Practicing Peace in Times of War (5 page)

W
HEN SOMETHING
we find unpleasant occurs, our conditioning automatically clicks in and we have a strong reaction. There is a practice we can do right then to help us stay present and awake. It is called compassionate abiding. Compassionate abiding provides a way to no longer invest our reactions with so much absolute truth. We can see our interpretations and our opinions as just that—our interpretations and opinions. We no longer have to be under their control, or have them color everything we think and do. Strong reactions will continue to arise, just the way the weather changes. But each of us can develop our ability to not escalate the emotions so that they become a nightmare and increase our suffering.

For the purpose of doing this practice, try to connect with a feeling of aversion to something. Whether this is a smell, a sound, or a memory of a person, an event, dark places, snakes—whatever it is, use your discursive mind to help you contact the feeling of aversion. And then, as much as possible, apply the technique of letting the thoughts go so that you can abide in the experience of aversion as a felt quality. For some people it’s just felt in the body. Sometimes it’s more atmospheric. Imagine someone asking you, “What does aversion feel like?” You want to find out. Even if you can’t put it into words, you want to have a nonverbal experience of dislike.

Once you’ve contacted that, if you can contact it, then breathe in; instead of pushing the feeling of aversion away, invite it in, but without believing in the judgments and opinions about it, just contacting the feeling free of your interpretation. You can do this for yourself as a way of approaching what you find repulsive, and you can also do it with the wish that all people, who just like you are hooked by the power of aversion, could not act it out, could not become its slave. In this way your own discomfort can connect you with the aversion and pain of other people and awaken your compassion.

So this exercise of compassionate abiding, and in this case specifically, abiding with the experience of aversion, consists of breathing in the negative feeling and then relaxing outward. Then you breathe the feeling in and relax outward again and again. You could do this for five minutes or for hours or anytime, on the spot, when aggressive feelings arise. We do this for ourselves and all other people who feel prejudice and disgust and have no way of working with it so it escalates into self-denigration, into jealousy, and violence, and creates endless suffering all over the world.

We contact the aversion, experiencing it as fully as possible as we breathe in, and then we relax as we breathe out. We let the feeling be a basis for compassion, and also—gradually, over time—we realize that it’s like a phantom; when we stay with it in this way, the aversion dissolves; it’s not an opponent that we’re struggling against; it’s not anything except energy that gets solidified and that we justify and then, on the basis of that justification, we hurt people.

There’s a quote that is usually attributed to Carl Jung that says, “The only way out is through.” This is very much the approach here. It’s not a way of getting rid of strong emotions, nor is it a way of indulging in them. Gradually we learn to simply abide with our experience just as it is, without building it up or tearing it down, without getting carried away, knowing our own unfabricated energy as the same fluid, dynamic, unpindownable energy that courses through all living things.

Positive Insecurity

I
N THIS BOOK
I’ve been exploring the topic of peace at the personal level, the level of each of us working with our own minds and our hearts. But I want to make it very clear that however we work with our minds and hearts these days will impact the future of this planet.

The Buddhist teachings on karma, put very simply, tell us that each moment in time—whether in our personal lives or in our life together on earth—is the result of our previous actions. According to these teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we ve sown for hundreds of years, over the course of many lifetimes. It’s also the case that the seeds you sowed yesterday have their result in your own life today. And the seeds that the United States has sown in the last year, five years, fifty years, hundred years, and so forth are having their impact on the world right now—and not just what the United States has sown but all the countries that are involved in the world situation today, being as painful as it is. We’ve been sowing these seeds for a long time.

I know many of us feel a kind of despair about whether all this can ever unwind it self. The message of this book is that it has to happen at the level of individuals working with their own minds, because even if these tumultuous times are the result of seeds that have been sown and reaped by whole nations, these nations of course are made up of millions of people who, just like ourselves, want happiness.

So whatever we do today, tomorrow, and every day of our lives until we die sows the seeds for our own future in this lifetime and sows the seeds for the future of this planet. The Buddhist teachings also say that the seeds of our present-day actions will bear fruit hundreds of years from now. This may seem like an impossibly long time to wait, but if you think in terms of sowing seeds for your children’s future and for your grandchildren’s future and your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s future, perhaps that’s more real and immediate to you. Nevertheless how we work with ourselves today is how a shift away from widespread aggression will come about.

The other day I was given an article that contained a quote by the German political thinker Rudolph Bahro. He writes, “When an old culture is dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure.”

I suppose some would question whether an old culture is dying right now, but somehow it rings true for me that we’re in a time of major change, a major transition in the world, and many of us are rather nervous about where we’re headed. But this quotation offers the intriguing suggestion that the new culture will be created by those who are not afraid to be insecure. The writer and teacher Alan Watts titled one of his books
The Wisdom of Insecurity.
Bahro’s quote is pointing us in that direction.

You can think of insecurity as a moment in time that we experience over and over in our lives. When you feel insecurity whether you’re feeling it in the middle of the night out of nowhere or whether it’s constant, there is a groundless and unformed quality to it. As I’ve already said, the Buddhist teachings suggest that this kind of insecurity can serve as a direct path to freedom—if you can stop yourself from setting off the chain reaction of aggression and misery.

You can think of the groundlessness and openness of insecurity as a chance that we’re given over and over to choose a fresh alternative. Things happen to us all the time that open up the space. This spaciousness, this wide-open, unbiased, unprejudiced space is inexpressible and fundamentally good and sound. It’s like the sky. Whenever you’re in a hot spot or feeling uncomfortable, whenever you’re caught up and don’t know what to do, you can find someplace where you can go and look at the sky and experience some freshness, free of hope and fear, free of bias and prejudice, just completely open. And this is accessible to us all the time. Space permeates everything, every moment of our lives.

You could say that this spaciousness and simplicity, dwelling in that place ongoingly would be a description of the enlightened or awakened state. But even for people like you and me, it’s accessible all the time. We experience it very directly whenever we feel wonder, whenever we feel awe, and when ever there’s a sudden shock. For example, you’re walking across the street, and someone yells an obscenity at you. Before the chain reaction starts, before the aggression or the habitual pattern clicks in, there’s a shock, an open space. There’s just the fact that something has stunned you, someone has just insulted you, the ground has just fallen out from under your feet. Before trying to get back on solid ground by following the habitual chain reaction, you can pause and breathe deeply in and breathe deeply out. Never underestimate the power of this simple pause.

I do this as a practice whenever the rug gets pulled out, whenever the ground shifts, whether it’s something hurting my feelings, or if suddenly, out of nowhere, something shocking happens that brings up panic. Whenever there’s that sting of pain, I practice pausing, because I know that that moment is precious. This is the instruction that I’ve been given, and it’s the one I’ve offered in this book. If we pause and breathe in and out, then we can have the experience of timeless presence, of the inexpressible wisdom and goodness of our own minds. We can look out at the world with fresh eyes and hear things with fresh ears. In that pause—which is free of bias, free of thinking, just given to us on a silver platter by this person who insulted us—we can relax and open. The sting of that ordinary shock can lead us to a new way of living.

All of our aggressive speech, our aggressive actions, starts in the mind. It starts when we get triggered, when we get hooked. This is the moment of truth for those people who wish to stop watering the seeds of anger and prejudice. When our lives become uncomfortable, rather than automatically watering these seeds of aggression, we can burn them up.

I often wondered why it is that when I get hooked, when I’m resentful for example, and I breathe with it instead of acting out, it feels like I’m sitting in the middle of the fire. I asked Kongtrul Rinpoche about this. He said, “Because by not doing the habitual thing, you’re burning up the seeds of aggression.” As each individual works with it in this way, it’s not just a minor thing. It’s an opportunity we’re given not only to connect with the inexpressible goodness of our minds and our hearts, but also to dissolve aggression in the world.

Someone once asked me, “What would it feel like to have burned up all those seeds, to be a person who no longer has any aggression?” The person who asked this was thinking that such a person might be pretty boring. No juice, no passion. I answered that I really wouldn’t know from personal experience, but I imagine that such a person would be great company. If you dissolved your aggression, it would mean that other people wouldn’t have to walk on eggshells around you, worried that something they might say would offend you. You’d be an accessible, genuine person. The awakened people that I’ve known are all very playful, curious, and unthreatened by things. They go into situations with their eyes and their hearts wide open. They have a real appetite for life instead of an appetite for aggression. They are, it seems, not afraid to be insecure.

In order to change our habits and burn up the seeds of aggression, we have to develop an appetite for what I like to call positive groundlessness, or positive insecurity. Normally of course, we want to get away from that uncomfortable feeling. It just seems reasonable to want to do so. And it would be reasonable, except for the fact that you may have noticed that it doesn’t really work. We’ve been trying the same ways of getting comfortable for as long as we can remember, and yet our aggression, our anxiety, our resentfulness don’t seem to be getting any less. I’m saying that we need to develop an appetite for groundlessness; we need to get curious about it and be willing to pause and hang out for a while in that space of insecurity.

One of the methods I’ve touched on for doing this is when you notice that you’re hooked, don’t act out, don’t repress, but let the experience pierce you to the heart. Another suggestion I’ve made is that when you notice that you’re hooked, just pause and breathe deeply in and out, knowing that this is a moment in time that’s impermanent, shifting, and changing. This insecurity that you’re feeling is nothing monolithic. It’s nothing solid. It’s not gras-pable. It’s passing. And you can breathe with it and relax with it, and let it pass through you.

Recently I was with Kongtrul Rinpoche and I asked him, “Rinpoche, you’ve been living in the West now for some time, and you know Western people well. What do you think is the most important advice that you could give to us?” He replied, “I think the most important thing that Westerners need to understand is guiltlessness.” He went on to explain, “Even though we may make a lot of mistakes and we may mess up in all kinds of ways, all of that is impermanent, shifting, changing, and temporary. But fundamentally, our minds and hearts are not guilty. They are innocent.”

So if at any moment of feeling guilty, insecure, and troubled you were to pause and let go of the words and start breathing slowly and deeply, you could let the whole drama unwind and unravel. If you could hang out in that uncomfortable yet impermanent, ineffable space, you might realize that all of this blaming of other people comes out of simply not being able to stay present.

If you want there to be peace—anything from peace of mind to peace on earth—here is the condensed instruction: stay with the initial tightening and don’t spin off. Keep it simple.

And there’s another essential ingredient: compassion. Train in keeping it simple in the vast context of all sentient beings. Point your finger randomly to any spot on the globe and you know for sure that there are beings there biting the hook. Almost everyone on the planet is addicted to spinning off, and the results aren’t looking so good. If even a few of us practice keeping it simple—not making such a big deal out of pleasant and unpleasant—it will make a significant difference.