We considered bodhichitta last week—The Mind that Seeks the Way. But that is starting in the middle. Pema Chödrön invites us to go back a step, because our starting point is the suffering of the world enfolded in self—in birth, constant change toward old age, dread disease, and fearful death. We must allow the suffering of all of Samsara to break our hearts, in order to break through that heart of suffering and awaken to true compassion for all sentient beings. In Japanese Zen this is called kokoro kanashiku, heartfelt sorrow, extending even to the necessity to kill plants to eat them.
We cannot shrink ourselves away from the sorrows of the world. On the contrary, the way forward is to open ourselves up to them. Pick one that impacts you as a starting point. It can be a relative or friend with cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or whatever. It can be someone in one of the world’s many trouble spots. It can be a victim of political insanity. The only requirement for this meditation is that the event impacts you strongly. I could talk to you about people close to me who had the worst of diabetic neuropathy, or protracted congestive heart failure, and so on, but you need to get in touch with your own pain.
Everybody wants to be free from their suffering, but the majority of us go about it in ways that only make things worse.
We can touch in with bodhichitta by simple allowing ourselves to experience our own raw feelings, without getting sucked into our thoughts and stories about them.
There you are. That’s the entire method of Buddhist meditation in a nutshell.
If I really connect with my jealousy, my anger, or my prejudice, I find myself standing in the shoes of humanity. From this place, the longing to wake up to alleviate the suffering of the world comes naturally.
Fear, too. Fear of spiders, or snakes, or elevators, or public performance, or examinations, or of others getting ahead of you. Behavioral psychologists also know this technique well, and use it to desensitize their patients to particularly troublesome feelings. They do not, in general, carry through on it all the way, of course.
So we start with one feeling about one person close to us, and we gradually expand our consciousness, allowing a wider and wider range of troublesome thoughts to come and go, until we can welcome the entire universe, and let go of ourselves.
After all, not welcoming it won’t make it go away. We have far too many examples of that in our world, but I am not going to wallow in such problems. Let them come and go in your meditation. And if you have the opportunity, do something practical about some of them. That is the content of Right Livelihood, one of the spokes of our dharma wheel that we will take up in more detail sometime. It as also the content of various bodhisattva vows, thus.
Saving beings from the Hells that they have flung themselves into never gets old
The flames of the Hells are all in the mind. They can’t hurt those who volunteer for this duty.
