What is Your Problem Now – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part 5

What is your problem now?  This is one of my favorite questions from The Power of Now and it’s the key to minimizing your pain and suffering in life.  So how can a simple phrase change how much you hurt?  Let’s take a closer look to see.

How you read that first sentence makes all the difference in the world and it offers insight into your level of spiritual development.  Perhaps you hear the angry echoes of a lover or your parents in those words? They might have thrown those words at you like a dagger, meaning what do you got to complain about now? What kind of drama are you stirring up? Why can’t you leave me alone?  However this is not what Tolle means here.  What he is offering is a quick way to release a great deal of suffering with a simple shift of perception that we are all capable of at any moment.  Let’s take a look at how this questions works to free you.

Much of our pain comes from clinging to the past or casting our minds into the future.  By doing this over and over again relentlessly, we compound our suffering exponentially.  This question offers a path out of that compounded suffering.  It is like a light in the forest.  It allows us to focus only on the problem at hand and not color it with thousands of other problems that do not really exist.  Let’s say that I suffer a set back of some kind.  Perhaps I lose some money or a deal doesn’t go through or a loved one dies or a lover leaves us.  This represents true pain, that I must feel completely, in order to release that suffering.  I must feel the loss of my loved one or the betrayal of the lover that left me.  I must feel it totally and completely, with my heart wide open to the anguish.  In this way, I am able to release it swiftly, letting go of these painful emotions as if in a sudden storm that hits and it gone, followed by the peace of a red sun in morning.  The storm passes and I am free again.  Instead what we generally do is suppress the emotions.  We push them down, deny them, fight them.  We don’t give ourselves over to body wrenching sobs.  We don’t give ourselves space to grieve.  Instead, we crush the pain and maintain a false facade of invincibility or we transmute that pain into anger and strike out at those around us with words or actions. Our mind then goes to work to make it worse.  It calls up past failures and wrongs against us and replays them over and over.  Or it casts into the future and imagines world collapse and global catastrophe or the imminent death of friends and family or ourselves.  These too play like mental movies, over and over.  Sometimes we project into the future and image a much better place for ourselves and feel happy for a flickering moment, only to have that moment ripped away from us because we become filled with longing for that imagined better place and so despise the present moment.  And yet, the present moment is all that we have.  The current problem we face is the only problem we need concern ourselves with.  Take something simple: being stuck in traffic. We all hate getting stuck in traffic, but our minds often make this simple problem much much worse.  As we fight the traffic, racing and revving our engines, cursing at other people for their stupidity, we throw our thoughts back into our day.  We think about all the idiots who wronged us or who made our day hard for no reason.  We replay that day over and over and it adds to our pain, magnifying it, growing it, feeding on itself.  Yet if we are able to ask that simple question “what is my problem now” we are able to answer with only one thing: traffic.  We are guided back to the present moment and we let go of the past, releasing it.  The day is over.  We are not fighting with our friend or lover now, or dealing with a difficult customer, we are here, dealing with traffic.  The thousand slings and arrows we’ve suffered that day are gone.  It is only by thinking about them that we cling to them, holding onto them and making our suffering in the present moment much worse.  Instead if we concentrate only on the problem at hand, the rest of our suffering drops away suddenly and we can see clearly again, our minds and body at ease, making it simpler to deal with traffic.  We just slow down when the road dictates and speed up when we can.  We no longer fight the traffic, we are one with it, as we are with all things, reacting as needed without rage and frustration.  We have transcended our pain.

To understand why our minds do this we must begin to understand the nature of our minds.  Today most people’s minds are broken.  They have no off switch.  They chatter at us so much that we become convinced that we are our thoughts.  We identify with them.  We think we are them.  And yet this is a crucial error on our parts.  There was a time when people’s minds did not blather at them constantly.  They turned off.  They went quiet or dormant for a time.  Today, it would be hard to find almost any person on the planet who does not suffer from a mind that does not shut up even for a second.  It’s gotten so out of hand that when I first talk to people about creating gaps in that constant stream of thoughts they see it is almost unimaginable.  It seems impossible and yet it is not.  You see the mind is a kind of broken tool.  It is like an out of control lawnmower chewing up anything in its path while you desperately chase after it.  The mind is a problem solving machine.  Like any tool it must be used and then set aside until it is truly needed again.  And yet the mind is like a drill that sees everything as a screw.  It is convinced that it can solve all manner of problems before they happen, preventing us pain and suffering and in doing so it causes us more.  The mind is so good at solving problems that it has gotten good at solving the biggest problem of all: not having any problems.  When they are no problems, there is no purpose for the mind.  It can go silent.  But silence to the mind is equal to death.  Perhaps you think that you will not be able to function with your mind idled, but I assure you, you will function even better.  When your mind is turned off, the traffic around you becomes inconsequential.  It is no longer the punishment of a cruel God or the workings of an oppressive societal scheme to keep you down by grinding up your will.  It becomes simply a series of slow downs and speed ups, done with lightness and ease.

We can understand the now and the process of staying present by observing our pets.  Animals intrinsically understand the answer to the question of “what is my problem now?”  They know it is only the problem at hand and not the phantoms of the past or the future.  Animals are not concerned with the problems of the past.  They are here now, always.  They do not worry about the future.  While people often look down at animals they should really be looking up to them because they are much closer to the state we call enlightenment than we are.  We can get there through dedication and persistence but animals already live there and they are waiting for us to catch up.

I learned much about present moment awareness from my cat Seven, who passed away last weekend.  She had cancer and we treated her for more than a year and a half effectively.  She remained the blithe, worry free spirit that she had always been and we were happy to have her around a little longer.  Like a trickster God, she constantly got into everything.  If a water cup was left uncovered her paws were in it.  If my desktop was left unlocked she was walking on the keys typing gibberish and sending a crazy email to a friend.  And yet her devilishness and tricks served as a constant reminder to enjoy the present moment and let go of my rage and constant circular thinking.  They were a persistent prodding to wake up and see clearly, to be here now and feel the joy that can only come in the now.  Admittedly, I was often unable to see what she was here to teach me but she was quite patient as all perfect beings are.  She never missed a chance to remind me again, calmly waiting for me to wake up.  She also taught me about the ways that we can transcend fear and move forward in life with a ease and lightness.  She was an absolutely fearless animal, reckless even, throwing her body through the air in the kitchen, across a yawning gap between island and counter just to eat a plant that my wife left in the window.  After falling out of the second story window, the very next day she was in the same window, chasing the wind.  She was this way, because her physical form was not important to her.  She did not cling to it.  Our physical form is a like a old pair of clothing that we shed when we die.  It is a sleeve, a temporary vessel that falls apart.

On Sunday she was gone just as fast as she lived.  The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, as Lao Tzu said, echoed famously in the movie Bladerunner.  She suddenly collapsed, vomiting and peeing the bed simultaneously, something she had never done.  We brought her to the hospital and they raised her core temperature and gave her a blood transfusion.  She came home to us, but it was not long before she went into collapse again and this time I could feel her slipping away as I stroked her fur and looked into her dilated eyes.  When we brought her to the doctor it did not seem likely that she would make it and so we had to put her to sleep which is an incredibly painful experience for a Buddha, because we experience all suffering and sadness with a raw intensity that can only be described as searing.  How you feel as your pets are passing, will tell you how close your are to waking up in time.  To the sleeping person the passing of a pet is not deeply felt.  The pets are simple things to them.  Sleeping people are entangled in their minds, dreaming fantasies of bigger, complex things that they imagine will make them happy when the key to their happiness is simple and right in front of them.  True joy comes not from complex creations of the mind.  True joy cannot be purchased or manipulated.  The simplest things, right in front of you, are the essence of all life: a walk with a loved one; the happiness in your pet’s eyes when they see a treat; breathing; swimming; dancing.  To the enlightened person an animal is such an obvious manifestation of the divine that it is almost blinding.  I can tell you that Seven was a physical manifestation of my power animal, a guardian spirit that chose a physical form to assist me on this plane.  In the Hindu tradition she might be considered an avatar.  In ancient Greece they would have called her a tutelary spirit.  But I have always liked the term spirit animal or power animal.  In the Shamanic tradition, Native American Shamans were spiritual guides who sought direct, unfiltered communication with God and the divine.  They did not experience God through words on a page, but by directly reaching out to the heavens in the same way that I work with the divine.  I need no filter.  God is open to anyone who wishes to see.  The Shamans were the first to see and understand power animals.  And I have no doubt that she was such a spirit.  Now in a way a power animal is a poor representation of what these spirits actually are but for us to perceive them they must take on familiar forms our limited minds can understand.  Spirits are not really bound by such concepts as whether they really exist, being in one place at one time, being alive or dead.  They do not need a physical form and yet sometimes that is the most useful form for them and so they take it on, despite its limitations.  The physical form is often a poor conduit for the divine.  We are like dial-up internet connections.  The great spirit is a massive pipe of raw power and information and we can only pull down a fraction of it.  We just don’t have the bandwidth to understand what true spiritual forms look like.  We cannot conceive  them properly.  They are like a child’s sketch to our limited perceptions.  They are all these things and none of them at the same time.  Seven is both gone and with me.  Like Ben Kenobi she is more powerful now then you can possibly imagine.  This may seem like a contradiction to my lesson on reincarnation, but if you look closely you’ll see that it is not.  Her spirit is still there, helping me and yet she is completely gone, melted back into the void.  Her spirit is like an echo, still with me and yet not so.  She does not need a physical form nor is she concerned with duality.  She is both transcended with her personality intact and completely dissolved into the essential energy of the void, at the same time.  This is something that the mind cannot conceive of and yet is true at the fundamental level.  She is both folded into the eternal melting pot, and she is here, still assisting me.  Her personality is like an echo in the universe, remaining so that she might continue to guide me and yet she is totally gone.  If you could see this about your own animals would you still cast them aside so carelessly?  When you can learn from the simplest things, you are well on your way to awakening.

Seven’s passing has shown me the power of opening up and of letting go.  When she died, I opened myself completely to this suffering.  I let it rip through me.  I felt it totally and completely.  I did not shrink from it.  I feel the absence of her, the fear that my guardian had died and that I was in unprotected and alone.  I feel the massive hole she left in my life and my wife’s.  And through feeling this I am already transcending it.  Because I have given myself over to fits of crying and to exploring the complex grieving emotions of emptiness, guilt, fear and sadness, the storm is lifting. Already when I think of her she brings a smile to my face more and more, rather than tears. Every day that increases without my having to force myself to think happy thoughts, a technique that gets people nowhere in the long run.  Also, slowly, slowly I am learning not to cling to her physical form, which is now gone, nothing but ash.  That form is no longer needed and it has passed away to the place beyond the wind.  She is both here and gone.  She is Shrodinger’s Cat, a quantum animal.  This is because I have embraced my pain as necessary and essential.  I have not run from it.  Our lives are really about experiencing everything around us fully.  It is through this experience that our pain is quickly transmuted.  It is only by clinging to this pain that I can distort my life, holding on to something that is no longer here and can never return.  What is my problem now?  I must deal with the passing of my spirit animal’s physical form.  I must feel her loss.  And then I must let go and forgive.  I must trust and focus back on the process of life, feeling her presence and allowing her to continue to do her work in the now.  It is then that my mind can go back to rest and I can once again directly connect to the divine with the carefree passion for everything that she taught me.  For now though, I must grieve and in my grief I am set free.

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