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Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation—proper motiviation for living an insightful, compassionate life.
Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on.
Fear of death is the background of the whole thing. It’s why we feel restless, why we panic, why there’s anxiety.
First, we like pleasure; we are attached to it. Conversely, we don’t like pain. Second, we like and are attached to praise. We try to avoid criticism and blame. Third, we like and are attached to fame. We dislike and try to avoid disgrace. Finally, we are attached to gain, to getting what we want. We don’t like losing what we have.
Whenever we’re feeling good, our thoughts are usually about things we like—praise, gain, pleasure, and fame. When we’re feeling uncomfortable and irritable and fed up, our thoughts and emotions are probably revolving around something like pain, loss, disgrace, or blame.
many of our mood swings are related to how we interpret what happens.
The irony is that we make up the eight worldly dharmas. We make them up in reaction to what happens to us in this world.
We might feel that somehow we should try to eradicate these feelings of pleasure and pain, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace. A more practical approach would be to get to know them, see how they hook us, see how they color our perception of reality, see how they aren’t all that solid.
We can explore these familiar pairs of opposites in everything we do. Instead of automatically falling into habitual patterns, we can begin to notice how we react when someone praises us. When someone blames us, how do we react? When we’ve lost something, how do we react? When we feel we’ve gained something, how do we react? When we feel pleasure or pain, is it as simple as that? Do we just feel pleasure or pain? Or is there a whole libretto that goes along with it?
We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off-limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.
This nonattachment has more kindness and more intimacy than that. It’s actually a desire to know, like the questions of a three-year-old.
When we become more insightful and compassionate about how we ourselves get hooked, we spontaneously feel more tenderness for the human race.
To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other.
The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality,
We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them.
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company.
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are:
Less desire
is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood.
After we practice less desire wholeheartedly and consistently, something shifts. We feel less desire in the sense of being less solidly seduced by our Very Important Story Lines.
The second kind of loneliness is contentment.
Contentment is a synonym for loneliness,
We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength.
The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities.
It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o’clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness.
in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness.
Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness.
Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment.
Our habitual assumptions—all our ideas about how things are—keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, “Oh yes, I know.” But we don’t know.
Not wandering in the world of desire is another way of describing cool loneliness.
Wandering in the world of desire involves looking for alternatives, seeking something to comfort us—food, drink, people.
because we want to find a way to make...
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Another aspect of cool loneliness is not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts.
With cool loneliness we do not expect security from our own internal chatter.
It has no objective reality. It is transparent and ungraspable.
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds.
When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?
nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about
The first mara is called devaputra mara. It has to do with seeking pleasure.
skandha mara, has to do with how we always try to re-create ourselves, try to get some ground back, try to be who we think we are.
klesha mara. It has to do with how we use our emotions to keep ours...
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yama mara, has to do with the fe...
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Devaputra mara
when pain presents itself to us in any form whatsoever, we run like crazy to try to become comfortable.
The devaputra mara is a good description of how we are all addicted to avoiding pain.
seeking pleasure is an opportunity to observe what we do in the face of pain.
Skandha mara is how we react when the rug is pulled out from under us.
The klesha mara is characterized by strong emotions.
