The Four Reminders: My New Book Is Available Now

MAJOR NEWS! My new book The Four Reminders: A Simple Buddhist Guide to Living and Dying Without Regret is now available in paperback and Kindle formats. Order the book today at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. With this modern interpretation of classic wisdom teachings, I've brought an ancient and very traditional set of contemplations on awakening into a fresh new light, making them relatable for anyone -- regardless of your path or background. 

This book has been over a decade in the making, and I'm delighted that all those years of hard work have earned The Four Reminders strong pre-publication endorsements from Ethan Nichtern, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Kino MacGregor, Kirkus Reviews, and more. I sincerely hope the book enlivens your own path of awakening. 

After you get the book, be sure to visit the web site www.thefourreminders.com and download the free Study & Discussion Guide, which will help you take your contemplation of the Four Reminders even deeper. Stay tuned for more news related to the book and upcoming events.

“A smart, eminently readable Buddhist guide to achieving an inner awakening.” — Kirkus Reviews

“With a great gift for updating the language and context of these invaluable lessons from the ancient world, Hunter reminds us that Buddhist wisdom was never meant to be mystical or exotic. Instead, these pages give you something much more important: practical advice for being human.” — Ethan Nichtern

“Hunter has woven a profound journey, rendering key and authentic Buddhist wisdom in a way that anyone can understand and apply. It is an invitation to all and any one of us, not just those already walking the spiritual path, to courageously embrace the eternal truths that lead to lasting happiness and peace.” — Yogarupa Rod Stryker

“A welcome addition to practicing what matters most. This book personally guides us through the practice so that we can reflect on our thoughts, words, and actions.” — Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison

“This book presents the transformational teachings of Buddhist mindfulness in a powerful and provocative way. Hunter doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to address deep-seated personal and cultural assumptions on the road to happiness and freedom. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a key to unlock the path to peace in their lives.” — Kino MacGregor

The Great Liberation

Death was a recurrent theme during the two years I lived as a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey. From my circle of friends and acquaintances outside, I received emails telling me of one loss after another. My acquaintance John was horrifically stabbed to death in his apartment by his own lover. My friend Gregg, who suffered from depression and had attempted suicide a few times before, finally succeeded. In the space of a few months, two other acquaintances died by drug overdose. My grandmother died of old age. And finally there was Ani Palmo, a senior nun at the Abbey, who passed away in my presence. As I shared one loss after another with my fellow residents, we contemplated the frequency with which death was visiting my circle of loved ones.

In the Four Reminders, a traditional Tibetan Buddhist teaching, the second reminder urges us to remember how fleeting and fragile life is, like a bubble, and how quickly and unexpectedly the bubble may be ruptured. “Death comes without warning,” it says. “This body will be a corpse. At that time, the Dharma will be my only help. I must practice it with exertion.” In other words, carpe diem: practice like your hair is on fire, for you never know when your time will be up.

“We do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.” – Montaigne

It’s true that death sometimes comes without warning, but at other times it mounts an all-out media blitz to warn people of its coming. It can arrive suddenly in a burst of unthinkable horror, as it did for my friend John; or it can send word discreetly that it is planning to come in the near future. Death can creep in bit by bit over the course of many years, gradually tightening its grip with agonizing slowness, giving you plenty of time to think about it. That’s how it came for Ani Palmo, who had battled first throat cancer and then emphysema for about a decade. She had rehearsed and anticipated and talked about her death for so long that it became a sort of running joke at the Abbey. Ani Palmo was dying, and she had been dying ever since most people could remember; but we wondered if she might end up out-living most of us.

I only got to know Ani Palmo during her last year-and-a-half — but even then, in her diminished capacity, she was a formidable person. As a young child she lived in Poland under Nazi occupation; after the war, she spent five years in an orphanage operated by nuns. A psychologist by profession, she left her first husband and two young children, remarried and emigrated to Canada in the 1970s; but she soon felt lost and confused amidst the drinking and drugging and sexual freedom of the time. After becoming a student of Chogyam Trungpa, she found her way: she divorced her second husband, took life-long vows as a Buddhist nun, and entered a strict three-year retreat with Kalu Rinpoche.
  
In the effusive manner of an old-world Polish grandmother, she was famous for her hospitality, and for the cookies and chocolates and gossip she would offer to visitors at her cabin. But once you were relaxed and comfortable, she would turn her flashing, slightly intimidating blue eyes on you and ask you — in her thick Polish accent — about your meditation practice. Her frivolity was matched by her gravitas as a practitioner. Her students loved her passionately, and had a respect for her that bordered on fear – and for good reason. For all her sweetness, Ani Palmo had sharp edges. She could be severe and demanding, and disarmingly perceptive.

By the time I knew her, Ani Palmo was confined to her cabin, tucked in the woods a short ways from the Abbey, and she breathed with the help of an oxygen machine. I often went into town and did the shopping for Abbey residents, so I was the one who brought Ani Palmo her supplies of cookies and chocolates. Her eyes always lit up when I walked into the room, and she would greet me with a cheerful “Hieeee!” or with my monastic name, “Zopa!” Occasionally, she would ask me to bring her something contraband, such as an “everything” bagel with garlic and onions (both taboo substances in the Buddhist monastic code), and we would share a conspiratorial smile. Then she would invite me to sit down, offer me some of the goodies I had brought for her, and ask for the latest gossip from the Abbey. Often, she would break down in a spell of acute wheezing, unable to catch her breath, the fluids deep in her lungs rattling in a guttural way that alarmed me every time I heard it.

With Ani Palmo there was none of the usual tip-toeing around the subject of death. It was constantly on her mind, and on her tongue. She anticipated death every day, and in fact she wished it would hurry up and come. It was long overdue, as far as she was concerned. Any casual conversation with her was likely to come around to the topic of her death, and she often sent visitors away with some little cherished possession as a parting gift, in case they never met again: a photo, a tchotchke, a Dharma text or practice implement. She seemed to have an endless supply of these objects, so her practice of giving them away was never finished. Again and again, people came to visit her and say their final, emotional farewells, only to return in a year or two or three to find her still alive. At her 76th birthday celebration, she told us that if her birthday wish came true, she would not live to see another one.

Ani Palmo did not fear death; what she feared was the suffering involved in dying. She had seen her mother dying, also from emphysema. She had witnessed the horror and pain of someone slowly drowning in her own internal fluids, so she knew more or less what kind of physical suffering was in store for her. She was already deep in the grips of that suffering, and could only tolerate it with the help of morphine and Dilaudid. Among the team of people at the Abbey who shared the task of giving Ani Palmo her medications, it was joked — but we weren’t sure it was really a joke — that she took enough painkillers every day to kill William S. Burroughs in the prime of his opiate addiction.

Yet, for all that, she was remarkably clear-minded, and surrendered to her situation. She had long ago accepted her illness as her own karma coming to fruition, and she did not seem to have any resentment about it. Since there was no looking away from death, in her case, she chose to fully embrace it. Following the Tibetan tradition, she saw death as the greatest opportunity for liberation and enlightenment — as long as one is properly prepared for it.

When I went to visit Ani Palmo I would sometimes find her listening to a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This reading had been recorded specifically for her, years before, by Pema Chödrön. The book is a shamanic guide both to dying and to liberation for the consciousness of the dead person in what is called the bardo — the disembodied, confusing state after death but before rebirth. According to tradition, this in-between state is fertile with the potential for full awakening if one is trained to recognize the nature of mind and to rest in it with equanimity. Over the years she spent preparing for death, Ani Palmo must have listened to that recording at least 100 times.

During Ani Palmo’s last stay at the hospital, about an hour's drive away from the Abbey, we set up a team of people to take turns staying with her around the clock. On the day she passed, I went to the hospital for a late-morning shift. Serri, one of the other temporary monks, was there along with Barbara, the director of the Abbey. Ani Palmo was very agitated, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was talking very fast in what seemed to be Polish, and struggling to catch her breath in-between phrases.

“Look, Ani Palmo,” said Barbara. “Zopa’s here.” Ani Palmo grew quiet for a moment and opened her eyes wide, making an effort to focus on me; I couldn’t be sure if she still recognized me. Then her eyes went unfocused again and she lapsed back into her Polish monologue. I sat by her bed for a while and stroked her hand and arm. She seemed to want desperately to communicate something, but we had no idea what she was saying.

Then, from somewhere within the stream of incoherent words, a few syllables jumped out at me, and I suddenly recognized them: “...Vajra Guru...” I realized that Ani Palmo wasn’t babbling incoherently — she was reciting the Guru Rinpoche mantra. I began to sing the mantra repeatedly to its familiar melody: Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum. Barbara and Serri joined in. Ani Palmo stopped speaking, her eyes still closed, and listened intently for a while as we repeated the mantra, and then she piped up again: “Om Ah Hum!” Those three syllables from the mantra that was sacred to her were her last clearly spoken words.

After a little while Ani Palmo raised her hand and gestured toward the MP3 player that held the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Serri turned on the recording, and we listened to Ani Pema’s voice as she began to guide Ani Palmo, according to tradition, through the stages of the dying process and its immediate aftermath. Since she had listened to the recording so many times before, it was natural to assume that this time might be like all the others.

After Barbara and Serri left to return to the Abbey, I was alone with Ani Palmo and the vivid descriptions, wafting out from the little MP3 player, of what one sees and experiences in the bardo of dying and the bardo of dharmata — the moment when the consciousness of the now-dead person reawakens without a physical body. According to tradition, in the bardo of dharmata the mind’s inherent luminosity and openness shines brilliantly and without obstruction, if only for a moment, before habitual patterns begin to cloud it over again. That moment of clarity is said to be ripe with potential for complete awakening, if one is able to recognize mind’s luminous, empty nature and remain within that experience.

The MP3 player was set on repeat, and Ani Palmo and I must have listened to that forty-minute section of the recording two or three times before it began to dawn on me that this might not simply be another in Ani Palmo's long series of rehearsals for death — that this might be the real thing. At a certain point Ani Palmo’s breathing abruptly shifted and became strangely calm. I called in the nurse to look at her. The nurse checked her IV line and felt her forehead, shrugged her shoulders, and left unfazed. She had seen similar things before.

I ran a washcloth under the tap and wiped Ani Palmo’s forehead with it. She was no longer very responsive to touch, but I could tell she was still listening to Ani Pema’s voice, and following the instructions. Every once in a while when Ani Pema would say her name, she would respond with a non-verbal sound of recognition, just the smallest of grunts — but enough to tell me she was still there, still listening. According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the hearing is the last of the senses to go; in fact, hearing is believed to continue functioning even in the bardo after death, which is why the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read aloud to people who have recently died.

Gradually, the spaces between Ani Palmo’s breaths became longer and longer. I began to silently count the time before her next in-breath: three, five, ten, fifteen seconds. At some point I waited for the next breath and counted the seconds, and then just kept counting: one minute, two minutes went by. I kept waiting, but she never took another breath. At the very end, after all those years of battling illness, she slipped across the threshold of death so peacefully that I wasn’t even sure it had happened. I reached out a hand to stroke her forehead and smooth her hair back, and whispered: “Your struggle is over, Ani Palmo. You’re free.”

Death is the greatest uncertainty, and yet nothing could be more certain than the fact that we will die. We don’t know when it will come, or how; and despite what we may believe and what tradition may tell us, we don’t really know what will or won’t happen once we cross that threshold. As with a black hole, we can’t know what lies beyond the event horizon because no light or information escapes the gravitational pull of this greatest of unknowns. But we can choose, to some degree, how we cross into the vast, open space of that question. We can go kicking and screaming with fear and regret, clutching in vain at the shards of the mirror that is shattering before our very eyes; or we can dissolve into that open space and trust that our fractured reflection in the broken mirror of self wasn’t really who we were in the first place.

Ani Palmo became one of my greatest teachers that morning: she showed me what the death of a great Dharma practitioner looks like. To the last moment, her commitment to waking up did not falter. Despite the complete deterioration of her body, the unbelievable amount of medication she was on, and whatever traces of fear and anxiety and attachment she might have felt — with so much stacked against her, she maintained the clarity and strength of mind and singularity of purpose to continue practicing, right up to the threshold of death, like her hair was on fire.

Wake Up, Wake Up!

This essay is a rework of a series of four shorter pieces published on this blog one year ago. It has been largely stripped of "Buddhist" jargon and rewritten to pass the mother test: hopefully even your mother could understand it.


Although enlightenment may be inevitable, and awakened mind itself may be our most basic nature, that doesn’t mean it comes naturally to us. We’ve been asleep at the wheel for a very long time — for decades, perhaps, or for countless lifetimes, depending on what you believe — and waking up from such a long sleep is not easy to do. Our sleep has a lot of momentum and energy behind it, like a train, and breaking that momentum also requires a lot of consciously directed energy. To stop a long freight train that’s moving fast, you don’t just slam on the brakes — you have to start applying the brakes a mile or two ahead of where you plan to actually stop.

The same is true on the spiritual path. Every once in a while, you hear about someone (like Eckhart Tolle) whose freight train came to an abrupt, unexpected stop, and there they were — suddenly wide awake. But that kind of person is as rare as a daytime star. For the rest of us, it’s a slow process. We have been hurtling forward, for such a long time, in the momentum of our confusion, that it takes a lot of consistent effort to even slow ourselves down. We apply the brakes by working with our minds and chipping away, bit by bit, at the momentum of our confusion. Eventually, we’ll be able to turn the train back towards its source, the primordial wisdom of awakened mind that is, according to almost every spiritual tradition, the origin of all things.


Count Your Blessings

The heart of the problem is that we take our lives for granted. We get stuck in complaining about all the big and little ways that life disappoints us, and we forget that, at the most basic level, we have it pretty good. We don’t have all the things we want, and we probably have other things we don’t want and can’t seem to get rid of, but in terms of having what we need for waking up — for putting the brakes on our confusion and turning the freight trains of our own minds back in the other direction — our circumstances really couldn’t be much better.

You’re a human being. You’ve probably been one all your life, so it’s difficult to imagine being anything else. But try to imagine it. What if you — whatever you call “you” — had been born as a horse, or a fish, or a dog, or a bug, or as some creature that humans have never seen and don’t have a name for? What kind of chances would you have, in such a life, to follow the path towards awakening? In the grand scheme of things, human beings are a pretty rare breed.

You have a body that works more or less well enough for you. Maybe it gives you problems — and, almost certainly, you’re not satisfied with your body the way it is — but consider, at the most basic level, how amazing and unlikely it is to merely exist in such a body. You are breathing, without even trying. You’re moving about. You probably have eyes, and ears, and hands. You can hold a book in your hands — a simple act that represents millions of years of evolution that resulted in the complex being that you are. But more than that — any monkey could hold a book, but you can read it. You have a mind that is capable of absorbing complex ideas and thinking in abstract ways; a mind, moreover, that is endowed with the blessing (or the curse, depending on what you do with it) of self-awareness. That is your human birthright, and it’s a power that many beings don’t have.

But it doesn’t stop there. You’re actually one of the luckiest human beings on the planet. Not only can you think and feel and move about, but you have the kind of circumstances, and the kind of mind, that has led you to seek out spiritual teachings in the first place. Imagine how many people in this world never have that opportunity. So many people are starving and struggling to survive, or born in places that are torn apart by war, or born with a mind that’s impaired; or they simply grow up in ways that only make them more confused and lead them further down the path of suffering. They never have a chance. But you’re one of the fortunate ones. If you’re like most people, you probably spend a lot of time complaining about your life circumstances, but in terms of your ability to progress along the spiritual path, your circumstances couldn’t really be much better. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Tibetan Buddhists call this kind of life a “precious human birth." They say it is incredibly rare, in the cosmic scheme of things, to be blessed with such a fortunate life; it would be a tragedy of cosmic proportions to waste such a precious gift, to not utilize it fully and meaningfully.

One of our most deeply rooted habitual patterns is self-criticism. Even when our situation is good, our minds always circle back to focus on what we lack, the areas where we perceive ourselves to be deficient — or the ways we perceive our outer circumstances to be unsatisfactory. This is especially true in the West, where our culture is steeped in the notion of Original Sin — the idea that we are, from the time we’re conceived in the womb, fundamentally bad, primordially corrupted, and we cannot be fixed without the intervention of a Higher Power to rescue us from ourselves. This is a far cry from the notion of Buddha Nature — the idea that all beings are fundamentally good, primordially pure, and that each being has the potential to awaken to its own true nature through its own actions and awareness.

Our compulsive self-criticism and discontent often blinds us to our own positive qualities and fortunate circumstances, making it difficult for us to relax with ourselves as we are, or to rest with what is happening in the moment. For example, we may be habitually speedy and impatient — always restless and eager to be somewhere other than where we are, doing something other than what we’re doing. I remember when I first caught this pattern coming up in my own mind, very vividly, in the midst of a weekend meditation training program. I found myself sitting there on the cushion, anxiously waiting for the bell to ring so I could get up and do walking meditation. Then, after a few minutes of walking meditation, I found myself anxiously waiting for the bell to ring again, so I could sit back down. When I realized the absurdity of what my mind was doing — always leaning into the next moment, the next activity, the next thought — I almost laughed out loud.

One of the roots of our discontent and restlessness may be residual, habitual feelings of shame, fear, deficiency and even self-pity that were ingrained in us early in life. If we let such feelings control our minds, they become a veil that prevents us from clearly seeing — much less utilizing — the opportunity for awakening that we have in this life. But through working with our minds in meditation, we can come to realize that these negative emotional habits have no inherent reality of their own. We're the ones who keep them spinning. We give them energy and soil in which to grow. Yielding to these ancient patterns frustrates our emotional well-being and stifles our spiritual growth.

Of all the infinite variety of situations into which we could have been born, we find ourselves now in this one — this very unlikely, slightly absurd human body, born into this very particular set of circumstances. In contrast to our habit of focusing on the negative, always feeling discontent over what our lives are lacking, we could, instead, turn our minds towards appreciating the precious qualities of this life, and making the best use of it — before it is gone. Part of what makes this human life we have so precious is that it is fleeting, and could totally disintegrate at any time, without warning. We should not take it for granted that our circumstances will always be so favorable; we should practice diligently on the spiritual path while we can.

At this very moment, all the necessary conditions have come together for you to be able to progress along the path toward enlightenment. Yet none of these blessings that you presently enjoy are guaranteed to you. Any of them could easily be lost, at any time, through your own death or through changing life circumstances. Wouldn't it suck to find yourself on your death-bed and be full of regret that you wasted your time in this life? What steps can you take to make sure that doesn't happen?


Time Is Running Out

In our modern Western culture, especially in America, we don’t even like to talk about death. It’s considered morbid to dwell on such things. We prefer to think about death as little as possible, until it absolutely can’t be avoided. We are like the ostrich that hides its head in the sand when afraid — it’s as if we imagine that by not looking squarely at the reality of death, we can somehow avoid being affected by it. When the death of a loved one happens, or when their own impending death comes within sight, most people are taken by surprise.

This attitude of denial and avoidance is, obviously, deeply unrealistic. We strive to keep the reality of death at arm's length, as if it were merely an abstract possibility — something that might happen to other people, but probably not to me. Of course we know intellectually that we will die at some point — yet, somehow, emotionally, the reality of it still does not entirely sink in. We coddle and cherish our bodies and pride ourselves on looking young, and we may take it for granted that our bodies will continue to serve us well into the distant future. But as we get older it becomes harder to live in denial of the body's gradual progression towards decrepitude and decay. Looking at photographs of ourselves when we were children, it's easy to see how quickly our lives are passing by. Buddhist scriptures compare our lives to a bubble, a dew drop, a bolt of lightning, and a torrent of water rushing down a hillside. A human life is so brief, even under the best of circumstances — and the older we get, the faster the years and decades seem to go by. How much time do you imagine you have left on this earth?

The human body is literally like a bubble — so easily ruptured, it might be here one instant and gone the next. If you nick an artery, you could be dead within minutes. From a spiritual perspective, it would be madness to place our trust and identification in such a fleeting and fragile mirage as the body — to believe that the body is what we are. And yet we do precisely that, don't we?

We deny death because we’re afraid of it. And we’re afraid of it because we’re in denial about it. This cycle of ignorance and fear of death causes us so much unnecessary suffering. Losing our fear of death — becoming more aware of it, more open to it — means living our human lives with a greater sense of urgency, remembering how little time we have left. Our habit is to put off until "tomorrow" what we should do today, thinking that "tomorrow" we'll have more convenient circumstances. When we get this or that thing, we think, when we get all our ducks in a row, we'll finally be able to really settle down and focus on spiritual practice. But what if our ducks never get in a row, and time runs out?

We spend our lives trying to fulfill our desires and passions. If we are single we may devote our thoughts and energy to the idea that if we only had a partner, then things would be great and we could really start living. We get caught up in pursuing sex and romance, thinking maybe that will bring us lasting happiness. There’s nothing particularly wrong with sex and romance. But looking at it from the larger perspective, isn't this just a distraction from what's really important? The clock is ticking, and when death comes for us, how are sex and romance going to help? When we’re lying there on our death-beds, is it really going to be enough to say to ourselves, “Yeah, I had a good time.”

At the time of death, we can’t take anything with us. Not lovers, friends, family, possessions, or our bodies. From the Buddhist point of view, the only thing we’ll be able carry with us into whatever happens next is the mind itself, which carries our karma (both good and bad) and our spiritual intentions. But the 'color' of our karma and the strength of the intentions we carry depend upon what we do and how we practice here and now.

With time running out, what is really most important to you? What could you be doing to make your life meaningful?


Everything You Do Matters

“Karma” is one of those Buddhist words that have entered the popular vocabulary, but its meaning is very poorly understood. It’s not a big mystical thing. Karma basically means that whatever we think, say or do produces an effect in our minds and in the world around us. Everything we do matters, because everything produces consequences that ripple outward and affect the whole environment. The way it works is very simple: when we do something positive, it plants seeds of happiness; and when we do something negative, it plants seeds of suffering. Sooner or later, when the conditions are right in the soil of our minds, these seeds will come to fruition and we will experience the results of what we have done. If you plant an apple seed, and the right conditions come together to nourish it, you don’t get an oak tree. You get an apple tree.

For those of us who grew up in a Western culture, the idea of karma may be a little hard to swallow. Generally, depending on our influences and our own inclinations, we are taught to adopt one of two standard viewpoints:

1. Theism/eternalism: Someone else (God) is pulling the strings, deciding where we're born, how long we live, the experiences we have, and so on; and when we die, God decides the eternal destiny of our "soul."
   
   
2. Nihilism/materialism: There's no rhyme or reason to our existence here; it's all random events taking place in an existential vacuum, and there is nothing beyond the flesh; when we die, our mind-stream ceases to exist in any form whatsoever.

Those two basic viewpoints represent two extremes, polar opposites on the spectrum of belief about how we got here and what forces shape our human experience. Most people believe in one or the other of those two extremes. It never occurs to them that there might be a third alternative somewhere in-between those two untenable opposites. Karma is the essence of that third, middle way: it means that our experience is neither random and meaningless (nihilism), nor is it being dictated by a creator god or puppet-master (theism). Rather, what we experience is the fruition of what we've created for ourselves — even if we're not always capable of seeing the connections between cause and result. Sometimes we can find evidence to support this view in our own lives: often the suffering or the happiness we experience is obviously self-created. Other times, it can be hard to trace the connection between cause and result because we may have planted the seeds so long ago that we don’t remember. (Do you even remember what you had for lunch on the second Tuesday of last month?) We therefore imagine that there’s no connection and that our experiences are just “happening” to us for no particular reason, but from a Buddhist point of view that is delusion.

At a metaphysical level, too, some people find that karma provides a better explanation of our existence than either of the more commonly held alternatives. If we reject both the theistic belief in a created "soul" that is eternally rewarded or punished for its actions in this life, along with the nihilistic belief that every aspect of consciousness dies with the body, it follows that some part of the mind will survive the death of the body, and that the force of whatever karma it has accrued in the past will go towards shaping its future experiences or lives.

Karma is not like a judge, doling out rewards and punishments for good or bad behavior — that’s the theistic spin again. Karma doesn’t care what we do, because it’s not an entity; it’s just the way things work, a natural law, the way water is always wet and fire is always hot. Karma is like a snowball: whatever direction we roll it in, it accumulates more and more mass. In each moment, we have a choice about which direction to roll the snowball: we can roll it towards further suffering and imprisonment, or we can roll it in the direction of freedom and ultimate happiness. What kind of karmic future are you creating for yourself? Do your actions sync up with your aspirations, or are they going in two different directions? Is there a disconnect between how you aspire to be in the world and how you actually are?

Here’s the good news: karma means that we have the power to create happiness and to stop creating suffering. It's not a question of waiting and hoping that things will work out in the end, or that some kind of savior will step in and make suffering go away and shower us with everlasting happiness. The power to create our future happiness is in our own hands.

Our "individual" experience also affects the people and other beings around us. When we suffer, we tend to make others suffer along with us, and when we are happy, we tend to make others happy too. So our personal karma is not as personal as we think it is; we’re all swimming in it together. Even if we don't say or do something, we can affect other people simply through the energetic quality or state of mind that we manifest in their presence. If they sense our tension and aggression, they become tense and aggressive. If they sense our love and compassion, they relax and open too. Without realizing it, we can have an impact on someone's life simply by the way we look at them in the subway, or on the street, and this too creates karma. Every single thing we do matters, and has consequences.

We normally think that there are some moments or situations that have moral implications, and others that don't. To contemplate the way karma works is to realize that every instant of consciousness as a human being has moral implications, because even thoughts and intentions have the power to generate positive or negative effects and thus to bring about happiness or suffering.

This is why meditation practice is so important on the spiritual path. Through meditation, we see our minds more clearly and develop calmness and insight; thus, we begin to dismantle the cognitive and emotional obscurations that have been leading us to sabotage our own happiness. Practice is what carries us along the path, and the path leads us to awakening.


Cutting Desire and Attachment

In our entire lives, when have we ever been satisfied for more than a few minutes? We are forever wishing we had more of something, or something better, or that we could make it last longer. We even bring this approach to our meditation practice, measuring ourselves against some ideal concept of the perfect meditator and coming up short, wishing we were better. Even when things are going well, the undercurrent of dissatisfaction, the sense that things are not yet good enough, is always there. This constant restlessness and desire for improvement is the basic suffering of human existence. We can never simply be happy with the way things are.

We live under the illusion that if we could just get the pieces of the puzzle lined up correctly — the right job, the right apartment, the right lover, the right spiritual state — then we would live happily ever after, and we wouldn't have to suffer anymore. But there’s a flaw in that logic. Even if we were lucky enough to get all the pieces together and all the ducks lined up (something most people never do), we still couldn't make it last. We'd still have the suffering of change, of seeing it all slip away, and the suffering that comes from the fear of that happening. The promise that external objects or conditions are going to bring us lasting happiness is a false promise, one that can never really be fulfilled. Even when we get what we want, we soon want more.

Just being alive brings suffering, because there is always the basic clinging to life and fear of death. Fear pervades human existence. We are afraid of so many things: death, illness, pain, ridicule, loneliness, heartbreak...the list goes on. But all these fears arise on the basis of desire and attachment. How could we be afraid of losing something to which we are not attached? From this perspective, the recipe for diminishing our fear and suffering is very simple: cut our desire and attachment.

The problem is that we constantly fail to recognize attachment and self-clinging as the causes of our suffering. When we are trapped in a state of anger and aggression, for example, we feel righteous and justified. We fail to notice the suffering that comes from being attached to our own point of view, which is being challenged by someone else. Similarly, when we are caught up in lust or poverty mentality, all we can see is the desired object and the happiness we believe it would bring us if we only had it. We fail to see that it is our own attachment to a concept that makes us unhappy.

Buddhism sometimes strikes people as morbid, because it talks a lot about suffering as a basic fact of life. Suffering, in fact, was the very first part of the Buddha’s very first sermon, after he attained enlightenment. But the Buddha wasn’t being morbid when he talked about suffering; he was just calling it like he saw it. He taught that human life is riddled with three basic kinds of suffering:

1. All-pervasive suffering: The basic quality of dissatisfaction and fear that pervades human existence
   
   
2. The suffering of change: The experience of unwanted change, pain or loss
   
   
3. The suffering of suffering: The added suffering that comes from struggling against the first two sufferings and trying to deny or avoid them, which only makes things worse — in other words, the suffering that we bring upon ourselves

All the material comforts in life in which we normally put our hope and trust — homes and wealth and pleasures, being liked, being respected, getting what we want — are shot through with these three types of suffering. No matter how much of them we get, we always want more; they don't last; and we're always worried about losing them.

Cutting desire and attachment doesn’t mean that we have to wall ourselves off from the world and go live in a cave and practice meditation 24 hours a day. It’s more a question of whether we put our faith and trust in temporary, material comforts, whether we honestly believe that our ultimate happiness depends upon them. It's okay to enjoy material comforts when they come along, but getting caught up in attachment to them and craving for more of them only leads to suffering.

The challenge is to find a middle path, a balanced way of being in the world that avoids both the extreme of ascetic renunciation and the opposite extreme of materialist indulgence. This means being open to the experience of whatever comes to us in our lives — without spending too much time worrying about keeping things a certain way. There is nothing inherently wrong with the search for happiness; the problem is that our search has been misdirected outside, rather than inside. Cutting desire and attachment means cutting our tendency to put priority on mundane activities, and returning always to the true priority: waking up.

Ask yourself: Recognizing the incredible opportunity I have to wake up in this life, and knowing that time is running out and every single thing I do matters, how much of my life do I want to spend pursuing temporary pleasures that come from outside, and how much do I want to spend pursuing genuine freedom — which can only come from inside? What are my real priorities?