Month: March 2018

Renunciate in the USA

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An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love Series

The idea of renunciation is not popular in our country because we don’t understand it.  In America we believe in accumulation; that’s our source of refuge: we accumulate.  The minute we have that coffee pot and that microwave and that big- screen TV and all those different things, we’re going to be happy.  If you don’t have a car, if you’re not rich, if you don’t have a toaster, if you don’t have a dishwasher, if you don’t have all of these things, that is the cause of suffering.  Yet the Buddha says, “No, that’s not the case. The cause of suffering is the desire for those things.”  Having devoted ourselves to accumulation, it becomes uncomfortable to think that we might have to dedicate our lives to renunciation.

It depends on your objects of refuge.  If you really think that the coffee percolator, the TV, the anti-aging cream, the microwave, the big car and all the money are your source of refuge, then most Americans are practicing their religion correctly.  But if you believe that enlightenment is the end of suffering, then that is your object of refuge. All the teachings and the supports to the Path to enlightenment – the Buddha, the Dharma or the Buddha’s teaching, and the Sangha or the Buddha’s community – are the objects of refuge.  That is what you see as the solution.  The things like toaster, can only make toast.  The things like coffee pot can only make coffee.  The things like TV can only show whatever they show.  They are not sources of refuge; they never, ever, end suffering for more than a short period of time.  If we understand that our sources of refuge are those things which end suffering, we’ll be able to perceive in a logical and real way.

We are a hard-working people.  We get up very early in the morning.  We quickly get ready under stressful conditions, putting on as much of those Estee Lauder things as we possibly can, before seven o’clock.  Then we leave and stay on the road for a very long time, under terrible conditions.  Then we get somewhere and we work very hard with people we don’t know very well, doing very strange things that are very different from our nature, all day long.  Then we come home on a very long road that is also very difficult to travel.  Then we eat very quickly, and don’t feel very well, watch TV and go to bed.  That’s what most of our culture does.  And it’s a very hard road.

We use so much energy doing things that we are told we must do.  We must have a certain level of education.  We must have a certain level of accumulation.  We must care for these things that we have accumulated. We must cultivate certain kinds of relationships.  That’s a big job. According to our culture there are certain lines that we have to cross in order to be successful and happy.  We work very hard at these things.

But chronically and repeatedly at certain ages of our lives we go through phases or passages when we are dissatisfied. Marriages go through the seven-year itch.  We go through middle age and we go through menopause.  We go through all these different stages, and they’re so common and usual that our psychologists are beginning to recognize and document them and consider some of them normal.

What are they really?  We work very hard to get to a certain phase of our life and then we find that it’s basically empty.  We didn’t get the satisfaction we were promised. Then we gear ourselves up for another phase.  When we get there, suddenly we find: uh oh.  That’s not to say we don’t have our little joys and happiness’s along the way.  But basically as a people we work very hard and yet are becoming deeply disappointed and disillusioned.

The way that some of us have chosen to deal with it is to think more positively and convince ourselves that we really are happy.  We go to friends or support groups or some New Age groups or a psychologist; all the different avenues that people explore when they’re really hurting.  What you basically come out with is, “Oh you have to change your thinking around.”  You are told to think, “My life is full, my life is fruitful, I am really happy and I like being busy like this because it means that I’m having many experiences.”  There are so many people doing that kind of thing it’s painful to watch.  Some people are okay with that; it’s their karma to live a good and simple life, and throughout their life they try to be kind to others.  But some people are really struggling.

Copyright ©  Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Astrology for 03/12/2018

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03/12/2018 Monday by Jampal & Wangmo

Theme: Communication and relationships

There are more opportunities to communicate about your connections with others today – from friends, family members, colleagues to complete strangers. You may feel hesitant to reach out but don’t let that stop you – others may feel hesitant as well. You don’t have to get your speech right before you speak if you come from the heart. Shared resources and seeking deep answers to deep questions are highlighted today. ‘The way to overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.’~Lady Bird Johnson

Today the Moon is Void of Course from 11.37 am EST USA until 4.46 pm. If you’re in another country check what that means for you time-wise. It’s best to avoid making major decisions or signing contracts during this time.

In Pursuit of The Real Cure

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An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love Series

For Westerners, one of the basic teachings of the Buddha, that all sentient beings are suffering, is very difficult to understand.  Our culture doesn’t buy the idea of suffering. Most of us seem to have everything, or if we don’t have everything we can get it if we really try. There are books that say if you really want to do thus and such, you can do it.  That implies something about the understanding of suffering in our culture. There is also a movement that developed gradually with the idea that if you constantly think positively, you can make your life into something that is completely pleasurable all the time. This became the New Age movement.

The Buddha says that if you honestly and with courage look around, you will see that idea doesn’t hold up. No matter what people’s thoughts are, or how they try to live a life with positive thinking or master their emotions in that superficial way by saying, “Right now I am happy.  I am constantly happy.  I am always happy, therefore I will be happy.”  No matter how they try to do that, we are getting old.  We are getting sick.  Eventually, everyone will die.

These are the thoughts we are given when we begin to study Buddhism, which turn the mind.  The three sufferings of the human realm: old age, sickness and death, and also the suffering of suffering.  Because even within that, there are different kinds of suffering: the suffering of loneliness, the suffering of poverty, the suffering of hunger.

We are not instructed by the Buddha to meditate on suffering to make ourselves miserable and increase our suffering.  That isn’t the point. The point of understanding suffering and courageously viewing suffering is that finally you will have the tools to do something about it.  Because at the same time that Lord Buddha teaches us there is suffering, he also says, “And there is an end to suffering.  And the end to suffering is enlightenment.”

Here in the West we do everything else in order to end our suffering.  We stand in front of the Estee Lauder counter for thirty years, and every year we buy a new product.  We do this in order to not suffer aging; that’s how we think as Westerners.  We develop new and better medical techniques in order to not suffer sickness.  When people die, we quickly take them off the streets and out of view and stick them in boxes. Then we claim that according to psychology one can safely grieve for nine weeks before it becomes neuroses.  We have done all of these things in order to deal with old age, sickness and death.  Of course we have social services and we try not to let people be too poor. If they are poor we put them all in the same part of the city so that nobody can see them.  All of these things exist in our society and yet we managed to cover them up. That’s really our psychology.

But if you understand a timeless and very simple truth, and look around you with courage at humans and animals all over the world, you will see suffering exists.  Has Estee Lauder cured aging yet?  Have we found a cure to death?  Have we found a cure to sickness?  We may have found a way to manipulate sickness, but it still exists.  These sufferings are still there, although we have managed to delude ourselves that they don’t exist.  The problem is that it’s not the cure.  The cure is realization, enlightenment.  In order to accomplish the end of all suffering, we as a culture have to turn some of our attention away from the grand cover up, and more to the pursuit of the real cure.  We have to finally understand our objects of refuge.

Copyright ©  Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Astrology for 03/11/2018

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03/11/2018 Sunday by Jampal & Wangmo

Theme: Digging deep

Today you can dig deep to draw on your inner emotional resources transforming your suffering into strength and courage. Your not a pushover today! But then again others aren’t either. Know which battles to pick today. You have a lot of capacity today to deal with any challenges you face. Give space and freedom to others today. There could be some positive unexpected changes. ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’~John Kabat-Zinn

True Refuge

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An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love Series

In the West we have a certain context through which we understand.  There’s a certain karmic format that we all participate in; our thoughts are shaped a certain way.  When we are children and form our ideas we all receive, individually and collectively, a certain kind of input. These things have a very important influence on us.  So the way a Westerner and an Easterner might approach the Buddha’s teaching is probably slightly different.

All of the cultures that practice Buddhism on a grand scale practice them from birth.  The basic ideas of the Buddha’s teachings permeate the entire culture.  But that’s not so with ours.  In fact, there are some ideas that we have been brought up with that seem to be contradictory to the Buddha’s teaching.  From this point of view, teachings of the Buddha have to be presented in a way that we can understand that while they seem to be contradictory to what we have learned, in fact they are not.

There is a universal truth being presented that isn’t contradicted by our culture, although the language and understanding is different.  If something is a universal truth, then it must be true wherever it is, or it isn’t true at all.  So what we’re looking for is a way to explain some of the basic thoughts to those that have never practiced Buddhism and haven’t heard any of these teachings before.

Compassion is a foundational thought that occurs again and again in the Buddha’s teaching.  But Westerners define compassion differently than Easterners, because Western ideas surrounding the concept of suffering are different than Eastern ideas.  From a Westerner’s point of view, we tend to think of compassion as meaning you feel sorry for somebody.  It seems to be understood on a relatively superficial and ordinary level.  If I say to you such and such is a compassionate person, you would think, “Oh probably he or she is kind.  They probably speak nicely.  They probably feed hungry people and put seed out for birds.”

Now, perhaps for a people or culture more schooled in the Buddhist teaching, when you say compassion or Bodhicitta, levels and levels of understanding occur within the mind simultaneously, and a more profound understanding takes place.  So although as Westerners we might think it would be valuable to be compassionate, if we understood the full implications of compassion on the many different levels that it exists, we would think compassion is not only desirable, but essential. There is no life without compassion.

One of the things I would like to do is deepen our understanding of compassion so that it becomes essential.  If it doesn’t become essential, we have the potential at any given moment to choose to be compassionate or not.  We can fall into being not compassionate.  We can accidentally forget to be compassionate.  All these different things can happen.  You know that this is true, if you look at your life: if you remember and are mindful, you sometimes do a fairly good job.  Then if you go into your natural habits, or become tired, have indigestion or PMS or whatever, you may forget and not be mindful of compassion.

If we had a deeper understanding of compassion it would be part of our foundation and there would be no choice, in the same way that there’s no choice about breathing.  You would never think, “Well, I’m in a good mood now, I’ll breathe,” or, “Well breathing is okay now because I’m relaxed,” or, “I can manage that now.”  That doesn’t happen because you know that to breathe is to live.  If we understood that compassion is as much a part of our being and as essential to our existence as breathing, then there would be less choice about it. It would more naturally and gracefully be part of our mind state.  In order for that to happen, we have to understand what compassion really means, and we have to understand the nature of suffering.

Copyright ©  Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Astrology for 03/10/2018

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03/10/2018 Saturday by Jampal & Wangmo

Theme: A bad hair day

With two ‘bad hair day’ planets – Saturn and Mars – squashing and challenging emotions it’s a good time to step back and practice taming your mind. It’s just one of those difficult days so don’t read too much into your difficulties. Nevertheless working with your emotions can make a difference in the world – like a ripple effect. ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today the Moon is Void of Course from 9.29pm on the 9th of March EST USA until 4.53 am. If you’re in another country check what that means for you time-wise. It’s best to avoid making major decisions or signing contracts during this time.

Extraordinary Blessings

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An excerpt from a teaching called Compassion, Love, & Wisdom by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We need to practice human kindness. For instance if  someone described to me child abuse and they said to me, “As a Buddhist you believe in karma, do you just accept that this is the child’s karma to have experienced abuse and do you sort of leave it at that and think, well that is their karma and pray for them?” Well, Lord Buddha, I don’t know what you would say if you were here right now, standing here in the flesh, but I’ll tell you what I understand to be the Buddha’s perspective. If you see someone being abused or hurt and you do nothing to end their suffering that is now your karma.  You will have karma with them and you always will until you can be of benefit to them.  So ordinary human kindness is very much a part of what we have to do, but it isn’t all that we do.

We have to prevent people from being hurt; we have to feed the hungry if we can.  If we see suffering we have to do what we can to end it. But it is simply not useful to stop there. We must continue with an extraordinary kind of love, an extraordinary kind of compassion that sees beyond the causes and effects that are only obvious in this life time and goes further to understand the root cause and the ultimate effect.  We must develop the capacity to completely liberate ourselves from the cause and effect relationships that have been caused from the beginningless past and that are with us always until we reach enlightenment.  We have to think not only of this one slice of reality that is our life, what is it – eighty years? We have to think of the countless eons of cyclic existence that we have continued to accumulate cause and effect relationships and we must institute causes that overcome all of them.  You have to get some perspective.  To practice Dharma sincerely you have to get some perspective.  It isn’t just about eighty years.  It is about a long time.  You may not always understand the causes that you experience the results of now.

It is popular now for people to go to psychics and say, “How come my husband always beats me?”  And the psychic says, “Oh, because in a past life you ran over him with a mule.”  Well, fine so far as that goes, that may very well be one of the things that happened. Maybe you were the mule and this psychic doesn’t like that, but anyway, that, I promise you, is only one of many things that contribute to your life such as it is now.  It is only one of many things and it is impossible for a psychic without complete omniscience to see all of them.  You may never know what the root causes are. But what is wonderful about the Buddha’s path is that you don’t have to know what the root causes are: they are all desire, hatred, greed and ignorance. This is the medicine.

Here in the West we love to examine our garbage before we take it out, but you don’t have to do that, you just take it out. This is the necessary perspective to maintain: that the wisdom we must seek is the wisdom that is different from ordinary knowledge, it is the pristine balance of the primordial wisdom state.  It is completely in union with love.  And that union is the very display, or results in the very display, of what we see bringing the most benefit in this world.  When we look in this world and see where there is hope and where there is relief, we find that there is an extraordinary path, that there is an extraordinary means to achieve realization. That there have been, and there are, in this world extraordinary teachers incarnating again and again, and there are extraordinary blessings. We are living in an extraordinary time, able to grasp an extraordinary opportunity.  This being the case we should adopt this wisdom as our most precious goal and adopt this love as our most precious mother.

Leaving you with that thought, I hope in some way you will come to the point where you will choose with certainty and with courage and with determination to practice in a consistent and meaningful way. I hope with all my heart you do not waste this precious opportunity.  It is taught this opportunity to hear the Buddha’s words and see the Buddha’s form and come to a point where we can accomplish the Buddha’s teaching is so rare it is like finding a precious jewel sifting through garbage.  It is that rare. And having had this opportunity once, if we do not institute the causes by which we will have it again and again and again it will be a long time before we see it again.  Those are the teachings.  I didn’t make that up and I believe them.  So I ask you to consider practice, to learn how to practice, to practice consistently and to be faithful in your practice and, most of all, to begin now, even on your own, to turn your mind with thoughts of caring for others.  To cultivate both ordinary and extraordinary kindness, to cultivate a pure determination to bring about the end of suffering, these things you can begin now.  Thank you.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Astrology for 03/09/2018

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03/09/2018 Friday by Jampal & Wangmo

Theme: The challenge of staying grounded

Tensions come to the surface today particularly in relations to the opposite sex. Most of the energy this week is about starting things and adapting, but less so about staying the course. It maybe a challenge to find ways to anchor yourself and activities. Everything might feel a little bit intangible. The resource you can draw upon is self-discipline. Even though this doesn’t sound very exciting  it can bring rewards. It’s a good time to address tasks you’ve been putting off. ‘Obstacles are not negative occurrences. They are manifestations of what we had not “planned” for and thus, they are precious doorways to wisdom.’~HH Dudjom Rinpoche 

 

Ultimate Compassion

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An excerpt from a teaching called Compassion, Love, & Wisdom by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Ordinary sentient beings cannot bring about extraordinary ends.  Ordinary sentient beings do not have the skill to bring about the end of suffering, since they themselves have within their mindstreams the causes of suffering.  Who then will act as this guide?  Who then will bring this path?  Who then will offer these teachings?  Who will announce a door to liberation?  It must be our intention as we practice this path until we reach supreme enlightenment, and once having accomplished realization, that we will remain in such a form as a Bodhisattva and return again and again and again in order to benefit beings. This is ultimate compassion.  This is the compassion that is actually quite different from ordinary human kindness.

Let’s take as an example a relationship with a teacher.  Let’s say that you have found a teacher who has those qualities, who has attained some realization and returns again and again to benefit beings.  We might think of human kindness in a certain way.  For instance let’s say that I have a student over here and he is a little slow.  He is a nice person, he is trying to accomplish Dharma, but he is a little slow.  Well if you examine it, that slowness is the result of laziness.  He is a little lazy.  Maybe he doesn’t have all the compassion he needs to really be fervent on this path.  Maybe he really needs to develop that compassion and maybe he is just getting a little slothful and maybe there are some things that the teacher can see that are not quite kosher, not quite right with him.  But because we are ordinary we might think, well maybe he is just a little slow and he can’t help it, he is doing the best he can. He is a nice guy, just leave him alone.  He is a little slow.  We might think maybe we will just be kind to him and we will try to support him to see if we can help him. Then we will just be nice to him and little by little he will do the best he can in his feeble, little way.

So he continues and he is still kind of slow and feeble and pitiful.  Then one day a good teacher comes along, sizes up the situation and really displays some wrathful activity and says, “You are going to straighten up your act.”  Gives him ‘what for,’ tells him the truth, reads him the riot act, testifies before Buddha and just changes his whole life around.  Causes him a great deal of upset, causes him to have serious gastric disturbances, causes him to whimper and cry a little bit and the rest of us might think, poor guy, boy did he ever get it.  Wow, that is really rough, that is really terrible.

The difference is that this teacher might have had the capacity to understand what is really happening is that an obstacle to his practice is arising.  It isn’t about being simple at all, it’s about an obstacle to his practice arising, and that obstacle has to do with past habits of sloth and laziness.  It has to do with not having been helpful to other sentient beings; it has to do with his not sending his mother a card on Mother’s day for a couple of years. We couldn’t see what the Lama could see and the Lama knew, but the Lama had that kind of wisdom. Well, what happened to this poor old guy is that he got really shook up, he got finished with his serious gastric disturbances, he took him pepto bismal and he is all squared away. Now suddenly he has changed.

How has he changed?  Has he changed because he really needed to be yelled at?  No because you could have done that.  What the Lama did was to cut out an obstacle and that is kind of miraculous activity because there was awareness there, there was a skillful means that ordinary sentient beings don’t have.  There was also a pure motivation.  That Lama wasn’t really interested in yelling at this poor guy, but he saw there was an obstacle close to the surface and if it were cut out in some profound way it would be pretty clear sailing after that.  That is also possible.  I don’t know if there is such a Lama or such a situation, I don’t know if any of these things are true, but I do know what I am describing is the difference between ordinary perception and extraordinary perception, the difference between ordinary human kindness and true compassion.

Human beings want to follow human rules; we want to be kind in the ways we are taught.  We think that is the answer because we don’t understand cause and effect.  We don’t understand that in order to change the effect we are seeing now you cannot simply mess around with the effect some more.  You have to remove the causes. If you have that pristine awareness, if you have that awakening, if you have that quality of knowing that comes with that kind of realization, you might be able to see the causes.  Through skillful means, with pure enlightened intention through the perfect stability of the union of wisdom with pure compassion in your mind, you might be able to bring about the causes to end the particular suffering he is experiencing. So maybe the man turns around and maybe it’s not because of the reasons that you think.

Our job is to develop these extraordinary skills, and although I think in my case it is going to take an awful long time, still I think we have to do our best to understand that what is needed to accomplish the end of suffering are not ordinary techniques.  They must come from the mind of enlightenment, they must lead to the mind of enlightenment, they must exhibit the qualities of the mind of enlightenment and they may not be exactly sympathetic to some of the human beliefs we may hold true.  We have to accept that this may be a challenge for Westerners.  Ordinary human kindness cannot be discounted.  It is a part of what we must do.  Actually ordinary human kindness is included in the miraculous compassion I just described, as not only did the Lama have the skill to know what was wrong with this fellow, not only did he have the ultimate compassion to care deeply that he accomplish his practice and achieve supreme enlightenment, but he also had ordinary human kindness. He cared about the guy and wanted him to be happy.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Astrology for 03/08/2018

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03/08/2018 Thursday by Jampal & Wangmo

Theme: Dealing with restriction

There are challenges in the next 10 days in dealing with unexpected hindrance in relationships and achieving your goals. You may also feel changeable energy levels. With the Moon in Sagittarius there is some relief and optimism that you can make a difference in the world. You can chat about the meaning of the universe over a coffee or sip on the beauty of the outdoors.‘Oh, If we could only taste the soundless voice that sings its silent name in colors.’~Jetsunma Akhon Norbu Lhamo

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