Don't Make Gods into Demons

This article is part of a series of short commentaries on proverbs or slogans from the Lojong ("mind-training") teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Several other such commentaries will be offered soon, in addition to the ones that have already appeared here in previous months. To see the whole series of commentaries on Lojong slogans, click here.


Don't Make Gods into Demons

Most of us have a strong tendency to complain about things, even when our circumstances are actually very good. As Chogyam Trungpa said in his commentary on this slogan, we habitually "make painful that which is inherently joyful." Lost in stinking thinking and spaced out in what Tara Brach calls the ‘trance of unworthiness,’ we focus only on the negative — on what is wrong, what is missing, what we lack. This is one of the meanings of turning gods into demons.

As humans, we have a curious power to manifest what we envision. This power can be a gift or a curse, depending on how we use it. When we envision negativity and focus on what we lack and what is wrong with our circumstances, then nothing we get ever seems to be good enough; the self-centered, “what about me?” attitude of the ego is a bottomless pit of dissatisfaction. We drift helplessly in a sea of poverty mentality, blown to and fro by the winds of hope and fear. But when we envision contentment and focus on making the best use of what we have, then we experience altogether different results. We might even find ourselves wondering how we can leave this world a better place than we found it.

The other meaning of turning gods into demons is perverting our spiritual practice by becoming arrogant and prideful about it. The spiritual path should be leading us towards greater humility and selflessness. If we find ourselves getting puffed up about our realizations or being judgmental and hypercritical of those who don’t agree with us, then something in our practice is amiss.

Chogyam Trungpa was once part of a panel of Tibetan teachers who were asked to explain how students could know whether or not they were making progress on the spiritual path. Each of the other teachers on the panel gave a rather lengthy, formulaic answer that relied on traditional doctrines and lists of qualities. Trungpa’s response, however, was brief, blunt and to the point: you know you’re progressing along the path, he said, if you’re becoming less arrogant and less opinionated.

Always Maintain Only a Joyful Mind

This article is part of a series of short commentaries on proverbs or slogans from the Lojong ("mind-training") teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Several other such commentaries will be offered soon, in addition to the ones that have already appeared here in previous months. To see the whole series of commentaries on Lojong slogans, click here.


Always Maintain Only a Joyful Mind

Look at the lives of the great spiritual beings who are now walking or have walked among us: the Karmapa, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others like them. These people are not gritting their teeth and just flatly enduring the hardships and challenges that come their way. They do not slog through their work as spiritual leaders with a sense of weariness or a chip on their shoulders. They do not cop resentments about the burdens they have to carry and the things they are asked to do for others. Quite the opposite: they bring boundless joy and cheerfulness and relaxation into everything they do, even in the midst of very difficult circumstances. They are always smiling and laughing, taking delight and finding humor in the situations and people around them — not in a Pollyannaish or frivolous way, but in a way that is united with their tremendous heart of compassion. They bring a constant sense of joy to their 24-hour-a-day practice of helping others.

For the rest of us, back on planet Earth, this slogan may sound naïve and pie-in-the-sky. Always maintain only a joyful mind? You’ve got to be kidding. How is that possible? And why would you even want to do that?

Often, the difficult circumstances we encounter in life land in our laps with a great thud, and no prior warning. We didn’t ask for our lover to leave us, or for our children to rebel against us, or for the stock we own to crash, or for the doctor to give us the diagnosis we didn’t want to hear. But there it is. We have no choice in the matter. The question is: how do we react? How do we work with it? How do we hold our minds in response to what life throws at us?

There is no situation that cannot be made better by infusing it with joy. Not Pollyanna joy, which is a kind of stupid, plastic cheerfulness that masks a total denial of the realities of ugly situations and negativity and suffering in our lives — but authentic joy, which sees these realities clearly but sees every situation as workable and as fuel for spiritual awakening.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the most beloved Catholic saints. She lived at the end of the 19th century and died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 24. When she was 15, she entered a Carmelite nunnery in which she was secluded for the rest of her life. Among the other nuns she encountered there was one particular nun who pushed all her buttons. Everything this nun did stuck in Thérèse’s craw: even the way she walked and talked and smelled was irritating. The Carmelites were a contemplative order and would spend many hours sitting in silent prayer in a chapel that echoed. This nun happened to sit near Thérèse, and all through the prayers she would make little clicking noises with her mouth that drove Thérèse up the wall. Thérèse sat there unable to focus her mind in prayer, consumed with annoyance and loathing for this clicking nun.

At some point, Thérèse concluded, to her dismay, that there was nothing she could do to make this nun change: she was stuck with her, and they were both committed to being there for life. Thérèse realized that the only way to change the situation would be to change herself, her whole way of relating to the other nun. Rather than avoiding the nun, as she had been doing, Thérèse began to go out of her way to find her and spend time with her. She always greeted her with the most genuine smile she could find within herself, and made little friendship gifts to give her. Finally, one day the nun said to Thérèse, “Sister Thérèse, I just don’t understand why you love me so much.” Thérèse thought: Well, if only you knew.*

Thérèse’s relationship to the other nun utterly changed, not because she succeeded in changing the other nun, but because she committed herself to changing her own mind. No doubt the other nun continued for the rest of her life with her clicking and all the other behaviors that annoyed Thérèse, but for Thérèse these things were no longer a problem. Thérèse had a boundless commitment to the practice of maintaining only a joyful mind; this commitment shines through in her autobiography. It is one of the reasons she is so beloved, and why she was one of the saints most quickly canonized after death. Thérèse didn’t have stigmata or perform any parlor-trick miracles: she performed the ultimate miracle of transforming her own mind. When she saw the blood on her handkerchief and pillowcase that signaled the presence of fatal tuberculosis and realized she would soon die, Thérèse “thought immediately of the joyful thing that I had to learn, and so I went over to the window.” How many of us would be able to hear our doctor give us a fatal diagnosis and “think immediately of the joyful thing” that we could learn from it? On her deathbed, Thérèse is reported to have said: “I have reached the point of not being able to suffer anymore, because all suffering is sweet to me.”

When we adopt the commitment to maintaining a joyful mind even in the face of challenging and difficult circumstances, then everything that happens in our lives is fuel for awakening. But if we take ourselves and our life situations too seriously and make too big a deal of them, then that very same fuel stokes the flames that burn us. Our habit is to get locked into a heavy, oppressive sense of how fixed and stuck things are — whether it’s outer circumstances, or other people and their neuroses, or just our own minds, our neuroses and our seeming inability to change. When we infuse our lives with a sense of lightness and joy and not taking things too seriously, it transforms our experience. Everything becomes much more workable, and we are able to relax right in the midst of chaos.

Our spiritual practice, too, should be a practice of maintaining a joyful mind. How often do we sit down to meditate as if we were going under the surgeon’s knife, as if meditation were a terrible and unpleasant chore that must be accomplished? With such an attitude, it’s little wonder we often lack enthusiasm for practice. Imagine, says Pema Chodron, what it might be like if we could bring to our spiritual practices the same sense of joy and delight and enthusiasm that we bring to, say, going for a swim, or eating popcorn and watching movies. We would probably be enlightened already!

When we find ourselves getting “too serious” about our spiritual practice, it might be helpful to turn down the flame on the stove a little bit, and let our practice simmer at a more reasonable pace rather than boiling over. Our challenge is often in knowing and respecting our own limits, and working at the level where we can maintain enthusiasm and joy.

We tend to think that our biggest obstacles and enemies are on the outside, in the shape of people and circumstances that challenge us. For instance, we might get very worked up thinking about the corrupt politicians, and the greedy Wall Street fatcats, and the lords of the military-industrial complex. We might get very enthusiastic about pointing the finger of blame at those people for many of the problems we see in the world today.

But in terms of what hinders our practice on the spiritual path, what stymies our awakening, it’s not the politicians or the fatcats or the five-star generals, or any other external figure — no matter how corrupt or misguided or galling they might be. In fact, no one outside of ourselves really has the power to hinder our awakening in the slightest. What hinders our awakening is the enemy within: our own mournful weariness, our laziness, discouragement, despair, depression and fatigue — all the internal enemies that deprive us of joyful exertion and make us withdraw fearfully into our protective shell.

The irony is that we devote ourselves whole-heartedly and enthusiastically to the pursuit and acquisition of external things that promise to make us comfortable and happy: money, possessions, relationships, careers, hobbies and so on. We don’t seem to have any shortage of joyful exertion for grasping at shiny baubles and emotional highs. Yet we seem unwilling to pursue the causes of true and lasting happiness — enlightenment itself — with the same zeal and enthusiasm. At bottom, it’s a question of understanding what really leads us to awakening and freedom, and what further ensnares us in suffering and delusion. When we hold the answer to that question deep in our bones, then our priorities become clear, and mournful weariness evaporates. With that kind of wind at our backs, we will not find it so difficult to always maintain only a joyful mind.


* I'm indebted to Tenzin Palmo for sharing, in one of her Dharma teachings, this beautiful story about St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

The Source of Your Joy

During the past month here at the Abbey, we've been immersed in studying and practicing the Four Foundations of Mindfulness -- a traditional form of meditation practiced since the time of the Buddha, 2500 years ago -- with Pema Chodron. It has been an unexpectedly wild ride, full of emotional drama and personal discoveries. I think each participant in the retreat feels that they've gotten to know themselves better this month.

We spent a good couple of weeks working with the first foundation, Mindfulness of Body -- repeatedly doing very slow body scans and bringing our attention as fully as possible into experiencing each part of our bodies. This was the first step in getting to know ourselves; that's because ordinarily we're not really in our bodies, or not in any genuine, meaningful way. You might have a concept of your left foot and where it is located in relation to the rest of your body; but how often do you actually descend into your left foot and remain there, experiencing the sensations that arise and pass at each moment? By being willing to remain with the unfabricated experience that is unfolding within our bodies, moment by moment, we begin to more fully inhabit our own human existence -- we come home to ourselves.

In practicing the second foundation, Mindfulness of Feeling, we began to explore the realm of feeling tones and emotional reactions. Every sensation or experience that arises is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral -- or at least we perceive it that way -- and then we're off to the races, reacting automatically, unthinkingly, with attachment or aversion or zoning out. What's more, we frequently escalate our elemental reactions of attachment and aversion into heightened states of emotional drama. The essence of Mindfulness of Feeling is allowing the mind to simply notice and rest with these intangible feeling tones and emotional energies, without adopting or rejecting them.

When we spend enough time with these foundations of mindfulness, we might notice that they blur into one another. Ordinarily, we think that our physical sensations are cut from a very different cloth than our emotional feelings, that these two elements of experience take place in different locations or that they enter through different doors of perception. But as we descend more deeply into our sensations and perceptions, we start to glimpse that it's all one big mash-up of experience unfolding in different ways. When we look beyond our assumption that experience can be neatly compartmentalized into different categories -- thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and perceptions -- we discover that it's difficult to draw hard and fast lines anywhere. Gaylon Ferguson compares this to the rooms of a house, which we think of as being very separate; but the smell of breakfast cooking travels through the whole house and finds you wherever you are.

Emotions, for example, can be embedded and expressed right within our bodies; they can, in fact, be carried there (and perhaps without our awareness) for years. During the first week of the retreat I noticed that each time we did the body scans, there was a particular moment when I would start to freak out. In the area of my solar plexus and stomach, I could feel a kind of gripping tension, a hot and tight and uncomfortable feeling. I knew I had stumbled across something that needed closer inspection.

As I stayed with this uncomfortable sensation in my abdomen, and the feelings of aversion and fear that arose in response to it, I gradually realized that the physical sensation itself was intertwined with a particular emotional feeling of grief that I had been carrying, in a rather unfelt way, for quite some time. Grief, and my resistance towards feeling it, were being expressed in my body, held in my gut like a stone. As I continued working with this tangle of emotional and physical feelings, I was able to begin letting go of the resistance, and moving into the grief itself.

I spent one afternoon weeping (weeping mindfully, if I may say so), and saw that indeed the feeling of grief arose and expressed itself right there in my solar plexus where I had felt the initial push and pull of something unfelt and unwanted. I had the image of a wet towel in my abdomen being squeezed tightly; the water that came out of the towel seemed to emerge as tears, and the whole physical display of grief. Afterwards, I felt somewhat as if a storm -- one that had perhaps been brewing and building for a long time -- had blown through and cleared the air. And the physical sensation of tightness and clutching in my solar plexus was noticeably diminished.

Later, as we went deeper into Mindfulness of Body and Feeling, I found that my attention and awareness were drawn very intensely, for several days, into my face. This felt like a natural emphasis, since the face is such an important part of how we humans embody and express our emotions; the face is perhaps the busiest intersection of mind and body. I began to notice subtle patterns of physical tension in my face: a gripping of the muscles below and above the eyes, a hardening of the eyebrows and a worried pinching of the area between the brows. The more I paid attention to these patterns, the less subtle they became.

But more significantly, I noticed how these habitual patterns of tension in my face seemed to go hand in hand with emotional drama or discursiveness in my mind. Each time my mind wandered off into some kind of story-line or discursive fantasy, my face would also assume a mask of tension reflecting the tension in my mind. I found it was impossible to determine which was the chicken and which was the egg: did the discursiveness in my mind trigger a reflexive tension in my face, or did the tension in my face invite and open the door for discursiveness to enter my mind? The two always seemed to be there at the same time, so it was impossible for me to say. But I noticed, too, that if I consciously relaxed the tension in my face, my mind also relaxed.

I was reminded of the psychologist Paul Ekman, whose pioneering work produced a tremendously nuanced and accurate system (the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS) for reading emotions on people’s faces. To develop this science, Ekman took himself as a test subject; in a process that was often grueling, he learned to control each and every muscle in his face individually, at will, sometimes even using electrical stimulation to get at certain muscles he could not control consciously. He also studied how people in various cultures express and interpret emotions on the face.

Along the way, Ekman made several startling discoveries. Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, as most scientists had always assumed. They are universal, and are hard-wired into our biology. Moreover, Ekman revealed something called facial micro-expressions, which are fleeting, instantaneous glimpses of emotion that pass across the face so quickly that they go unnoticed by most people. Micro-expressions, too, are involuntary, and when one knows how to identify and interpret them, it becomes possible to read people’s true emotions even when they are trying to pretend they feel otherwise.

Another of Ekman’s discoveries, which he stumbled upon through his early experimentation on his own face, is that there is no clear separation between the emotion itself and its corresponding facial expression. We might assume that first there is an emotion and then there a reactive facial expression that signals the presence of that emotion. What Ekman found, however, was that simply by adopting a particular facial expression, he would actually experience the corresponding emotion. Which is the chicken and which the egg, indeed?

When I shared my recent experience with Pema Chodron, she pointed out that this is probably why many Buddhist teachers stress the importance of smiling. Some even teach smiling as an actual practice to their students. I have to admit that, until now, that kind of instruction always sounded incredibly cheesy to me, and I dismissed it rather cynically. But my own experiments in meditation this month, not to mention the decades of scientific work produced by Paul Ekman, suggest that there might be something to it. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”