Knowing

Last weekend Mingyur Rinpoche came to Montreal.  I followed him around like a groupie. First for a six hour day of introductory lectures and guided meditation (I sat with my mother in the second row.) Then a talk at the brain imaging centre at the Montreal neuro (where my mother had recently had a brain shunt put in), and finally for a two hour White Tara empowerment ceremony.

This ceremony was very different from the low floor secularism that Mingyur Rinpoche has become famous for.  It was closer to the mass I have known all my life as a Catholic.  There was chanting. There was a high and elaborate ceremonial hat. There were white diaphanous scarves that were placed around our necks. There were offerings and communion food. But there was a lightness that made it substantially different.

"I wish you all had this hat," he joked in the middle of the ritual, in which we all imagined the "White Tara" the embodiment of the female buddha nature sitting above our head, and imagined feeling what she felt, and knowing what she knew.  The communion was a procession of nuts, fruits, and finally cheezies.  Yes, that's right, instead of the tasteless wafer I have known, so carefully designed to leave the mouth drier and hungrier after its dissolution, this white Tara ceremony ended with a puff of artificial cheese flavour, designed in its way to bring you to a bliss point that will also leave you wanting more.

But without the lovingly cultivated bliss of a strong and stable practice, whatever "more" we achieve it achingly transient.

We are enlightened, but not allowed to tell anyone, jokes my Rinpoche. It is believed in Tibetan Buddhism that everyone is fundamentally good and perfect. That we don't recognize our own enlightenment.  Through practice, we recognize it from time to time, and through extended, disciplined and authentically loving practice, we can make this recognition intuitive, which is the best definition of enlightenment I can offer right now.

Through this ceremony, I have taken the boddhisatva vow. I will practice every day, and work to increase my hours of practice in the hope that I can make this knowledge intuitive for all.

Practicing Generosity

I learned a new take on tonglen this week, the Tibetan practice of giving and taking. The way I've been doing it in the last few years, is to imagine myself taking in the suffering of others on an in- breath, and then imagining myself sending out liberation, comfort, just the feeling of release. But in this online Varajana course I'm taking, I've learned that we practice generosity by breathing out our virtues, our skills, our ability to love.

That is practicing generosity in meditation.

Practicing generosity in daily life is quite simple, being more gradually willing to let go of possessions, ideas of the self, resources.  Mingyur Rinpoche demonstrates it by shifting a coconut from one hand to the other.  It's not being attached to things, but also not to the fruits of our skills.

For me these days, generosity is practicing the letting go of my usual comforts to focus on cleaning, then dedicating any energy, skill, comfort I get from cleaning to anyone who is struggling to find the motivation and energy to take care of themselves. Yesterday and this morning, I gave up the twenty minutes of blissful meditation to pick up stuff.

This is an extension of last week's insight into the difference between anger and hatred.  Anger is the emotion that arises. Hatred is anger in practice.  To begin to untangle and de-iterate this habit of hatred,  one needs to look at how to iterate love.  Ther is love the spontaneous feeling, and love the practice. When I look around my chaotic home, I see the I am not practicing love in this domain. I see myself surrounded in learned helplessness. I think of everyone who feels helpless, I clean, and send any motivation I am accumulating through these increased minutes and hours of cleaning.

An interesting thing happened this weekend. I did a cleaning meditation that started with picking up all the paper, chip bags, light squalor from the floor, feeling the resistance, and sending out any good that might come of this.  And suddenly, in the middle of his online video game with a friend, my son turned to me and said, "is there anything I can do to help?"

The impact of generosity.

Generosity

Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of generosity is letting go.  We tend to think of it as giving, but to give that which a bodhisattva most deeply wants to give, enlightenment, we have to let go of all that muddies this joyful wisdom that is our birthright.

Anger, resentment, envy, I continue to struggle with these everyday, as do most people living in the world. The best way to let them go is to be with them until they dissolve, but this is hard work, and that is where the generosity comes in.

I need to let go of the cravings that burn up the time I could be putting into letting my anger, resentment and envy go.  So this week I devote time to letting go.  Letting go of bad food.  Letting go of bad habits.  Letting go of lethargy and binge watching.  Letting go of fatigue and poor health.

Later:

2 hrs of meditation later.

I started a meditation on anger, but I realized later that really the emotion I need to let go of if I'm going to be generous is hatred.  Similar, but different.  Anger is the emotion that arises, hatred is that emotion applied to an object, now seen as the source of the anger.

Hatred is what makes the anger seem solid and material.  So to become more generous, I'm going to take some time today, and this week to recognize and release the hating habit.

Re-reading some of my past posts on hatred, I found some forgotten insight:

First, this one on the recursive power of hatred.  If you apply just the right amount of hatred to hatred, it becomes like a de-iterating loop, ceasing at the point of equanimity.

And just before that, a night when I started to move away from self-hatred. Clearly, I've been down this path before, and there's a wonderful place at the end of it, that I can find my way back to.