Author: meditation

Perseverance

Today, I want to talk about one of the six perfections. We have already talked about a couple of the perfections in the past including generosity and patience. Let’s discuss today perseverance. This is also known as vigor and enthusiasm. I am sure you have heard this expression that goes half of life is just showing up. I used to tell this to my kids all the time. All that means is to make sure that you are consistently showing up for what needs to be done. Keep giving your efforts without regard to short-term results or lack thereof.

Let me give you an example. When I came to the US, during the first semester, I was paying for all my expenses. As an international student, the fees are really high. So the goal for most international students is to receive a research assistant position where the University waives your tuition and pays you a small stipend on top of that. Within the first month of starting the semester, I started talking to professors for a potential research assistant position. One professor told me, he had a grant application out with the National Science Foundation and if it was approved, he would have two or three positions open. I would go visit the professor every two weeks to see if heard anything from the NSF. About two months later, one day I visited the professor and asked if he heard anything. To my surprise, he said, yes his application was approved and he would need three research assistants on that project. He said there were about ten students who were asking him for a position. Then he said something totally surprising. He said he was going to interview everyone for two of the position and he was offering me one of the positions. I thanked him and he went, do you know why I offered you this position? I had no clue. He explained that I was the only one, who was persistent, meeting him every two weeks, and wanted his lead researcher to be someone with that kind of drive. Who knew?

The point here is that no matter how many times you hear no, or fail, we must get up and move towards our goal. Let me put it another way. Have you ever owned a stock? I am not a stock market guy personally. But I have heard so many stories where people get out of their position because it was going down just to see their stocks turn around and go higher.  If they only held on to that for a few more days or weeks. Again, this is not meant to be stock market advice. I have zero experience in the stock market.

What perseverance means is that we must become independent of internal and external influences when we are moving toward a goal. All of you are here listening to these meditation videos and attending sessions because something in you tells you that you want to become mindful. You want some level of mental peace and joy and bliss within you. if that is the goal then please make sure that you don’t get influenced by outside influences. You will have good meditation days and not-so-good meditation days. Some days you may feel like you met Buddha himself and other days, your mind is so wound up that nothing brings peace it seems. That is perfectly OK. With time, you will be able to get into a situation where no matter the external conditions, you will be able to bring your mind to peace.

So please don’t give up because you think you are not making progress in your meditation practice. You are certainly making a progress. I had this interesting discussion with a young person. This person is in their early twenties and was having some challenges. I was trying to help them walk through the situation and kind of helping them make a plan for long-term success. We would talk weekly. After a couple of weeks, they said it doesn’t seem like they are making any progress and it feels two steps forward and one step backward. I said OK; imagine if you are walking from your house to the nearest pizza place. Let’s say it is 1,000 steps away. Once you start your journey, let’s say you take two steps forward and one step backward. After say about 10 minutes, you are 20 steps away from your house. If you did not take one step backward, you would have been 30 steps away. Even with 20 steps away from your house, you are still closer to the pizza place than you were if you were just sitting in your house. And that is what is important.

The moral of the discussion here is to make sure you keep performing beneficial actions and don’t give up because you are not seeing immediate results.

Instant Happiness

We live in the age of instant gratification. So I thought I would offer you an instant gratification version of meditation today! We have talked about happiness on and off here for the past year. I have talked about how real happiness comes from within and that outer problems should not affect our inner happiness. On one level all of you have told me that it makes sense but difficult to grasp. Today, I want to prove to you that real happiness is within us. We will do a meditation known as transfer of enjoyment meditation to show this.

Before we do that though, let’s talk about how many of us can say we are really happy all the time? Forget all the time, how many of you were truly happy meaning no delusions – no anger, attachment, hatred, upset, hurt feeling, jealousy, and so forth for a full 24 hour period? Hardly any one of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hour period. It certainly comes and goes. We are happy for a while and all of a sudden, our mind starts to wonder and gets to a negative place, and poof, it destroys our happiness. So why is that? If we are on a vacation, we should be free from all worries. But even on vacation, something disturbs our peace of mind. Geshe Kelsang says in the book How to Transform Your Life, “Inner peace, or mental peace, is the source of all our happiness. Although all living beings have the same basic wish to be happy all the time, very few people understand the real causes of happiness. We usually believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result, we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring them. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we will see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.”

This is similar to what I mentioned earlier. When we are on vacation and if something sets us off, we are no longer happy. So, it is certainly not our surroundings that make us happy. I think we can say for sure that everyone wants to be happy. No exceptions. Have you met anyone that does not want to be happy all the time? Their definition of happiness may be different but they all want to be happy –  free from suffering. If all of us have the same desire to be happy, happiness should be not as elusive as it has been. The reason for this elusiveness is that we are looking for our happiness in the wrong places. Some people look for happiness in food, money, travel, sex, drugs, big houses, fancy cars, and so on. None of that can give us permanent happiness. We are told early in life that you achieve a certain career goal, get married, have kids and happiness will follow. Well, the divorce rate tells us that is not true! We have turned this whole thing backward. Rather than being happy with the journey, we are teaching kids to look for a destination. This in turn creates unreasonable expectations as kids are growing up and sets up them for a lifetime of unhappiness. Happiness is a state of mind. If we develop a positive state of mind, we will naturally be happy. This is what we need to train ourselves into. Fortunately, there is a shortcut to this process called Transfer of Enjoyment meditation. This meditation is a doorway into this practice of getting our mind to a happy state in an instant. It is however not the be-all and end-all. Initially, it is a good practice to use this meditation until we get to a point where we can get into a happy state of mind on demand. Without needing any external stimulus.

Emptiness of I

We have been discussing emptiness for the past few weeks. We looked at the emptiness of phenomenon, the emptiness of body as well as the emptiness of mind. So let’s continue with this deep subject and look at the emptiness of I today.

To explore the emptiness of I, we will go looking for that inherently existing I. Before we look for anything, we must know what it is that we are looking for. If you want to find your car keys, you need to know what they look like before you can find them. Similarly, we must first know what does inherently existing I looks like before we go searching for it.

The easiest way to see what our inherently existing I, is to go back and think about a time when we were grasping for that I. Think about a time when you were proud of yourself. May be achieved something big or you were proud of your children or whatever the case may be. Think about your state of mind and your physical expressions at the time. You were really into yourself. If you visualize yourself at your proudest moment, you have found your inherently existing I. Another place to look is to think about a time you were really frightened. Let’s a wild animal was chasing you or you were scared about losing a relationship or money or whatever that may be. Again, if you can think about your state of mind at that time or your physical state (maybe you were shaking). That is your inherently existing I. You can also look at a couple of other examples such as a time when you were in a really sad state of mind. That will also have the same effect.

So once you identify what the inherently existing I looks like, now we start searching for it. Before we go on searching though, let’s agree on what possibilities are there. We can either find our inherently existing I in our body, or our mind, or a combination of body and mind, or outside of our body and mind. That’s it there is no fifth possibility. Let’s begin.

First, we need to see if we can find our inherently existing I in our body. Similar to our contemplation of the emptiness of the body, we start searching for it. Can we find our I in our limbs? The easiest way to find out is to say what if I lose my limbs? Will your inherently existing I still be there? In other words, will you still be proud or afraid or sad at the moment you were thinking of? Of course. It would not change that at all. So we know our I is not in our limbs. Now look for it in our organs. As we discussed previously, every one of our organs is transplantable. So we can have someone else’s kidney or heart or whatever and we will still be here and our I will still be proud, afraid, sad at the moment you were thinking of. So our organs are not our I. Same applies to our skin. So now that we have established that we cannot find our inherently existing I in our body; let’s look for it in our mind.

As we discussed last week, our mind is this vast awareness that is continuing from the beginningless time. It changes from moment to moment. If it was inherently existing, it would be solid as a rock if you will. It would not be changing on a moment-to-moment basis. If it was inherently existing, we would be able to find it at any given moment. But the mind changes every moment and we cannot find this unhappy mind or happy mind because it constantly changes. The same logic applies when we look at our feelings. Our feelings are as fleeting as the wind blowing on a stormy day. They keep changing from moment to moment and we cannot find the mind that contains that feeling when we go look for it. Another way to look at this is that our mind is the possessed and we are the possessor. It is our mind. For example, I am speaking into my microphone but that does not make me the microphone. So the possessor and possessed cannot be the same. So, our mind cannot be the inherently existing I.

How about body and mind combined? Well, two things that are not me cannot be me. If we go on a drive looking for a horse. We see a goat and we say that’s not a horse. We see a cow and we say that’s not a horse. We cannot put the goat and the cow together and say that’s a horse!

So now, only one possibility is left. Maybe we find our inherently existing I somewhere outside our body and mind. How absurd does that sound? Let’s go through the exercise anyway. You are seating in one place. Where would you look for your I? Is it in the other corner of the same room? Is it outside the room? Outside the house maybe? What about in some other City? Just not possible right?

As you can see, we cannot find the inherently existing I that we so strongly grasp. This grasping is what our ego is. It is the root of almost all of our delusions. We are grasping at the thing that does not exist to create problems in our lives. If we begin to let go of that grasping just little by little, life will begin to change for the better for humanity.

In today’s meditation, as always, we will start by first settling in our hearts. Once settled we will begin to contemplate the inherent existence of our I. We will first identify the object (our I that we strongly grasp). Then we will go look for it as we just talked about. Once we realize there is no inherent existing I, we will meditate on that.

Emptiness of Mind

Let’s continue with our discussions on emptiness today. In the last two sessions, we looked at the emptiness of phenomenon as well as the emptiness of the body. Let’s look at an example that may explain emptiness a little better. Growing up, I used to watch magician shows few times a year. There were these magicians who were also hypnotists that would come to town and perform magic shows. When you go to these shows, almost always they would have at least one hypnotist spell during the show. They would put the whole audience into their spell and then all of a sudden you would think that a piece of wood is a cow or something. Emptiness is just like that. We are the people in the audience. For us, the cow is as real as it comes. It exists and there is no doubt about it. We look at all phenomena just like that. We think they exist and are real. Now if you are the magician, you can see the cow but you know it does not exist at all. So that is the next level of understanding we need to cultivate. Where we can see that cow exists but it does not exist inherently. It is just an imputed existence. Now if you walked into the hall let’s say half an hour after he put his spell on the audience. You would only see that piece of wood and do not see the cow at all. That is true wisdom. We all eventually want to strive for that. Hope all of these make sense and explains the emptiness a little better.

Today, we are going to meditate on the emptiness of the mind. And before we do that, let’s look at what our mind is. We have discussed in the past, three types of mind. Gross mind the waking mind that sees everything that we see in the world. Subtle mind the mind that is active in our dream state. And very subtle mind our peaceful mind that travels from one life to the next.

One way to look at this is that our mind is like a river. It is a consciousness that is flowing from lifetime to lifetime. Have you ever been to a river to hang out? You see these water bubbles when the water touches a rock. Our life is just like that water bubble. When the water bubble bursts, what happens to the water? It just becomes part of the river that’s it. It goes and creates another bubble somewhere else.

Yet another way to look at this is soap bubbles we used to blow when we were young. Let’s say you blow a bubble and I blow a bubble. We both talk about “our” bubbles. All of a sudden the bubble bursts. Where did the bubble go? Can we call the air inside those bubbles my air and your air? Of course not.

Our very subtle mind is just like their bubbles. It is part of a consciousness that is going on from the beginningless time. Life after life without stopping.

So does the mind exist inherently? Let’s go find this inherently existing mind. We know that the mind is a continuum. When we are happy or unhappy we look at that mind as inherently existing. However, we know that our mind changes from moment to moment. If it was inherently existing, it would be solid as a rock if you will. It would not be changing on a moment-to-moment basis. If it was inherently existing, we would be able to find it at any given moment. But the mind changes every moment and we cannot find this unhappy mind or happy mind because it constantly changes. The same logic applies when we look at our feelings. Our feelings are as fleeting as the wind blowing on a stormy day. They keep changing from moment to moment and we cannot find the mind that contains that feeling when we go look for it.

Of all the emptiness teachings, I find the emptiness of the mind probably the most difficult to grasp. So don’t be discouraged if you are struggling with the concept. In time with enough contemplation and example, you will begin to understand the concept.

Emptiness of Body

We started talking about the profound subject of emptiness in the last session. We will continue with that in today’s session. Today, we are going to look at something you may find radical. Since we are talking about there being no inherent existence on its side. How about our body? Our body seems as real as anything we have ever encountered.

Let’s look at the way in which we look at our body. Most of us cling to our body strongly and have our identity tied to our body. When we think of our body, we are vividly thinking of our body and not our arms, legs, etc. We tend to imagine our body independent of parts of our body.

So let’s go and find that vividly existing body that we all identify with. For our body to exist inherently, there are only three possibilities. Our body exists as one of its parts, the collection of its parts or outside of its parts. That’s it there is no fourth possibility. So as long as we agree that there are only three possibilities in which our body can exist inherently, let’s go and find out body.

So let’s look at the first possibility. We can take a look at each of our parts independently.  Let’s start with our legs. Is our leg our body? The easiest way to look at this is to think about what happens if one of our legs needs to be amputated. If we don’t have one of our legs, we will still say that the body without one of our legs is still our body. So obviously our leg is not our body. Hopefully, you are with me so far. This same logic we can apply to our arms. So in that case, we can all agree that our limbs are not our body.

Now take a look at our organs. How about our kidneys? Is the kidney our body? Our friend and fellow meditator Chirag has the first-hand experience on this. A few years ago he went through a kidney transplant. So in his body, he has his sister’s kidney. So Chirag’s body is fine without his original kidney and we still call it Chirag’s body. So we can all agree that our kidney is not our body. With that same logic, each of our organs is transplantable. If each of our organs is transplantable, then we can safely say that our organs are not the body. That leaves our skin. Science tells us that human skin cells are replaced every 28 days. So that means our skin cannot be our body.

So by now we have looked at each part of our body and concluded that we cannot find our body in its individual parts. How about the collection of these parts. I will address this with an example. We went for a Safari a few years ago. My wife really wanted to see a black rhino. We saw a lion and that we know is not a rhino. We saw an elephant and we knew that was not a rhino. We saw a cheetah and no, that is not a rhino. Now can I tell my wife that honey, I know a lion or an elephant or a cheetah in itself is not a rhino but collectively we can call it a rhino. How absurd will that sound? So my point is that a collection of things that are not the body cannot be a body. And we know that each individual part is not the body.

So how about finding this body outside of its parts. Where we even begin to look for it? In a closet? In the car? In some other City? It just does not make sense. So we can surely say that our body does not exist outside of its parts.

So we have looked at the body and could not find it in its parts, collection of its parts, or the outside of its parts. So there is not the inherently existing body. We cling to it anyway. Shantideva, a great Indian scholar once said that at dusk time, when we are walking a pile of stones may look like a human body to us. It is just like that. Because of the darkness of our ignorance, we are clinging to this body as inherently existent. If we truly search for our body in a meditation session, we will realize that it is nothing but the manifestation of the emptiness.

Now some of you may ask but I see this body clearly. Yes, you do. And that is just an imputation. It’s a body because we all decided to call it a body. That does not give it an inherent existence. Meaning it has an imputed or dependent existence.

Hope this makes a little sense. I know it is a lot to unpack. This is a little profound and may take some time to realize. But we will all get there with some examples and meditation.