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“Like a subliminal message being played under the predominant
music, a sense of possibility, no matter how faint, drives a wedge
between the suffering we may wake up with each day and the hopelessness
that can try to move in with us on a permanent basis. It inspires
us to envision a better life for ourselves. It is this glimmer of
possibility that is the beginning of faith.
…with faith we move into the unknown, openly meeting whatever
the next moment brings. Faith is what gets us out of bed, gets us
on an airplane to an unknown land, opens us to the possibility that
our lives can be different. Though we may repeatedly stumble, afraid
to move forward in the dark, we have the strength to take that magnitude
of risk because of faith.
…without faith in change we would be compelled to repeat patterns
of suffering—like an abused child who grows up to find an abusive
partner—at least reassured by being able to predict mortification
and pain. Without a sense of possibility, we would be stuck—isolated,
hopeless and unspeakably sad.”
Salzberg then goes on to describe how her own faith took root when
she experienced a glimmer of awareness while in a class in Buddhism
in college. Not sure why she was going, she took off to India. She
describes standing under the Bodhi tree where the historical Buddha,
Siddhartha Gautama sat and received his enlightenment.
She writes: “My heart leaped. For the first time I understood
the sacredness of place, how it could possess a transporting power
and open the door to a new way of looking at the world. Tibetan Buddhists
had strung prayer flags between the Bodhi tree’s lower branches,
so that the wind could carry prayers for all beings around the entire
glove. As I watched them flapping I realized that perhaps as a child
I had been less alone than I had thought.”
Later she talks about being in a room with her Buddhist teachers and
thinking: “I can learn to be truly free. I felt as if nothing
and no one could take away the joy of that prospect.”
“This state of love-filled delight in possibilities and eager
joy at the prospect of actualizing them is known in Buddhism as bright
faith. Bright faith goes beyond merely claiming that possibility for
oneself to immersing oneself in it.
…With bright faith we feel exalted as we are lifted out of our
normal sense of insignificance, thrilled as we no longer feel lost
and alone. The enthusiasm, energy, and courage we need in order to
leave the safe path, to stop aligning ourselves with the familiar
or the convenient, arises with bright faith. It enables us to step
out, step away, and see what we can make of our lives. With bright
faith we act on our potential to transform our suffering and live
in a different way.
Bright faith is seen simply as a beginning, and not a beginning in
which we surrender discriminating intelligence, but rather one in
which we surrender cynicism and apathy. Its abundant energy propels
us forward into the unknown.”
SERMON
To quote an article by Rev. Bruce Marshall I once read in a UU journal:
“It is not difficult to make yourself unhappy. With proper
coaching and a little practice anyone can do it. I will show you how.
By following a few easy rules you may become as miserable as you wish.
I guarantee it. By fine tuning these techniques we can maximize our
capacities and develop that dormant potential within.
Today I would like to pass on some time honored tools and techniques
for just such a practice. Let’s call them the four ignoble truths.
1. First, Never slow down, keep running. Keep your mind running,
keep your thoughts running, keep your mouth running. Joy is the enemy
of suffering and joy needs an opening, so talk fast, think fast, eat
fast, and always make quick decisions, especially on demand.
There is a danger however which we must be aware of. Sometimes, even
though you may be speeding along right well in life, thinking you’re
on a seamless grove, you may become aware of a current, almost a hum
of joy hovering somewhere near you.
This means there is a possibility that what you are doing could actually
bring you some pleasure if you slow down and look at it and savor
it. And pleasure is one of the qualities of joy. Not the loftiest
one, but one of them.
At this point, you will need to take extra measures to shut out that
murmuring which signals joy’s presence. Step up your practice
in other words. You have two ways to turn. One is to speed up further,
the other is to stop completely.
Speeding up you run the risk of heart attack, or death. So, it’s
infinitely more productive in your pursuit of unhappiness to stop,
and sit down very quickly when you hear joy beckoning. Then desperately
grab for it.
That is ignoble truth number two: unhappiness is guaranteed if we
can pin happiness into a headlock. Say over and over as a mantra:
Why can’t life be like this all the time? This will guarantee
that your suffering will return. You will find that joy has eluded
your tight grasp.
Rabindranath Tagore warned us of this quality of joy when he described
“abounding joy as that which scatters and gives up and dies
in every moment”
Though joy may flee from our grasping hands, it is constantly trying
to reassert itself, I have learned from experience, so be sure to
take the opportunity when you do stop and sit, to repeat additional
mantras like: “Why did I say that?” with as much meanness
towards yourself as you can.
Perfectionism is an excellent technique for, well, perfecting suffering.
So is comparison of oneself with others, so by all means throw in
a few weighty comparisons. Preferably compare yourself with someone
who has been doing whatever it is you are doing, much longer than
you. Joy will thus be safely shut out, if only for a time.
Leading us to the problem of the ebb and flow of life, and, ignoble
Truth Number three, which contains a paradox. For the full experience
of suffering: Never allow your grief its full expression. Remember
the Psalm which clearly warns us: “Weeping may tarry all night,
but joy comes with the morning” Those psalmists sure knew what
suffering was all about.
So by all means never weep deeply, remain only superficially sentimental
and weepy. Deep weeping has a way of clearing out the ground for joy
to come with the morning. Joy and woe are woven fine, sings the poet
Wordsworth, so be careful. Especially be sure never to let yourself
join in the One great human community of shared grieving. Isolation
is extremely important in the cultivation of suffering and misery.
It may even be the key and is the fourth ignoble truth.
OK I think you get my point. Yes?
Actually my point thus far is: all people who are born into this
world suffer. And we heap suffering on top of suffering. We create
much of our personal suffering. This was the Buddha’s first
Noble truth was: All who are born into this world suffer.
I’m not sure that middle class people always believe they get
to claim their suffering; but I hope the little rant I did gave some
examples of how in fact all humans who are born into this world suffer.
Why is that so? Because, of ignorance and attachment, says the Buddha.
Which is the second Noble truth. Ignorance: Now, the Buddha’s
not talking about no book learnin’ here. He’s talking
about ignorance of who we are, of our true nature.
Sharon Salzberg says it better than I could. She writes: “The
second Noble truth says that we look at our personal histories, our
bodies, our thoughts and feelings and we conclude, ‘that’s
who I am.’
When we look to these things to know who we actually are, we are consumed
and exhausted. Within ten minutes we might see sadness, amusement,
anger, kindness; we might feel physical pleasure, then discomfort,
then relief, then apprehension as the discomfort emerges again.
We might see ourselves as powerful one moment, powerless the next.
As our thoughts and feelings and sensations shift and change, any
superficial idea of who we are unravels. We may strive mightily to
hold it together, because we fear being nothing, being nowhere. As
long as we are ignorant of what lies below our surface identifications,
the teachings say, we will be unhappy.”
Buddhism asks us to notice, become aware of the fact, that nothing
is permanent in this world. That seems so obvious, intellectually,
and in fact we do know it on a deep level, otherwise why would we
try so hard to hang on? What we seem not to be able to learn is how
absurd, and painful it is to do that. We suffer, because inevitably
everything will change or move on.
An aside: I think it’s always important when speaking about
Buddhist ideas of attachment and detachment, to emphasize that the
word detachment is not meant to evoke distance or coldness, or the
inability to form attachments, as it would in some forms of western
psychology, quite the opposite.
Here is a vivid Buddhist story that illustrates the experience of
attachment. There is a coconut with some sweet treasure inside. A
monkey spies this treasure in the coconut and goes for it. He is able
to get its hand into the coconut and make a fist around the treasure.
But once he has done that he cannot get his hand back out. Still he
will not let go.
The story ends there, as Buddhist stories often do, with no articulated
“moral to the story”. We are invited to let the obvious
widen in our consciousness. One might imagine what the monkey looks
like, and feels like, dragging that big coconut around for the rest
of his life.
In the 12 step recovery programs there’s an unofficial slogan
that is somewhat related to this. It is: “let go or get dragged”.
I had a very literal experience with that truth a couple years ago.
I’m out walking my dogs. They’re big standard poodles
about 65 pounds each and they’re on a two in one leash. They
see a cute little poodle prancing down the other side of busy Jersey
Avenue. They take off across the street.
Do I let go of the leash? No! I hang on for dear life, and get dragged
on my side half way across the street, like a gigantic sack of potatoes.
It never occurred to me to let go. Partly because there wasn’t
time to think, and partly because my first impulse towards my dogs
is love and protection. I was afraid they’d get hit by a car.
But the truth is they could have been across the street in two seconds.
Yet, because I couldn’t let go, all three of us nearly ended
up as the filling in an automotive sandwich. Actually, when I think
back, we must have looked like one of those cartoons where there’s
a flattened road runner character (me) splat! on the ground, and two
cars are rearing up like exclamation points on either side, while
the two poodles straining at the leash to get to little Fifi who continues
to prance her way, oblivious, down the street, tail up in the air.
It is so deeply ingrained in us to be unwilling to let go. And we
suffer as a result. We get dragged. We get dragged by our attachment
to the past, to our expectations of the future, by the cauldron of
resentment, anger and regret, by our stubborn willfulness to win at
all costs, or to convince others we are right. We get dragged by other
people’s moods, by our desire for them to change, by our habits,
by our fears, by the barking dogs of the psyche you name it.
This attachment is suffering. And our suffering affects everything,
it ripples out to everything. It creates our world as we know it,
which is a world of illusion, says Buddhism. The world as we see it,
the world as we feel it, the world as we define it, the world as we
share it. The world of appearances is illusion, but we are attached
to it, and so we suffer.
But in Buddhism there is hope. It is a realistic religion, one of
empirical observation. We suffer yes. 1st noble truth. All persons
born into this world suffer.
2nd noble truth: We suffer because we get attached and are ignorant
of our true nature. We think this is the way it has to be.
But Buddhism doesn’t lie down like road kill on the road of
resignation. Oh no. And yet I can’t tell you how many people
I have met over the years who will say: Buddhism is all about suffering.
It’s so pessimistic, it believes all life is suffering.
Salzberg writes that the third noble truth “is about liberation
from suffering and from the identification with surfaces, and from
the attachment to things, and thoughts, and other impermanent entities
in life.”
And she says liberation, or freedom, is understood within Buddhism
in several ways: “As wisdom that understands fully the nature
of life.
As liberation from distorted concepts of who we think we are by seeing
clearly who we actually are…
As boundless, unimpeded love for ourselves and all others without
exception;
As experience of that which lies beyond our conditioning, that which
frees us from suffering.”
That which lies beyond our conditioning, and that which frees us
from suffering….
Is this God? The Buddha when asked: is there a God or is there not
a God, remained silent. From my reading of Buddhism, the workshops
I’ve been to over 20 or so years, not that many but a number,
and from my own meditation practice, I read “that which lies
beyond” as the Oneness, the Presence, and the meta-reality beneath
all appearances, the underlying reality which one strives to connect
with in meditation. One meditates so that increasingly one is speaking,
acting, living, loving out of that spaciousness and compassionate
reality.
The fourth and final Nobel truth is the path, it’s the practice
which allows one to actually find freedom and joy, one’s true
nature. And in Buddhism there is an 8 fold path within the 4th noble
truth, which we don’t have time to go into today. And in any
case, as with any spiritual practice is best understood if actually
practiced.
The Buddha once said: Don’t believe anything I say just because
I said it. Test it out for yourself.
Buddhism is not an easy path. In fact it’s hard on the fanny,
given that so much meditation is involved in a deep practice. And
it’s tough on the mind, because the mind really wants us to
stay loyal to it storehouse of ideas and assumptions and beliefs and
theories it has stored up, with our help, in our brains. We think
we own our minds, but our minds own us, until we learn what they are
about.
Buddhism seems to say, you know, it took you a long time, you and
your thoughts, to get to where you are, you may have to spend, not
as much time perhaps, but often quite a bit of time sitting and listening
before any real change happens to you.
I’m reminded of a sentence attributed to Einstein that I find
very helpful to remember, whenever I’m in a rush to become a
different person overnight, or when I want someone else to become
a different person overnight. He said: “You can’t solve
a problem with the same mind that created it.”
So why bother? Why do all the work of changing our minds if it takes
so much time? Or, maybe the real question is: why do some people want
to sit on little cushions for years, what could possibly be calling
them to do that?
Probably one needs a bright faith, such as Salzberg described in the
reading this morning, a sense of a promise, a deep promise that calls
into your own deeps. With that bright promise, in a way, there is
an immediate cessation to suffering. And maybe, we only suffer again,
when lose faith.
Maybe one needs to first admit that one suffers. I don’t know.
Things happen to us differently, in various orders, mostly we begin
and begin again. I wonder if there isn’t just such light, the
call to bright faith, reasons for bright faith, all over the place,
but we don’t know how to engage with it.
I’ll end with another story of the Buddha from Salzberg’s
book which I heard her tell last year at UU General Assembly in St.
Louis. She is illustrating this very dilemma of how to respond to
a bright beckoning which could produce deep trust in the possibility
of liberation. It is an example of what the Buddhists call “walk
away doubt”.
…The Buddha went through all he went through. He was born in
the lap of luxury. He had his wake up call when he witnessed the suffering
of other human beings: death, disease, poverty. He was called to understand
suffering and to find the end of human suffering. He went through
trials and temptations, he went through a time of asceticism and realized
that wasn’t for him; he went through some other things. He meditated,
and then when he had become enlightened, he went out on the road…
A man sees him coming down the road; he sees this bright and shining
being, emanating love and compassion.
And the man is drawn to the Buddha and he says: Who are you? What
are you?
And the Buddha says: “I am awake”.
And the man says, “Well, eh, OK maybe”. And he walks off.
I’ll leave you with the questions Sharon gave to us. In these
questions she is asking us to entertain the possibility of using a
different kind of doubt than “walk-away” doubt. It is
called in Buddhism “Skillful doubt”
She asked us:
What if,
What if the man instead of walking away from this light which he had
been drawn to, had instead been curious? What if he had said: Hunh?
What’s that to be awake?
What does that mean?
How did you do that?
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