Many people have an intellectual understanding of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, but it is not always clear how we actually use this wisdom in our daily lives.  In the next two posts, I will try explain what I do in the hope that it proves helpful. In this first post, I will provide a quick refresher on the meaning of emptiness (or at least my understanding of its meaning…).  In the second post, I will explain how I try use this wisdom in the meditation break.

For me, the sign that our understanding of emptiness is correct in the meditation break is we feel personally responsible for everything, and the action that follows is to choose to change our mind about whatever we have a problem with. 

Venerable Geshe-la explains that phenomena are nothing other than “mere karmic appearances of mind.”  There are three components to this:  “mere appearance,” “karmic appearance” and “of mind.”   Mere appearance means everything is like a dream.  The only difference between regular dreams and our waking world is the mind that does the dreaming.  During sleep, it is our subtle mind that does the dreaming; and during the waking state, it is our waking mind.  But both are equally dreams in that everything is created/projected by our mind – and there is nothing behind any of these projections that they refer to.  All of reality is only dream, and nothing more. 

Karmic appearance means the cause of each mere appearance is our own karma.  Each karmic seed can be thought of as a link to a “YouTube” video (many layers of meaning to that), and the karmic appearance itself is when the link has been activated and the appearances begin to run for a certain duration.  Each video is a karmic echo of your own past actions. 

 The Sutra view of emptiness brings us to the understanding that all things are mere karmic appearances.  People will then often fall into the extreme of nothingness, thinking that things do not exist at all.  The middle way is things do exist as mere karmic appearances.  But what does that mean?  Is there something there or not?  Yes, there is something there, but what is there is only the appearance of something being there.  It is an illusion, yes, but an illusion of what?  An illusion of something real.  There is nothing else there. 

But that begs the question, what then is the nature of this illusion?  What is the illusion “made of”?  This is where the “of mind” comes into play from mere karmic appearance of mind.  “Of mind” means the nature of these karmic appearances is mind.  For me, the easiest way to understand this is with the analogy of waves on an ocean.  Our mind is like an ocean, and each appearance is like a wave on that ocean.  You cannot separate the wave from the ocean, the ocean is the nature of the wave, yet you can still distinguish one wave from another.  What creates the waves?  The karmic seeds on the floor of the ocean of our mind.  When activated, the karmic seeds push up a currents which when they reach the surface (our waking mind) create waves.  Just as different waves have different shapes and reflections, so too different karmic waves take on the form of different karmic appearances.  But they are all inseparable from the ocean of our mind, yet we can still nominally distinguish one wave from another.

The enlightened mind is one in which all karmic waves have been gathered and pacified into the completely still ocean of our clear light mind.  When the karmic waves have settled, the waters of our mind become increasingly clear until they become the completely clear light.  All obstructions have unwound themselves and in this clear stillness we not only know the ultimate nature of everything directly and simultaneously as one nature, we feel as if we are this completely pure and clear ocean of omniscient clear light.  It is from this basis that the meditation break re-emerges.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool we twice, shame on me.  We all know this lesson from childhood, but it is amazing how easily it is for our delusions to deceive us again and again.  Attachment in particular!  It promises all sorts of goodies, and we go after the objects of our attachment.  Then, just when we think we are going to get the happiness we were chasing, it deceives us again.  You cannot help but reminded of the old Charlie Brown cartoons where Lucy puts the football down for Charlie Brown to kick, he goes to kick it and she pulls it away and he falls on his back.  She then promises him that she won’t do it again, Charlie Brown believes her, he goes to kick it and she does it again.  He keeps believing her again and again, and she keeps pulling it away again and again.  We are just like Charlie Brown, believing the Lucy of our attachment – every time, she deceives us.  The only thing reliable about our delusions is they will deceive us every time. 

What we tend to do is project false hopes onto unreliable things, and then we feel terribly deceived and let down when those things don’t live up to our expectations.  Did these things or these people prove unreliable?  Yes, they did.  But our problem was we foolishly believed it would be otherwise.  The fundamental lesson of renunciation is learning to accept that the nature of samsara’s pleasures is to be deceptive – they give no contentment, only torment.  Once we have accepted this to be true, we are no longer fooled, and we stop going down the deluded roads to begin with.

So what is reliable?  The only thing that is reliable is our own practice of virtue.  That will never deceive us or let us down.  Instead of investing our hopes in others that they will give us something back and somehow fulfill our voids, instead we should invest our energies in selflessly loving, cherishing and helping others.  A life selflessly working for others is its own reward.  We do not expect anything in return from them, we rather just do the right thing towards them.  Karma is perfectly reliable.  Being patient, being kind, loving and supporting those around us, especially our family, will never let us down. 

Our family members may even let us down, such as our children blaming us for all of their problems or our parents turning out to be deluded beings struggling with life and their own delusions (just like us, but contrary to our unrealistic hopes), but their doing so is just a karmic echo of our having done the same towards others in the past.  If others let us down, it is because we have let others down in the past.  If others create false hopes in us, it is because we have done the same to others in the past.  Does it suck when this happens?  Of course it does.  But the lesson to be learned is to resolve to never do the same to others.  Sometimes life’s lessons are painful, but if we learn them then they won’t be for nothing.  Later, we may even come to view such lessons as our greatest blessings.

Venerable Geshe-la says that every living being shares the same basic wish to be happy all the time.  The problem is we are confused about what makes us happy.  Normally, we think our happiness is a passive reaction to favorable external circumstances, so therefore when our circumstances are less than favorable we suffer.  The fundamental revolution of the spiritual path is it provides us with a perfectly reliable method for building our own true happiness within our own mind that we can take with us in every situation of our life, and indeed for all our future lives.

At the root of it, the path to happiness is quite simple:  we need to “find the right words, and then make them sincere.”  How can we understand this?  We are happy if our mind is happy.  Our mind is happy if our mind is at peace, regardless of our external circumstance.  The method for making our mind peaceful is to mix it with wisdom and virtue.  The more deeply and irreversibly we mix our mind with wisdom and virtue, the more peaceful and therefore happy we become.  There is no other method for lasting happiness, and this method alone is sufficient.  This doesn’t mean we don’t also have to successfully manage our external affairs, rather it means if we want to be happy while we manage our external affairs,  we need to actively strive to mix our mind with virtue while doing them.

So how do we mix our mind with virtue?  Through meditation.  Meditation is nothing other than the method by which we mix our mind with virtue.  Meditation is not just sitting cross-legged with our eyes closed on our meditation cushion in the morning.  We can actually meditate all of the time by actively trying to mix our mind with wisdom and virtue all of the time in every situation of our life.

We mix our mind with virtue at three different levels:  listening, contemplating and placement meditation.  These three levels can simply be understood as “finding the right words and then making them sincere.”  Enlightened beings have attained the state of perfect happiness all of the time.  They then explain how they did it and encourage us to do the same.  They specifically, with their words, explain the main minds we need to generate within ourselves, such as an appreciation of our precious human life, the wish to become free from all delusions, love, compassion and the wisdom realizing emptiness.  Their words are not only a very precise reflection of the minds they have generated, but mixing our mind with them is the path itself to the same state.

When we listen to or read their words, our goal is to gain an intellectual understanding of what they mean.  We may or may not agree yet with the idea, but at least we intellectually understand it.  This is finding the right words.  Once we have done so, we then test the words to see if they are in fact true.  We analyze and contemplate the meaning of the words, examining whether they are true and applicable and sound.  In short, we validate the truth of the words for ourselves.  Our contemplation is complete when what we intellectually understood through listening becomes true for ourselves.  We know the meaning of the words is true, correct and reliable.  Placement meditation is then striving to keep this truth alive and functioning in our mind.  We try maintain the continuum of our understanding or realizing of this truth.  It is largely an issue of continually recalling the truth we have understood.  Our placement meditation functions to transform what we understand to be true into, as Venerable Tharchin says, “an acquisition of our personality.”  We do not simply realize we have a precious human life, but we are actively seizing it.  We do not simply realize others are precious, but we become a loving person, etc.  In the beginning, we have ‘moments’ where we are loving; but through continual training we become loving all of the time in everything we do.  When this is the case, we are said to have a “spontaneous realization” of love, in other words, being a loving person just comes natural all of the time.  In short, contemplation and placement meditation is the method for “making [the correct words] sincere.”  We not only believe them to be true but we live every moment of our lives as an expression of their truth. 

So how can we do this all of the time, even while managing our external affairs?  It is simple:  we manage our external affairs by responding to them with wisdom and virtue.  We listen to, contemplate and meditate on the Dharma specifically in terms of how it can be used and applied to the circumstances and challenges of our life, whatever they happen to be.  We can do this not only in formal meditation, but as we go about our daily business.  Wisdom and virtue is the correct response to every circumstance, both in terms of making us internally happy, but also in the sense of making all of our external activities successful.  If we can do this all the time, every moment of our life will be happy, meaningful and bring us one step closer to the final goal.

The entire spiritual path is a process of abandoning our faults and cultivating our good qualities.  The approach we take to doing this determines whether our spiritual path is a “joyful” one or a miserable one.  Due to conditioning from our childhood and society, we have a bad habit of beating ourselves up and making ourselves feel bad about ourselves due to our faults, believing this is the way to get ourselves to change.  Such an approach is completely self-defeating.  Instead, we need to motivate ourselves positively by feeling good about aspiring to doing things right and living up to higher principles of wisdom.  In short, we need to “identify with becoming better,” and live out that narrative.  Likewise, with others in our life, we need to stop trying to change others by making them feel bad about themselves and instead we should see them as “becoming better,” and we should encourage them to continue in that sense by helping them feel good about themselves for the fact that they are getting better.

One of the main obstacles to people embarking upon and progressing along the spiritual path is they don’t have a healthy way of relating to their own faults.  Our parents quite often used “guilt trips” or made us feel bad about ourselves as a means of getting us to change.  It is not their fault that they did this, since that is how all of society is programmed.  We often get such negative reinforcement in school, at work, amongst our friends, etc.  So when we start on the spiritual path and we learn what the correct and perfect ways of doing things are, we realize how far we are from that ideal.  It is almost as if the more Dharma we learn, the more we realize we are a total failure, and we beat ourselves up more and more.  This is a very common “Dharma neurosis.”  We even think if only we beat ourselves up enough, then we will get ourselves to change.

But the reality is such an approach not only makes us miserable and feel bad about ourselves, but it actually blocks our change.  When we feel bad about ourselves, we feel like we cannot do anything right.  Changing ourselve is the hardest thing we will ever do in life, and when we feel like we can’t do anything right we destroy our own confidence in our ability to change and we destroy our capacity to do so by beating ourselves up.  Guilt is anger towards ourselves.  Anger seeks to harm the object of our anger.  When the object of our anger is ourselves, we harm ourselves and therefore undermine our own capacity to change.  When we then try to change, but fail to do so, we really then feel like a total failure and lose all hope.  We then beat ourselves up even more in a vicious cycle.  There is no bottom to this pit or end to this process.   It ends in suicide.

Instead, we need to motivate ourselves by “feeling good about getting better.”  We need to let go of identifying with our faults and with being a failure, and instead choose to identify with “somebody getting better with effort.”  We should take the time to identify and rejoice in our little successes, and to see how, even though we still have a long way to do, we are heading in the right direction.  Our bad habits are just that – bad habits, they are not intrinsic parts of ourselves.  We are not our faults, we are rather somebody shedding all that isn’t us.  When we identify with “getting better” we enter into a virtuous cycle of feeling good about ourselves, which increases our confidence and capacity, which then enables us to change ourselves even more.  It is not arrogance to identify with getting better because we are honestly acknowledging our faults, but are at the same time confident in our ability to overcome them with effort.

We also need to be very careful that we don’t try change others by making them feel bad about themselves.  This is an easy trap to fall into, especially with those in our family or those who work for us.  Because we do this to ourselves, we do it to others.  I have a terrible habit of doing this with those I love.  The fundamental reason why is because I have aversion to being around people with faults.  But how can one be a bodhisattva, somone committed to help all beings overcome all of their faults, if we can’t stand being around people who have faults?!?  It is a total contradiction.  Because it bothers me that they have faults, I get upset at them for having them.  I focus only on what they do wrong because that is what bothers me.  Because I focus only on what they do wrong, they too see within themselves only what they do wrong.  Because I don’t like that in them, they don’t like it in themselves.  Because I am, even if only mentally, beating them up about their faults, they too then start beating themselves up about their faults.  They then enter into the guilt traps described above.  They become worse, I get more frustrated and we all feed off of each other in a negative way.  It is very unhealthy and most unhelpful.

When instead I see them as “somebody getting better” and I help them see that in themselves, then they can identifywith  themselves as “somebody getting better” and feel good about themselves.

So both with ourselves and with those around us, we need to stop beating ourselves or others up over our faults, but rather identify with “getting better.”  This one simple change will transform our spiritual path from one of self-flaggelation to one of moving from joy to joy.