Soothing an ancient ache

A very handsome man, to my eyes, just walked into this London café on what looked to be a date with a woman sitting here. “Lucky her,” I was half-thinking; but in the time it took for him to buy a coffee + croissant and offer this to her with a charming smile, she had changed her mind: “Oh, no, thank you, I actually just want to sit here with my own thoughts.” He smiled graciously and withdrew. A tad embarrassing and wouldn’t have happened if I’d been 20 years younger, lol.

Dating is tough, I hear. Many things in life are tough these days. Not sure what this particular woman is holding out for, but clearly not a devastatingly handsome man with long black hair and a cool hat. Now I’m back in the land of Sunday papers the size of a rainforest, I briefly glanced at an article yesterday about 22 ways to keep a floundering marriage alive and 17 ways to have an amicable divorce if you can’t. Most of it seemed like common sense, but some of it sounded a tad desperate. (Only I can’t give you any examples because my Dad has thrown the papers away with his customary efficiency— efficiency, that is, when it comes to throwing the papers away before I’ve had a chance to read them.)

The spark of that intense initial attraction inevitably fades sooner or later, however handsome or even well suited—this I can say from my own repeated experience. If we want to avoid the heartbreak in order to remain in—or even to leave—a decent romantic relationship, we have to progress from that to real love and cherishing, just like with any other impermanent relationship with any other impermanent sentient being in this oh-so impermanent life. Indeed lives—for if we take our countless former lives into account, we have been in every relationship with every single being, multiple times. (Even this dude! He has been my date, my mom, my enemy, and even my dinner). At some point we have to give up the attachments, aversions, and indifferences—give up the dualism of inherently existent me and you—and instead exchange self with others. That way we can truly love people through thick and thin versus chasing and running from them forever.

Happiness has always been within

There is a longing behind every attachment or addiction, of course, one that has been there for a while, indeed since time without beginning. We are usually too taken up chasing the object of attachment to interpret this longing or discover where it is really coming from or why it keeps arising. I heard someone describe this the other day as a “misplaced attempt to soothe an ancient ache”. He went on to describe how all of our addictions are telling us that there is a wound in us that needs attention.

Our addictions and attachments are surface expressions of a deeper story, a story as old as time; our habitual rituals masking an ongoing, underlying dissatisfaction and pain. We have been ignoring our inner landscapes, so busy are we focused outwards. And when we get frustrated with ourselves or worn down by our addictions, we tend to wage war with the behaviors while missing their source.

What is this source? Self-grasping ignorance and its mistaken appearances, which make us feel separated out from everything, like there’s a gap between us and everything else. Due to the imprints of self-grasping, everything mistakenly appears to be outside the mind and at a remove from us; and due to our ongoing self-grasping we believe and buy into that appearance. Our attachment is then a futile attempt to draw stuff closer while holding it at this inherent remove.

Our addictions and attachments are not a moral failing so much as a deep misunderstanding of where fulfillment and happiness actually come from. I think we are hungering for connection not just with others but with ourselves because—in so far as we are running from or towards our own mental creations—we are split off from ourselves. On the whole, we don’t feel whole. We feel more or less uneasy with ourselves much of the time. We often don’t even like ourselves—but, in that scenario, who exactly doesn’t like whom?! And how contrary is that?!

When we are chased by a tiger in a dream, what exactly are we scared of? Think of what Buddha Shakyamuni says in King of Concentration Sutra:

In a dream a girl meets a boy and sees that he is dying.
She is happy to meet him but unhappy to see him dying.
We should understand that all phenomena are like this.

Let’s see what’s going on here. The dreamer has created the girl, the boy, the meeting, the parting – none of that is actually happening, none of that is real. Yet, oblivious to the fact that they are imputing or projecting all of this, the dreamer is running toward their own mental creation out of attachment and away from it out of grief.

If I am over here and everything else is over there, I need to pull the desirable things towards me and push away the undesirable. This is a full time job, with never-ending overtime. Fighting ourselves all the time only strengthens our grip, only strengthens our attachments and aversions, because we have set things up so dualistically.

What is self-love?

Gently growing our understanding of renunciation, love, and wisdom will liberate us from the dualism causing this terrible grip. I have been thinking lately how it is not self-cherishing but renunciation that is actually self-love and self-compassion. Why? Love is wishing someone real happiness, and compassion is wishing someone real freedom. Though the word can sound intimidating, renunciation just means wishing for ourselves the real, lasting happiness that comes from inner peace and the real, lasting freedom that comes from using wisdom to overcome our delusions (including our self-cherishing).

On the way, we may have to face some discomfort that we’ve never learned to sit with because we’ve been drowning it out with distractions, attachments, cravings, and the general noise of daily life. But it doesn’t take too long to see that our thoughts are not as scary as we believed, and we can take it from there.

Seeking bliss

I think what we are really seeking, when we try so hard to get close to people, is bliss and union. And there is nothing wrong with the longing for bliss and union – the wish to be made whole, in a way, and the wish to be happy – only with our understanding and methods.

Do you ever feel exhausted and pulled in all directions, overwhelmed by the sheer and almost impossible number of moving parts in your life? Rather than constantly going out to become “too closely involved in the external situation” as Geshe-la says in How to Transform Your Life, we learn in Dharma to come inwards. In a way we are trying to go inside rather than always going outside. We try from day one to drop into our heart, where we find everything. (Here’s a start: Drop into your heart and breathe.)

We do this in several ways – renunciation starts to bring us into our heart. Love does. Faith does. Wisdom does in the realization that everything “out there” is imaginary or hallucinated, not even out there to begin with. Generation stage does. Completion stage seals the deal:

As long as impure winds are flowing through our channels, we will continue to develop negative thoughts. Seeing how our states of mind depend upon the purity or impurity of our winds, Secret Mantra practitioners strive to control their winds. ~ Tantric Grounds and Paths

Eventually in Dharma, using completion stage meditation, we want all our inner winds to come inwards, ending up inside our central channel, whereupon we will experience the very subtle mind, the clear light of bliss, which we can unite with emptiness, the true nature of reality. Whereupon we will never feel any dualism or separation again, just open-ended non-dual happiness and love.

If we are able to centralize our winds through the force of meditation, we can learn to retain mindfulness even when our mind is in a subtle state, and use our subtle mind to meditate. Meditation performed with a subtle mind is much more powerful than meditation performed with a gross mind. The subtle mind is naturally concentrated because, when the winds dissolve within the central channel, they no longer support distracting conceptions. ~ Tantric Grounds and Paths

Probably all our Buddhist meditations from the first breathing meditation are taking us in this direction. For at the moment our thoughts are all going outwards, as it were, to external objects, because our inner winds are flowing outwards. Once we can get our winds inside the central channel through meditation, we will realize that this is where reality is to be found. We manifest our very subtle mind, our clear light mind, in which all dualistic appearances have subsided. All that appears to this mind is emptiness, and through our prior training in emptiness we realize what this emptiness means. We can realize ultimate truth and conventional truth as they are taught and practiced in Sutra, only now with the non-conceptual bliss in our heart. And now we are only years or months away from the supreme inner peace of enlightenment.

So, to conclude …

Running from ourselves …

Have you not had enough yet of delusions?! I ask myself sometimes. The masochistic (or, perhaps more accurately, sadistic) tendencies of our attachments and aversions that have held us in their thrall since beginningless time? Believing things that aren’t there and not seeing what is? Even 100 years would have been enough of this. Even one year. At some point we’re not going to tolerate even one more minute.

Like I started saying above, when we dream of someone trying to murder us and we run in fear, what are we actually running from? Yes, the imaginings of our own mind. We are running from our own creations like Victor Frankenstein trying to get away from his monster. And how can running from ourselves ever end well?

We need to develop a state of mind where delusions – our own and others – come to die.

… versus dropping into the heart

I think a really good or even just manageable life involves spending time in the heart every day, and then using every opportunity – a commute here, a tea break there – to drop into the heart. All Yogis did that. Despite the thousands of people who would have happily spent hours with him and all the places he could have gone, Venerable Geshe-la always seemed blissfully happy just to get back to his small room.