Shift Control, Option Command,
"In your mind's browser, clear your cache...delete your history...navigate to a blank web page..." That's the cartoon version of how computer geeks learn to meditate. It flashed on my screen this week, courtesy of an amused lama, and I couldn't resist forwarding it to a Dharma brother who runs a meditation class sanctioned as time-out stress reduction for high-powered co-workers at Adobe.
This is what we've come to as Dharma wends its way around the West: Buddhism as an operating system to run your mind. The late Trungpa Rinpoche riveted Westerners in the '70s by delivering Dharma in familiar psychological jargon, coining phrases like "spiritual materialism", "ego clinging" and "guru neurosis." In the 80s slick, four-color photogenic magazines purveyed it as fashionably active ecology: engaged Buddhism! In the '90s, a hip Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche made a film instead of a thangkha; Dzigar Kongtrul taught wearing Armani suits. Now the whole under-40 generation has taken it cyber. Buddha: Friend him on Facebook!
As life would have it, that cartoon hit my screen days after a Tibetan lama asked me why other lamas and gurus have wider, more enthusiastic (read that: book buying) audiences than our precious elder Rinpoche, who happens to be the greatest Tibetan Buddhist scholar alive. I noticed how the lama got edgy when I tried to explain our teacher's very traditional monastic, ancient Tibetan cultural metaphors don't resonant with young people bred on instant messaging. They needed prompts more magnetic than a cow pees slowly or a butter lamp lights the dark. The younger Rinpoches and lamas describe meditation as charging your cell phone battery so you pick up signals. Ponlop Rinpoche calls the Buddha a beatnik, hippie rebel, an Occupy forefather. Mingyur Rinpoche has even gone on You Tube with a short very direct and funny video of how to meditate while multitasking in a busy world. Westerners will adopt Buddhism if Buddhism adapts to them. Here's our take: what does the Dalai Lama tell a hotdog vendor: "Make me one with everything!" How does the Dalai Lama send email? With no attachment.
We need to make the message in the instant. So...testing...testing...The computer screen on which you are reading this is cyber space. That perfectly reflects what Buddhists call the the Dharmakaya--kaya being the Sanskrit word for a universe or realm or the space in which something happens, like cyber activity. Your mind is actually the Dharmakaya. It used to be described as a mirror and but let's call it a computer screen, which also reflects everything it contacts. Anything can appear on it, spontaneously appear fully formed, and just as spontaneously disappear when you focus on something else or open another window. So try thinking of your mind as a computer screen, a carry-around laptop. Or else just a very smart phone messaging you all the time.
Ask yourself: where did what appears on the screen actually come from? Locate that. Okay, where did it go when you scrolled down or moved on? Do you know where it resides when not on your screen or in your mind? Is what flashes on substantial, solid, real? Or is it just the play of light, like a movie coming out of a projector onto the silver screen? Meditate on that.
Your computer browser is a clear example of openness. It's space for anything to arise. And so is the Dharmakaya, your mind. That's emptiness: unobstructed spaciousness allowing for the appearance of anything.
That continuous flow of appearances is non-solidity, impermanence, life. Are the appearances really there, alive? How did they get there? Can you engage with them? Do they engage with you? How do you know what you perceive is real and not a trick of your imagination, like what you want to see? Do you cling to certain images, invest them with attributes they do not contain? Or do you watch detached without judgment, hope or fear, as they flow by?
Do you act out, taking the images that flow through your mind as present and very real even though you know the images flowing across the computer screen are not? Where's the difference?
Can you see what's on your screen? Do you always know when something is there, no matter what that something is? Buddhists call that luminosity. This is the sublime power of your mind: it always knows, always illuminates whatever reflection is crossing it, so you know. You may not know right from wrong but you do know that you know what you know.
Do you update early and often? Do you empty the trash or keep it on the computer, even though you can't see it? Put that in psychological terms and you've got Dharma.
Does your mind get stuck on something? Does something drag you away from the present moment back to where you've already been to make it seem present? That's cookies! Just like on your computer marking sites you visit, crowding your cache, these lingering traces of past activity stain your mind like markers. Like cookies, they are attachments. Meditation is having TACO reveal how many cookies are hidden behind the computer screen, how many past thoughts are stuck, caught on something in the flow of the mind. It's about erasing all that past crap. No tracks, no trace, no obstruction.
The original world wide web is Indra's net in which every node of webbing is a jewel reflecting every other node, so that none can be distinguished as apart. My mind is My Space, and as Dharmakaya it is linked in. Control...delete...escape...
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 5:26 PM
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