Self Protection

Perhaps it is, as the Tibetans say, auspicious coincidence, or as Jews say, bischert,(meant to be), that this very week America is withering under too much hot air about guns and control, the leaders of my Dharma class wanted to focus on a 1,000 year old piece of advice about saving yourself from harm. Its single sentence is one of 37 mind training slogans passed down through Tibet from the great Indian master Atisha, who got it from the master Serlingpa, supposedly on the island of Borneo. So it has been around.

"To see confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection" appears in Atisha's section of spiritual fitness training instructions called "Transforming Adverse Conditions into the Path of Awakening." It's so dense and hard to grasp, it usually causes a lot of head scratching and despair. Often in urgency to grab something less slippery, people rush right over it, seeking simpler stuff, like the advice that comes just before: "Be grateful to everyone." We are no less lazy in the Dharma than we are in the gym.

As it happens, I was for years one of those who slurred right over it in the race for something to really get into. But I have been mulling over this shunyata protection proposition lately and have begun to see how handy it can be. It's rather like having your very own fixer--once you break the code.

We all know what confusion is, or so I think. We say we live in New York or Paris or San Francisco or Borneo for that matter, but the truth is we all really live in confusion. What is really going on here? Do you know it all? Sometimes just when you think you do, whack-a-mole! We live in permanent confusion, Dharma says, blinded by our anger, pride, jealousy, craving and willful ignorance.

Shunyata is Sanskrit for emptiness, and in simplest terms it means: no there there. For other terms, you can read lots of past blog posts to find out how and why things aren't what we think they are. Let's just say: "not what I think" is what to think as the new normal.
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Kaya essentially means the space in which life happens, that space all around and in us. The Tibetans have three main kayas. Sometimes I think of them as the movie screen (the Dharmakaya where everything happens), the projector (the Sambhogakaya which provides the luminosity to see it) and the movie itself (the action on the screen).

What the Tibetan gurus are getting at is simply that when something happens, whatever happens, anything that happens puts the absolute truth of life right out there on display. It's now playing in or as the Dharmakaya, the big wrap around screen which gives it the space to show up. Simultaneously there is the seemingly real appearance of something actually going on on that screen that we can grasp: the Nirmanakaya, what we taste, touch, see, hear, and smell. Between these everyday events and the harder to sense truth about them is the third kaya: their indestructible bond of togetherness, the space and light in which the other two mix and mingle so we can perceive them. They are so joined at the hip we never get one without the other.

Mostly we get confused. Things keep moving, morphing, shape shifting, not waiting for us to catch up. The story just goes on and on and on and on.... . All these things coming at us in the Nirmanakaya, the everyday endlessly hitting us. What to do? The boss is a bastard, the kid is crying, the spouse is a souse...the alarm is blaring like a bugle and we don't want to wake... . Doesn't it sometimes feel life is gunning you down? And that it's learned to fire faster rounds of assault?

Well here's the bullet-proof vest: remembering emptiness, sensing there really is no there there. Because when something seems to be happening, it may not be. You may just be interpreting it that way, perhaps taking it personally. So cuddle emptiness, and ask: what person is taking it personally? The employee? The parent? The spouse? Who am I? Which one is waking to that damned alarm? 
  Who is the who there to who it can happen? Horton may hear a who but whose who? 
And does it matter? To answer that, take this stress test: Imagine a cup breaks on the far side of a restaurant dining room. You hear and see it but it means little to you, doesn't it? A cup has broken; no big deal. Okay. Now imagine the cup in your hand suddenly slips, drops and breaks. Eek!  Ouch! She--it! YOUR cup. Broken!  Mega super deal, isn't it? Yet tiz the same story: a cup has broken. What, you who yoo hoo, made it such a big deal? 

So here's the trick: when your mind's in a four-person pile-up or just blindsided by some hit and run idea, and you are so utterly paralyzed by confusion, you probably just keep telling yourself: "This isn't happening!" "This can't be happening to me." Well, hold that thought. You are absolutely right! It's just a show on the big screen, the same display of colorful light that comes when a reel of film winds through a projector and appears on a screen. Nobody is on that screen, really, are they?

Knowing this, knowing that you are watching something and not exactly inside it, opens up space, the aisle you can move down to relieve yourself of the poisonous thinking flowing through your mind. That poisonous thinking is the anger, jealousy, pride, craving and willful ignorance that blinds and thus enslaves us. Knowing you can put some distance between you and your kneejerk negative reactions provides breathing room, which induces clarity that lets you steer out of harm's way.

So this sentence about emptiness being the best protection is something of the magic bullet everybody's after, all the protection from assaults of pain and suffering anybody needs.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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