SUNRISE MIND
“The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly re-creating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.” (Chögyam Trungpa, 1984)
Lately the temptation to crawl into a cocoon has been all too compelling for me. I’m hoping you can identify with such times as make one want to crawl under a rock or escape to a desert island, or whatever metaphor floats your boat!
Whether or not this urge is familiar to you, I am fairly certain we all have times when our coping skills don’t rise to the challenge in a way that would make us proud. As Trungpa put it earlier: “If you feel bad when you come home because you had a hard day at the office, you can tell the truth about that: you feel bad. Then you don’t have to try to shake off your pain by throwing it around your living room.”
Well, the other day I threw it around the living room. And splattered a few innocent bystanders while I was at it.
I perpetuated a pattern of thought and behavior that no longer serves me. But there was a silver lining to seeing the mess it left, to stepping back, reflecting on how things got that way, and discerning what needed to change. Trungpa would call that cleaning up our world:
“In this world there are always possibilities of original purity, because the world is clean to begin with. Dirt never comes first, at all. For example, when you buy new towels, they don’t have any dirt on them. Then, as you use them, they become dirty. But you can always wash them and return them to their original state. In the same way, our entire physical and psychological existence and the world that we know—our sky, our earth, our houses, everything we have—was and is originally clean. But then we begin to smear the situation with our conflicting emotions. Still, fundamentally speaking, our existence is all good, and it is all launderable. That is what we mean by basic goodness: the pure ground that is always there, waiting to be cleaned by us. We can always return to that primordial ground. That is the logic of the Great Eastern Sun.”
In contrast to Trungpa’s “setting sun world” — a closed loop of conditioned actions and reactions that create and perpetuate our problems — his rising sun vision is one of original purity. Other spiritual writers would perhaps refer to it as our soul or essence, over which is built up a lifelong dross of misunderstandings and coping mechanisms that Trungpa would have us scrape away in order to embody the pure gold that remains.
Put more simply, we can enact our desire to purify our minds (however vague and theoretical that sounds) by taking a very practical approach to cleaning up our surroundings. I call this cleaning up my own back yard. Whatever I do, literally, towards home maintenance and improvement, can be seen symbolically as a desire to clean up my karma, my thoughts and actions, and the effects of these on the people around me. Same with my physical appearance. I can develop habits of dress and personal hygiene that reflect both my self-discipline and the integrity of my beliefs. Beliefs that what I think and feel, say and do are either part of the problem or part of the solution. In order to discern which is which, I apply a method that was given to me long ago.
Generating a calm, receptive state with a simple centering meditation (as described in blog 4) I ask these questions:
What is the core issue here?
What am I contributing to the problem, and how can I change it?
What am I contributing to the solution, and how can I keep doing it?
Protect me from the problem, because I’m in it.
And I surrender it now.
I then spend time reflecting in my journal about the possible causes and solutions to the problem in question. Following that I surrender these musing to whatever higher intelligence is available to me (what I call my divine committee) and get on with my day. Throughout the day I then hold the thought gently that I want to see what’s really happening. At day’s end I go back to this reflection and see if anything has come clear to me.
By applying Trungpa’s advice to “perceive the world directly” and “see on the spot with wakefulness” I begin to see beyond my personal opinions and priorities to a much bigger picture. Granted it can come as a shock to register my relative insignificance in this bigger picture, but it also deprives my ego of thinking I’m the center of the universe.
The beginning of spiritual warriorship is marked by this profound shift in focus from a “me-centered” attitude to a “we-centered” reality. The reality that it’s NOT.ABOUT.ME. Needless to say, no offense, but it’s not about you either. It’s about all of us, working separately and together, to clean up the mess.