritual Guide or teacher thinks something bad about us, there are three possibilities:  If we are doing something wrong, we admit it without guilt and change.  If we are doing something correct, we continue to do it.  Or we think we are doing something right, but the teacher thinks we are doing something wrong.  When this happens, we have an open, honest discussion about it.  It is important to make sure we are not going to the extreme of exaggerating the bad of what the teacher thinks.   We often exaggerate thinking the teacher thinks only bad about us, and doesn’t see our good qualities.  We then become defensive and try to justify why we are right and the teacher is wrong.  This shuts down the learning process.

When we do have a discussion, we need to learn to accept ourself and our mistakes without judgement.  We often project that the spiritual guide is viewing us the way we are viewing ourselves.  We think he is judging us and thinking bad about us and not liking us because of our faults because that is how we are relating to ourselves.

We also need to seek clarification until you have clarity about what is correct.  We need to be more concerned with doing what is right than in being right.  Motivated by this, we should try seek clarification through external and internal methods until all doubts are resolved.  For example, if we see our teacher doing something we perceive to be wrong, Geshe-la advises that with an open mind we approach the other person and tell them how we are viewing their actions, but we wanted to understand their perspective.  If we have such a conversation without attacking our teacher, then one of two things will happen.  Either the teacher will realize they were making a mistake, they thank you, and everything functions better in the future; or your teacher will explain their perspective, you will realize why you were wrong, and your faith and understanding will increase.  Either way, everybody is better off from having the conversation.  If instead, we think they are making a mistake but we keep it all bottled up inside because we think we are supposed to view everything they do as perfect, then eventually this view will eat away at our faith in and relationship with our teacher like a cancer until eventually it dies completely.  Our teacher will continue on making their mistakes and we will have lost our path.  Everybody is worse off.  Geshe-la says, again and again, we need to behave conventionally exactly normally like everybody else.  When we have a problem with what somebody is doing, we have a normal conversation about it.  To not do is a mistaken and externally exaggerated relationship with the Spiritual Guide.

One final possibility is after clarification you conclude that you are right and the teacher is wrong but they can’t admit it and they don’t change.  If this happens, then keep an open mind that your view could change later and continue repeating the methods above.  Eventually, things will become unblocked.

 

Activating the inner Spiritual Guide: Motivation for doing series

Kadampa Ryan Activating our inner Spiritual Guide

Reliance upon the Spiritual Guide is the root of the path.  Gen-la Losang said that there is only one activity on the spiritual path, and that is mixing our mind with that of the Spiritual Guide.  Since his mind is already enlightened, by mixing our mind with his, we too become enlightened.  Geshe-la said at the Summer Festival several years ago that he will take us by the hand internally and guide us every step of the way to enlightenment.  Kadam Bjorn explains that we can literally ask the Spiritual Guide to do our practice for us in our mind, so he will do all the work, all we need to do is know how to ask him.  A very pure senior teacher once said we need to allow ourselves to become completely under the influence of the Spiritual Guide, both externally and internally.  In this series of posts, I will explain my understanding of how to do all of these things.

This series of posts will principally discuss three things:  First, how do we get our relationship right with the outer Spiritual Guide; second, how to leave behind our ordinary mind, and why we should want to; and finally, how do we align ourself with and ultimately surrender ourselves completely to the Spiritual Guide.  We can do this with respect to our wishes, our thoughts, our actions and ultimately ourselves.

Getting our relationship right with the outer Spiritual Guide

There is no relationship more important to get right than the one with your spiritual guide.  There is no relationship more important that you can have because it is eternal and promises limitless fruit.  There are several reasons why we need to get our relationship right with the Spiritual Guide.  Your relationship with the outer spiritual guide is like your lifeline in your spiritual practice.  Many people think they can have bad relationships with everybody externally but a good one with Geshe-la inside, but generally everything falls apart when our external relationship with our spiritual guide is bad.  We lose everything.

If we can’t get our relationship right with our spiritual guide, then our future students of Dharma won’t get it right with us when we are their teacher, and then we won’t be able to really help them.  The faith we have in our spiritual guide determines the faith our students will have in us.  We don’t want our students to have faith in us because we like that sort of thing, rather we want our students to have faith in us so that we can help them.  This is a very important point.  We need to make it a priority to cultivate good, honest, working relationships with our teachers.  If our relationships are bad, even if we have perfect Dharma, we will be unable to help anybody.  By getting it right with the outer spiritual guide, you will be able to get it right with the inner spiritual guide.  The outer spiritual guide will help you identify your delusions that specifically get in the way of you having a good relationship with the inner spiritual guide.  By clearing these, you clear away the internal interference until eventually you realize he is with you all of the time.

So who is the outer spiritual guide?  There are three different levels.  The first, and most obvious, is he is the little Tibetan guy.  This is the individual who assumes the aspect of a Spiritual Guide and appears to accomplish the function of a Spiritual Guide, namely to lead us along the path of Sutra and Tantra.  We first learn how to get our relationship right with him – this is the easiest.  Second, we come to understand the spiritual guide as the synthesis of all three jewels, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha – in other words, we come to view the totality of the tradition, externally and internally, as one giant Spiritual Guide with many aspects, like many facets of a diamond.  We view all the teachers, our Sangha friends, the books, the centers, all the different Buddhas, everything as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  These are like his mind.  We view all the instructions and teachings that are given as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  This is his speech.  We view all the practitioners and Sangha as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  These are his body.  If our relationship with even one part of this is not good, then our relationship with one aspect/part of our spiritual guide is not good.  The third and final level is we come to understand him as everybody and everything.  The ultimate nature of all things is bliss and emptiness, so it is correct to say that everybody and everything ultimately arises from and is an emanation of the Spiritual Guide. A senior teacher once explained how we can view ourselves as we are on solitary retreat right now, and everything we see is an emanation of your Spiritual Guide, like one big Truman Show.

Cultivating healthy relationships: How to bring out the best in yourself and others

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

I have saved this topic for the last, because normally what we want is to learn methods for changing the other person because we think it is they who need to change.  What I have tried to communicate during this series of posts is that it is actually we ourselves who need to change, not the other person.

But how can we get others to change?  As Bodhisattvas, don’t we want all beings to change themselves into Buddhas?  So while in general we say we don’t try change others, we nonetheless want others to change for the better.  The key condition for being able to help anyone is we ourselves need to have absolutely no need whatsoever for the other person to change.  The fact that they are a deluded mess serves us just fine because we know how to transform everything.  If we are attached to them changing, the more we try to change them, the more they will resist our advice, even if it is exactly the advice they need to hear.  But when they know we accept them just as they are and we have no hidden agenda why we want them to change, then they are open to listening to us.  We present them the alternatives, but leave them completely free to decide what to do.  In that space, they can make their own decision to change, and when they do so, they will own that decision as their own.

We need to make sure our motivation is pure.  We shouldn’t want others to change for ourselves, for example, so we no longer have to deal with their problems anymore.  We need to stop trying to change them.  We need to leave people to be completely free to change from their own side.  If we pressure people to change then even if they do it is not from their own side, and so it will not stick and not be meaningful.  We need to create an atmosphere of total respect and freedom for them to make their own decisions.  This is true even if they don’t do this for you.  In this space, we try set a good example.  The only real way to change others is to show a good example.  When people see our good example, and they see how it works better than what they are doing, they will naturally from their own side want to change.  We should only explicitly offer people advice if they ask for it, or if they are open to receiving it.  If they are not asking for it, then they will reject what we have to say as if we are shoving it down their throats.

A really great way of doing this is to ‘own others’ faults as your own.’  We see others as mirror-like Buddhas who reflect back to us our own faults.  We then find that fault inside of ourselves, and purge it like bad blood.  There are several benefits of practicing like this.  We will be able to show the best possible example for the other person.  We will learn what you need to learn about how to overcome their biggest faults.  And, at the very least, we will have one less fault.

I know there are those who will think that it is a misuse of the Dharma to explain how we can use it to make our relationships more healthy, stable and rewarding.  But this is wrong.  First, most people come into the Dharma with the intention of fixing their lives.  If we do not respond to this need, they will turn to something else.  First we show them how they can fix the problems of this life with the Dharma, and on the basis of that experience we show them that they can also solve the problems of their future lives with the Dharma.  Second, this view grasps at our modern relationships as being inherently worldly.  All things are equally empty, so therefore all things are equally transformable.  It is our ignorance grasping at some things being intrinsically worldly that prevents us from bringing the Dharma into every aspect of our life.  This ignorance is actually quite common among many people, and they transmit this ignorance to other new people coming into the tradition.  This creates all sorts of inner turmoil for people.  They want to practice Dharma, but they don’t want to abandon their modern life, so they view the two as competitive with one another.  If they stick with the Dharma, they will have an extreme view and continue to transmit it to others, making them miserable in the process.  If they abandon the Dharma because “it asks too much of them”, then they lose everything.  Nobody wins from such a view.  Third, the primary task of our tradition right now is to attain the union of Kadampa Buddhism and modern life.  How can we do that if we are not allowed to bring the Dharma into our normal relationships and try use it to deal with our modern-day relationship challenges?

When Venerable Tharchin was on his long retreat, near the end he went to Geshe-la and said, “I am very close to enlightenment.  I know if I continue a bit longer I will make it.”  Geshe-la then told him that it was time to leave his retreat.  Venerable Tharchin was in shock because it was not the answer he was expecting!  Geshe-la then said, “If you stay up here, you will attain enlightenment, but you will become a ‘worthless Buddha’ because you will have no relationships with living beings.”  Our ability to help others depends upon the realizations in our heart and the quality of our relationships with others.  Eventually, we need to lead all beings to enlightenment.  We won’t even be able to begin to do so if we don’t first know how to have healthy, stable and rewarding relationships with others.  A Bodhisattva is a friend of the world.  This starts with the people in our lives.

Cultivating healthy relationships: Knowing when and how to get out of a dysfunctional relationship

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

If you recall from the first post in this series, a healthy relationship is one where we are able to increase our own good qualities in the relationship.

So with this understanding, under what conditions should we get out of a relationship?  It depends on what we want.  If what we want is good external conditions, the answer may be different than if what we want is to develop ourselves internally.  Historically, what we want is good external conditions, so we jump from one situation to another depending on the external rewards of the situation.  As we start to want internal growth and development, an entirely new level of justification for remaining in a relationship arises.  It is entirely possible that from an external perspective, there is nothing keeping us in a relationship, but from an internal perspective, we are still growing so we want to stick around.  Whether we remain in a relationship depends on many factors:

It depends on our capacity to use/transform the situation into an opportunity to increase our inner qualities.  If the situation we are in is so extreme that it is functioning to destroy us internally, then the situation is beyond our capacity and we need to get out.  This does not mean that there won’t be difficult times and situations where we are knocked on our butt.  The question is do we have the capacity to pick ourselves back up again and be better for it.  In this context, it depends upon our motivation.  If our motivation is thinking that we can run away from our problems by running away from the relationship, then we will be disappointed.  We cannot escape from our karma.  If we moved to a cave to get away from it all, we would start to prefer some parts of the cave to others.

It depends on whether we have tried everything.  Before we leave a situation we need to make sure that we have tried everything we can think of, plus some, to make it work.  Only then can we leave with a clean conscience.

It depends on whether the other person has the intention to change.  If somebody doesn’t have the intention to change, then no matter what you do, they won’t change.  People often think if they get married or have a kid then the person will change, but then they are disappointed when it doesn’t happen.  If the other person doesn’t have a sincere interest in changing, then they won’t.  So we should stop holding out for that, and move on to help somebody else.

It depends on our sense of self-worth.  We tend to undervalue ourselves and allow ourselves to remain in an unhealthy situation.  In the eyes of the Buddhas, we are all perfectly good and extremely precious.  Because we lack confidence in ourselves we think it is better to be with somebody even if it is bad than it is to be alone.  This is not true.  It is better to be alone than to be in a destructive relationship.

It depends on our relevant alternatives.  In general we say that our task is to learn how to respond to the situations we find ourselves in without delusion.  If we cannot yet do this, but we still have the capacity to grow, then we should stay.  However, this depends on our alternatives.  It doesn’t make sense to exaggerate the importance of a few people at the expense of the many.  We may be able to remain in a situation and have a small effect on somebody else, but if our alternative is to bring about greater benefit to a greater number of people, then it may make sense for us to get out.

So assuming we have examined carefully these points, and we have decided that we need to get out, the question is how.  We need to generate a pure motivation concerned for the other person.  We need to try to leave for their sake, and understand how our leaving is best for them in the long-run (even if it means in the short-run they suffer more from losing us).  If we are genuine with this, then when we explain to them why we are leaving for their sake, they will be able to accept it easier.  If we are not at the point of leaving yet, we need to set terms under which we are willing to stay and leave it up to the other person to decide if they can meet those terms or not.  We need to come to a clear understanding of what is a functional relationship and under what conditions we are willing to stay.  Then we have an honest conversation with the other person communicating the conditions under which we can remain.  Then if the relationship does break it is because they decided that they can’t stay under our terms.  So it is them who is leaving, not us.  We should not let things linger on.  If we know it is going nowhere, it is better to end it and move on than to let things linger for years.  If it is just not going to work, it is better to come to this understanding early and make a clean break than it is to allow things to linger on in a goofy way.

When things are really dysfunctional, what do we do?  Usually the thing that prevents us from getting out is emotional blackmail of an extreme sense.  We get out in such circumstances by gradually breaking the cycle of emotional blackmail, as described in an earlier post.  It is quite possible that the other person will not want to remain with us when they realize that they can no longer emotionally blackmail us.  In abuse situations, we need to realize that we are harming the other person by allowing them to abuse us, and we need to get out.  If it is really extreme threats either of suicide or real harm, then we need to be very careful, but we need to know that staying in such a situation will not make it go away.  We need to get out, it is just an issue of how.  In such cases, we should seek professional advice.

Cultivating healthy relationships: How to break the cycle of emotional blackmail

Kadampa Ryan Cultivating healthy relationships with others

The purpose of the next couple of posts is to explain how to deal with the more difficult cases.  In this post we will talk about how to break the cycle of emotional blackmail, and in the following posts we will discuss knowing how and when to get out of dysfunctional relationships and how to bring out the best in ourselves and others.

Emotional blackmail is when somebody applies an emotional penalty against us when we don’t do what they want us to do.  It is only a problem if we are inclined to change our behavior as a result of the emotional penalty they apply.  In other words, if we were planning on acting in the way the other person wants us to regardless of the emotional penalty they are threatening, then it is a non-issue and not worth responding to.  Better to just ignore it and do our thing.

The most important thing to know about blackmail is when somebody emotionally blackmails us and we give in to their threats we guarantee that they will attempt to blackmail us again in the future.  The other person knows they can control and manipulate us.  This is why it is a cycle.

So how do we break this cycle?  The starting point is we need to acknowledge that the only reason why people can emotionally blackmail us is because we let them.  At the end of the day we have choice over our actions.  We can choose not to give in to their threats.  The reason why we usually do give in is because we think it is not worth the hassle – the other person will make a bigger problem for us if we don’t go along than the benefit we otherwise would receive if we did what we think is best absent their threats.  So we decide that it is not worth the fight.  The flaw in this logic is that while it may be true on any given instance, the fact that this destructive pattern will be repeated again and again reverses the costs and benefits.  It is not just this one issue, but the blackmail will happen again and again on issue after issue until we finally break the cycle.

Before we take a stand against somebody blackmailing us we need to make sure that we are right.  It is not advisable to take a stand on issues where we are wrong because that just makes us stubborn and unreasonable.  To break the cycle we need to be willing to accept whatever penalty they throw at us and still not change our behavior.  This will demonstrate to them that their emotional weapon of choice is powerless over us.  We will not change as a result.  This eliminates the power of that particular emotional weapon forever.  They will know that it no longer works.  Even if they try to use that same emotional weapon again, it will be easier for us to again not give in.  Eventually they will no longer try using it because they know it doesn’t work anymore.

Please note when we do not give in to their first level of threats, they will most likely escalate the emotional penalty they throw at us to something worse.  We have to be willing to take that as well.  The point at which we give in is the point at which they have control over us.  They will seek out the point we are the most vulnerable on and attack that.  So in parallel we need to train in non-attachment to the things that they can threaten to take away from us.  We need to get to the point where mentally we don’t need these things anymore.  We need to get to the point where we don’t fear what they can do to us anymore.  Our happiness does not depend on having what they can take away from us nor does it depend on avoiding what harm they can throw at us (if they are abusive, then we often need to get out.  See the next couple of posts).

Cultivating this non-attachment can sometimes be very hard to do, especially when it comes to losing the love of those who are very close to us, such as our spouse, children or parents.  But as Saint Francis said, “ask that I may not so much seek to be loved as to love.”  In other words, it doesn’t matter whether they love us, it only matters whether we love them.  Our happiness does not depend on them loving us, rather our happiness depends on us being able to love others – something entirely within our control.  It is our attachment to things that others can take away from us which enables them to blackmail us.  If we didn’t have this attachment, it wouldn’t be possible to blackmail us.

We need to work gradually with this.  We often can’t break free from their systems of control too quickly because the other person won’t be able to take it and may do something really stupid.  We should start by not giving in on small things at first, and then when we think it is becoming too much (for them or for us), we strategically give in.  Then next time we push it a little bit further.  Eventually we absorb everything they have to throw at us, and none of it works, so they stop trying.

How do we deal with particularly difficult cases of others threatening to harm us or to harm themselves?  We need to be very careful here to assess how credible the threat is.  If it is truly credible, then we need to know at what point to stop.  Usually people who threaten things like harming us or harming themselves also employ a vast arsenal of smaller threats and emotional blackmail weapons.  By gradually wearing away at these smaller threats through the method described above, we can erode the foundation for them to call in their ultimate trump card.  Since we don’t give in on the smaller threats, they are forced to escalate until they reach their trump card.  But then they will have to threaten the ultimate on smaller and smaller things.  In such a situation, they are more likely themselves to not think it is worth it, for example, to kill themselves if we don’t go to the movie of their choice!  By eroding the smaller threats we make the ultimate threats less likely and less credible.  Sometimes we may need to call their bluff; and if we are right that they are bluffing, they become highly unlikely to employ that particular threat again.  This helps us because then we are not threatened in this way again and it helps them because they are forced to learn new ways of dealing with others.  If, however, the situation is really extreme, and we have done everything we can think of, then we might need to get them help and get ourself out.  We will talk about this in a later post.

How can we do all of this with a compassionate motivation?  Our motivation for breaking the cycle of emotional blackmail should be as compassionate as possible.  By allowing somebody to emotionally blackmail us we are enabling them to accumulate all sorts of negative karma for themselves which will result in them being similarly emotionally blackmailed in the future.  They blackmail us because they think their happiness depends on us doing particular things.  By giving in, we feed their attachment and therefore make them dependent.  This doesn’t help them.  We also need to help them realize that their happiness does not depend on what we do.

The bottom line is we don’t help people by indulging them in their delusions.  This doesn’t mean we jump to the extreme of never doing so in one go, but it does mean we have a general direction of our relationship with them.  With an intention to save others from all of the negative consequences described above, as an act of love towards them, we simply stop giving in.

It will be hard, and sometimes people may conclude it is not worth having a relationship with us if they can no longer manipulate us.  So be it – the relationship was doomed anyways.  But most of the time, we can bring about a change in the dynamic between us and others by engaging in Ghandi-style non-cooperation with wrong behavior.  If we succeed in doing so, after the long ordeal, our relationship will then be put on a healthy foundation and we can begin to enjoy the fruits of mutual love and respect.

Cultivating healthy relationships: How to make peace instead of retaliate

Kadampa Ryan 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden, Cultivating healthy relationships with others

When somebody harms us our first reaction is to retaliate.  We usually do this out of anger, with the wish to get the person back or teach them a lesson not to do this to us again in the future.  But in general, retaliation only makes the situation worse.  To understand this we need to examine who really benefits and who is really harmed when someone acts towards us in a way that would normally harm us.  If we check, we realize we actually benefit.  We have now paid off a long-standing karmic debt.  If we practice patience, our inner qualities are improved.  The other person loses – they create the causes to experience suffering in the future, and were miserable in the experience because they got angry.  It was our fault they did what they did to us anyway, since we created the cause for them to do it to us.  So actually it is we who should feel sorry towards the other person.

But non-retaliation does not mean that we become everyone’s favourite doormat, or that there aren’t circumstances where we need to be firm.  Here we make a distinction between wrathful actions and angry actions.  Anger is necessarily an uncontrolled deluded mind, whereas wrathful actions are engaged in with total control, knowing exactly what we are doing.  Anger is necessarily motivated by self-cherishing, whereas wrathful actions are necessarily motivated by compassion and the wish to help the other person.  We need to be honest with ourselves and check if it is sincerely for the sake of the other person that we are wrathful with them or are we just using Dharma to rationalize the conclusions of our self-cherishing and angry mind.  Anger is directed towards the another person, whereas wrathful actions are necessarily directed towards delusions.  Anger is directed towards anyone who harms us, whereas wrathful actions are generally directed towards those who have sufficient faith in us.  So we need to check how much faith the person has in us.  Anger is necessarily a reckless action, whereas wrathful actions require tremendous skill.  In general, they almost always backfire unless you have extreme skill.

How to resolve conflicts with others

What follows is some step-by-step advice we can follow for resolving conflicts with others:

  1. Face up to your own mistakes and faults.  The first step is admitting that you have done something wrong.  Normally we blame the other person for all conflicts, and then we come up with a million reasons justifying why we are faultless and they are to blame.  This just causes things to degenerate into a blame game, increasing defensiveness and the problems.  It is totally useless to do this because it leaves the solution to the problem in the court of the other person.  It is much better to take the responsibility all into our court, so that the solution is all in our court.  It is particularly useful to look at ourself from the perspective of the other person.  Try see yourself the way the other person sees you.  This will help you identify where you have made mistakes and will make your facing up to your faults more effective with the other person.  The key to wisdom is being able to view the world from the perspective of others.  By facing up to your own faults, and apologizing for what you have done wrong creates the space for the other person to do the same.  The key here is you need to be sincere.  It doesn’t work to just say, ‘it was all me’, when you don’t really believe that.  The key here is not to expect anything in return.  We can get mighty upset when we apologize for what we did wrong, and then the other person doesn’t reciprocate.  We should do the right thing, regardless of what the other person does.
  2. We need to relate to the other person’s pure intentions.  Nobody is evil in their own mind, even Stalin, Hitler, and Osama Bin Laden thought they were good.  So you need to put yourself into the mind of the other person and understand what their good intentions are, and relate to that.  A good example is those family members who care so much about you that they smother and control you because they cannot stand to see you suffer.  Of course, their controlling behaviour makes things worse, but it is coming from a good place.  Likewise, we all know people who want all the right things but they use all the wrong means to attain them.  By relating to the person’s pure potential, it functions to draw it out, and shows them that you understand their position.
  3. Start first by establishing common ground.  When we are in a conflict we tend to focus so much on the differences that we lose sight of the much more significant commonalities.  In most conflict situations, it is inappropriate attention to focus on the minor differences and neglect the vast swaths of commonality.  It is from the space of common ground that differences can be resolved.
  4. In working through the differences try the following approach:  For those issues which are not important, or you are wrong, graciously practice accepting defeat and offering the victory.  There are so many things that we fight for that are really irrelevant.  For those issues that are important and that there are differences on, stand your ground without getting angry and clarify your intention.

These steps will help lay the groundwork for de-escalating the conflict in your life.  The other person will see you are trying to make things better and you are trying to act constructively.  It is much harder to act unreasonably in response to somebody who is being reasonable and constructive.  This helps not only you, but it also helps them.

Finally, if we want to eliminate even the possibility of being harmed, we need to surrender our lives and our karma completely to our Dharma protector Dorje Shugden.  We get angry because we wish things were different than they are.  When we rely on Dorje Shugden, everything is perfect for our swiftest possible enlightenment.  The situation may be uncomfortable and even painful, but we will know it is good for us.  We will know it is by working through this emotional challenge that we will grow spiritually and move closer to enlightenment.  We will gain the realizations we need to help others in the future who are suffering from similar problems.  In short, our difficulties will have a clear spiritual purpose.  If we genuinely feel that things are indeed “perfect”, then there is no basis for us wishing things were different than they are.  Therefore, there will be no basis for an angry response to arise in our mind when we are harmed.  Conflict may still occur, but we will not experience that conflict as a problem.  Through our not adding fuel to the fires of anger in the world, gradually the relationships around us will become increasingly harmonious, peaceful and rewarding.