We've lost touch with the contingency of life

From: A Trackless Path 10
Full transcript (available soon)
Audioclip (Available soon)

Now in many respects spiritual practice becomes possible only when societies are able to generate a sufficient surplus so that people have the leisure and time to do so. And the amount of time and opportunities that we have are very much due to the way the society is set up, which generates huge amounts of surplus, does everything it can to rope people into generating more surpluses. And spending actually precious little time utilizing those surpluses, individually or collectively, for the common good. Which is actually extraordinarily ironic when you think about it. But I mean that's how we end up in this kind of rat race or the treadmill.

For me anyway, the most important one of these [reminders] is death and impermanence. Where we are faced with the certainty that we're going to die, which can be more broadly extended to everything we know, every relationship that we have is at some point going to change and it's not going to be there anymore. It may be with our death. It may be before that. And we don't know when any of that is going to happen. And we have our ideas.

And we often fall under the spell of the last couple of centuries, which has allowed us to control our environment and circumstances to a degree which was unthinkable in earlier cultures to the extent now that if anybody dies prematurely it's deemed that something has gone wrong and somebody is to blame. And out come the lawyers and so forth. And we've lost touch, in many respects, with the contingency of life. But this is very important because it doesn't matter how many safeguards we build into things. Things still happen. People get sick, accidents happen.

And out of this comes a very important piece. In traditional Buddhism, one is encouraged again and again to sever attachment to this life. And so everything is projected onto future lives and that's what you're working towards. That's mythical language, one could say, metaphorical language. And over the years I've come to interpret what death and impermanence do for us is to bring us into the awareness that what we experience now is all we will ever know. And then the question is, what are we going to do with it? And all of the other reminders, their energy and the power come from being really, really clear about that one point.

So, over the next day or two one of the things I'd like you to keep in mind is, we have this life, each of us has our own experience;  what do we do with it? This brings into play the old Chinese adage or wish, May you live a life of no regret. Which sounds inconsequential perhaps when you first hear it but as one allows it to rattle around inside it becomes weightier and weightier with meaning and implication.

And it's very important, I think, because many people say, "Okay so you're saying just focus on your own life. That sounds very selfish." And this goes back to a point I touched on in the beginning of our time together. And that is we have to be very clear about what our life is. Our life is everything we experience. Not what we want to experience or what we want to happen, etc., etc. It is everything we experience. And this is where the Mahayana instruction of Regard life as a dream comes into play in a way that a lot of people overlook.

Everything that arises in a dream is something that's arising in your own mind. It's not coming from anywhere else, though one can develop theories about visitations and things like that. But it's all coming from your own experience. And you can't get away from any of it because it's all yours. And that's what I mean when I say our life consists of everything we experience. What happens most of the time is that we direct our energies to those aspects of life which we find interesting or rewarding or fulfilling in some way. And we ignore, push away, or seek to destroy sometimes those aspects of life which make us uncomfortable. But all of it is our life. And what do we do with all of it?

Confusion - Dreaming

In the morning there's the occasional, "Oh thank God (or Buddha?)! It was just a dream, relax." Or sometimes, "Oh how unfortunate, it was just a dream."

Then there's the situation, where you want someone to pinch you and tell you it is just a dream, but no, it doesn't happen - it seems to be really real. Damn it. Can't believe it. And on rare occasions you wonder if this is really happeneing to you right now. Normally things like this just happen in a dream (or a movie, or to other people), but it's real, isn't it? Cool:).

One night last week I had two dreams. In the morning I thought, well, that was a weird one. Then when I came around a corner in the office to my desk I saw someone (from the dream) and realized, "Oh, that other thing was just a dream too." Had just immediately forgotten the second one in the morning was a dream and must have filed it straight and wrongly in memory under real.

So?

Confusion - Dreaming (TAN01) (from TAN01: Then and Now (class) 00:52:28.00 - 00:55:35.00)

(download into iTunes)

How can we understand this confusion? How many of you remember your dreams? Okay, in a dream does everything appear real?

Students: Yeah.

It may be somewhat more fluid than it is right now, but while you’re dreaming it appears real. One of the great teachers of the 19th century had a dream in which he was being chased by a lion. And he ran into a temple where one of the ancient heads of that tradition was sitting on a throne laughing his head off. He said to this guy, “You can’t be any great lama if you don’t even know that you’re being chased by a lion in a dream and you’re this frightened.” And then he woke up from the dream. But during the dream it feels very real.

How do you know you aren’t dreaming right now? This actually is a deep philosophical question. There is no way to know. How do we know we aren’t a dream in the mind of God? We don’t know. There is no way of telling. That may be a little disturbing to you, but there is no way of telling.

When I was in the three-year retreat, this was made very, very clear to us, because the retreat schedule is pretty demanding, and basically you’re functioning on four or five hours of sleep a night, six if you’re lucky.

You’re meant to be resting in your meditation, but you get tired. And several of us experienced this: we’d wake up, and we’d set up the offerings which was part of the morning ritual, and start doing our prayers and things like that. We’re all in our individual rooms.

It would be going quite nicely, and then we’d wake up [laughter], and we’d go, “What?” Because the offerings wouldn’t be done. Several times I had to wake up twice. In the first wake-up I was actually dreaming, but I had no idea that I was dreaming. And then I’d wake up and go “huh?”

So we don’t know. And that’s what this confusion is like. We experience all this stuff. It feels so real, we act as if this is it, but we really don’t know what the hell’s going on, at all. And the only thing we know is that we struggle. There are a couple of other things we know, but I’ll get to those in a minute.