My dog irritates me on the early morning walk so generally I choose to fill this time with words of peace and wisdom. I listen to videos of Buddhist teachers. Most of the time I can relate with what they are saying and the information is a good reminder of my already solid understanding of certain basic concepts. Sometimes I listen to them and get a proverbial punch in the face.
Earlier in the week I listened to a talk by Pema Chodron called "Fearless Non-theism". It crushed me in so many ways. For 3-4 straight days, I listened to this talk and continued to be floored by it and reminded of how weak I am when we get down to brass tacks.
"Fearless Non-theism" by Pema Chodron
The great thing about this talk and most of Pema's talks is that you don't really need to be a Buddhist to get them. This talk in particular expands across any gender, race, religion, political, and emotional barrier. It is truth, raw stinky truth.
Here is the text if you want to get down to the nitty gritty:
The difference between theism and non-theism is not
whether one does or does not believe in
God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including
both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there
is some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate
us and take care of us. It means thinking there is always going to be a
babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our
responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves.
Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment
without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. We sometimes think that
dharma is something outside of ourselves, something to believe in, something to
measure up to. However, dharma isn't a belief; it isn't a dogma. It is total
appreciation of impermanence and change. The teachings disintegrate when we try to grasp them. We have to
experience them without hope. Many brave and compassionate people have
experience them and taught them. The message is fearless; dharma was never
meant to be a belief that we blindly follow. Dharma gives us nothing to hold on
to at all.
Non-theism is finally realizing that there is no baby sitter
that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone.
Non-theism is realizing that it's not just babysitters that come and go. The
whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.
For those who want something to hold on to, life is even
more inconvenient. From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all
addicted to hope, hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction
has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to
getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.
The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel
suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally
somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel
it's happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however,
when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we're
addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up
or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something;
they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We
hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone
else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and
therefore something is lacking in our world.
This is where renunciation enters the picture,
renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules
that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out
that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as
babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort
and to distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious
hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is teaching to
inspire us to investigate what's happening every time we grab something because
we can't stand to face what's coming.
If hope and fear are two sides on one coin, so are
hopelessness and confidence. If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity
and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the
groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path. If there
is no interest in stepping beyond hope and fear, then there's no meaning in
taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Taking refuge in
Buddha, dharma, and sangha is about giving up hope of getting ground under our
feet. We are ready to take refuge when this style of teaching, whether we feel
completely up to it or not, is like hearing something hauntingly familiar, like
the experience of a child meeting its mother after a long separation.
Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we're going
to make the journey with the hope of getting security. If we make the journey
to get security, we're completely missing the point. We can do our meditation
practice with the hope of getting security; we can study the teachings with the
hope of getting security; we can follow all the guidelines and instructions with
the hope of getting security; but it will only lead to disappointment and pain.
We could save ourselves a lot of time by taking this message very seriously right
now. Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin
with hopelessness.
All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for
hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death.
Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki
Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that's just about to sail out to
sea and sink. But it's very hard, no matter how much we hear about it, to
believe in our own death. Many spiritual practices try to encourage us to take
our own death seriously, but it's amazing how difficult it is to allow it to
hit home. That one thing in life that we can really count on is incredibly
remote for all of us. We don't go so far as to say, "No way, I'm not going
to die," because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be
later. That's the biggest hope.
Trungpa Rinpoche once gave a public lecture titled
"Death in Everyday Life." We are raised in a culture that fears death
and hides it from us. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We
experience it in the form of disappointment, in the form of things not working out.
We experience it in the form of things always being in a process of change.
When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that's death in
everyday life.
Death in everyday life could also be defined as
experiencing all the things that we don't want. Our marriage isn't working; our
job isn't coming together. Having a relationship with death in everyday life
means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic,
with embarrassment, with things not working out. As the years go on, we don't
call the babysitter quite so fast.
Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation, proper
motivation for living an insightful, compassionate life. But most of the time,
warding off death is our biggest motivation. We habitually ward off any sense
of problem. We're always trying to deny that it's a natural occurrence that
things change, that the sand is slipping through our fingers. Time is passing.
It's as natural as the seasons changing and day turning into night. But getting
old, getting sick, losing what we love, we don't see those events as natural
occurrences. We want to ward off that sense of death, no matter what.
Excerpted from When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice
for Difficult Times,
by Pema Chodron, Shambhala Publications, 1997, pp. 38-45.
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