I can remember back when I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, “Hyper Nonsense” with Shawno and Jen.  It was a weekly (approximately) podcast that’s was just plain fun.  Anyway.  Shawno said something that just wowed me in an episode.  “I denounce your reality and replace it with my own.”  I completely broke down laughing at this.   It was so hilariously self centered and aggressive, that I thought I have to use it.

As soon as I got to a computer, I typed the phrase into Twitter, giving Shawno full credit of course,  but claiming the phrase as mine now.   Shawno tweeted (twitter term) back that he actually stole the phrase from the TV series “Mythbusters” and wasn’t quite sure he got it right.  Either way, I still think it’s hilarious, I subjected my coworkers to it rather liberally.

In general, the more we repeat something, be it verbally, or physically, or whatever, the more familiar we get with it.  So I thought about this phrase quite a bit as I searched for places where I could throw it in when dealing with co-workers.  I discovered that, even though it was meant completely in jest, there is actually some real truth in this little phrase if we look deep down.

Our days are filled with incidents and people who either re-enforce our ego or push and pull at it in an effort to change it.  OK…OK…work with me here, folks.  Any thought or idea that you have that you verbalize, most people will either agree with you (support your ego) or disagree with you (diminish your ego).  For instance, if you say I think Dennis Kucinich is the best candidate for President, someone will either support you (“Yea…me too…I like his approach to education”) or not (“Are you nuts?  Kucinich is waaay too liberal.  There’s no way he can be a leader on the world stage!”).  OK…maybe that one was too controversial.  Let’s try another one.  “Whoa!  This jambalaya is WAAAY to spicy! (If you’re living in Louisiana, this may be more controversial than politics) Someone may agree with you or disagree with you.

So in our reality, the food is too spicy, but someone else is negating our reality and replacing it with their own.  “Stop being such a wuss.  It’s not that hot!”  In their reality, the food isn’t spicy at all.  So which one is right?  Once again we have come back to our ego painting our perceptions of true reality.  It’s those damn adjectives again.  And when we look close, we can see that at the root, they are trying to negate our reality and replace it with their own.  So what do we do in return?  We try to do the same thing.  They are wrong, we are right.  “It is, in fact, too spicy.  Your taste buds are just dead.”  Now we are negating their reality.

So I can hear you now.  “Lans, you’re kinda making a mountain out of a mole hill here.  It’s just different taste, not some philosophical negating of reality junk.”  Well, is it?  Remember that from our, un-enlightened point of view, our perceptions are what we believe to be true reality.  But to our friend Joe, his perceptions are true reality.  As long as our perceptions mesh, all is well for both our egos, but when our perceptions differ, egos have to defend themselves.  Sometimes it’s not really worth our effort, we just subconsciously tell ourselves that our reality is correct, the other party’s reality is a misperception, and let it drop.  But sometimes, our egos step into the cage for the no holds barred slug fest.  We can’t let it drop.  We must force someone else’s ego to bend to ours.  Our perception must be accepted as correct.  We have to use every trick in the book to force our opponent concede defeat.

“So what you’re saying is that people disagree?  Big news flash there, Buddha Boy. “  Ok…Ok…I may be taking too long getting to the point.  But in almost every situation, nobody’s PERCEPTION of reality is TRUE reality.  We’ve talked many times on this podcast about what enlightenment is.  It’s seeing things as they truly are.  Well, since most of us aren’t enlightened, we AREN’T seeing things as they truly are.  Looking at the simple food example before, one ego says something is too hot, while another says that it’s not.  But the food is the food.  It’s not too hot or not hot enough or whatever.  It’s just the food.  Everything else is ego assigning those perceptions again.

This came in my email today.  I get a daily email from lojongmindtraining.com with commentaries on the  Lojong sayings by several great teachers.  This one from the great Pema Chodron I thought was particularly good.

Don’t Misinterpret

I often talk to people who tell me they’re Buddhist, so I ask them about their sitting practice.

Some will say something like, “Well, I don’t get into that part of it, I just read and study.”

Others, when asked the same question may tell me how they sit for an hour a day.  “Very good!  What are you studying currently?”

“I try to keep it to the more practical side and just concentrate on the sitting.”

The struggle to balance practice and study is something that most, if not all meditators face.  I’m currently way to far on the study side and am slowly trying to work my practice to balance it all out.  It’s important for us to understand that these are two very necessary parts of a single process.  It’s somewhat akin to someone saying they are going to cook a hamburger, but without using both meat and fire.  While either can serve some small purpose on it’s own, you must have both to eat a hamburger.  Likewise, to follow a Buddhist path, you can’t JUST meditate and you can’t JUST read and study.

This is even pointed out to us, albeit subtly, when we take the refuge vows.  The vows have us repeat ‘I take refuge in the Buddha.  I take refuge in the Dharma.  I take refuge in the Sangha.’  But what are we actually talking about?  Taking refuge in the Buddha is looking to the Buddha as the example.  He is the example of someone who can practice, follow the path and attain enlightenment.  We are talking about the meditation part here.  The Buddha is the example to us of one who can attain enlightenment via meditation.

Taking refuge in the Dharma is talking about the teachings.  We have to study the teachings and gain that knowledge that they contain.  These two are two sides of the same coin (well, really three sides if you include the sangha, but who’s counting here, right?).  The Dharma, or the teachings, provide that foundation that we sit in when we meditate.  The meditation is the practical application of the teachings.  While meditation has some secular benefits to it, from the perspective of following a Buddhist Path, it is one of our main methods of working with the teachings.  Without the teachings, we are essentially working with nothing.

Likewise, simply studying the teachings without putting them into practice is at best mental gymnastics and at worst, futile.  There are many aspects to Buddhist teachings that, without allowing the mind to actively work with them in a formal mediation setting, will remain nothing more than a neat, but mentally confusing little saying.  You must take the teachings and work on experiencing them first hand.  It’s only through this experience that we can progress along our path.

By the same token, meditating without benefit of the teachings is like studying for a test without having a book or notes.  Pretty futile.  Of course, you will learn a little more about how your own mind works but there will be no context from which to work with this.  You could think of it as having a car with a really powerful engine but no drive shaft.  There is a lot of potential there, but without out the drive shaft, all you can do is rev the engine really loudly and waste gas and time.

Now, I am not saying that practicing meditation without benefit of the teachings is useless.  Far from it!  We have talked on many occasions about the secular (for lack of a better term) benefits of meditation (reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, improving concentration).  What I am talking about is the person trying to follow a Buddhist path.

Likewise, I am not saying that Buddhist teachings are not without merit in just reading what they have to say.  But to comprehend and apply much of what is being taught on anything more than a rudimentary level takes a trained mind.  And the way to a trained mind is on the cushion.

So the point here is that we have to strike a balance.  We must devote some of our time to study of the dharma and some of our time to sitting on the cushion.  After we study a teaching for a little bit, we need to ‘let it stew’, by sitting with it on the cushion.  Sometimes this can be an active contemplation, which we haven’t really discussed much.  But contemplative meditation changes the object of your concentration from the breath to a concept.  Thinking back, I guess we have talked about on contemplative practice, Tonglen, the practices of sending and taking.  In Tonglen practice, we are actually working with the concept of compassion during the meditation.  However, you would be amazed what insight can arise on a particular teaching when we are practicing our plain old, normal, daily meditation.

So I would suggest all of us on the path take a little inventory and see if we have a good balance between practice and study.  If not, maybe add or subtract a little here or there.  This is something great to do on a recurring basis because we can easily get caught up in one aspect over the other depending on where our life and path happen to be at the moment.  As I mentioned above, I currently find myself leaning far to heavily to the studying side, but after a quick inventory, the scales are beginning to even out a bit, back to the Middle Way.

Religious pluralism?  What the hell is that, right?  In this case, we are talking about  a worldview according to which one’s religion is not the sole and exclusive source of truth, and thus that at least some truths and true values exist in other religions, or according to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the assigning of validity to all faith traditions.  This is the subject of a short article written by His Holiness in the latest edition of ‘Shambhala Sun Magazine’ and more importantly, the reason you should turn off your computer and head to your local book store right now and pick up a copy.  The beginning of the article can be read here, and while I am not going to reproduce the entire rest of the article here both for copyright reasons and issues of the health of my fingers, I would like to share the paragraph I felt really hit home with me.

…from the theistic religion’s point of view, if one believes that the entire cosmos, including the sentient beings within it, is a creation of one all powerful and compassionate God, the inescapable consequence is that the existence of faith traditions other than one’s own are also God’s creation.  To deny this would imply one of two results:  either one rejects God’s omnipotence – that is to say that, although these other faiths are “false ways”,  God remains incapable of stopping their emergence – or if one maintains that God is perfectly capable of preventing the emergence of these “false ways”, He chooses not to do so, then one rejects God’s all-embracing compassion.  The latter would imply that, for whatever reasons, God chose to exclude some – in fact, millions of his own children – and left them to follow false ways that would lead to their damnation.   So the logic of monotheism, especially the standard version that attributes omnipotence, omniscience and all embracing compassion to God, inevitably entails the recognition that the world’s many religious traditions are in one way or another are related to God’s divine intentions for the ultimate well being of His children.   This means that, as a devout follower of God, one must accord respect, and if possible, reverence to all religions.

Although I have tried to put this into words for years, I have never been successful because I have never been able to argue the point of view that ‘my faith tells me I’m right and you’re wrong.”  I just didn’t have the smarts to debate that argument.  Obviously, His Holiness is vastly superior to me in the realm of religious debate (not to mention several million other things, I’m sure).

His Holiness turns 75 today!

I ran the The Heart Sutra through http://wordle.net. Pretty interesting.

Give it a shot yourself. (Best viewed in Large or Original on flickr. Just click the image.)

The Heart Sutra

I believe that most of the world’s great religions stem from the same place.  Not tone person or one place, but that most religions tend to spring from the same thing:  man’s attempt to find a reason for existence and to understand the true nature of reality.  This may be a controversial stance to take. An Evangelical Christian would say that his religion has nothing to do and nothing in common with that of a Hindu.  The Jew may say that his religion and that of Islam are diametrically opposed, but I truly don’t see there being that much difference in the basic, fundamentals of what each is trying to accomplish.

We all examine this multi-colored rainbow that we can refer to as ultimate reality but we tend to shade it. It’s as if we were wearing colored glasses as we look at the rainbow because we can’t fathom the whole thing in it’s entirety. Each religion wears a different colored lens on the glasses so the glasses filter out part of the whole, amplify another part and distort still more. As a religion grows, that which was amplified is made more important and deemed more correct. That which was filtered out is not known and deemed incorrect and the distortions grow and get even more distorted.

In the small Arkansas town where I was raised, believe it or not there was a certain amount of religious tolerance, at least within the crowd that my family was a part of.  Although a practicing Presbyterian, my grandmother was a self taught student of world religions and was very open to the points of view of all religions, regardless of whether that point of view was positive or negative to her beliefs.  When I was very young and my grandmother would read to me, we were just as likely to be reading about the basics of Zen, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, or the life of Thomas Jefferson as we were about The Adventures Curious George or Babar the Elephant.  This not only gave me a wide breadth of knowledge, but a certain tolerance for things that were different.

When I became a Buddhist, there was a certain part of this attitude that I lost.  While I was perfectly willing to live and let live, I would get very defensive, to the point of going on the offense, if I was faced with a discussion comparing my religion with another.  Buddhism was my territory and thou shall not criticize my territory.  I jumped in and defended my territory at all costs.  But as time went on, I began to see that the problem wasn’t their reaction to my religion, but my reaction to my religion.

As I began to look deep within my own path, and at the same time try to understand theirs, in much the same way my grandmother had 40 or so years earlier.  I began to discover that at the source, there is not much difference.  In every religion, some things are emphasized, others forgotten about, and still others are probably just misinterpreted.  But we are all are looking for the same things.  Peace, happiness, respect and acceptance.  We have just chosen different ways of realizing it.  We are walking on different paths to the same goal.

Now when my spiritual path is criticized by another, I try to look at and emphasize what we have in common, not where the differences are.  This may not help the other person to realize where I am coming from, but it certainly helps me realize where they are coming from, and that’s made quite an effect.

Ok..Ok.. Before you start screaming at me about ‘not believing in karma’, let me explain. I’ve talked about karma on the podcast before, but it’s one of those subjects that has so many levels that we can explore.

I’ve heard a lot of people recently talking about karma, but I think they have some misunderstandings about it.  I’ve heard comments such as “He’s gonna get some bad karma for that.” or “Karma says he’s gonna suffer three fold for that one.” or “Something good should come to her, with all that good karma.” or “Wow!  She won!  She must have some really good karma.” First let me address the ‘three fold’ issue and put that one too rest. This is crossing from another religion/philosophy. This is from the Three Fold Law in Wicca. Now, first, I am no Wicca expert, but the law says “Ever mind the rule of three. What ye send out comes back to thee,” which basically means whatever you do, you will get back times three. Again, this is part of the wiccan belief system, not the Buddhist.

This brings us to something that can be confusing about the concept of karma. There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ karma. I have heard many advanced students and even llamas talk about “good” karma and “bad” karma and it’s just incorrect, plain and simple. Karma is like gravity. It just “is.” Good or Bad are adjectives we assign depending on how we perceive the situation that either generated the karma or the situation where the karma comes to it’s fruition.

“But Lans, I thought if I do something bad, karma will do something bad to me. And by the same token, if I do something good, I will get something good.”

Yes, yes. This is the common assumption. But good and bad are relative to your personal situation and the set of circumstances laid out before you. Let’s look at a simple example. A man throws a brick through a window. Is this good or bad? If he is breaking into a place to rob it, we would say it’s bad. If he were breaking in to rescue a child from a burning house, then we would say good. But the karmic act we’re discussing is breaking the window with the brick. It’s an action, that will generate other actions and situations. You can label them good or bad as you like, but in reality, they are just effects with no adjectives assigned.   It’s that simple.

More complicated is the karma generated by the intent. Yes, intent creates karma too. But once again, motivation, and the goodness or badness of it is still something that is something that is relative to how we perceive it. We are not perceiving things as they truly are. We are perceiving them colored with our own thoughts and opinions.

The underlying concept of karma, is very simple. It’s cause and effect. That’s it. But where karma get’s confusing to some is when we have to factor in all karma into the equation. Karma is not personal. Thinking that karma is personal reinforces ego and flies in the face of the teachings on emptiness which tell us that no one thing exists independently. This is not to say that karma you generate will not effect you. It most certainly will. But what I am saying is that karma you generate will have an effect on tons of other situations, many not directly related to you.  By the same token, karma generated by other beings will have an effect on you too.  Here is the mystery of karma.  In order to figure it all out, you have to be able to comprehend the intertwining of all the karma being generated by all beings and how it effects the specific situation you are being confronted with at the present time.  We can pretty much all agree this is impossible.  So the point to remember is that karma “is what it is”, nothing more, nothing less.