Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (13 page)

The third attitude is that of the shepherd and shepherdess, whose flock always comes first. This is the grandfather with the frogs or the pilot of the sinking plane. It’s the story of firemen entering a burning building or a father risking his life to save his child. The shepherd and shepherdess automatically put others before themselves.

Almost everyone assumes that putting others first is how we’re always supposed to approach the warrior commitment. And if we do anything less, we criticize ourselves. But one way of entry isn’t better than another. It could be said that we evolve toward the attitude of the shepherd and shepherdess, but it’s a natural evolution. The other two approaches are no less valid. The importance of this teaching is to point out that all three approaches are admirable, beautiful, to-be-applauded ways of making the warrior commitment.

In fact, most of us use all three approaches. There are probably many examples in your life of working on yourself with the aspiration to be present and useful to other people. And there are times when your sorrow has connected
you with the sorrow of others, when your grief or physical pain has been a catalyst for appreciating what another person is going through. There are also times when you spontaneously put others first.

Coldheartedness and narrow-mindedness are not the kinds of habits we want to reinforce. They won’t predispose us to awakening—in fact, they will keep us stuck. So we make the warrior commitment—take the vow to care for one another—then do our best to never turn our backs on anyone. And when we falter, we renew our commitment and move on, knowing that even the awakened ones of the past understood what it felt like to relapse. Otherwise, how could they have any idea about what other beings go through? Otherwise, how could they have cultivated patience and forgiveness, loving-kindness and compassion?

The Third Commitment

Committing to Embrace the World Just as It Is

9

Nowhere to Hide

W
ITH THE THIRD COMMITMENT
, we step fully into groundlessness, relaxing into the continually changing nature of our situation and experiencing it as awakened energy, as the manifestation of basic goodness. In some sense, this is nothing new. It’s what we’ve been training in all along. But experientially it’s a big leap forward, and it points us toward a major shift in consciousness. We take what we’ve integrated from the previous commitments, particularly being fully present with an open heart, and up the ante. Here the emphasis is on
fully,
and the demand to put
fully present
into practice is far greater. This definitely squeezes the old self-absorbed habit of ego clinging considerably. The feeling of nowhere to hide can be quite intense.

Once, when I had spent several months devoting myself as continuously as I could to this practice, I complained to Chögyam Trungpa that I felt as if I would jump out of my skin. I was irritated by even specks of dust and ready to snap at people all the time. He replied that this was because the practice was demanding that I be sane, demanding that I grow up, and I wasn’t used to that yet.

The third commitment, traditionally known as the Samaya Vow, is a commitment to embrace the world just as it is.
Samaya
is a Tibetan word meaning “sacred vow” or “binding vow.” It entails a coming together with our total
experience, an unshakable bond with life. With this commitment, we accept that we are bound to reality, bound to everything we perceive in every moment. There is no way to get away from our experience, nowhere to go other than right where we are. We surrender to life. We give in and settle down with all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, thoughts, and people we encounter. This is a commitment to not reject anything. The words of the Tibetan Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse express this beautifully:

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

The attitude of the third commitment is that we live in a world that is intrinsically good, intrinsically awake, and our path is to realize this. Simply put, the practice at this stage is to turn toward your experience, all of it, and never turn away.

First, you continue to live by the other commitments. You practice mindfulness, coming back over and over to exactly where you are and what you’re experiencing: feet on the floor, knee hurting, warm water flowing over your hands, winter air stinging your eyes, sound of hammering, smell of coffee.

Then you add to that a sense of deep appreciation for each of those unique and precious moments. You may wish the workmen would stop hammering—it’s been going on all day, every day, for a month, and you’re fed up with it. But it will pass. And when you look back a year later, it will
seem as if the hammering were over in a finger snap. Hearing the hammering is a fleeting, transitory experience, and each time the hammer hits is a unique moment. You will never hear sound exactly like that again.

No matter how irritated you are by what you’re hearing, each sound is worthy of your attention. When you listen to it with appreciation, it begins to draw you out of yourself, out of the small, self-centered world that is always just about Me. When you have this kind of genuine connection with yourself and the world, you may begin to encounter wakefulness. You suddenly feel as if you’re in a vast, wide-open space with unlimited breathing room. It’s as if you’ve stepped out of a small, dark, stuffy tent and found yourself standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. This is the place of just being. It’s not an otherworldly, ethereal place. You haven’t transcended the ordinary details of your life. Quite the opposite. You’ve finally contacted them 100 percent, and they’ve become a doorway to what in the Vajrayana tradition is called sacred world. Sacred not in the sense of religious or holy but in the sense of precious, rare, fleeting, fundamentally genuine and good.

There are some verses by Chögyam Trungpa that describe what such a world is like. He begins by describing sight as a doorway to sacred world:

Whatever is seen with the eyes is vividly unreal in emptiness, yet there is still form.

“Vividly unreal in emptiness” refers to the ordinary, everyday world, empty of concept, free of labels, clearly perceived in all of its brilliance but never fully graspable. Then the verse goes on to say “yet there is still form.” Emptiness
and form are forever inseparable. What we see—our perception of ordinary, no-big-deal sights—is the form, the manifestation of emptiness, of awakened energy. From the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we fall asleep—and even in our dreams—there is continuous, ceaseless manifestation. We always have the opportunity to let our sight connect us with the preciousness of this sacred world.

Emptiness is not a void, a blank space where nothing is happening. The whole point is that discovering basic goodness—discovering the awakeness, the is-ness, the nowness of things—doesn’t happen by transcending ordinary reality. It comes from appreciating simple experiences free of story line. When we see a red car with a dented door; when we feel heat or cold, softness or hardness; when we taste a plum or smell rotting leaves, these simple, direct experiences are our contact with basic wakefulness, with basic goodness, with sacred world. It’s only by fully touching our relative experience that we discover the fresh, timeless, ultimate nature of our world.

Once in the early seventies, a student stood up at a talk and demanded that Chögyam Trungpa tell him what enlightenment is. I’ve always remembered his answer. “Enlightenment,” he said, “is like hearing a bugle or smelling tobacco for the first time.” That is the viewpoint behind this teaching on the third commitment. If we hide from our experience or dismiss it as insignificant, we are losing a chance for enlightenment.

Continuing, the verse says,

Whatever is heard with the ears is the echo of emptiness, yet real.

Hearing, along with our other perceptions, is also a doorway to sacred world. Whatever we hear is the echo, the sound, of emptiness, of awakened energy, ungraspable yet audible. It’s also “the clear and distinct utterance of the guru”—the voice of the teacher. If someone is talking to us, even when we don’t like what they’re saying, that’s not just some ordinary schmuck nattering on. It’s the voice of the teacher, the sound of emptiness, of awakened energy manifesting. If a raven outside our window is piercing our eardrums with its raucous cry, that’s the sound of awakened energy, the voice of the teacher waking us up.

There is nothing we can see or hear that isn’t a manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn’t a doorway to sacred world. This is the view of the third commitment. It’s the view we commit to when we vow to embrace the world just as it is. We vow to appreciate ourselves and our world. We vow to turn toward and never turn away.

Ordinarily, we are constantly projecting our preferences onto whatever is manifesting. Everything comes with our mixed feelings—our personal preferences, our cultural baggage—as well as with
plenty
of shenpa. But as Chögyam Trungpa said, “It’s like saying ‘oatmeal.’ Some people like hot cereal and some people hate it. Nevertheless, oatmeal remains oatmeal.”

If we look at the snow outside our window in winter, we can see its color, how it falls, how it accumulates on the ground and on cars and on tree branches, how it forms piles of different shapes. We can see its crystals sparkling in sunlight and the blue-white of its shadows. We can see snow as snow, without adding anything extra. But usually we don’t see snow that way. Our vision is clouded by our
emotional reactions. We like it, or we don’t like it. It makes us happy, or it makes us sad. It makes us anxious or irritated, because we have to shovel it before we go to work and we’re already running late.

Even with mixed feelings, there are degrees of intensity. We can like the snow with clinging, with shenpa (“I really hope it sticks so we can ski this weekend”), but we can also like it without clinging, without shenpa. We can
not
like it with shenpa, with righteous indignation (“How dare it snow on the day of my big party”), but we can also
not
like it without shenpa, without any emotional attachment. But regardless of how we feel about snow, it’s still snow—awakened energy manifesting, just as it is. It’s possible to see it without a story line.

Chögyam Trungpa’s verses go on to say,

Good or bad, happy or sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

Whatever occurs in your mind—thoughts about getting revenge or how to cheat on your taxes or what you’re planning to do when this meeting is over; spiritual thoughts, aggressive thoughts, anxious thoughts, cheerful thoughts—whatever occurs is the manifestation of emptiness, the manifestation of enlightened mind. The path to unshakable well-being lies in being completely present and open to all sights, all sounds, all thoughts—never withdrawing, never hiding, never needing to jazz them up or tone them down.

This is a tricky idea to grasp, no question. That’s why we train in the first two commitments, with the building blocks of refraining from harming with our speech or actions and not closing our mind and heart to anyone. We need that
deep training to reach the place where everything becomes the path of awakening.

Much of the training in the first two commitments involves minimizing our tendency to pin our labels and preconceptions, our views and opinions, on everything we perceive. With the third commitment, we take that still further. It’s not that we can’t have views and opinions about oatmeal or snow—or anything else, for that matter. It’s just that we don’t cling to those views. Instead, we try them on, have fun with them, like an actor or actress in a play. We can dance with life when it’s a wild party completely out of control, and we can dance with life when it’s as tender as a lover. We work with whatever we have, with whoever we are, right now.

This commitment is about engaging with the simplicity of life, with life just as it comes, without frills. We begin to see our views and opinions—even the ones that have a lot of heat in them—as no more, no less than our views and opinions. Snow remains snow. Oatmeal remains oatmeal, whether we want it never to be on the menu for the rest of time or we love it so much that we open a health spa where it’s on the menu at every meal.

Consider another example: smoking. Some people think smoking is bad, the worst thing on the planet. Some people love smoking and feel abused by all the restrictions that are being imposed on them. Nevertheless, smoking remains smoking. You may be reading this and thinking that you’re not sure you buy this perspective—everyone
knows
cigarette smoking is a health hazard, and look, here’s a 570-page study on lung cancer and the effects of secondhand smoke. But consider the vehemence with which you oppose the idea that smoking is just smoking or the vehemence
with which you support it. Smoking may not be intrinsically right or wrong, but it certainly stirs up a lot of shenpa.

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions. And at bottom, those opinions are merely our efforts to escape the underlying uneasiness of being human, the uneasiness of feeling like we can’t get ground under our feet. So we hold on to our fixed ideas of
this is how it is
and disparage any opposing views. But imagine what the world would be like if we could come to see our likes and dislikes as merely likes and dislikes, and what we take to be intrinsically true as just our personal viewpoint.