From The Christian Reader:
The Call to Service
The soldier is summoned to a life of active duty, and so is the Christian. The very nature of the calling precludes a life of ease. If you had thought to be a summer soldier, consider your commission carefully. Your spiritual orders are rigorous. Like the apostle, I would not have you be ignorant on this point and will, therefore, list a few of your directives.
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Those sins which have lain nearest your heart must now be trampled under your feet. And what courage and resolution this requires! You think Abraham was tested to the limit when called upon to take Isaac, “thine only son… whom thou lovest” (Genesis 22:2), and offer him up with his own hands. Yet what was that to this: “Soul, take the lust which is the child dearest to your heart, your Isaac, the sin from which you intend to gain the greatest pleasure. Lay hands on it and offer it up; pour out its blood before Me; run the sacrificing knife into the very heart of it– and do it joyfully!”
This is more than the human spirit can bear to hear. Our lust will not lie so patiently on the alter as Isaac, nor as the Lamb brought dumb to the slaughter (Isaiah 53:7). Our flesh will roar and shriek, rending the heart with its hideous cries. Indeed, who can express the conflict, the wrestlings, the convulsions of spirit we endure before we can put our heart into such a command? Or who can fully recount the cleverness with which such a lust will plead for itself?
When the Spirit convicts you of sin, Satan will try to convince you, “It is such a little one– spare it.” Or he will bribe the soul with a vow of secrecy: “You can keep me and your good reputation, too. I will not be seen in your company to shame you among your neighbors. You may shut me up in the attic of your heart, out of sight, if only you will let me now and then have the wild embraces of your thoughts and affections in secret.”
by William Gurnall, from The Christian in Complete Armor
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The Hour Of Testing
From The Christian Reader:
The Hour of Testing
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Without God’s strength, you cannot stand in the hour of testing. The challenge is beyond the stretch of human fortitude. Just suppose all your strength is already engaged to barricade your soul against temptation and Satan is steadily hacking away at your resolve; what will you do? You need not panic. Only send faith to cry at God’s window, like the man in the parable asking his neighbor for bread at midnight, and He who keeps covenant forever will provide. When faith fails, however, and the soul has no one to send for divine intervention, the battle is all but over, and Satan will at that very moment be crossing the threshold.
When you are in the midst of testing, do not give up in despair. Faith is a dogged grace! Unless your soul flatly denies the power of God, this courier—faith—will beat a well-worn path to the throne. Doubt cripples but does not incapacitate faith. Indeed, even as you are disputing the mercy of God and questioning in your mind whether He will come to your rescue, faith will make its way, if haltingly, into His presence. And the message it delivers will be, “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”
But if you conclude finally that God cannot pardon or save, cannot come to your rescue, this shoots faith through the heart. Then your soul will fall at Satan’s feet, too disheartened to keep the door shut any longer to his temptation. Remember this: The one who abandons faith in the midst of a spiritual drought can be compared to the fool who throws away his pitcher the first day the well is dry.
It has ever been and always will be the Father’s will that we trust only Him. God demands to be called the Almighty; He insists we place our confidence in Him. That child is wise who does as his father bids. Man may be called wise, merciful, mighty; but only God is all-wise, all-merciful, almighty.
by William Gurnall, from The Christian in Complete Armor
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The Hour of Testing
Get "The Christian in Complete Armor" from the Reformation Bookstore
Without God’s strength, you cannot stand in the hour of testing. The challenge is beyond the stretch of human fortitude. Just suppose all your strength is already engaged to barricade your soul against temptation and Satan is steadily hacking away at your resolve; what will you do? You need not panic. Only send faith to cry at God’s window, like the man in the parable asking his neighbor for bread at midnight, and He who keeps covenant forever will provide. When faith fails, however, and the soul has no one to send for divine intervention, the battle is all but over, and Satan will at that very moment be crossing the threshold.
When you are in the midst of testing, do not give up in despair. Faith is a dogged grace! Unless your soul flatly denies the power of God, this courier—faith—will beat a well-worn path to the throne. Doubt cripples but does not incapacitate faith. Indeed, even as you are disputing the mercy of God and questioning in your mind whether He will come to your rescue, faith will make its way, if haltingly, into His presence. And the message it delivers will be, “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”
But if you conclude finally that God cannot pardon or save, cannot come to your rescue, this shoots faith through the heart. Then your soul will fall at Satan’s feet, too disheartened to keep the door shut any longer to his temptation. Remember this: The one who abandons faith in the midst of a spiritual drought can be compared to the fool who throws away his pitcher the first day the well is dry.
It has ever been and always will be the Father’s will that we trust only Him. God demands to be called the Almighty; He insists we place our confidence in Him. That child is wise who does as his father bids. Man may be called wise, merciful, mighty; but only God is all-wise, all-merciful, almighty.
by William Gurnall, from The Christian in Complete Armor
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The Story Of Scripture
From The Christian Reader:
The Story of Scripture
by Eric Rauch
Within the Emerging church movement (and to a lesser degree outside of it) you will often hear the word “narrative” being thrown around. Most Christians tend to get a bit uncomfortable when you refer to the Bible as a “story.” When they hear the word they automatically think of it in the negative sense, as in children’s story, fable, or myth. This is due in part to the effective tactic of agnostic skeptics who refer to the Bible as a “fairy tale for adults.” However, it is also due to our own people teaching the Bible as a collection of unrelated stories about character qualities and mysterious divine intervention. When our children are young we teach them about “Bible characters” using flannel-graphs, crafts, and cartoon images. Instead of using powerful images like Caravaggio’s David and Goliath (see here and here), we resort to colorful caricatures, dramatic emphasis, or, worse yet, fruits and vegetables, to tell the story. Is it any wonder that such a large percentage of children raised in the modern church abandon their “faith” when confronted with the reality of the “real world?” What good does a flannel-graph story do when you are constantly being accosted by professors, co-workers, and friends who are intent on undermining your “Sunday-school religion?”
In his short but powerful indictment of secularism, Harry Blamires writes:
We cannot make sense of adult life with the mental equipment of the child. We cannot afford to carry into adult life a Christian consciousness so under-nourished and anaemic that we slide into accepting faddish convenience recipes for worldly well-being as our daily diet. The evidence is that when the time comes for getting to grips with the Christian faith as adults and not as children, many of our contemporaries abandon their faith. They were early spoon-fed on the milk of the word, but in adulthood they discard the nourishment as babyish, and assume that there is no more to be said. Meanwhile, professing believers, men and women who perhaps make great steps forward in other spheres of life, all too often succumb to the epidemic of anorexia religiosa which destroys all appetite for progress in Christian understanding and commitment. [1]
While Blamires is right on the money in his assessment of the child/adult dualism that threatens real Christianity, he stresses the grown-up side of the Gospel without ever questioning how the Church is teaching the Bible to its youngest members. If we continue to teach our children the Bible as nothing more than a series of stories, when do we expect that they will make the transition from milk to meat? Just as real milk is necessary for a baby to grow, real Bible is necessary for the child. But if, as adults, we continue to forsake the meat of the Bible in favor of the milk, we will never grow as God intended us to. Teaching the stories of the Bible is one thing, but teaching the stories of the Bible in a silly way does nothing to advance a love for and understanding of the Bible in children. Why do we allow the Bible to be taught in this way, yet would never entertain the notion of teaching American or European history like this?
When Christians teach the Bible, they need to constantly have the “big picture” in their minds. The story of the Bible (and it is a story, or narrative if you so prefer) is a comprehensive explanation for everything that we experience in the world. In this sense, the Bible is the worldview for the Christian. The Bible provides answers to the major worldview questions that have plagued philosophers since the beginning: why, who, what, where, how, and when. These ultimate interrogatives must be answered by any worldview that claims to have the answer to the “meaning of life.” And a worldview must “hang together” by being consistent within itself. We naturally know this about any endeavor that we undertake in life. If a factory-worker spent his whole life installing transistors on a circuit-board without ever once wondering about what his transistors are being used for, we would think him a little strange if we met him at a cocktail party.
“Hi, Bob, what do you do for a living?”
“I install transistors on circuit boards at the factory on Maple Street.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. What does your factory make?”
“I don’t know. I never bothered asking. I just install transistors for eight hours and go home.”
“Oh, OK. See you later Bob.”
If, after discussing the factory on Maple with other party guests, we discover that Bob is actually contributing his transistor-filled circuit boards to heat-seeking missiles for a terrorist country, would this change Bob’s view of his occupation? Does the “story” of Bob’s occupation line up with his generally pacifistic approach to life? Could Bob reconcile these two conflicting “facts” in his life without quitting his job, or letting go of his pacifism? This is where our worldviews—our ultimate stories about reality—really matter.
The story of the Bible is told quite succinctly in the first five books, ending with Joshua leading the covenant people into the “promised land.” Zoom out a bit on the entire Bible and we now see Jesus, the new Joshua, leading His covenant people into the “promised land,” the heavenly Zion, the city that Abraham was looking for “whose architect and builder was God” (Hebrews 11:8-10). The Bible is filled with repetitive patterns and types that the smaller stories (the Sunday-school ones) fit into. If we neglect to teach our children the grand narrative of the Bible—God bringing His people into the promised land—there is nothing that the smaller stories can contribute other than interesting miraculous events that make us feel good. Without the overarching story of the Bible, the Sunday-school faith of flannel-graphs and character qualities will never stand a chance against the humanistic, all-encompassing worldview of the secularist.
Notes:
[1] Harry Blamires, Recovering the Christian Mind (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1988), 9.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Story of Scripture
by Eric Rauch
Within the Emerging church movement (and to a lesser degree outside of it) you will often hear the word “narrative” being thrown around. Most Christians tend to get a bit uncomfortable when you refer to the Bible as a “story.” When they hear the word they automatically think of it in the negative sense, as in children’s story, fable, or myth. This is due in part to the effective tactic of agnostic skeptics who refer to the Bible as a “fairy tale for adults.” However, it is also due to our own people teaching the Bible as a collection of unrelated stories about character qualities and mysterious divine intervention. When our children are young we teach them about “Bible characters” using flannel-graphs, crafts, and cartoon images. Instead of using powerful images like Caravaggio’s David and Goliath (see here and here), we resort to colorful caricatures, dramatic emphasis, or, worse yet, fruits and vegetables, to tell the story. Is it any wonder that such a large percentage of children raised in the modern church abandon their “faith” when confronted with the reality of the “real world?” What good does a flannel-graph story do when you are constantly being accosted by professors, co-workers, and friends who are intent on undermining your “Sunday-school religion?”
In his short but powerful indictment of secularism, Harry Blamires writes:
We cannot make sense of adult life with the mental equipment of the child. We cannot afford to carry into adult life a Christian consciousness so under-nourished and anaemic that we slide into accepting faddish convenience recipes for worldly well-being as our daily diet. The evidence is that when the time comes for getting to grips with the Christian faith as adults and not as children, many of our contemporaries abandon their faith. They were early spoon-fed on the milk of the word, but in adulthood they discard the nourishment as babyish, and assume that there is no more to be said. Meanwhile, professing believers, men and women who perhaps make great steps forward in other spheres of life, all too often succumb to the epidemic of anorexia religiosa which destroys all appetite for progress in Christian understanding and commitment. [1]
While Blamires is right on the money in his assessment of the child/adult dualism that threatens real Christianity, he stresses the grown-up side of the Gospel without ever questioning how the Church is teaching the Bible to its youngest members. If we continue to teach our children the Bible as nothing more than a series of stories, when do we expect that they will make the transition from milk to meat? Just as real milk is necessary for a baby to grow, real Bible is necessary for the child. But if, as adults, we continue to forsake the meat of the Bible in favor of the milk, we will never grow as God intended us to. Teaching the stories of the Bible is one thing, but teaching the stories of the Bible in a silly way does nothing to advance a love for and understanding of the Bible in children. Why do we allow the Bible to be taught in this way, yet would never entertain the notion of teaching American or European history like this?
When Christians teach the Bible, they need to constantly have the “big picture” in their minds. The story of the Bible (and it is a story, or narrative if you so prefer) is a comprehensive explanation for everything that we experience in the world. In this sense, the Bible is the worldview for the Christian. The Bible provides answers to the major worldview questions that have plagued philosophers since the beginning: why, who, what, where, how, and when. These ultimate interrogatives must be answered by any worldview that claims to have the answer to the “meaning of life.” And a worldview must “hang together” by being consistent within itself. We naturally know this about any endeavor that we undertake in life. If a factory-worker spent his whole life installing transistors on a circuit-board without ever once wondering about what his transistors are being used for, we would think him a little strange if we met him at a cocktail party.
“Hi, Bob, what do you do for a living?”
“I install transistors on circuit boards at the factory on Maple Street.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. What does your factory make?”
“I don’t know. I never bothered asking. I just install transistors for eight hours and go home.”
“Oh, OK. See you later Bob.”
If, after discussing the factory on Maple with other party guests, we discover that Bob is actually contributing his transistor-filled circuit boards to heat-seeking missiles for a terrorist country, would this change Bob’s view of his occupation? Does the “story” of Bob’s occupation line up with his generally pacifistic approach to life? Could Bob reconcile these two conflicting “facts” in his life without quitting his job, or letting go of his pacifism? This is where our worldviews—our ultimate stories about reality—really matter.
The story of the Bible is told quite succinctly in the first five books, ending with Joshua leading the covenant people into the “promised land.” Zoom out a bit on the entire Bible and we now see Jesus, the new Joshua, leading His covenant people into the “promised land,” the heavenly Zion, the city that Abraham was looking for “whose architect and builder was God” (Hebrews 11:8-10). The Bible is filled with repetitive patterns and types that the smaller stories (the Sunday-school ones) fit into. If we neglect to teach our children the grand narrative of the Bible—God bringing His people into the promised land—there is nothing that the smaller stories can contribute other than interesting miraculous events that make us feel good. Without the overarching story of the Bible, the Sunday-school faith of flannel-graphs and character qualities will never stand a chance against the humanistic, all-encompassing worldview of the secularist.
Notes:
[1] Harry Blamires, Recovering the Christian Mind (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1988), 9.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forgive Us Our Trespasses
From Zionica.com:
Forgive Us Our Trespasses
by Philip Ryken
We need daily pardon and daily protection as well as daily provision. So after Jesus taught us to pray, “give us today our daily bread,” He also taught us to pray, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:12–13).
These petitions are for fallen sinners — for people who are often tempted to sin, and sometimes give in. Even before we face these temptations, we should ask God to keep us safe from what John Calvin called in his Institutes “the violent assaults of Satan.” In asking not to be led into temptation, we are not requesting that we will never be tempted at all, but that when we are tempted God will deliver us from Satan’s deadly attacks.
But what about the times when we do sin and fall into spiritual debt? How should we pray then?
The first thing to do when we fall into debt is to figure out how much we owe. So what debt do we owe to God because of our sin? We are guilty for what we have done and for what we have left undone, for sins of omission as well as commission. Our debt includes secret sins as well as public ones, deliberate sins as well as sins committed in relative ignorance. And when all our sins are added together, they place us in God’s eternal debt.
Yet Jesus has taught us to ask our Father to help us. “Our Father,” we are to pray, “forgive us our debts.” With these words we declare our moral bankruptcy, freely admitting that we owe God more than everything we have. Then we ask Him to forgive us outright. And because He is our loving Father, God does what we ask. When we go to Him weighed down with the debt of all our sin, He does not sit down with us to work out a payment plan. Instead, He offers full and free forgiveness.
When God remits our debts He is well within His legal rights, for the Scripture says that He took our sin away, “canceling the record of debt that stood against us” by “nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:14). This vivid image corresponds to the way debts were sometimes cancelled in the ancient world. When a debtor finally paid off all his debts, his creditor would strike a nail through the certificate of debt. In the same way, when Christ died on the cross, God drove a nail right through the infinite debt of our sin. There are no longer any outstanding charges against us.
The debts we ask God to forgive when we pray the way Jesus taught us to pray are the very debts that were crucified with Christ at Calvary. When Christ died on the cross, all our debts were cancelled. The Greek word for “cancel” (exaleipho), which Paul uses in Colossians 2, means “to blot out” or “to wipe away.” It means that the mountain of debt we once owed to God because of our sin has been completely erased.
There are still some things we owe to God, however — not out of debt, but out of gratitude — and one of those things is forgiveness. “Forgive us our debts,” Jesus taught us to pray, “as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12 nkjv). From this petition we learn that we are not the only ones in debt. We have debtors of our own, people who owe us something for what they have done to us. And we are called to forgive them.
This is a hard teaching. The prayer for forgiveness is the only petition in the Lord’s Prayer that comes with a condition attached. If we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. Yet we find it hard to forgive. How, then, can we be forgiven?
To illustrate the difficulty, consider something John Wesley said in his missionary days when he was having a difficult time with General Oglethorpe, the proud and pitiless founder of colonial Georgia. Oglethorpe made this startling comment: “I never forgive.” “Then I hope, sir,” replied Wesley, “you never sin.” Wesley was thinking of the Lord’s Prayer, which implies that the unforgiving are unforgiven.
Asking for our own forgiveness takes priority over offering it to others. If we had to forgive before we could be forgiven, then forgiveness would become a work, something we had to do to be saved. Yet salvation comes by grace alone. We cannot work off our debts, we can only ask for them to be canceled. But now, having been forgiven, by the grace of God we are also able to forgive. Indeed, our ability to forgive is one of the surest signs of our having been forgiven. Those who are truly forgiven, truly forgive.
Giving such forgiveness can be very costly, and the more someone has hurt us, the harder it is to forgive. Yet forgiveness also brings great joy, not only to the forgiven, but especially to the forgiver. The Greek term for “forgiveness” (aphiemi) comes from a word that means “to let go.” Forgiveness is a release, a letting go of self-destructive feelings like anger, bitterness, and revenge.
Richard Wurmbrand once met a man who had experienced the divine release that comes through forgiveness. Wurmbrand was in a Communist prison in Romania at the time, lying in a prison cell reserved for those who were dying. In the cot on his right was a pastor who had been beaten so badly that he was about to die. On his left was the very man who had beaten him, a Communist who was later betrayed and tortured by his comrades.
One night the Communist awakened in the middle of a nightmare and cried out, “Please, pastor, say a prayer for me. I have committed such crimes, I cannot die.” The pastor feebly got up, stumbled past Wurmbrand’s cot, and sat at the bedside of his enemy.
As he watched, Wurmbrand saw the pastor caress the hair of the man who had tortured him and speak these amazing words: “I have forgiven you with all of my heart, and I love you. If I who am only a sinner can love and forgive you, more so can Jesus who is the Son of God and who is love incarnate. Return to Him. He longs for you much more than you long for Him. He wishes to forgive you much more than you wish to be forgiven. You just repent.” There, in the prison cell, the Communist began to confess all his murders and tortures. When he had finished, the two men prayed together, embraced, and then returned to their beds, where each died that very night.
The Romanian pastor had learned how to forgive. He had learned this from Jesus, who first forgave his debts, and then taught him to forgive his debtors. This same Jesus forgives us and delivers us, for by His death on the cross He has canceled our debt and destroyed the power of the Devil.
Forgive Us Our Trespasses
by Philip Ryken
We need daily pardon and daily protection as well as daily provision. So after Jesus taught us to pray, “give us today our daily bread,” He also taught us to pray, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:12–13).
These petitions are for fallen sinners — for people who are often tempted to sin, and sometimes give in. Even before we face these temptations, we should ask God to keep us safe from what John Calvin called in his Institutes “the violent assaults of Satan.” In asking not to be led into temptation, we are not requesting that we will never be tempted at all, but that when we are tempted God will deliver us from Satan’s deadly attacks.
But what about the times when we do sin and fall into spiritual debt? How should we pray then?
The first thing to do when we fall into debt is to figure out how much we owe. So what debt do we owe to God because of our sin? We are guilty for what we have done and for what we have left undone, for sins of omission as well as commission. Our debt includes secret sins as well as public ones, deliberate sins as well as sins committed in relative ignorance. And when all our sins are added together, they place us in God’s eternal debt.
Yet Jesus has taught us to ask our Father to help us. “Our Father,” we are to pray, “forgive us our debts.” With these words we declare our moral bankruptcy, freely admitting that we owe God more than everything we have. Then we ask Him to forgive us outright. And because He is our loving Father, God does what we ask. When we go to Him weighed down with the debt of all our sin, He does not sit down with us to work out a payment plan. Instead, He offers full and free forgiveness.
When God remits our debts He is well within His legal rights, for the Scripture says that He took our sin away, “canceling the record of debt that stood against us” by “nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:14). This vivid image corresponds to the way debts were sometimes cancelled in the ancient world. When a debtor finally paid off all his debts, his creditor would strike a nail through the certificate of debt. In the same way, when Christ died on the cross, God drove a nail right through the infinite debt of our sin. There are no longer any outstanding charges against us.
The debts we ask God to forgive when we pray the way Jesus taught us to pray are the very debts that were crucified with Christ at Calvary. When Christ died on the cross, all our debts were cancelled. The Greek word for “cancel” (exaleipho), which Paul uses in Colossians 2, means “to blot out” or “to wipe away.” It means that the mountain of debt we once owed to God because of our sin has been completely erased.
There are still some things we owe to God, however — not out of debt, but out of gratitude — and one of those things is forgiveness. “Forgive us our debts,” Jesus taught us to pray, “as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12 nkjv). From this petition we learn that we are not the only ones in debt. We have debtors of our own, people who owe us something for what they have done to us. And we are called to forgive them.
This is a hard teaching. The prayer for forgiveness is the only petition in the Lord’s Prayer that comes with a condition attached. If we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. Yet we find it hard to forgive. How, then, can we be forgiven?
To illustrate the difficulty, consider something John Wesley said in his missionary days when he was having a difficult time with General Oglethorpe, the proud and pitiless founder of colonial Georgia. Oglethorpe made this startling comment: “I never forgive.” “Then I hope, sir,” replied Wesley, “you never sin.” Wesley was thinking of the Lord’s Prayer, which implies that the unforgiving are unforgiven.
Asking for our own forgiveness takes priority over offering it to others. If we had to forgive before we could be forgiven, then forgiveness would become a work, something we had to do to be saved. Yet salvation comes by grace alone. We cannot work off our debts, we can only ask for them to be canceled. But now, having been forgiven, by the grace of God we are also able to forgive. Indeed, our ability to forgive is one of the surest signs of our having been forgiven. Those who are truly forgiven, truly forgive.
Giving such forgiveness can be very costly, and the more someone has hurt us, the harder it is to forgive. Yet forgiveness also brings great joy, not only to the forgiven, but especially to the forgiver. The Greek term for “forgiveness” (aphiemi) comes from a word that means “to let go.” Forgiveness is a release, a letting go of self-destructive feelings like anger, bitterness, and revenge.
Richard Wurmbrand once met a man who had experienced the divine release that comes through forgiveness. Wurmbrand was in a Communist prison in Romania at the time, lying in a prison cell reserved for those who were dying. In the cot on his right was a pastor who had been beaten so badly that he was about to die. On his left was the very man who had beaten him, a Communist who was later betrayed and tortured by his comrades.
One night the Communist awakened in the middle of a nightmare and cried out, “Please, pastor, say a prayer for me. I have committed such crimes, I cannot die.” The pastor feebly got up, stumbled past Wurmbrand’s cot, and sat at the bedside of his enemy.
As he watched, Wurmbrand saw the pastor caress the hair of the man who had tortured him and speak these amazing words: “I have forgiven you with all of my heart, and I love you. If I who am only a sinner can love and forgive you, more so can Jesus who is the Son of God and who is love incarnate. Return to Him. He longs for you much more than you long for Him. He wishes to forgive you much more than you wish to be forgiven. You just repent.” There, in the prison cell, the Communist began to confess all his murders and tortures. When he had finished, the two men prayed together, embraced, and then returned to their beds, where each died that very night.
The Romanian pastor had learned how to forgive. He had learned this from Jesus, who first forgave his debts, and then taught him to forgive his debtors. This same Jesus forgives us and delivers us, for by His death on the cross He has canceled our debt and destroyed the power of the Devil.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
An Introduction To Zen
From Tricycle:
An Introduction to Zen
By Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara
Read more on Tricycle's 90-day Zen meditation challenge
The Big Sit Introduction
Introduction to Zen
Setting Up Your Home Altar
Genjokoan
The Value of A Vow
How to Sit
The Bodhisattva Precepts
Sign up for the challenge now!
What is Zen?
The word “Zen” is tossed around so carelessly in the commercial world, the human potential world, the world of design, and in popular culture in general, that for someone new to it as an authentic spiritual tradition, it has become too vague to have much meaning. Real Zen is the practice of coming back to the actual right-now-in-this-moment self, coming back to the naturalness, the intimacy and simplicity of our true nature. Zen practice is not about getting away from our life as it is; it is about getting into our life as it is, with all of its vividness, beauty, hardship, joy and sorrow. Zen is a path of awakening: awakening to who we really are, and awakening the aspiration to serve others and take responsibility for all of life.
This sounds good, but how is it to be accomplished? How is it possible to enter such a new way of experiencing one’s life?
The Practice
There is a term in the Celtic tradition that I find resonates with something fundamental about Zen practice. The Celts spoke of “thin places,” places like caves or wells or other special sites where the boundary between the mundane and magical was permeable. To me, Zen practice offers a kind of thin place, a “place” where we can discover that there is fundamentally no separation between ourselves and others, that what we seek is always so close, always right here. In the Lotus Sutra’s parable of the burning house, the only escape from our greed, anger, and ignorance is said to be through a “narrow door.” The narrow door, the thin place, and any of a number of metaphors point us in the direction of our own realization. A door or a gate or a threshold also implies that there is effort, movement, investment in transformation.
© RararanamooriAt the heart of Zen practice is zazen, seated meditation. One master said that listening and thinking are like being outside the gate, and zazen is returning home and sitting in peace. Zazen is really a very simple practice and does not involve complicated instructions. When one studies the ancient Zen meditation manuals, it is always surprising how brief and plain they are. While they speak of the possibility of attaining the freedom and naturalness of a tiger in the mountains or a dragon in the water, the actual instructions are so concrete. Sit in the proper posture and attend to the body, breath, and mind.
Make a Place to Sit
It is best to have a place set aside for regular zazen. Whether it is a room or just a corner, the space should be clean and uncluttered. Place a mat on the floor (a folded blanket will do) and on it a zafu, another type of comfortable sitting cushion, or a bench. If floor sitting is too difficult, simply use a chair.
Preparing to Sit
When you do zazen, wear loose, clean clothes. At the beginning of a sitting period, it is traditional to bow to an altar, offer a stick of incense, and bow once more. Then, as you stand before your seat, bow toward and away from your cushion, bench, or chair. These acts help us to realize intention and respect. The incense is offered with the intention that this session is for all beings, for all creation, not just for oneself. The standing bow to and away from our cushion actualizes our respect for our practice and for those, whether present or not, who practice with us. The physical act of bowing, of folding our body down, placing our head in a traditionally respectful position of vulnerability, gives the ego a big break, an opportunity to let go. When you are seated—whether cross-legged, kneeling, or in a chair—settle into the zazen posture: Place your hands on your lap or thighs, in the cosmic mudra, your right hand holding your left one, palms up, with your thumbs barely touching, forming a circle.
Posture
Your posture in sitting is vitally important. Sit on the forward third of your cushion or chair, so that your hips are higher than your knees and your belly is free to move in and out without stress on your lower back. Your ears are in line with your shoulders, your head balanced gently on your neck, your eyes are slightly open, gazing down about three feet in front of you. Your chin is pointing neither up nor down, but is slightly tucked in. Place your tongue just behind your teeth on the roof of your mouth. Sway from side to side until you find your center point.
Now attend to the breath. Breathe naturally. Breathing in, allow the breath to fully enter your body until your lower belly expands; then, breathing out, softly allow the breath to ease out through your nostrils. Notice how the breath seems to travel through the main avenues of your torso. Your belly should rise and fall naturally with each breath. Let the breath fill your lower abdomen as if it were a balloon. Later, you may notice that even the bottoms of your feet are breathing in and out. As you relax into the breath, you can begin silently counting each full cycle of breath, noting “one” on the out-breath, “two” on the next out-breath, and so on up to “ten.” When you reach “ten,” begin again with “one.” When you realize that you have stopped counting, and are caught up in thinking, simply take another breath and go back to “one.”
Do this—counting your breath, maintaining your posture, sitting still—for the 20-minute period of zazen. Notice that urges to move—to scratch your nose, to tug on your ear—are usually ways to move away from the energies in your body. Instead of moving, stay with them, observe them, and bring your focus back to the breathing. Learn to notice how these urges fall away, only to be replaced by others, demonstrating the second noble truth: the cause of suffering is craving. All the disparate ideas, thoughts, impulses—everything comes and goes, and yet you sit. And little by little, the chatter drops away and your body, breath, and mind are one. Zazen is so simple. We focus on our posture and on counting our breath, and this develops samadhi, a unified mind. But the practice is not about reaching “ten.” It is about training the body and mind. Let the body settle, let the breath settle, let the mind settle. Don’t worry about whether your practice is working, don’t judge your performance, don’t tell yourself stories or find other ways to avoid this very moment. These are just ways of separating from our deepest intention and our zazen. When you do zazen, just do zazen. That’s enough.
The Original Self
In the Genjokoan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), Zen Master Dogen writes:
When one first seeks the dharma, one is far away
from its environs.
When one has already correctly transmitted
the dharma to oneself, one is one’s original
self at that moment.
Dogen Zenji’s teaching reminds us of our initial separation from what is ours. When we begin to seek the dharma, there is an “I” that looks for it over “there.” But the dharma is already alive in us, and requires only that we realize it, which is what he means in the second sentence: having “correctly transmitted the dharma to oneself,” one is one’s real self in that moment.
I think all of us yearn to experience ourselves as whole and complete, to live our lives fully and freshly in each moment. But something blocks us, and Zen training is one way to see that, all along, we have what we need. This is called the realization of the original self.
The Daily Practice: Be Consistent
The zazen period we are recommending is 20 minutes. You may find that you will want to do more—or less— and that is fine. What is important is consistency. To keep your practice consistent, remember what the famous Nike ad says: “Just do it.” Don’t concern yourself with trying to get to some particular place or state of mind. Each day’s zazen will be a little different, just like the rest of life. We practice steadiness in our daily meditation—alert, sleepy, focused—we just practice each day, through the high points and the low. When you mess up—and you will— just say, “Okay, back to my cushion.” When you are sitting, you may realize that you are thinking about something else. At that moment, take a deep breath and recognize that, in that moment of realization, you have come back to now. As an old meditation manual says, as soon as you are aware of a thought, it will vanish! When we are thinking of a thing, we are lost in it, lost in thinking about “x.” But when we become aware of our thinking, then we are in a secondary state. The actual thinking of “x” is gone, and there is either just awareness or we begin a new thought based on that awareness. Either way, the original thinking is gone. If we practice daily, soon we are able to stay more often in that space of pure awareness without an object. Just breathing, just being present—we call this being naturally unified.
Zazen is a form that allows us to practice the no form of boundless emptiness. The freedom that is made available to us through form is one of those grand paradoxes of life. When we organize ourselves and create a structure, we also create the means to be free of structure. Form helps us by organizing and directing our energies. But we can carry our form lightly, with respect and appreciation for its gifts. This subtle discipline—settling, unifying, letting be—is called the dharma gate of peace and joy.
In addition to zazen and bowing, there are other aspects of Zen practice that help us on the way. One is setting up a home altar, which encourages the actualizing of respect and devotion. To place something on an altar is to meet it, to hold it in esteem. Traditionally, in Zen monasteries, the altar in the zendo (meditation hall) had as its focus a statue of Manjushri, the bodhisattva representing transcendent wisdom. Manjushri holds a sword that cuts away delusions, thus clearing our minds. By putting such an image on our altar, we vow to take on that strong energy of slicing away at our delusions, our ignorance, our greed and anger. We vow to be clear. For your home altar, place a statue or image of any buddha or bodhisattva who evokes in you the aspiration to realize those qualities— wisdom, compassion, peace—that he or she embodies. You may place an incense bowl and incense (which is a fine way to time your zazen); a flower, which evokes transient beauty; water, an element of nourishment; and a candle to brighten the space.
Study and Online Dharma Talks
Study is another aspect of Zen. We study to encourage, refine, and deepen our own practice and that of others. This ango—the traditional 90-day Zen practice period—we will study Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan. How do we approach this or any other Zen study text? How do we penetrate the surface to get to the heart of the matter, to the workings of enlightened mind in the midst of daily life? Study the text as if it were a koan (a paradoxical phrase pointing to the nature of ultimate reality): chew on a few lines each day. And with each reading, stop and put the meaning into your life, asking yourself what this line means to you. In studying this inspiring and brilliant work, you can bring it directly into your own life, your own practice, so that the text comes to actually be yours and you express the text in your life. This is Zen study, and the Genjokoan will be the subject of my accompanying talks online.
The Precepts
Finally, because all of this practice leads to our realization of our interdependence and interrelatedness with all beings, we will also take up the practice of the sixteen bodhisattva precepts. These precepts are not commandments; rather, they are guiding principles for living a life of freedom and service. The precepts will be one of the topics in the online discussions. The precepts are themselves worthy of a lifetime of study and practice. Indeed, in some Zen traditions, they are part of formal koan study, with each precept appreciated from various perspectives. Make them your own, be intimate with them. Rather than simply trying to follow them, embody them, in much the same way in which you “become” your zazen.
Sitting with Others
I encourage you to step up and experience Zen practice. But for now there is one more thing to keep in mind. While we are trying, both in this section and through the online resources, to provide you with what you need to get a solid start in establishing your own daily practice, Zen is not a solitary practice. As we chant at the end of our liturgy, “May we realize the Buddha Way together.” Sitting with others, studying with others, working with others, talking with others—all these are integral to the life of Zen. So I encourage you as well to join with others whenever possible. Go to a Zen meditation center or a similar group and sit with other people. And participate in our online community as well, where you will find a directory of Zen centers and teachers. Listen to the lectures, join the discussion group, read the supplemental material that will be posted. I hope that for the next three months you will help me in my own practice by joining this ango.
Let’s let Master Dogen have the last word:
The dharma is amply present in every person, but without practice, it
is not manifested; without realization, it is not attained.
An Introduction to Zen
By Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara
Read more on Tricycle's 90-day Zen meditation challenge
The Big Sit Introduction
Introduction to Zen
Setting Up Your Home Altar
Genjokoan
The Value of A Vow
How to Sit
The Bodhisattva Precepts
Sign up for the challenge now!
What is Zen?
The word “Zen” is tossed around so carelessly in the commercial world, the human potential world, the world of design, and in popular culture in general, that for someone new to it as an authentic spiritual tradition, it has become too vague to have much meaning. Real Zen is the practice of coming back to the actual right-now-in-this-moment self, coming back to the naturalness, the intimacy and simplicity of our true nature. Zen practice is not about getting away from our life as it is; it is about getting into our life as it is, with all of its vividness, beauty, hardship, joy and sorrow. Zen is a path of awakening: awakening to who we really are, and awakening the aspiration to serve others and take responsibility for all of life.
This sounds good, but how is it to be accomplished? How is it possible to enter such a new way of experiencing one’s life?
The Practice
There is a term in the Celtic tradition that I find resonates with something fundamental about Zen practice. The Celts spoke of “thin places,” places like caves or wells or other special sites where the boundary between the mundane and magical was permeable. To me, Zen practice offers a kind of thin place, a “place” where we can discover that there is fundamentally no separation between ourselves and others, that what we seek is always so close, always right here. In the Lotus Sutra’s parable of the burning house, the only escape from our greed, anger, and ignorance is said to be through a “narrow door.” The narrow door, the thin place, and any of a number of metaphors point us in the direction of our own realization. A door or a gate or a threshold also implies that there is effort, movement, investment in transformation.
© RararanamooriAt the heart of Zen practice is zazen, seated meditation. One master said that listening and thinking are like being outside the gate, and zazen is returning home and sitting in peace. Zazen is really a very simple practice and does not involve complicated instructions. When one studies the ancient Zen meditation manuals, it is always surprising how brief and plain they are. While they speak of the possibility of attaining the freedom and naturalness of a tiger in the mountains or a dragon in the water, the actual instructions are so concrete. Sit in the proper posture and attend to the body, breath, and mind.
Make a Place to Sit
It is best to have a place set aside for regular zazen. Whether it is a room or just a corner, the space should be clean and uncluttered. Place a mat on the floor (a folded blanket will do) and on it a zafu, another type of comfortable sitting cushion, or a bench. If floor sitting is too difficult, simply use a chair.
Preparing to Sit
When you do zazen, wear loose, clean clothes. At the beginning of a sitting period, it is traditional to bow to an altar, offer a stick of incense, and bow once more. Then, as you stand before your seat, bow toward and away from your cushion, bench, or chair. These acts help us to realize intention and respect. The incense is offered with the intention that this session is for all beings, for all creation, not just for oneself. The standing bow to and away from our cushion actualizes our respect for our practice and for those, whether present or not, who practice with us. The physical act of bowing, of folding our body down, placing our head in a traditionally respectful position of vulnerability, gives the ego a big break, an opportunity to let go. When you are seated—whether cross-legged, kneeling, or in a chair—settle into the zazen posture: Place your hands on your lap or thighs, in the cosmic mudra, your right hand holding your left one, palms up, with your thumbs barely touching, forming a circle.
Posture
Your posture in sitting is vitally important. Sit on the forward third of your cushion or chair, so that your hips are higher than your knees and your belly is free to move in and out without stress on your lower back. Your ears are in line with your shoulders, your head balanced gently on your neck, your eyes are slightly open, gazing down about three feet in front of you. Your chin is pointing neither up nor down, but is slightly tucked in. Place your tongue just behind your teeth on the roof of your mouth. Sway from side to side until you find your center point.
Now attend to the breath. Breathe naturally. Breathing in, allow the breath to fully enter your body until your lower belly expands; then, breathing out, softly allow the breath to ease out through your nostrils. Notice how the breath seems to travel through the main avenues of your torso. Your belly should rise and fall naturally with each breath. Let the breath fill your lower abdomen as if it were a balloon. Later, you may notice that even the bottoms of your feet are breathing in and out. As you relax into the breath, you can begin silently counting each full cycle of breath, noting “one” on the out-breath, “two” on the next out-breath, and so on up to “ten.” When you reach “ten,” begin again with “one.” When you realize that you have stopped counting, and are caught up in thinking, simply take another breath and go back to “one.”
Do this—counting your breath, maintaining your posture, sitting still—for the 20-minute period of zazen. Notice that urges to move—to scratch your nose, to tug on your ear—are usually ways to move away from the energies in your body. Instead of moving, stay with them, observe them, and bring your focus back to the breathing. Learn to notice how these urges fall away, only to be replaced by others, demonstrating the second noble truth: the cause of suffering is craving. All the disparate ideas, thoughts, impulses—everything comes and goes, and yet you sit. And little by little, the chatter drops away and your body, breath, and mind are one. Zazen is so simple. We focus on our posture and on counting our breath, and this develops samadhi, a unified mind. But the practice is not about reaching “ten.” It is about training the body and mind. Let the body settle, let the breath settle, let the mind settle. Don’t worry about whether your practice is working, don’t judge your performance, don’t tell yourself stories or find other ways to avoid this very moment. These are just ways of separating from our deepest intention and our zazen. When you do zazen, just do zazen. That’s enough.
The Original Self
In the Genjokoan (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), Zen Master Dogen writes:
When one first seeks the dharma, one is far away
from its environs.
When one has already correctly transmitted
the dharma to oneself, one is one’s original
self at that moment.
Dogen Zenji’s teaching reminds us of our initial separation from what is ours. When we begin to seek the dharma, there is an “I” that looks for it over “there.” But the dharma is already alive in us, and requires only that we realize it, which is what he means in the second sentence: having “correctly transmitted the dharma to oneself,” one is one’s real self in that moment.
I think all of us yearn to experience ourselves as whole and complete, to live our lives fully and freshly in each moment. But something blocks us, and Zen training is one way to see that, all along, we have what we need. This is called the realization of the original self.
The Daily Practice: Be Consistent
The zazen period we are recommending is 20 minutes. You may find that you will want to do more—or less— and that is fine. What is important is consistency. To keep your practice consistent, remember what the famous Nike ad says: “Just do it.” Don’t concern yourself with trying to get to some particular place or state of mind. Each day’s zazen will be a little different, just like the rest of life. We practice steadiness in our daily meditation—alert, sleepy, focused—we just practice each day, through the high points and the low. When you mess up—and you will— just say, “Okay, back to my cushion.” When you are sitting, you may realize that you are thinking about something else. At that moment, take a deep breath and recognize that, in that moment of realization, you have come back to now. As an old meditation manual says, as soon as you are aware of a thought, it will vanish! When we are thinking of a thing, we are lost in it, lost in thinking about “x.” But when we become aware of our thinking, then we are in a secondary state. The actual thinking of “x” is gone, and there is either just awareness or we begin a new thought based on that awareness. Either way, the original thinking is gone. If we practice daily, soon we are able to stay more often in that space of pure awareness without an object. Just breathing, just being present—we call this being naturally unified.
Zazen is a form that allows us to practice the no form of boundless emptiness. The freedom that is made available to us through form is one of those grand paradoxes of life. When we organize ourselves and create a structure, we also create the means to be free of structure. Form helps us by organizing and directing our energies. But we can carry our form lightly, with respect and appreciation for its gifts. This subtle discipline—settling, unifying, letting be—is called the dharma gate of peace and joy.
In addition to zazen and bowing, there are other aspects of Zen practice that help us on the way. One is setting up a home altar, which encourages the actualizing of respect and devotion. To place something on an altar is to meet it, to hold it in esteem. Traditionally, in Zen monasteries, the altar in the zendo (meditation hall) had as its focus a statue of Manjushri, the bodhisattva representing transcendent wisdom. Manjushri holds a sword that cuts away delusions, thus clearing our minds. By putting such an image on our altar, we vow to take on that strong energy of slicing away at our delusions, our ignorance, our greed and anger. We vow to be clear. For your home altar, place a statue or image of any buddha or bodhisattva who evokes in you the aspiration to realize those qualities— wisdom, compassion, peace—that he or she embodies. You may place an incense bowl and incense (which is a fine way to time your zazen); a flower, which evokes transient beauty; water, an element of nourishment; and a candle to brighten the space.
Study and Online Dharma Talks
Study is another aspect of Zen. We study to encourage, refine, and deepen our own practice and that of others. This ango—the traditional 90-day Zen practice period—we will study Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan. How do we approach this or any other Zen study text? How do we penetrate the surface to get to the heart of the matter, to the workings of enlightened mind in the midst of daily life? Study the text as if it were a koan (a paradoxical phrase pointing to the nature of ultimate reality): chew on a few lines each day. And with each reading, stop and put the meaning into your life, asking yourself what this line means to you. In studying this inspiring and brilliant work, you can bring it directly into your own life, your own practice, so that the text comes to actually be yours and you express the text in your life. This is Zen study, and the Genjokoan will be the subject of my accompanying talks online.
The Precepts
Finally, because all of this practice leads to our realization of our interdependence and interrelatedness with all beings, we will also take up the practice of the sixteen bodhisattva precepts. These precepts are not commandments; rather, they are guiding principles for living a life of freedom and service. The precepts will be one of the topics in the online discussions. The precepts are themselves worthy of a lifetime of study and practice. Indeed, in some Zen traditions, they are part of formal koan study, with each precept appreciated from various perspectives. Make them your own, be intimate with them. Rather than simply trying to follow them, embody them, in much the same way in which you “become” your zazen.
Sitting with Others
I encourage you to step up and experience Zen practice. But for now there is one more thing to keep in mind. While we are trying, both in this section and through the online resources, to provide you with what you need to get a solid start in establishing your own daily practice, Zen is not a solitary practice. As we chant at the end of our liturgy, “May we realize the Buddha Way together.” Sitting with others, studying with others, working with others, talking with others—all these are integral to the life of Zen. So I encourage you as well to join with others whenever possible. Go to a Zen meditation center or a similar group and sit with other people. And participate in our online community as well, where you will find a directory of Zen centers and teachers. Listen to the lectures, join the discussion group, read the supplemental material that will be posted. I hope that for the next three months you will help me in my own practice by joining this ango.
Let’s let Master Dogen have the last word:
The dharma is amply present in every person, but without practice, it
is not manifested; without realization, it is not attained.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Aim Of Attention
From Tricycle:
The Aim of Attention
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Self-awareness . . . is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions.
—Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
ORDINARILY, our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely, or depressed, we’re carried away by such feelings and by the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany them. We’re not free; we can’t see other options, other possibilities.
The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle. We can begin to watch our thoughts and emotions without necessarily being affected by them quite as powerfully or vividly as we’re used to. We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him- or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, or hobbled by low self-esteem to a person who can look at loneliness, shame, and low self-esteem as movements of the mind.
The process is not unlike going to the gym. You have a goal—whether it’s losing weight, building muscles, promoting your health, or some other reason. In order to achieve that goal, you lift weights, jog on a treadmill, take classes, and so on. Gradually, you begin to see the fruits of these activities; and seeing them, you’re inspired to continue.
In the case of attention practice, the important point is to know that the goal is to establish and develop stability of awareness that will allow you to look at thoughts, emotions, and even physical pain without wavering. Bearing that in mind, let’s look at applying the following four steps.
Step One: The Main Exercise
The main exercise of attention practice can be broken down into three stages. The first involves simply looking at a thought or emotion with what, in Buddhist terms, is known as ordinary awareness—bringing attention to thoughts or feelings without any express purpose or intention. Just notice and identify what you’re thinking or feeling. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m lonely. We practice ordinary attention every moment of every day. We look at a cup, for example, and simply acknowledge, That’s a cup. Very little judgment is involved at this stage. We don’t think That’s a good cup, a bad cup, an attractive cup, a small cup, or a large cup. We just recognize cup. Applying ordinary awareness to thoughts and emotions involves the same simple acknowledgment: Oh, I’m angry. Oh, I’m jealous. Oh, I’m frustrated. Oh, I could have done better. Oh, I said (or did) something.
Sometimes, thoughts and emotions are not very clear. In such cases, we can look at the messages we receive from our physical bodies. Physical sensations could reflect a host of emotional or mental states— anger, frustration, jealousy, regret, or a mix of disturbing thoughts and feelings. The important point is to simply look at what’s going on and acknowledge whatever you’re experiencing just as it is, rather than to resist it or succumb to it.
The second stage involves meditative awareness— approaching thoughts and emotions as objects of focus through which we can stabilize awareness. To use an example, a student of mine once confided that he suffered from what he called a “people-pleasing” complex. At work, he was always trying to do more, to work longer hours to complete professional projects, which consequently stole time he wished to spend with his wife and family. The conflict became intense. He would wake up several times during the night, sweating, his heart beating fast. He felt he couldn’t please his managers, coworkers, and family at the same time, and the more he tried to please everyone, the less successful he felt. He was judging himself a failure, creating judgments about others as demanding, and casting those judgments about himself and others in stone. He had defined himself as a failure, incapable of pleasing all of the people all of the time.
This man had some experience with looking at objects, sounds, and physical sensations, so I advised him to apply the same method of meditative awareness during those moments when he woke up at night. “Watch the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations,” I told him. “Initially, ‘the people-pleasing’ complex might seem like one giant thing. But as you look at the complex it doesn’t seem like one big giant thing anymore. You’ll start to see that it has a lot of parts. It’s made up of thoughts, like ‘I should have done A, B, or C. Why didn’t I do X, Y, or Z?’ It also comprises emotions, such as fear, anger, and resentment, and physical sensations, including churning in the stomach, an accelerated heartbeat, and sweating. Images may also occur: people being disappointed in you or yelling at you. As you look with meditative attention, the complex becomes like a bubble—inside of which are many smaller bubbles.”
Whatever you’re feeling—whether it’s panic, anxiety, loneliness, or people-pleasing—the basic approach is to try to watch any of the smaller bubbles with the same sort of attention applied to watching a physical object or focusing on a sound. In doing so, you’ll probably notice that the thoughts, emotions, and even physical sensations shift and change. For a while, fear may be most persistent, or perhaps the beating of your heart, or the images of people’s reactions. After a while—perhaps five minutes or so—one or another of these responses, the bubble within the bubble, pulls your attention. Focus on that with meditative attention. In so doing, gradually your attention will shift from identifying as swallowed up in an emotional bubble to the one watching the bubble.
The third stage of the exercise involves a little bit of analysis: an intuitive “tuning in” to determine the effect of the practice. As I was taught, there are three possible results of applying meditative awareness to an emotional issue.
The first is that the problem dissipates altogether. Some of my students tell me, “You gave me this exercise, but it doesn’t work for me.”
“What do you mean?” I ask them.
“These thoughts, these emotions, disappear too quickly,” they reply. “They become fuzzy or unclear. They don’t stay in place long enough to look at them.”
“That’s great!” I tell them. “That’s the point of attention practice.”
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
The second possibility is that the thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations intensify. That’s also a good sign—an indication that deeply embedded perspectives are beginning to “loosen up.” To use an analogy, suppose you apply a few drops of water to a plate or bowl encrusted with dried food. Initially, the plate or bowl looks messier as the residue spreads. Actually, though, the plate isn’t getting messier; the dried food is dissolving.
The third possibility is that emotions may just remain at the same level, neither diminishing nor intensifying. That’s also great! Why? Because we can use an emotion—and the thoughts, images, and physical sensations that accompany it—as strong supports for attention practice. So often, we allow our emotions to use us. Applying attention practice, we use our emotions as a focus for developing awareness, an opportunity to look at the “looker.” Just as we need sound to look at sound, form to look at form, we need emotions to look at emotions. In fact, intense emotions can be our best friends in terms of stabilizing the mind, giving the restless bird a branch on which to rest.
Focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states.
Step Two: Try Something Different
In the beginning, it can be difficult to immediately address strong emotions or the biases that have developed over long periods. Emotions can color perception, behavior, even physical sensations. They can seem so solid, so big, that we can’t bring ourselves to face them. As one student of mine commented recently, “Working with big emotions—the longterm ones like low self-esteem that kind of define your life—is like trying to climb Mount Everest before we’ve even learned how to climb a hill.”
So, bearing in mind that the goal of shamatha practice is to develop stability of awareness, I offer people the advice given to me by my own teachers. Rather than try to tackle powerful or long-term emotions, focus instead on something smaller and more manageable.
One method is to generate, by artificial means, another emotion, something simpler or smaller and not so intense. For example, if you’re working with loneliness, try working with anger. Imagine a situation in which you’re having an argument with a coworker who messed up your files or someone who cuts ahead of you in line at the grocery store. Once you begin to feel that anger, use that to focus your awareness. Focus on the feeling of anger, the words that cross your mind, the physical sensations, or the image of the person cutting ahead of you. Practicing in this way, you can gain experience on how to deal with emotions.
Once you’ve achieved some proficiency in dealing with artificially generated emotions, you can start to look at past experiences and deliberately recall situations in which you may have felt anger, jealousy, embarrassment, or frustration. Bear in mind that the point of trying something different is to develop a stability of awareness—to discover the looker rather than being overcome by what is looked at.
Working with artificial or smaller emotions builds up the strength to work attentively with larger or long-term emotions, such as loneliness, low selfesteem, or an unhealthy need to please. In a way, this approach is like starting a physical workout regimen. When you go to the gym, you don’t start off by lifting heavy weights. You begin by lifting weights that are manageable. Gradually, as your strength improves, you can begin lifting heavier weights. Drawing attention to emotional states works the same way. While there is some benefit in addressing large or long-standing emotional issues directly, sometimes we have to build up our emotional muscles a bit more gradually, remembering that the goal of attention practice is to develop stability of awareness.
Another approach involves using the physical symptoms of emotion as objects of focus. For example, a woman attending a public seminar confessed that she had suffered for years from severe depression. She had been taking medication prescribed by her doctor, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that her body was filled with burning lead.
“Where do you feel this burning lead?” I asked.
“All over,” she replied. “It’s overwhelming.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Instead of looking at the overall pain, focus on one small part of your body. Maybe your foot. Maybe just your toe. Choose a small place to direct your attention. Look at small parts of your body one at a time, instead of trying to work on your whole body at once. Remember that the goal of shamatha practice is to develop stability of awareness. Once you’ve achieved stability by focusing on your foot or your toe, you can begin to extend that awareness to larger areas.”
Applying attention to smaller emotions—or simply focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations—develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states. Once you begin to grow your “attentional muscles,” you can begin drawing attention to larger emotional issues. As you do so, you may find yourself directly confronting the underlying self-judgment and judgment of others as “enemies.” You may unravel the belief in being stuck, or the blind spot that inhibits your awareness of your potential. Almost certainly, you will confront the “myth of me,” the tendency to identify with your loneliness, low self-esteem, perfectionism, or isolation.
It’s important to remember that such confrontations are not battles but opportunities to discover the power of the mind. The same mind that can create such harsh judgments is capable of undoing them through the power of awareness and attention.
Step Three: Step Back
Sometimes an emotion is so persistent or so strong that it just seems impossible to look at. Something holds it in place. Another approach that can be especially helpful when dealing with particularly strong emotions, or mental or emotional habits that have developed over a long period is to take a step back and look at what lies behind the emotion—what you might call the support or “booster” of the emotion. For example, there were times when I would try to look directly at the panic I felt as a child, and I just failed. I couldn’t sit still, my heart would race, and I’d sweat as my body temperature rose. Finally I asked my teacher, Saljay Rinpoche, for help.
“You don’t want to feel panic?” he asked.
“Of course not!” I answered. “I want to get rid of it right now!”
He considered my response for a few moments and then, nodding, replied, “Oh, now I see. What’s bothering you is the fear of panic. Sometimes, the fear of panic is stronger than the panic itself.”
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
It hadn’t occurred to me to step back and look at what might be holding my panic in place. I was too wrapped up in the symptoms to see how very deeply I was afraid of the overwhelming emotion. But as I took Saljay Rinpoche’s advice and looked at the underlying fear of panic, I began to find that panic became more manageable.
Over the years, I’ve found this approach effective in counseling other people. If an emotion or a disturbing state of mind is too painful to look at directly, seek the underlying condition that holds it in place. You may be surprised at what you discover.
You may find fear of the emotion, as I did. You may find some other type of resistance, such as a lack of confidence in even trying to work with emotions. You may find small events, triggers that signal or reinforce a broader emotional response. Fatigue, for example, can often signal a depressive episode. An argument with a coworker, spouse, or family member can often trigger thoughts of worthlessness or isolation, reinforcing a sense of low self-esteem. When we work with the feelings behind the feelings, we begin to work more directly with the entrenched beliefs that perpetuate emotional difficulties.
Step Four: Take a Break
An important part of any practice involves learning when to just stop practicing altogether. Stopping gives you more space, which allows you to accept the ups and downs, the possible turbulence of the experience that may be generated by your practice. If you don’t give yourself an opportunity to stop, you may be carried away by the turbulence—and by a sense of guilt because you’re not “doing it right” or not understanding the exercise. How come even though I have these very clear instructions, you may ask yourself, they don’t seem to work? It must be my fault.
In general, when you engage in attention practice, you’ll encounter two extreme points at which you know when to stop. One extreme is when your practice begins to deteriorate. Maybe you lose your focus or feel disgusted with the exercise. Perhaps the method becomes unclear. Even if you step back, looking at the triggers or boosters of anxiety, loneliness, and so on, or try something different, your practice doesn’t work. You may think, I’m so tired of practicing. I can’t see the benefit of going on.
The idea of stopping meditation when the focus becomes too intense or your mind becomes dull or confused is actually an important and often overlooked part of practice. An analogy is often drawn from “dry channel” or “empty reservoir” irrigation practices implemented by Tibetan farmers who would plant their fields around a natural reservoir, such as a small pond or lake, around which they’d dig channels that would run through the crops. Sometimes, even if the channels were well dug, there wasn’t much water flowing through them, because the reservoir itself was empty.
Similarly, when you practice, even though you have clear instructions and you understand the importance of effort and intention, you can experience fatigue, irritation, dullness, or hopelessness because your mental, emotional, and physical “reservoir” is empty. The likely cause is that you’ve applied too much effort, too eagerly, and haven’t built up a sufficiently abundant reservoir of inner strength. The instructions I received from my father and other teachers urging short practice periods can’t be emphasized enough. In dealing with intense or long-term emotional states, we need to fill our reservoirs. Even the Buddha didn’t become the Buddha overnight!
The second extreme at which it’s important to take a break occurs when your experience of the practice feels absolutely fantastic. There may come a point at which you feel extraordinarily light and comfortable in your body or an intense state of happiness or joy. You may experience a boundless sense of clarity—a mental experience like a brilliant sun shining in a cloudless blue sky. Everything appears so fresh and precise. Or perhaps thoughts, feelings, and sensations cease and your mind becomes completely still. At this point, you stop.
Sometimes people say, “It’s not fair! I’m having such a wonderful experience. Why should I stop?”
I sympathize with their frustration, since I, too, have enjoyed such blissful experiences. I felt such greed, such desire to hold on to them. But my teachers explained to me that if I held on, I would eventually grow disappointed. Because the nature of experience is impermanent, sooner or later the bliss, the clarity, the stillness, and so on, would vanish, and then I would feel really horrible. I’d end up feeling like I did something wrong or that the practices don’t work. While the real goal is to develop a stability of awareness that allows one to look with equanimity at any experience, there is also the danger of becoming attached to blissful, clear, or still experiences as the result of attention practice.
They further explained that taking a break at a high point cultivates an eagerness to continue practicing, encouraging us to stabilize awareness and “build up our reservoirs.”
Strange as it may seem, stopping is as much an important aspect of practice as starting.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a teacher in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. This article has been excerpted from Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, © 2009 by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Reprinted with permission from Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Images © Image100/Corbi
The Aim of Attention
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Self-awareness . . . is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions.
—Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
ORDINARILY, our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely, or depressed, we’re carried away by such feelings and by the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany them. We’re not free; we can’t see other options, other possibilities.
The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle. We can begin to watch our thoughts and emotions without necessarily being affected by them quite as powerfully or vividly as we’re used to. We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him- or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, or hobbled by low self-esteem to a person who can look at loneliness, shame, and low self-esteem as movements of the mind.
The process is not unlike going to the gym. You have a goal—whether it’s losing weight, building muscles, promoting your health, or some other reason. In order to achieve that goal, you lift weights, jog on a treadmill, take classes, and so on. Gradually, you begin to see the fruits of these activities; and seeing them, you’re inspired to continue.
In the case of attention practice, the important point is to know that the goal is to establish and develop stability of awareness that will allow you to look at thoughts, emotions, and even physical pain without wavering. Bearing that in mind, let’s look at applying the following four steps.
Step One: The Main Exercise
The main exercise of attention practice can be broken down into three stages. The first involves simply looking at a thought or emotion with what, in Buddhist terms, is known as ordinary awareness—bringing attention to thoughts or feelings without any express purpose or intention. Just notice and identify what you’re thinking or feeling. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m lonely. We practice ordinary attention every moment of every day. We look at a cup, for example, and simply acknowledge, That’s a cup. Very little judgment is involved at this stage. We don’t think That’s a good cup, a bad cup, an attractive cup, a small cup, or a large cup. We just recognize cup. Applying ordinary awareness to thoughts and emotions involves the same simple acknowledgment: Oh, I’m angry. Oh, I’m jealous. Oh, I’m frustrated. Oh, I could have done better. Oh, I said (or did) something.
Sometimes, thoughts and emotions are not very clear. In such cases, we can look at the messages we receive from our physical bodies. Physical sensations could reflect a host of emotional or mental states— anger, frustration, jealousy, regret, or a mix of disturbing thoughts and feelings. The important point is to simply look at what’s going on and acknowledge whatever you’re experiencing just as it is, rather than to resist it or succumb to it.
The second stage involves meditative awareness— approaching thoughts and emotions as objects of focus through which we can stabilize awareness. To use an example, a student of mine once confided that he suffered from what he called a “people-pleasing” complex. At work, he was always trying to do more, to work longer hours to complete professional projects, which consequently stole time he wished to spend with his wife and family. The conflict became intense. He would wake up several times during the night, sweating, his heart beating fast. He felt he couldn’t please his managers, coworkers, and family at the same time, and the more he tried to please everyone, the less successful he felt. He was judging himself a failure, creating judgments about others as demanding, and casting those judgments about himself and others in stone. He had defined himself as a failure, incapable of pleasing all of the people all of the time.
This man had some experience with looking at objects, sounds, and physical sensations, so I advised him to apply the same method of meditative awareness during those moments when he woke up at night. “Watch the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations,” I told him. “Initially, ‘the people-pleasing’ complex might seem like one giant thing. But as you look at the complex it doesn’t seem like one big giant thing anymore. You’ll start to see that it has a lot of parts. It’s made up of thoughts, like ‘I should have done A, B, or C. Why didn’t I do X, Y, or Z?’ It also comprises emotions, such as fear, anger, and resentment, and physical sensations, including churning in the stomach, an accelerated heartbeat, and sweating. Images may also occur: people being disappointed in you or yelling at you. As you look with meditative attention, the complex becomes like a bubble—inside of which are many smaller bubbles.”
Whatever you’re feeling—whether it’s panic, anxiety, loneliness, or people-pleasing—the basic approach is to try to watch any of the smaller bubbles with the same sort of attention applied to watching a physical object or focusing on a sound. In doing so, you’ll probably notice that the thoughts, emotions, and even physical sensations shift and change. For a while, fear may be most persistent, or perhaps the beating of your heart, or the images of people’s reactions. After a while—perhaps five minutes or so—one or another of these responses, the bubble within the bubble, pulls your attention. Focus on that with meditative attention. In so doing, gradually your attention will shift from identifying as swallowed up in an emotional bubble to the one watching the bubble.
The third stage of the exercise involves a little bit of analysis: an intuitive “tuning in” to determine the effect of the practice. As I was taught, there are three possible results of applying meditative awareness to an emotional issue.
The first is that the problem dissipates altogether. Some of my students tell me, “You gave me this exercise, but it doesn’t work for me.”
“What do you mean?” I ask them.
“These thoughts, these emotions, disappear too quickly,” they reply. “They become fuzzy or unclear. They don’t stay in place long enough to look at them.”
“That’s great!” I tell them. “That’s the point of attention practice.”
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
The second possibility is that the thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations intensify. That’s also a good sign—an indication that deeply embedded perspectives are beginning to “loosen up.” To use an analogy, suppose you apply a few drops of water to a plate or bowl encrusted with dried food. Initially, the plate or bowl looks messier as the residue spreads. Actually, though, the plate isn’t getting messier; the dried food is dissolving.
The third possibility is that emotions may just remain at the same level, neither diminishing nor intensifying. That’s also great! Why? Because we can use an emotion—and the thoughts, images, and physical sensations that accompany it—as strong supports for attention practice. So often, we allow our emotions to use us. Applying attention practice, we use our emotions as a focus for developing awareness, an opportunity to look at the “looker.” Just as we need sound to look at sound, form to look at form, we need emotions to look at emotions. In fact, intense emotions can be our best friends in terms of stabilizing the mind, giving the restless bird a branch on which to rest.
Focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states.
Step Two: Try Something Different
In the beginning, it can be difficult to immediately address strong emotions or the biases that have developed over long periods. Emotions can color perception, behavior, even physical sensations. They can seem so solid, so big, that we can’t bring ourselves to face them. As one student of mine commented recently, “Working with big emotions—the longterm ones like low self-esteem that kind of define your life—is like trying to climb Mount Everest before we’ve even learned how to climb a hill.”
So, bearing in mind that the goal of shamatha practice is to develop stability of awareness, I offer people the advice given to me by my own teachers. Rather than try to tackle powerful or long-term emotions, focus instead on something smaller and more manageable.
One method is to generate, by artificial means, another emotion, something simpler or smaller and not so intense. For example, if you’re working with loneliness, try working with anger. Imagine a situation in which you’re having an argument with a coworker who messed up your files or someone who cuts ahead of you in line at the grocery store. Once you begin to feel that anger, use that to focus your awareness. Focus on the feeling of anger, the words that cross your mind, the physical sensations, or the image of the person cutting ahead of you. Practicing in this way, you can gain experience on how to deal with emotions.
Once you’ve achieved some proficiency in dealing with artificially generated emotions, you can start to look at past experiences and deliberately recall situations in which you may have felt anger, jealousy, embarrassment, or frustration. Bear in mind that the point of trying something different is to develop a stability of awareness—to discover the looker rather than being overcome by what is looked at.
Working with artificial or smaller emotions builds up the strength to work attentively with larger or long-term emotions, such as loneliness, low selfesteem, or an unhealthy need to please. In a way, this approach is like starting a physical workout regimen. When you go to the gym, you don’t start off by lifting heavy weights. You begin by lifting weights that are manageable. Gradually, as your strength improves, you can begin lifting heavier weights. Drawing attention to emotional states works the same way. While there is some benefit in addressing large or long-standing emotional issues directly, sometimes we have to build up our emotional muscles a bit more gradually, remembering that the goal of attention practice is to develop stability of awareness.
Another approach involves using the physical symptoms of emotion as objects of focus. For example, a woman attending a public seminar confessed that she had suffered for years from severe depression. She had been taking medication prescribed by her doctor, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that her body was filled with burning lead.
“Where do you feel this burning lead?” I asked.
“All over,” she replied. “It’s overwhelming.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Instead of looking at the overall pain, focus on one small part of your body. Maybe your foot. Maybe just your toe. Choose a small place to direct your attention. Look at small parts of your body one at a time, instead of trying to work on your whole body at once. Remember that the goal of shamatha practice is to develop stability of awareness. Once you’ve achieved stability by focusing on your foot or your toe, you can begin to extend that awareness to larger areas.”
Applying attention to smaller emotions—or simply focusing on form, sound, or physical sensations—develops your capacity to look at long-term, overwhelming emotional states. Once you begin to grow your “attentional muscles,” you can begin drawing attention to larger emotional issues. As you do so, you may find yourself directly confronting the underlying self-judgment and judgment of others as “enemies.” You may unravel the belief in being stuck, or the blind spot that inhibits your awareness of your potential. Almost certainly, you will confront the “myth of me,” the tendency to identify with your loneliness, low self-esteem, perfectionism, or isolation.
It’s important to remember that such confrontations are not battles but opportunities to discover the power of the mind. The same mind that can create such harsh judgments is capable of undoing them through the power of awareness and attention.
Step Three: Step Back
Sometimes an emotion is so persistent or so strong that it just seems impossible to look at. Something holds it in place. Another approach that can be especially helpful when dealing with particularly strong emotions, or mental or emotional habits that have developed over a long period is to take a step back and look at what lies behind the emotion—what you might call the support or “booster” of the emotion. For example, there were times when I would try to look directly at the panic I felt as a child, and I just failed. I couldn’t sit still, my heart would race, and I’d sweat as my body temperature rose. Finally I asked my teacher, Saljay Rinpoche, for help.
“You don’t want to feel panic?” he asked.
“Of course not!” I answered. “I want to get rid of it right now!”
He considered my response for a few moments and then, nodding, replied, “Oh, now I see. What’s bothering you is the fear of panic. Sometimes, the fear of panic is stronger than the panic itself.”
YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE gives instructions in the liberating practice of awareness
By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
It hadn’t occurred to me to step back and look at what might be holding my panic in place. I was too wrapped up in the symptoms to see how very deeply I was afraid of the overwhelming emotion. But as I took Saljay Rinpoche’s advice and looked at the underlying fear of panic, I began to find that panic became more manageable.
Over the years, I’ve found this approach effective in counseling other people. If an emotion or a disturbing state of mind is too painful to look at directly, seek the underlying condition that holds it in place. You may be surprised at what you discover.
You may find fear of the emotion, as I did. You may find some other type of resistance, such as a lack of confidence in even trying to work with emotions. You may find small events, triggers that signal or reinforce a broader emotional response. Fatigue, for example, can often signal a depressive episode. An argument with a coworker, spouse, or family member can often trigger thoughts of worthlessness or isolation, reinforcing a sense of low self-esteem. When we work with the feelings behind the feelings, we begin to work more directly with the entrenched beliefs that perpetuate emotional difficulties.
Step Four: Take a Break
An important part of any practice involves learning when to just stop practicing altogether. Stopping gives you more space, which allows you to accept the ups and downs, the possible turbulence of the experience that may be generated by your practice. If you don’t give yourself an opportunity to stop, you may be carried away by the turbulence—and by a sense of guilt because you’re not “doing it right” or not understanding the exercise. How come even though I have these very clear instructions, you may ask yourself, they don’t seem to work? It must be my fault.
In general, when you engage in attention practice, you’ll encounter two extreme points at which you know when to stop. One extreme is when your practice begins to deteriorate. Maybe you lose your focus or feel disgusted with the exercise. Perhaps the method becomes unclear. Even if you step back, looking at the triggers or boosters of anxiety, loneliness, and so on, or try something different, your practice doesn’t work. You may think, I’m so tired of practicing. I can’t see the benefit of going on.
The idea of stopping meditation when the focus becomes too intense or your mind becomes dull or confused is actually an important and often overlooked part of practice. An analogy is often drawn from “dry channel” or “empty reservoir” irrigation practices implemented by Tibetan farmers who would plant their fields around a natural reservoir, such as a small pond or lake, around which they’d dig channels that would run through the crops. Sometimes, even if the channels were well dug, there wasn’t much water flowing through them, because the reservoir itself was empty.
Similarly, when you practice, even though you have clear instructions and you understand the importance of effort and intention, you can experience fatigue, irritation, dullness, or hopelessness because your mental, emotional, and physical “reservoir” is empty. The likely cause is that you’ve applied too much effort, too eagerly, and haven’t built up a sufficiently abundant reservoir of inner strength. The instructions I received from my father and other teachers urging short practice periods can’t be emphasized enough. In dealing with intense or long-term emotional states, we need to fill our reservoirs. Even the Buddha didn’t become the Buddha overnight!
The second extreme at which it’s important to take a break occurs when your experience of the practice feels absolutely fantastic. There may come a point at which you feel extraordinarily light and comfortable in your body or an intense state of happiness or joy. You may experience a boundless sense of clarity—a mental experience like a brilliant sun shining in a cloudless blue sky. Everything appears so fresh and precise. Or perhaps thoughts, feelings, and sensations cease and your mind becomes completely still. At this point, you stop.
Sometimes people say, “It’s not fair! I’m having such a wonderful experience. Why should I stop?”
I sympathize with their frustration, since I, too, have enjoyed such blissful experiences. I felt such greed, such desire to hold on to them. But my teachers explained to me that if I held on, I would eventually grow disappointed. Because the nature of experience is impermanent, sooner or later the bliss, the clarity, the stillness, and so on, would vanish, and then I would feel really horrible. I’d end up feeling like I did something wrong or that the practices don’t work. While the real goal is to develop a stability of awareness that allows one to look with equanimity at any experience, there is also the danger of becoming attached to blissful, clear, or still experiences as the result of attention practice.
They further explained that taking a break at a high point cultivates an eagerness to continue practicing, encouraging us to stabilize awareness and “build up our reservoirs.”
Strange as it may seem, stopping is as much an important aspect of practice as starting.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a teacher in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. This article has been excerpted from Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom, © 2009 by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Reprinted with permission from Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Images © Image100/Corbi
The Hereafter
From The Christian Reader:
The Hereafter
Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do you know not now, but you shall know hereafter. (John 8:7)
Oh that “hereafter,” what a solemn word to the ungodly! Is there, then, a hereafter? Jesus says there is; and I believe it, because He says it. That hereafter will be terrible to the man that dies in his sins. It will be a hereafter whose history will be “written in mourning, lamentation, and woe.” It had been better for you, reader, living and dying impenitent and unbelieving, had you never been born, or had there been no hereafter. But there is a hereafter of woe to the sinner, as of bliss to the saint. “These shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.”
Get "Morning Thoughts" from the Reformation Bookstore
The position which the Christian shall occupy hereafter will be most favorable to a full and clear comprehension of all the mysteries of the earthly journey. The “clouds and darkness”–emblems in our history of obscurity and distress–which now envelope God’s throne, and enshroud His government of the saints, will have passed away; the mist and fog will have vanished, and, breathing a purer atmosphere, and canopied by a brighter sky, the glorified saint will then see every object, circumstance, incident, and step, with an eye unobscured by a vapor, and unmoistened by a tear. “Now we know in part; then shall we know even as we are known.” And what shall we know? All the mysteries of providence. Things which had made us greatly grieve, will then be seen to have been causes of the greatest joy. Clouds of threatening, which appeared to us charged with the agent of destruction, will then unveil, and reveal the love which they embosomed and concealed.
All the mysteries of faith, too, will be known. “Now we see through a glass darkly (in a riddle), but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” The great “mystery of godliness” will develop and unfold its wonders. His everlasting love to His Church–His choice of a people for Himself–His sovereign grace in calling them–all, all, will shine forth with unclouded luster to the eternal praise of His great and holy name. Oh, what a perfect, harmonious, and glorious whole will all His doings in providence and grace appear, from first to last, to the undimmed eye, the ravished gaze of His white-robed, palm-bearing Church.
Many and holy are the lessons we may gather from this subject. The first is the lesson of deep humility. There are three steps in the Christian’s life. The first is–humility; the second is–humility; the third is–humility. In veiling His dealings, Jesus would “hide pride” from us. In “leading the blind by a way that they know not,” He teaches them to confide in the knowledge, truth, and goodness of their Divine escort–and that confidence is the calm unquestioning repose of faith.
by Octavius Winslow, from Morning Thoughts
The Hereafter
Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do you know not now, but you shall know hereafter. (John 8:7)
Oh that “hereafter,” what a solemn word to the ungodly! Is there, then, a hereafter? Jesus says there is; and I believe it, because He says it. That hereafter will be terrible to the man that dies in his sins. It will be a hereafter whose history will be “written in mourning, lamentation, and woe.” It had been better for you, reader, living and dying impenitent and unbelieving, had you never been born, or had there been no hereafter. But there is a hereafter of woe to the sinner, as of bliss to the saint. “These shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.”
Get "Morning Thoughts" from the Reformation Bookstore
The position which the Christian shall occupy hereafter will be most favorable to a full and clear comprehension of all the mysteries of the earthly journey. The “clouds and darkness”–emblems in our history of obscurity and distress–which now envelope God’s throne, and enshroud His government of the saints, will have passed away; the mist and fog will have vanished, and, breathing a purer atmosphere, and canopied by a brighter sky, the glorified saint will then see every object, circumstance, incident, and step, with an eye unobscured by a vapor, and unmoistened by a tear. “Now we know in part; then shall we know even as we are known.” And what shall we know? All the mysteries of providence. Things which had made us greatly grieve, will then be seen to have been causes of the greatest joy. Clouds of threatening, which appeared to us charged with the agent of destruction, will then unveil, and reveal the love which they embosomed and concealed.
All the mysteries of faith, too, will be known. “Now we see through a glass darkly (in a riddle), but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.” The great “mystery of godliness” will develop and unfold its wonders. His everlasting love to His Church–His choice of a people for Himself–His sovereign grace in calling them–all, all, will shine forth with unclouded luster to the eternal praise of His great and holy name. Oh, what a perfect, harmonious, and glorious whole will all His doings in providence and grace appear, from first to last, to the undimmed eye, the ravished gaze of His white-robed, palm-bearing Church.
Many and holy are the lessons we may gather from this subject. The first is the lesson of deep humility. There are three steps in the Christian’s life. The first is–humility; the second is–humility; the third is–humility. In veiling His dealings, Jesus would “hide pride” from us. In “leading the blind by a way that they know not,” He teaches them to confide in the knowledge, truth, and goodness of their Divine escort–and that confidence is the calm unquestioning repose of faith.
by Octavius Winslow, from Morning Thoughts
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