(Ed: A lot has happened since I first wrote this article, and it all seems to prove the point. Which goes to show that Buddhist wisdom doesn’t go out of date.)
In a few short hours we may have voted Brexit or Bremain, who on earth knows!? Who is in control of all this anyway?!
There is no stability in samsara because all appearances are the nature of our ever-shifting, uncontrolled mind and projected by our karma. In a flash everything can change; we can even lose everything and everyone we know.
Anything can appear
Life sped up
Have you ever wondered what your life would look like if it had been filmed and you watched it all sped up?! Pretty darn weird, is what. Speed all our lives up — what a very peculiar, overwhelming plethora of changes!!! Love them, hate them, feed them, eat them, hug them, fight them … we have had every relationship imaginable with every living being. You know those Tee-shirts “Been there, done that”? There is no tee-shirt large enough for all the places we have been, for all the things that we have done.
In this life alone, I have lived for several years on every continent except Antarctica and I have visited nearly 50 countries. I am, predictably enough, writing this article on yet another plane (flip, nice sunset!) on the way through a brief night to a brief dream in Reykjavik, next to a charming man who has lived all over the place, having just stood in line at the airport with someone else who also travels extensively. Yet all this is nothing
Memento
And waking life only seems more consistent than dream life because we bring some memory or mindfulness to it and so, in a way, have more time to get used to things before they change on us. (Our waking minds are gross minds, so we are better at using mindfulness than with our subtler levels of dreaming mind.) My sister-in-law’s mother, Christine, had a bad stroke and has spent the last several years in a nursing home. She has no short-term memory and describes the experience as “dream-like”. It is memory and memory alone, it seems, that makes coherence of appearances, strings them together into narratives; and so when we lack memory we can quickly lose the plot. Or have to do the same things over and over again, like a Guppy.
Diversion from main article
Which reminds me, I read a report recently saying that human beings these days have a shorter attention span than a goldfish – approximately 8 seconds. That’s what we get, if you ask me, from spending the whole day stimulating the senses with non-stop diversions (Snapchat, anyone?! Have you managed to refrain from checking your texts or Facebook feed since you started reading this article? Have any of you indeed even managed to get this far down th
Comfy sofa
We try so hard to hold on in our waking life, but in a flash everything can change. We can be evicted, we can be deserted, we can be exiled, we can be wounded, we can even be in our next life. It seems like we try to anchor ourselves in this ever-changing scenery with a partner (“us against the world!”), a family, a house, a reputation, Facebook likes, etc — trying to construct a weighty life on top of an infrastructure that is simply projection of mind. For as long as we have self-grasping — feeling alienated from our own surroundings by grasping dualistically at a world outside our mind — we seem to have an existential need to do this; which is why it can feel devastating when the seeming anchors of relationships or careers etc end. We can feel as though we have lost our still point, our northern star, our comfy sofa in samsara.
So we keep trying to build up our money, our career, our sense of who and what we are, our family, our friends, our body – but none of these fleeting, flimsy edifices can save us from new unfurling karmic projections once they are ready to ripen.
We try to cling to reality but there isn’t any. Not in appearances, anyway. In Lost, they at least moved time zones with the same body and gross minds and even a few select companions – but in one flash of light our body could change and so could our gross mind to go with it. For example, if we are reborn as a cat, our gross mind will certainly feel very different to how it does now, and our companions will be nothing like our friends now. If human, we have to learn all this stuff all over again, or a whole bunch of new stuff — for example if I am reborn in Iceland, I will have to say
Nothing can be pinned down; nothing. We can have a six-pack and a rifle, and talk in manly monosyllables; but when the flash comes this is not going to help us one bit. We need to change our minds. And we kind of need to do it right now, while we are in the relatively stable position of this precious human life and have some refuge. That’s the urgency, far more so than running through a jungle. (Apologies for all these Lost references if you haven’t seen it 🙂 I am not even suggesting you put yourselves through 5 seasons of Lost, you probably have far superior, more culturally up-to-date things to do. Like Snapchat. Or Pokemon GO. But you get the idea.)
Unfound
Nothing can be found when we search with wisdom, which means that nothing exists inherently. Attachment is trying to hold onto hallucinations – it needs its object to have a degree of permanence and substantiality that it simply doesn’t have, which makes this all-too-common delusion at best a waste of time. (Reminds me of my favorite line from the latest Star Wars movie, “Escape first, hug later.”)
We can drop no anchors in samsara’s contaminated ocean; it has no bottom. We need to set about purifying and transforming the entire ocean of our root mind. For then, instead of it throwing up endless waves of pointless suffering, it will manifest endless waves of beneficial bliss.
We can go for refuge to all-pervasive enlightened beings, to Dharma, to Sangha. We can purify our mind and gain full mastery of our thoughts so that we can choose to go wherever and whenever we want. We can in particular gain an experience of emptiness — realizing that all appearances are the nature of the mind and the mind is the nature of emptiness — so that we not only realize exactly what is going on but can control it completely. And we can then be a deep, vast, source of refuge for everyone else.
(Regardless of who wins the Referendum, whose results are rolling in unpredictably as we speak …)
Your comments are most welcome!
15 Comments
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I love this article. I was considering steering over to Ireland, now I’ll let the winds have their way with me.
We can’t drop no anchors
In this sea
Because the water
Is way too deep
The waves are high
And the wind is strong
And every thing
Feels Oh So Wrong
Thank you Luna, needed your wisdom badly today. Lots of love
You have outdone yourself with this article! Thanks for the wisdom- esp. needed at this time. – Kate
Mind bogglingly brilliant article. In the first sentence under the sofa heading I read “we try so hard to hold on to our life” which is audio true, especially in light of your wonderful insight. Thank you as always. Here is the poem that popped into my head at 5 this morning as I woke to the result. Happy to see it has some overlaps with your thoughts.
My Brexit Poem
The heart is without borders
It can travel round the world or into space
The heart is without species
It can travel from a flower to a bird
From a spider to a lion to a human
The heart is without self
It transcends all beings
With a single thought
“I love”
The heart is without time
It’s steady pulse easily holds
What was, what is and will be
We are the heart
We are the good heart
We are everywhere and everything
Always
Mind bogglingly brilliant poem! Thank you.
I love this Lam Chung. May I share it? Most of my FB friends are so caught up in the referendum result this morning and your words may help some of them.
Of course Polly, so glad you like it
Beautiful poem!
It was so helpful to read this Luna as I wake up to the Eu referendum results this morning. It’s as if you pre knew the result as you were writing! I think this may be because the whole situation is indeed an hallucination and a distraction and applies to every situation whether I label it good or bad. And no reason to be discouraged. Thank you too for the reminder – there is no dropping an anchor in samsara’s ocean. Simply reading about renunciation and emptiness has settled my mind. Sending love and gratitude.
Thank you, Polly.
Always expect the unexpected :-O
Thank you, Luna. Need to reread this many times. It is so refreshing, ESPECIALLY NOW. I never watch TV; but, there’s enough lostness everywhere to make me feel lost often. You have a poetic way of letting us know this. Cheers, Judy Lamb
Looks like we all woke up to a strange new world in Britain. Love is what we need today and every day.
Completely engrossing and quite the reality check! Loved it…especially the “Lost” episode. I couldn’t breathe until you moved to the next section! So samsara. So true. So good to be on our way out of here. xMal
Gotta stop the destabilizing hallucinations of samsara by seeing the truth.