An excerpt from a teaching called Dharma and the Western Mind by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo
By now you know that you are interested in spirituality and meditation but maybe you seem to keep falling off the horse. You are interested but you have remained too peripheral: you have been meditating a little, you have been nice a little, you have been living a good life a little, you have been eating health foods and maybe you don’t eat meat anymore. Maybe you have been doing all these things but you know somewhere in your heart that it is a little too peripheral and that there is something more. And you have to address that need and get into the core of it, address how you will get courageous enough to jump into the core of it and get yourself motivated enough to do something that people in our society simply are not doing. How are you going to do that? Other people will not compliment you for it. How you are going to have the courage to get into it, and have the stamina to stay on it? How you are not going to be tricked away from it by yourself? How you are not going to be seduced into believing that ordinary circumstances can be of ultimate benefit when they can’t? You have to convince yourself that temporary things will never satisfy you.
Along with the need to experience ultimate bliss you also have to convince yourself that no matter what you do or who you are with, if you are simply manipulating ordinary circumstances and not trying to accomplish the path to supreme realization, then you will do just that – spend your life manipulating ordinary circumstances and you will not accomplish supreme enlightenment. How will you have the courage to understand that so that you can do what needs to be done, not continue on the wheel of death and rebirth endlessly, and be of use to those who are themselves suffering without a hope of accomplishing the path that you have hopes of accomplishing?
Please stabilize your mind by allowing it to become on fire with caring and loving, and more concerned with the suffering of others than with your own. This will not be easy. You will have to cultivate it. If you were born with that kind of love you would be teaching me, I don’t have that kind of love. I have to cultivate compassion constantly. If you had been born that way everything would be different. You have to cultivate that kind of love every moment and that is where the courage comes in. You can’t just love your family and think that is enough. You can’t just love your friends and think that is enough. You have to cultivate such compassion that your enemy becomes exactly the same weight as your friend. There is one person that you love so much that you are crazy about them and there is also someone who is the bane of your existence. You should think about them, the one that drives you up the wall no matter what you do. Although you try to be patient you still have to grit your teeth. There is one like that in your life. You have to take these two people and you have to make them equal, you have to love them the same. You have to realize that they are both trying to be happy and that neither one of them knows how. If they do attain happiness, it is temporary; it is the only kind that they can get. They can do the same as you, manipulate things around a little bit, but that is it. It goes away soon. So you have to practice in such a way that your mind becomes really awakened to that consideration of others as being equal, absolutely equal and the same as you. And there are more of them.
How do you cultivate that? I have some suggestions that I think cause Westerners to practice; that I think is a way for you to hook yourself and practice sincerely. I suggest that you do a three day retreat. Almost everyone can take either Friday or Monday off of work. Almost everyone can do that. First of all in preparation go to the library and check out all different kinds of books about different forms of life: insects, animals, jellyfish, and all different forms of life. Check out books about different kinds of cultures and different countries. The only ones that you can really look at in books, unfortunately, are the ones you can see with human eyes, so that is where you have to start and so you should examine these different life forms. Examine these different people in different countries and how they live and how they die, what their rites are what their rituals are what they struggle for, what they have to eat, what they do not have to eat, all of the different trials and tribulations that they go through – the different conditions under which they live.
Then look at the different life forms, look at the different insects and different things that are around us that we never notice. Think what it must be, for instance, to be an ant that builds this whole nest with all these little tunnels and gets all these little eggs and feeds them and runs around and sniffs everybody else and finds where the food is and brings it back. Have you ever seen an ant carrying food? That is too much work for me. That would cause me to go on a diet quickly, maybe that is my problem. These ants carry enormous quantities of food and they work very hard and they get the food down there and they feed these little round things, and build this whole city. They are working really hard and suddenly along comes this person chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, whistling a tune and scrappppp – the whole ant pile is gone. Think about that.
Then think of all the different life forms that are so incredibly impermanent. Think about going through all the trouble of being a larva or pupa and then you get to fly for exactly twenty-four hours. Think about all that. And then think about life forms that are hard for us to understand. For instance, there is something called a midge which is a little bug and the midge actually conceives its young inside of itself and then its young proceed to eat it and then it dies when there is not enough left to carry it around any more. Think of that. They never choose that, they don’t know that, they just do it.
Think about oxen that are caused to pull heavy carts so many hours a day and how hard they must work. Think about how difficult it is for dogs and cats who are left out in the streets by themselves and how helpless they are and we decide to experiment on them. Think about all these different things that are so hard to think about and read these books and really study them and become aware of something. We put these blinders on and we insulate ourselves and we try not to watch but for that one day I am asking you to watch, really look, really learn what the whole scene is about, and try to see it.
On the second day you should continue to allow yourself to be greatly moved. The first day you have studied, the second day you should think about it, meditate on it, really contemplate it, take walks, try not to see anybody else. You don’t want to do anything but think about this, contemplate it, walk with it, think about it, sit with it, just spend the day with it and during the second part of that day you have to start thinking whether it is important to you that this should change. Having to spend a day letting yourself be moved is also hard because we like to insulate ourselves in such a way that it is hard to turn us back on again. You won’t die, not this time anyway. Just think about it.
On the third day allow yourself to love, not just to feel sorry. The third day is the most important because you have to take what you did the first two days – don’t get stuck in despair – and you have to say now I will accomplish Dharma, now I will practice. You have to let yourself be turned on by love, not just sorrow. You have to think how important it is to finish this. You have to think, you have to allow yourself to feel the intensity of your caring. Allow yourself to really love them, allow yourself to get turned on and during the course of that day make commitments. Make them in such a way that you have to keep them. Create for yourself a ritual if that helps, make an altar, make an offering of some kind, symbolic that you have offered yourself and pray. The third day you should pray. Make wishing prayers that you will be changed in such a way that your life will be a perfect vehicle for unconditional love. Those prayers are heard, they are truly heard. You should visualize in front of you all the Buddha’s and Bodhisattvas, even if you don’t know what they look like, just assume that they are there and they will show up. Speak to them from your heart and say, “Please, make of me a clean place so that wherever I am compassion can live in the world.”
You should pray with all your heart: “Let me be reborn in a form that will be of benefit to sentient beings, let me be the cause of the end of suffering. If there is a need for food let me be reborn as food, lots of it; if there is a need for medicine let me be reborn as medicine, let me be the doctor, let me be the bridge on which they cross,” and so on. Make those prayers from the depth of your heart until you have tears in your eyes. You haven’t done it properly until you have tears in your eyes, by the way, and do it in such a way that you formalize this bargain with yourself and you ask all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to be your witness and from that moment on you are determined that you will find a means to accomplish supreme enlightenment so that you can be of benefit to sentient beings. And once you begin to practice your path and practice it sincerely you should take days like that or retreats like that on a regular basis because we need them. We are too busy, we are too proper, we are too insulated, we need them. We need to remember. It is hard to love.
A Lama that said, “I have taken the vows of ordination such as these monks and nuns have taken and he said that I have practiced these vows and there are over two hundred of them, every day of my life, perfectly, I have not missed once, I have done everything properly he said but the vows of compassion, the vows of Bodhicitta I have never been able to keep them for one hour.” And my friend that is true of all of us. We have to constantly be awakened and reawakened to love.
©Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo
