Life continues to be in a tremendous state of flux on so many levels, and will likely continue to be for some time. More on that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I continue to read Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. Central to this insightful and inspiring book are the ideas of impermanence and groundlessness. Boy does that hit home, especially now!

Maybe it’s time to stop fighting it, and maybe even begin to relax and lighten up a bit, as impossible as that may seem right now. Maybe that’s the lesson.

Here are a few more profound passages from the second half of that book.

“There are three truths–traditionally called three marks–of our existence: impermanence, suffering, and egolessness. Impermanence is the goodness of reality. Just as the four seasons are in continual flux, winter changing to spring and summer to autumn; just as day becomes night, light becoming dark becoming light again–in the same way everything is constantly evolving. Impermanence is the essence of everything. We regard it as pain, but impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality. When you fall in love, recognize it as impermanence, and let that intensify the preciousness. When we recognize impermanence, this is called mindfulness, awareness, curiosity, inquisitiveness, paying attention. Our suffering is based so much in our fear of impermanence. Whoever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? Pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable. Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. Ego covers up our experience of just being here, fully being who we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. We experience egolessness when we’ve lost our reference point, when we get a shock and our mind is stopped.”

“What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality. The maras provide descriptions of some very familiar ways in which we try to avoid what is happening. There are four. The first Mara is called devaputra, and has to do with seeking pleasure, how we are addicted to avoiding pain. The second–skandha– has to do with how we always try to re-create ourselves, try to be who we think we are. Instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are when the rug is pulled out from under us, we can touch into that mind of simply not knowing. The third Mara is klesha. It has to do with how we use our emotions to keep ourselves dumb or asleep. A simple feeling will arise, and we panic. We begin to weave our thoughts into a story line, which gives rise to bigger emotions. The fourth, yama, has to do with fear of death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, sits some kind of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have experience confirm, congratulate, and make you feel completely together. But the essence of life is that it’s challenging.”

“Whether we’re eating or working or meditating or listening or talking, the reason that we’re here in this world is to study ourselves. The challenge is how to develop compassion right along with clear seeing, how to train in lightening up and cheering up rather than becoming more guilt-ridden and miserable. Honesty without kindness, humour, and goodheartedness can be just mean. When we look into our hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe. When we begin to just try to accept ourselves, that’s the beginning of growing up.”

“Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. The middle way involves not hanging on to our version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong (or right), we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and wrong?”

“When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found, in the tenderness of pain itself. We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole.”

“Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In the process, we become liberated from very ancient patterns of selfishness. We begin to feel love for both ourselves and others; we begin to take care of ourselves and others. Tonglen awakens our compassion an introduces us to a far bigger view of reality. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open–breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever we feel would bring them relief and happiness.”

“Prajna is a way if seeing which continually dissolves any tendency to use things to get ground under our feet, a kind of bullshit detector that protects us from becoming righteous. There are no promises that everything will be OK. Instead we are encouraged to simply look at joy and sorrow, at laughing and crying, at hoping and fearing, at all that lives and dies. We learn that what truly heals is gratitude and tenderness.”

“The first paramita is generosity, the journey of learning how to give. When we feel inadequate and unworthy, we hoard things. We are so afraid–afraid of losing, afraid of feeling even more poverty stricken than we do already. We wish for comfort, but instead we reinforce aversion, the sense of sin, and the feeling that we are hopeless. The more we experience fundamental richness, the more we can loosen our grip. At the everyday, ordinary level, we experience it as flexibility and warmth.”

“The paramita of discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment….to find the balance between not too tight and not too loose, between not too laid back and not too rigid.”

The paramita of patience involves relaxing, opening to what’s happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.”

The paramita of exertion is touching in to our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way.”

“The paramita of meditation allows us to continue the journey. It is the basis for an enlightened society that is not based on winning and losing, loss and gain. We connect with something unconditional–a state of mind, a basic environment that does not grasp or reject anything.”

“The sixth paramita is prajna, that which turns all actions into gold…it cuts through the whole thing. It makes us homeless. We have no place left to dwell on anything. When we work with generosity, we see our nostalgia for wanting to hold on. When we work with discipline, we see our nostalgia for wanting to zone out and not relate at all. As we work with patience, we discover our longing to speed. When we practice exertion, we realize our laziness. With mediation we see our endless discursiveness, our restlessness, and our attitude of couldn’t care less. We keep taking off the armour and stepping further into groundlessness.”

“You may have noticed that there is frequently an irritating, if not depressing, discrepancy between our ideas and good intentions and how we act when we are confronted with the nitty-gritty details of real-life situations. We continually find ourselves in that squeeze, where we look for alternatives to just being there. The place of the squeeze is the very point where we can really learn something. At that moment of hassle or bewilderment or embarrassment, our minds could become bigger. In that awkward, ambiguous moment is our own wisdom mind. Right here in the uncertainty of everyday chaos is our wisdom mind. We can move toward difficulties instead of backing away. Invite what scares us to introduce itself and hang around for awhile.”

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