CRASH COURSE
I have contributed to the panic in financial markets. As my savings sank by a quarter, then by half in the terrifying how low can you go limbo Wall Street dances, I sank day by day toward great depression. The timing of the market meltdown could not have been worse for people like me who are about to reach the retirement account. Our runway isn’t long enough for liftoff, as a financial world friend colorfully put it. In fact, two different friends fessed up they might “make it maybe eight years on what’s left, if I don’t do anything more than eat and sleep.” I feel that way myself. Now when I do my prayers to White Tara and Guru Rinpoche for long life, I find myself pausing to think: Hold it! I can't afford to live so long.
It’s seriously scary to have life turn into a Stephen King story in which you get to watch your long term lifestyle suddenly eaten away like a computer is by a nasty virus or a body is by cancer. It’s horrifying to wonder if you will have basics three years hence, especially when you didn’t get far beyond basics last year because you were trying so hard to save the money that just evaporated. Fear is a snake whose bite paralyzes. The financial free fall left me as frozen as the credit markets, cleaning my own house, telling friends I couldn’t join them at restaurants or movies, scrounging dinner from the back of my cupboard.
This social diet left a lot of time and certainly much motivation to pray to the protectors for a bailout. I took full advantage of the fact that Dharma, except for all the initial expense of setting up a shrine, is free. Amazingly enough, the protectors relayed a message. It wasn’t, thank Buddha, the story of Patrul Rinpoche throwing all his gold into the river to travel on penniless, happily unburdened by the fear of losing his money. That wouldn’t work in a country where begging is not a way of life for anyone but private jet CEOs. The message was about me facing the impermanence of my savings, i.e. my future, the same self-defeating way I wrote my aunt has been facing her mortality: consumed by dread. My mind was so tight, it had squeezed out Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso teaching that “fear is created by thinking about the future—it does not exist in the present moment of experience. You should look at your own experience and see how fear is just a thought about a future event.” I offered to my shrine all those thank you points from Citibank.
Of course the message was the same old same old Buddhist exhortation: Now! And naturally it came with the inevitable mantra: “O my now is the time. Right now, just now, only now, hmmmm?” Sticking to the moment, bravely groping through the dark, felt like the only way to go without collapsing if I was going to keep going at all. So I tried to be my own personal coach, training myself to get through the day step by step, bird by bird, one glass of water at a time. I celebrated having the karma to have clean water, and the electricity to pump it since blackouts now last sixteen hours in Nepal. I went out for dinner and had a glass of champagne plus a glass of wine, just to watch myself enjoy them, remembering the gift magnet in the kitchen that says: have you ever noticed what the hell! is never the wrong answer. To prove I wasn't helplessly glued by attachment, I parted with a little money to send it to my cooking class kids in Nepal who really do need it more than me. Was I not the brave soul who gave Rinpoche a card with the Ray Charles quote: “Live everyday like it’s gonna be your last because one of these days you’re gonna be right!”
Since timing is everything, how uncanny is it that the financial soufflé fell as the three major teachers I heard in the past four months all independently said the whole point of Dharma is to rise up each morning and get gracefully through the day? How did they know now is the time we needed to hear that meditation is not the point, at least not when it’s easily achieved in a remote, quiet cave or retreat? A split second before the world comes to an end, they come to tell us Milarepa stuff is inferior meditation, believe it or not, because it’s too simple. Superior meditation is multitasking. It’s walking through this noisy, pushy, scary world without losing the divine equanimity you can get in that cave. It's the joy of a bodhisattva stuck in the traffic of downtown Samsara. What market timing!
“Forget about enlightenment,” Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo said. “It’s not important right now. Dharma is really just enlightened common sense. If your mind is out of control, you will be too, and since you can’t just leave your mind behind like a car, you need to control it so you don’t keep crashing into things.” She diagnosed the problem as the vision thing: we see objects and not the space they arise in.
“Forget enlightenment,” she repeated. “The real issue is: are you becoming a nicer, a happier person every minute of the day? Are you paying attention to every minute? If you are, you'd be asking yourself: Really, who wakes up thinking today I want to be angry, depressed and frustrated?”
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It’s seriously scary to have life turn into a Stephen King story in which you get to watch your long term lifestyle suddenly eaten away like a computer is by a nasty virus or a body is by cancer. It’s horrifying to wonder if you will have basics three years hence, especially when you didn’t get far beyond basics last year because you were trying so hard to save the money that just evaporated. Fear is a snake whose bite paralyzes. The financial free fall left me as frozen as the credit markets, cleaning my own house, telling friends I couldn’t join them at restaurants or movies, scrounging dinner from the back of my cupboard.
This social diet left a lot of time and certainly much motivation to pray to the protectors for a bailout. I took full advantage of the fact that Dharma, except for all the initial expense of setting up a shrine, is free. Amazingly enough, the protectors relayed a message. It wasn’t, thank Buddha, the story of Patrul Rinpoche throwing all his gold into the river to travel on penniless, happily unburdened by the fear of losing his money. That wouldn’t work in a country where begging is not a way of life for anyone but private jet CEOs. The message was about me facing the impermanence of my savings, i.e. my future, the same self-defeating way I wrote my aunt has been facing her mortality: consumed by dread. My mind was so tight, it had squeezed out Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso teaching that “fear is created by thinking about the future—it does not exist in the present moment of experience. You should look at your own experience and see how fear is just a thought about a future event.” I offered to my shrine all those thank you points from Citibank.
Of course the message was the same old same old Buddhist exhortation: Now! And naturally it came with the inevitable mantra: “O my now is the time. Right now, just now, only now, hmmmm?” Sticking to the moment, bravely groping through the dark, felt like the only way to go without collapsing if I was going to keep going at all. So I tried to be my own personal coach, training myself to get through the day step by step, bird by bird, one glass of water at a time. I celebrated having the karma to have clean water, and the electricity to pump it since blackouts now last sixteen hours in Nepal. I went out for dinner and had a glass of champagne plus a glass of wine, just to watch myself enjoy them, remembering the gift magnet in the kitchen that says: have you ever noticed what the hell! is never the wrong answer. To prove I wasn't helplessly glued by attachment, I parted with a little money to send it to my cooking class kids in Nepal who really do need it more than me. Was I not the brave soul who gave Rinpoche a card with the Ray Charles quote: “Live everyday like it’s gonna be your last because one of these days you’re gonna be right!”
Since timing is everything, how uncanny is it that the financial soufflé fell as the three major teachers I heard in the past four months all independently said the whole point of Dharma is to rise up each morning and get gracefully through the day? How did they know now is the time we needed to hear that meditation is not the point, at least not when it’s easily achieved in a remote, quiet cave or retreat? A split second before the world comes to an end, they come to tell us Milarepa stuff is inferior meditation, believe it or not, because it’s too simple. Superior meditation is multitasking. It’s walking through this noisy, pushy, scary world without losing the divine equanimity you can get in that cave. It's the joy of a bodhisattva stuck in the traffic of downtown Samsara. What market timing!
“Forget about enlightenment,” Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo said. “It’s not important right now. Dharma is really just enlightened common sense. If your mind is out of control, you will be too, and since you can’t just leave your mind behind like a car, you need to control it so you don’t keep crashing into things.” She diagnosed the problem as the vision thing: we see objects and not the space they arise in.
“Forget enlightenment,” she repeated. “The real issue is: are you becoming a nicer, a happier person every minute of the day? Are you paying attention to every minute? If you are, you'd be asking yourself: Really, who wakes up thinking today I want to be angry, depressed and frustrated?”
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Labels: market meltdown, Tenzin Palmo
posted by Sandy Garson @ 7:05 PM
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