Why would anyone else want to take up buddhist practice if I haven't taken it up myself?
It's not even that I have to be, like, uh, enlightened or anything. But shouldn't I, at least, be practicing, since I've ostensibly devoted my life to buddhism?
In fact, my ideas and projects are a great excuse to avoid practicing, and thus, to avoid facing myself and having a look.
It all started with my 30th High School Class Reunion. (Which, I hear, they don't have in Europe, which, I think, is completely uncivilized.) I had hooked up with some great old friends via Facebook and one of them, after not having seen or spoken to her for 20 years except for on Facebook, completely out of the blue, drove to my house and knocked on my door and demanded that I go to the reunion. We all had a great time. Another old friend at the reunion had taken up buddhism and had taken some of our courses. So I decided to gather my local sangha mates (all 3 of them) and have a sangha day next month at my house just for fun.
Then one thought led to another. "I need to get a bell. I need to get some official Rigpa thangkas. I need to get some proper offering bowls. We could make my house the Rigpa Center. Kristen and I should do some regular open meditations in Cleveland because our friends have been wanting to join a sitting group and we've been procrastinating." I started thinking about a Rigpa Yeshe kids home school program, and how I dreamed of having a buddhist summer camp for kids at our retreat land in upstate New York. And how we need to send all the parent instructors to Rigpa Yeshe training in Lerab Ling, France. Then I thought, "I really need to amp up my day trading and make a lot of money so I can fund all this." Another of my old friends at the reunion quit her job and has been trading microcaps full time since 2003 and I thought I should add microcaps to my repertoire. I thought, "How very auspicious that I reconnected with these old friends! It's a sign." And then I stopped practicing.
That's how it was when I was working for Rigpa. A few months after I started working for Rigpa, I stopped practicing. I found my work meaningful and extremely rewarding when I was able to actually help people. But mostly, working for Rigpa is like getting sucked up in the vortex of the entire sangha's ideas and projects to further the study of buddhism and help humanity. This vortex sucks you into a black hole of anger and frustration because, of course, time and money are extremely limited, but ideas and anger and frustration are completely unlimited. After 5 years of this I quit.
Now I'm just getting sucked up by my own vortex. I have no one else to blame. Anyway, it's an improvement because I this time I let a week go by without practicing instead of 5 years. LOL!!!!
Maybe now I've got just enough awareness to catch myself before I get too far down the hope and fear rabbit hole. So now I can choose how I live my life, instead of having my ambitions and their all-consuming emotions choose my life for me. Of course, I could have chosen to live my life with practice when I was working for Rigpa. That would have given me perspective and helped me be more effective and it would have helped me considerably with my anger and frustration.
But I guess I had to go through all that in order to see my spiritual materialism. "I want to 'fix' Rigpa." "I want to be the one who makes Rigpa big in America." "I want to bring buddhism to the corporate world." "I want to make Rigpa more efficient with technology so we can focus on helping students with their study and practice." "I want to grow distance learning to one million students." "I need to help make this retreat be the best one ever."
It's much better to just go get a job and make a bunch of money so you can support yourself in your dharma study and practice and go to retreats and teachings and maybe even help some other people to do the same, than it is to be ambitious about your "spiritual" projects.
This poem was written by a student and is in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, page 32 revised edition.
Autobiography in Five Chapters
1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I walk around it.
5) I walk down another street.
Posts
