An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999
Let’s say we were living in a terribly traumatic situation where there was all kinds of danger and all kinds of suffering, but something came on TV, a sitcom, the one that starts with an event and ends up with happily ever after in 30 minutes. Don’t you love that about sitcoms? I wish life were like that. In the midst of all your travail and suffering you watch this sitcom, and for that short period of time, you’re comfortable, sort of happy. You can laugh at things, but like the sitcom playing, does it change anything? When the sitcom is finished, what happens? You’ve still got your life, right? So it’s like that with the kind of escaping that we try to do. We try to put ourselves in a comfort zone. We are so addicted to the narcotic quality of samsara that we try to bring that narcotic state onto ourselves again and again. We want to watch TV. We want to do different kinds of activities that make us feel safe. We like to do activities that we can control. We like to experience little adventures that are completely within our control, where there are no surprises, and we call that amusement. We like to experience psychological, emotional events that are totally safe and totally controlled, and we call that relationships. We don’t want to leave that comfort zone.
What is that comfort zone? That comfort zone is the blind, dumb acceptance of the appearance of phenomena as being real without any discrimination, without any recognition. We prefer to bring this narcotic cloak onto ourselves. When we feel that things are getting too naked, too real, pull up the covers! That’s what we do. And we all have different ways of doing that, don’t we? You know some people like to do the domestic goddess routine; some people like to be workaholics; some people like to do the fertility mambo.
No matter what area you’re practicing, you have to require of yourself a mental exercise – to rethink things, to reassess. You have to practice recognition. Do not wait for recognition to come. The mistake that most practitioners make is magical thinking. They say, “If I do this practice for two hours a day for the rest of my life, and maybe I’ll take a three year retreat, then I will be enlightened.” It’s like a magical charm. It doesn’t matter how you do those things or what you do after those things or before those things, but so long as you do those things, you will be enlightened. This is the kind of thinking we have about our practice. What I’m suggesting is that it’s not true. We achieve enlightenment when we awaken. There’s a difference. You can’t really say you achieve your enlightenment after you finish your practice. You achieve your enlightenment when you awaken. The state of recognition is the key here. How you hone your mind, how you choose to use your senses, how you redefine, how you study Samsara in order to recognize, how you study and learn to discriminate is necessary in order to achieve realization. It is part of the process of awakening.
© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo
