The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (13 page)

Refugee:
that’s what it means to become a Buddhist, that’s what it means to become one who wholeheartedly is using one’s life to wake up instead of to go to sleep. It’s very inconvenient. Trungpa Rinpoche was a man who appreciated the lessons of inconvenience; he was also a man who lived wholeheartedly. It didn’t matter if it was convenient or inconvenient. There was some sense of wholehearted journey in his life. Once you know that the purpose of life is simply to walk forward and continually to use your life to wake you up rather than put you to sleep, then there’s that sense of wholeheartedness about inconvenience, wholeheartedness about convenience.

Rinpoche emphasized inconvenience. For instance, he always kept everybody waiting for his talks, I don’t think through any plan on his part, but simply because he was who he was. There was an
abhisheka
(empowerment ceremony) for which he kept people waiting for three days. It was often the case that when he would finally do something, you had so completely given up that you didn’t think that it would ever really happen. When he wanted everyone to move to Nova Scotia, he used to tease people
about their comfort orientation. He said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to want to do it because it might mean leaving your nice house or your nice job. You might not have an easy time finding a job in Nova Scotia.’ Sometimes I think he wanted people to move to Nova Scotia just because it was so inconvenient. Comfort orientation murders the spirit – that was the general message. Opting for coziness, having that as your prime reason for existing, becomes a continual obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, doing something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land.

Rinpoche’s oldest son, the Sawang Ösel Mukpo, told me that Rinpoche told him that he liked to arrange the furniture in his rooms so that it was just slightly uncomfortable to reach for a glass. Instead of putting the table close so that everything was comfortable, he liked it to be about half an inch too far away so that you had to reach. Rinpoche also said many times that it was good to wear your clothes a little too tight. He himself used to wear an obi, the wide belt that goes with a kimono, underneath his clothes, really tight, so that if he slouched, he would be uncomfortable – he had to keep his ‘head and shoulders.’ He designed uniforms. I remember one he designed to be worn at a certain ceremony: it was made of scratchy wool with a high collar, and the temperature outside was about ninety degrees with high humidity as well. He contended that those inconveniences actually perk you up, keep you awake,
present gaps in your cozy, seamless reality of centralizing into yourself.

When I was feeling a little off these last couple of days, it was like a prod to figure out, ‘What am I going to do, just cave in? Yeah, I’ll just cave in. Who cares?’ Then I noticed that other people began to feel uneasy because I had snapped at them. They hadn’t done anything wrong; I was just feeling irritable. You realize that how you feel affects people, and yet you don’t want to pretend that you feel good when actually you feel horrible. It’s like a koan and you’re left with it. If you’re really wholehearted, you’re continually left with this koan of inconvenience. It’s so inconvenient to find that you’re irritable, that you have a headache. It’s inconvenient to get sick, so inconvenient to lose your great radiating presence and be just a normal shmuck. It’s so inconvenient to have people not regard you as wonderful, so inconvenient to have people see that you have egg in your beard, that in the middle of the oryoki ceremony there’s dental floss stuck to the bottom of your foot. It’s so inconvenient to find yourself embarrassed, so inconvenient to find yourself not measuring up.

The very first teaching I ever got that I can remember was at a dharmadhatu, one of the centers Rinpoche established. One of the older students was giving a talk, and he began by saying, ‘If you are interested in these teachings, then you have to accept the fact that you’re never going to get it all together.’ It was a shocking statement to me. He
said with a lot of clarity. ‘You are never going to get it all together, you’re never going to get your act together, fully, completely. You’re never going to get all the little loose ends tied up.’

Life is so inconvenient. It’s so inconvenient running this abbey, I can’t tell you. You just get the kitchen together and the bookkeeper leaves. You just get the books together and the housekeeper leaves. You just get a good housekeeper and a good kitchen and a good bookkeeper, and suddenly there are no monks or nuns in the monastery. Then maybe everything’s working and the water goes off for a week and there’s no electricity and the food starts rotting. It’s so inconvenient.

Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following that path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life. Not only that, sometimes when you just get flying and it all feels so good and you think, ‘This is it, this is the path that has heart,’ you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody’s looking at you. You say to yourself, ‘What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face.’ Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior’s journey, it
pricks you, it pokes you. It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

^*
An intermediate state. The term usually refers to the period between death and the next rebirth.

eighteen
the four reminders

T
he traditional four reminders are basic reminders of why one might make a continual effort to return to the present moment. The first one reminds us of our precious human birth; the second, of the truth of impermanence; the third, of the law of karma; and the fourth, of the futility of continuing to wander in samsara. Today I’d like to talk about these four ways of continually waking yourself up and remembering why you practice, why when you go home you might try to set up a space where you can meditate each day and just be fully with yourself the way you have been here for a month. Why even bother to wake up rather than go to sleep? Why spend the rest of your life sowing seeds of wakefulness, aspiring to take a leap and open up more and become a warrior? Why? When there are all these financial worries, marital problems, problems with friends, problems with communication, problems with everything, and you feel trapped, why bother to go and sit? Why bother to look up at the sky and try to find a gap or some space in that thick discursiveness? We ask ourselves these very basic questions all the time.

The teachings on the four reminders address these questions. You can reflect on them any time, whether you live at Gampo Abbey or in Vancouver or in Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the top of Mount Everest, or the bottom of the ocean. Whether you’re a
naga
(water-being) or a ghost or a human or a hell-being or a god-realm person – whatever you are – you can reflect on these four reminders of why you practice.

The first reminder is our precious birth. All of us sitting here have what is traditionally called a good birth, one that is rare and wonderful. All you have to do is pick up
Time
magazine and compare yourself to almost anyone on any page to realize that, even though you do have your miseries, your psychological unpleasantnesses, your feelings of being trapped, and so on, they’re kind of rarefied compared with how it could be in terms of being run over by tanks, starving to death, being bombed, being in prison, being seriously addicted to alcohol or drugs or anything else that’s self-destructive. The other day I read about a nineteen-year-old girl addicted to crack, nine months pregnant, whose life consists of shooting up and then going out to prostitute herself so she can get enough money to shoot up again. She was about to give birth to a baby who was going to be addicted to crack. That was her whole life; she would continue to do that until she died. On the other hand, living a cushy life in which everything is totally luxurious is also not at all helpful. You don’t have the opportunity
to develop much understanding about how people suffer or much sense of an open heart. You’re all caught up in the good feeling of having two or three hundred pairs of shoes in your closet, like Imelda Marcos, or a beautiful home with a swimming pool, or whatever it is you have.

The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don’t have extreme pain that’s inescapable. We don’t have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it’s helpful to reflect on that. Maybe this is a good time to read the newspapers a lot and remember how terrifying life can be. We’re always in a position where something might happen to us. We don’t know. We’re Jews living in France or Germany or Holland in 1936, we’re just leading our ordinary lives, getting up in the morning, having our two or three meals a day, having our routines, and then one day the Gestapo comes and takes us away. Or maybe we’re living in Pompeii and all of a sudden a volcano erupts and we’re under a lot of lava. Anything could happen. Now is a very uncertain time. We don’t know. Even at the personal level, tomorrow, any one of us might find that we have an incurable disease or that someone we love very much does.

In other words, life can just turn upside down. Anything can happen. How precious, how really sweet and precious our lives are. We are in the midst of this beauty, we have our health and intelligence and education and enough money and so forth, and
yet every one of us has had our bout of depression during this dathun, every single one of us has had that feeling in the pit of our stomach. That definitely happens. One thing that Rinpoche taught and also really manifested to all of us who knew him – even though it’s not easy to pull it off – was that just because you’re feeling depressed doesn’t mean that you have to forget how precious the whole situation is. Depression is just like weather – it comes and goes. Lots of different feelings, emotions, and thoughts, they just come and go forever, but that’s no reason to forget how precious the situation is.

Beginning to realize how precious life is becomes one of your most powerful tools. It’s like gratitude. If you feel gratitude for your life, then even if the Nazi trucks come and take you away, you don’t lose that feeling of gratitude. There’s a mahayana slogan: ‘Be grateful to everyone.’ Basically, it doesn’t matter how bad it gets, once you have this feeling of gratitude for your own life and the preciousness of human birth, then it takes you into any realm. What I’m saying is that now it’s easy. If you think you can start feeling grateful when you’re in the hell realm, if you think you can suddenly perk up, you’ll find it’s about five hundred percent more difficult than in our present situation; you’ll have trouble doing it. We are actually in the best and the easiest situation. It’s good to remember that. It’s good to remember all the talks you’ve ever heard on basic goodness and basic cheerfulness and gratitude.

In the vajrayana there’s a lot of emphasis put on devotion, which could be a form of immense gratitude that has a lot of vision in it. Devotion is remembering all those who worked so hard, who had the same neurosis, the same pain that we do, the same depression, the same toothaches, the same difficult relationships, the same bills – the same everything – who never gave up. Because they never gave up, they are an inspiration for us. They are our heroes and heroines, you might say, because when we read their stories (when we read the story of Milarepa, for example), rather than feeling intimidated, we identify with it all along. We see ourselves in every episode; we realize that it’s possible to keep going and never give up. We feel devotion toward the lineage of people who have worked so hard to make it easier for us. Sometimes you meet one particular teacher who seems to personify that for you, and then you also have a guru toward whom to feel devotion. It’s as if these men and women hand down a lineage of gratitude and fearlessness and cheerfulness and vision. And they’re just like us, except that we sometimes lose heart. The fact that there are these examples makes us tremendously grateful and devoted to these people. It gives us some sense of spirit that we also could follow along in that lineage. Then what we do to recognize our own precious human birth can be an inspiration for everybody else.

In the early seventies a friend kept telling me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t try to make those feelings
go away.’ His advice went on: ‘Anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment or your sense of feeling inferior or your sense of resentment – anything you can do to work with those things – do it, please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.’ That was really good advice. So when I would start to become depressed, I would remember, ‘Now wait a minute. Maybe I just have to figure out how to rouse myself genuinely, because there are a lot of people suffering like this, and if I can do it, they can do it.’ I felt a sense of interconnectedness. ‘If a shmuck like me can do it, anybody can do it.’ That’s what I used to say, that if a miserable person like me – who’s completely caught up in anger and depression and betrayal – if I can do it, then anyone can do it, so I’m going to try. That was good advice that helped me to realize my precious human birth.

The second reminder is impermanence. Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it’s very brief. Also, its length is unpredictable. Our lives are impermanent. I myself have, at the most, thirty more years to live, maybe thirty-five, but that would be tops. Maybe I have only twenty more years to live. Maybe I don’t even have one more day to live. It’s sobering to me to think that I don’t have all that long left. It makes me feel that I want to use it well. If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually
had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude. Traditionally it’s said that once you are born, you immediately start dying. I remember that in Boulder, every year the Hare Krishna people put up a display of life-sized figures starting with a newborn baby, through all the stages of life. You couldn’t help but identify with this figure getting bigger and stronger, in the prime of life, until the whole things starts going downhill and the figure is shown getting older, with the final one a corpse. You don’t even know if you’re going to have the privilege of going through that whole process. Even if you do, impermanence is very real.