Paper Bags

A birthday poem written by the old bag labeled Dennis Hunter.

This being human is a paper shopping bag.
Inside the bag is a parcel we carry from womb to tomb.
Most of our lives are spent staring at the bag,
identifying with the label it represents: “me.”
We build our lives around a brand, a fiction,
proudly sporting it through the world
and comparing it to other people’s brands.
We all want to have the best brand, to be seen
carrying the shopping bag with the finest label.
We have forgotten the purpose of a shopping bag,
and confused the bag and the brand with what's inside.
Stop for a moment, dissociate yourself from this bag of bones
and all the labels and brands it represents, and look inside.
Try to remember why you picked up a shopping bag
in the first place, and what it contains.
It’s raining now, and your paper bag is wet.
Already its fibers are weakening; soon it will break
and spill its contents into the street.
Don’t wait until then to open the parcel and see what's inside.
Open it now!
You’ve forgotten you ever went shopping in the first place,
and here you are, crying out against the rain,
holding a disintegrating bag from the great Store.

But this is where the metaphor breaks down…

The parcel in your bag is not something you bought,
for you cannot acquire or own what you are.
The parcel is you, and you never left the Store with it.
You only carried it around for a little while
in a shopping bag made of space, time and flesh,
from one part of the Store to another:
this laughable parade of paper bags and colorful logos.
You can neither purchase nor shoplift yourself.
Nothing ever leaves the Store, but everything returns to it.
Remember this, and be free from the illusion
of imprisonment inside a crumbling bag of bones, skin and personality.
Forget your brand, remember this, and embrace the deathless state.
The great Store, and everything in it, is you.

Outside Looking In

There's no barrier or wall to be breached
before you can be set free.
Only a shift of awareness takes place,
and suddenly you are no longer inside looking out,
but outside looking in, and what you see
is that there was really nothing there to see.
Nothing to look at, but the looking itself, looking at looking.
Seeing, seeing seeing. Being, being being.
Knowing, knowing knowing.
Experience is not two things. Not one thing. It's no thing at all.
And then, you're not even on the outside looking in,
because "inside" and "outside" are still duality.
Instead, you see there never was any wall or line
separating the inside from the outside.
That was the grand illusion, the primordial magic trick.
Great magician, you can't make the elephant disappear
if it never was in the room to begin with.

Stop Making Sense

Stop talking to yourself about silence
and talking to yourself about stillness.
You need not talk yourself into these states.
You need only stop talking altogether
and allow the silence and stillness
that are already always present to be undisturbed.
Begin to talk about them, woo them, try to create them,
and watch them move away.
You need not do anything to create silence; rather,
only stop with all the doing, the talking, the wooing
and silence is what's left.
You need not try so very hard to remain still; rather,
only cease with all the movement, the effort, the chatter
and stillness is already present.
Rest within that stillness, that silence,
already here, uncreated, unadulterated,
and you may glimpse Natural Awareness:
not mere consciousness, which is always consciousness of something,
walled in by the reference points of self and other,
but Awareness—vast, undifferentiated, without reference points.
Not self, but Self, beyond all notions of self and other.
Not this, but That, beyond all ideas of this and that.
Yet, again, talk about Awareness, try to describe it
or grab hold of it, and you move away from it.
You crawl back into the safety of the cage
of the little self, with its bowls of food and water,
each bowl labeled neatly with your name and your reference points.
Only ask yourself: is it your destiny to live in this cage forever?
Do you really need these little bowls of kibble
when the vast open field of Awareness is waiting for you
just outside the door of your cage?

Why the Buddha Laughs

Buddhism often gets a bad rap for being pessimistic or taking life too seriously, especially with its famous teachings on suffering, impermanence and emptiness.

But the reality is quite the opposite. Those who have developed any genuine realization of the teachings of Buddhism are often among the most joyful and happy people you could ever meet. Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who is famous for, among other things, undergoing extensive brain scans and laboratory testing while in meditative states, has been branded by neuroscientists as "the happiest person alive."

There is a particularly baffling slogan in the Lojong teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, which says: "Always maintain only a joyful mind." That sounds like a tall order! Always?!! Only?!! I often feel lucky if I can experience a truly joyful mind for just a few intervals throughout the day.

But that constant, all-pervasive joyful mind is exactly what many realized Buddhist teachers manifest. When I picture the Dalai Lama, the image that comes to mind is one of him smiling and laughing and literally beaming positive energy to everyone around him, which he seems to do 365 days a year.

The 16th Karmapa

My own teacher, the very learned scholar Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, frequently laughs and plays with childlike joy, and constantly seeks ways to make his students drop all of their serious trips and do the same. When you spend time with a realized teacher like Dzogchen Ponlop, you never know how or when he's going to sneak up and pull the rug out from under you—maybe figuratively, or maybe literally. That's part of his job as a teacher. Many of the most direct and personal teachings I've received from him were designed to puncture whatever bubble of excessive seriousness in which I happened to be floating and to make me stop, see the absurdity of my own habitual patterns, drop it all, and just smile, relax, and laugh at myself.

"Since everything is but an illusion, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one might as well burst out laughing!"
—Longchenpa, 14th-century Tibetan meditation master

Laughter is medicine for the heart, mind and body. It lowers blood pressure, dispels self-pity and depression, triggers neurochemical reactions that increase feelings of well-being, and strengthens our positive feelings of connection with other beings. It creates a sense of openness and space that wasn't there before, and an open mind leads to new possibilities.

Taking ourselves very seriously, on the other hand, is most often a recipe for unhappiness. The more we invest our attention in all of our personal dramas and our inflated sense of self-importance—the storm that rotates around the illusory center of I, I, I, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine—the more miserable and isolated we become. It's an ancient habit, a dysfunctional skill we've been developing since before we were born. But each time we drop the overly serious trance of selfing and open to a mind of spontaneous joyfulness, we reconnect with our deeper nature and shed a piece of the baggage of the small, tragic self.

"Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing."
—Frida Kahlo

Are Your Thoughts Killing You?

That was the question posed, in large block lettering, on a flyer I used to see taped to streetlamp poles and phonebooths all around New York City, advertising some type of mind-control therapy. As a meditator I've frequently wrestled with an overactive mind -- sometimes to the point of exhaustion -- and whenever I saw that flyer I wanted to respond, emphatically: "YES!"

When we begin to practice meditation, most of us are in for a rude awakening. We sit down on our cushion with the hope and intention of experiencing clarity and peace -- and maybe we do find moments of that -- but more often than not, we are confronted with a mind that seems to have a mind of its own, one that has no respect for our hopes or our intentions of being good meditators. If we aren't sliding into dullness and sleepiness, we are wild and agitated, jumping from thought to thought and unable to stay with the object of meditation.

This first, naked experience of mind's habitual wildness can be shocking and disheartening, and many beginning meditators give up at this point. Tenzin Palmo compares this to someone who sits down at the piano for the first time to learn to play and, within minutes, gives up in frustration because they cannot immediately play a Beethoven concerto. Who in their right mind would approach learning to play the piano that way? And yet, so many people do precisely this with meditation.

In his book "Mindfulness in Plain English," Bhante Henepola Gunaratana beautifully captures the feeling of this experience:

Somewhere in this process, you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels, barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you never noticed.

Much of the language we use to talk about meditation can give us the mistaken, even dangerous idea that we are supposed to be aiming for a state of meditation that is thought-free. Thoughts are seen as distractions and detours away from the object of meditation, something to be avoided -- in fact, for many of us, much of the time, thoughts are regarded as the enemy, a nemesis that constantly lurks and springs out of the bushes at every turn to startle us and spoil our feeble attempts to abide peacefully. If we believe we are "supposed" to be meditating without thoughts, but find that the mind is continually thinking in spite of our best intentions, then it becomes easy for us to fall into the trap of adopting an adversarial relationship to our thoughts. But that way madness lies.

We cannot control our mind's tendency to think any more than we can control the sun's tendency to shine. Milarepa, in his song of realization, "The Six Questions," said: "Mind's impulse to sudden thought cannot be stopped by hundreds with spears." Imagine that all the warriors from the movie "300" gathered in a circle around you and threatened to impale you with their spears and swords if you had a single thought -- even then, under penalty of a gruesome and violent death, you still could not suppress your mind's impulse towards thought. In fact, it seems like the more we desire to be thought-free, the more wild and numerous our thoughts become. Our minds, like wild animals, don't like being backed into a corner. If you try to meditate by suppressing your thoughts, it becomes like one of those Whack-a-Mole games at a carnival -- each time one critter pops up and you smash it over the head with the mallet, another one pops up somewhere else.

In a Dharma talk I was listening to recently, Tara Brach pointed out that our mind's strong habitual tendency towards conceptual thought is actually part and parcel of our genetic heritage as human beings. Our vision and our hearing and our sense of smell are pretty pathetic in the animal kingdom, but our ability to think and strategize has enabled our species to dominate life on earth (and, unfortunately, to destroy much of it). From an evolutionary point of view, it's no wonder that our biggest advantage as a species has such a powerful sway on our minds. So why, then, do we torture ourselves, yearning to achieve the impossible, to avoid the unavoidable? Why do we try to meditate without thoughts?

The problem can become even worse if we do experience periods of non-thought in meditation. Such experiences do arise, if only briefly, and they can be blissful and thrilling because they match our idealized concept of what meditation is "supposed" to feel like. But if we latch onto these experiences and try to perpetuate them, or try to resuscitate them after they've passed -- which they invariably do -- then we fall back in the same old trap of not relating naturally to what's happening right now. If thoughts are what is arising in the present moment, then we need to find a way to relate naturally to our thoughts.

In the radical Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of meditation, thoughts and emotions are viewed as the spontaneous display and movement of wisdom itself. Not only are thoughts or emotions *not* regarded as a problem in meditation -- from a yogi's point of view, they are extremely good news. The more thoughts the merrier. Thoughts and emotions are not separate from mind's innate clarity and luminosity; they are, in fact, its very display and brilliance, and therefore they make mind's luminosity and clarity easier to see.

The problem is not that thoughts arise -- it's how we react to them when they do arise. Normally, we react to our thoughts somewhat hysterically, labeling them as good or bad thoughts and trying to string out and sustain the good ones and suppress or push away the bad ones. But thoughts actually have no substance; they arise spontaneously from the empty nature of mind, and they naturally dissolve back into that same emptiness -- as long as we don't interfere with them. The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says that we are always bothering our thoughts, trying to change them into something they are not, trying to make them permanent and solid through our attachment and aversion. Imagine, he says, how you would feel if there were someone who tried to grab you every time you passed by and wanted to change you and manipulate you and give you a new haircut and a new outfit, and simply wouldn't leave you alone. This is how we relate to our thoughts most of the time.

Thoughts, say the Mahamudra and Dzogchen masters, dissolve naturally in the very same instant they arise -- like drawing on the surface of water -- unless we get involved in trying to adopt or reject them. "Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky," wrote Trungpa Rinpoche in the Sadhana of Mahamudra.

In his commentaries on Dzogchen, the great Dza Patrul Rinpoche said that if you lack this realization of thoughts as being self-arisen and self-liberated, then your meditation practice -- no matter how sincere and diligent -- will be merely the path of delusion. You might have some good experiences and think that your practice is bearing fruit because your mental afflictions are temporarily suppressed, but when you encounter adverse circumstances, "the rotten corpse of your thoughts will rise again."

"A single instant of self-liberated awareness," he writes, "is superior to a thousand experiences of a still mind."

If we really want to get on with this business of liberation and awakening, we need to stop kidding ourselves about our thoughts and emotions. As long as we continue to regard the thoughts that arise in our minds as friends or enemies, as good or bad, and continue trying to adopt the good ones and reject the bad ones -- as if any of them had any real substance to begin with -- then we will keep binding ourselves in the cycle of suffering, like a snake that someone has tied in a knot. Just as the snake naturally and easily frees itself from the knot when left to its own devices, our thoughts and emotions are self-liberated in the very instant they arise -- with just one catch. We have to stop bothering them, and let them be as they are.