Buddha Speaks to Graduates

So we've come again to that time of year for conspicuously celebrating people who are moving on. June is a seemingly unending series of public promotions as students in tassels graduate with Pomp and Circumstance to higher education, provided of course they can sit through all the speeches first. You know: the valedictorian has to express hopes, the honored guest has to impress expectations, the principal has to depress fears. Then everybody claps.

I really don't want to be the grinch who puts the kibosh on all the caps and gowns, but I do think one way or other, without them, all of us are graduating all the time. No spotlight, speeches or congratulations for a job well done, but still we are continually moving on all the time, not just to a higher shoe size, but to what you could call higher education if you mean learning more about our hopes, expectations and fears. Yes, management. There aren't many honor scrolls given out for this continuing accomplishment, and the only procession is the one you are in by yourself. Yet I suspect these unheralded moments are graduations the Buddha might prefer to address. 

I imagine he'd do it in 21st Century style with a visual gimmick to look smooth and attract attention. You know: graphs, charts, pies, slides, videos--something really colorful that makes you look seriously smart. So I suggest Prayer Flags.  After all, they continually send into the wind the Buddha's unending wishes for all of us to graduate from suffering to satisfaction, or peace. Om mani peme hung. And, they come in five colors.

Red: May All Beings Be Free from Suffering
Red is a warning: DANGER! So why go there? Of course we are all trained to stop our cars at red lights and stop signs. We've seen enough TV and movies to know if we don't, we could get killed in a collision and end up DOA on CSI. But how about that other vehicle that propels us around, our mind? Where's its Driver's Ed? We don't always stop at "uh oh" or "ouch", do we?  We just plow right past our doubts, our sneaking suspicions and intuition that something's-- o.k. the total truth, someone's-- just a little off our specs. Thinking the wrong stuff in something or someone otherwise so right will go away, maybe just melt like the ice in a July gin and tonic, helps us ignore the signal to slow down, even halt before we collide with reality. Trust me, that usually does not end well. Reality is never going to be at fault. Despite the Buddha's insistence on impermanence, I've found whatever from the get-go did not feel right, whatever in a job prospect, a love interest or a piece of property jumped out as an "ugh!"  will not somehow suddenly morph into an "ah!" just because we badly want it to.  Sorry, it's going to remain a scratchy thorn that will eventually blind with rage or poison. So we need to be careful how we drive ourselves.  Since the universe is always trying to guide us safely to reality, perhaps we should stop running those red lights it installs to save us from smash-ups with it.

Blue: May All Beings Be Free from the Causes of Suffering

Picasso had his Blue Period, and we all have one--or two or three or, o.k. dozens--too. Nobody got on Picasso's case and we shouldn't pile on ours. As inevitably as the moon has phases, as inevitably as it switches places with the sun, we are going to have blue periods. The world is not, at least not just yet, one gigantic Disneyland cynically manufactured to keep us all spellbound by delight. It's a gorgeous combination of mountains, valleys and oceans that churn and calm, flow and ebb. Do you really want to be the grotesquely numbing, waterless flat of Kansas?  (Realized beings excepted)

What makes us blue anyway? Why do we sometimes feel so unhappy, sensing that life is treating us badly? Maybe, hmmm? Maybe it's because what we think of as badly or wrong is whatever is not going our way, i.e. the way we personally hoped or expected. The universe totally ignored our agenda. Life did not deliver the goods we wanted. Well, perhaps so many other people wanted the "goods" too, they had to be back ordered. You never know. 

Then again, we might ask: who says we are, each of us, the final judge of good or bad, right or wrong? How do we know for sure which is which? And for how long? The Buddha says happiness is getting what we want--the right stuff, and unhappiness is having that ignored--baaad. We are so pathologically afraid of not getting what we want, we have created a whole corporate culture dedicated to letting us have everything our way--for a price of course. But if we take a hard look back at our lives, we'll probably see that sometimes not getting what or who we wanted turned out to be the real happily ever after. Honestly, could you have lived a lifetime with that slob you saw at the reunion? Or been happy in that much smaller apartment than the one you eventually found?

Okay, granted, sometimes bad things happen to good people. The Buddha, through the mouth of Tai Situ Rinpoche, says suffering is the broom that sweeps up your negative karma and makes you good to go. Trungpa Rinpoche liked to say all our shit--the stuff that gives us the blues, is the manure that makes our perfection grow--if we learn how to apply it. So appreciate downtime. Only when you acknowledge trouble can you find the remedy for it. And, duh, trouble usually comes from not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

White: May All Beings Have Happiness and the Causes of Happiness 

White is supposedly the absence of color, nothing happening. Nothing meaningful anyway, as in white noise. White's a clean slate or a fresh start, also a soft billowy cloud out of which we can coax rain to fertilize and refresh. Most of all, it is the symbol of purity, a way of saying spotless perfection.  Killjoy was not here. But the Buddha says we are. Just like Chenrezig, we are, all of us pure stainless perfection --well, our mind anyway, Minds are, of course, the Buddha's field of expertise, so perhaps we should trust him on this. It's huge his message: no matter how badly we think we've fucked up, no matter how horribly others have harmed us, no matter what stains we've put on our reputation, or how black and blue our thoughts. we're still absolutely as pure and perfect as white, (oh yes, the driven snow) because nothing sticks. That's emptiness for you. Every second our mind moves into blank freshness with no carry-on baggage. It remains unsullied by whatever passes through; it's more stainless than steel. Whatever we feel is weighing it down actually isn't; that's  literally just our imagination having a field day because there's nothing there. Is there? Can you find it?  Bad thoughts about bad happenings are just like a cloud blowing across the sky without affecting it in any way. And it disappears, leaving the sky pristine. So every second is our chance for a clean break, a fresh start, a new way. You don't need a computer algorithm to be an innovative entrepreneur. 


Green: May All Beings Never Be Dissociated from the Supreme Happiness which is without Suffering  

Okay, so money can't buy happiness, but it definitely does buy a lot of stuff that lets you think you've nailed it. We've got an entire economy based on that fact fiction. I hate to hammer the point but your happiness has planned obsolescence built right into it; it's probably the one thing that corporations build  to last. Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to denounce money. My teacher Thrangu Rinpoche always says having money is not a problem at all, not a bad thing of itself. The bad and the problem come from how you got it and how you handle it. Did you acquire it honestly without harm to anyone or anything? Do you hoard it or share it? Do you use it to benefit others in a way that does no harm? (Like building Buddhist monasteries ;o) or feeding the hungry organic food.) Or are you one of those billionaires who uses wealth like a weapon to beat people into submission, the only happiness going to lawyers who get to submit outrageous billing?

What's wrong with having money is the greed it evokes for turning everything into it, for creating a Midas culture that commoditizes absolutely everything and everyone it touches--which leads to what I suppose you might call a Gilded Age.

There's also nothing wrong with stuff in and of itself. Nothing wrong with having a bed to sleep in, a fridge for your food, and a Smart phone to keep up with Facebook. What's wrong, or bad, is getting so attached to your stuff, you cannot live without it and will harm anybody who gets between you and it. Or getting despondent when you lose some. Or refusing to share or perhaps even give something to someone in need. Or gift someone who admires what you have. What's wrong with money and stuff, and yes attachment to people too, is not being able to let go without kicking and screaming, without thinking you can't live if you don't own them. Actually the sun will still come up in the morning and you will still have to pee after drinking two cups of tea. Trust me. I was robbed of my family heirlooms, threw away my yearbooks and had to toss my collection of trip slides but I'm still here! So love your people and your things, even your money with a shrug. Life has this weird habit of hanging around even when they're gone.                                     

Yellow: May all Beings Remain in Boundless Equanimity, Freed from Attachment and Aversion

We're done with talk of gold so let's have yellow be the sun, source of everything including us. Without it's warmth, its energy, nothing would exist. We owe it big time. Solar energy grows the greens that cows turn into milk. It grows the trees we turn into rubber wheels. It shines on our skin turning into vital Vitamin D. All that it does is without prejudice or favoritism. It shines on everyone, not just on a few A-list people, and does not find some people more deserving of its radiance than others. What a way to see how equal we human beings basically are with each other in the world. The sun seems to think we all equally deserve to live. It does not discriminate. It does not have first class and business class rays brighter than economy. The sun puts out everything it's got for the benefit of all beings and the effort hasn't killed it yet. It's still going strong. There's a message there.




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