Podcast

Taking happiness and suffering on the path (part 3)
by Lama Tsering Everest

The self is always insecure; it’s not really true, it’s incidental and that incidental sensation of self is always insecure. So, it’s always trying to prove that it’s real, but I am, I am and I am important, I mean I can see you, I can judge you, I can like you, I can dislike you, I can make my efforts to get from you what I want, or to avoid from you what I don’t want; I am important, not only am I important, mine is important, me and mine. And we have a priority, me and what I think and what I like and where I want to go and what I want to do is more important than you; what you like, where you want to go, what’s important for you, ok, well, fine, as long as it’s not a problem for me.

So we have a very problematic relationship between self and other and that produces a lot of negative energy. This dynamic, that is not really absolutely true but relatively functioning, this dynamic produces karma. The sensation of self and its interaction with the sensation of other and when I hurt and harm another because I am important and I deserve it and it’s perfectly justifiable from my own point of view, then I create negative karma, negative energy.
It’s not that it is negative in essence, in essence it’s never moved from absolute truth, it’s never been divided, it has always been undivided. But like throwing a boomerang, it comes back from where it was thrown. So if I hurt or harm another because I am important, looks like I have thrown an action, but eventually that action simply returns home, nothing else for it to do, there is no other place for it to go.

And so again, this is why Lord Buddha said: “Life is suffering” because we don’t understand how our mind is working, what you serve in life is what you get. So, there are two processes then to the path of moving from ignorance, not knowing the true nature to knowing the true nature, two processes: one is the process of managing the sensation of separation, and one is eliminating the separation. Now we manage the sensation of separation for our own benefit. Excuse me, for me, for me and mine, this us and them thing, they can just go do whatever they want, but me and mine, this is how I am interacting with the phenomena now.

But from the Buddhist point of view, we have to be able to manage the phenomena without cultivating this error in self-priority; the original mistake is the sensation of self, and from that we project self on others and call it other. So what that means is that we have already got a story going here, we have already got a full blowing sensation of me and everything that is not me, we have already got all the ramifications of all of our actions, our thoughts, our words that have already been moving in this story, the sensation of the separation between me and you. Liking, not liking, wanting, not wanting, hurting and harming, not only this lifetime but countless lifetimes, the habit is intense.

And so what Lord Buddha is saying is you have to change your mind and the deepest way to change your mind is to realize you are not the most important person here; everybody wants happiness, nobody wants to suffer, just like you. You know how different our world would be if we could just incorporate that? Just that, not all the other, you know, unbelievably profound points of perspective, adjustment of perspective that Buddhism provides, just that one, just understanding that when you meet someone, whoever they are, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, they are doing that because they want to be happy and that is what is motivating them. They don’t really know what causes happiness, just like you don’t know, really don’t know what causes happiness and just like you they are trying to sidestep suffering and that may mean that they treat you badly, because maybe right now, in this moment, you are the cause or the object to blame for their suffering. Just that much adjustment to the mindset would make an unbelievable difference in our world, but that doesn’t happen, you know, on mass, that happens one by one; one by one understanding that other people are not to blame for your story. That’s a big deal, I mean, think about not blaming anybody for your story, not your mother’s fault, not your father’s fault, not your ex-husband’s fault, not your kid’s fault, not the government’s fault, not the weather’s fault, not the television’s fault. Think of the things we blame, not your wife’s fault, not your mother-in-law’s fault; I am very sensitive to mother-in-laws now, they have a bad reputation and so do cockroaches, they have a very, very, very bad reputation, you know, people just really don’t like them. So, imagine our world if we didn’t blame, if you didn’t blame, if nobody blamed somebody else.

So this topic of taking suffering and happiness on the path, in order to really do that, you have to understand that the path, the journey, a spiritual journey is a journey to realizing the true nature of your mind; that God didn’t do this to you, this is the product of not understanding our own mind. It doesn’t mean that bad things didn’t happen, it means that your mind perceived the bad thing happening. If we can change the mind we can eliminate suffering. If you try, Rinpoche always used this example, if you have to pass a very thorny field you shouldn’t try to put leather over the whole field, you should put leather on your legs and feet. To try to change everybody else in this life, you are going to wear out before it’s finished; honestly, you are not going to get much done. But if you change your own mind and you come to realize that nature, non-divided perfection that permeates your being, you could be a lot more effective in benefiting others. If you leather your own legs and feet you can pass the field, you could actually plant something different there.

So, now, what we have that happens in our life that is suffering, is the product of the previous actions; when somebody comes to you aggressive or harmful or hurtful, like a fruit grown in a tree of bad fruit in a bad tree, at some point a seed had to be planted for that tree to grow and for that fruit to ripen; and what Buddhism is saying is deal with the seeds, don’t plant those seeds, don’t hurt and harm others; if you hurt and harm others eventually the boomerang comes back; they are just people who want to be happy and when it comes back that somebody hurts you or harms you, you should own it, own it and understand “All right, this was a boomerang I didn’t know, I shouldn’t have thrown that”. And here at this point in the teaching, I think because of our puritan background, we get a little bit upset at the fact that we could have caused these things to happen to us; this isn’t in this lifetime, in previous lifetimes. That’s a little bit hard to swallow because how do we know? But one teacher, he said: you can’t blame the cheese for the behavior of the milk; the cheese is the byproduct of the milk. In our lifetime now, who we are now, it’s not that you have a bad personality or a bad behavior, I mean, you may, but not the things that happen to you now, are not a result of you being a bad person; these are the results of previous reactions to phenomena that now you can’t even tell what happened.

Like when you were a kid and you reacted to something in a way that you didn’t understand any better, as a result maybe somebody got hurt, maybe somebody’s feelings were hurt, maybe somebody’s body was hurt, but we didn’t really mean that, it wasn’t like a viciousness or a violence or a terribleness, well, maybe it was…But all the things that happen to us could not come to us from some other; they come from not understanding how our mind works.           

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