What pre-existing conditions of my existence have the greatest potential or the most potency within them already to evoke drala, to invite the dharma to blossom in/as my life? What challenging and charged situations occur and recur most frequently, stir the most emotion and provoke the most conceptual reactivity? In short, where are my sticking points, where are my triggers, and what passions and interests inspire me most, and how can I relate to those particular aspects as fuel for the journey?
Shantideva wrote the Bodhicaryavata, so the story goes, as instruction for himself, which he later shared with the assembled folk of Nalanda University. His instructions are per his particularities, his peculiarity, his preferred metaphor. His primary klesha, at least as indicated in the text, was anger, and his favorite metaphors those of warriorship and battle. While this is useful/helpful insofar as I can generally relate to it, anger isn't my primary mode. Military and combative imagery is for me more injurious than instructive. How can I relate to Shantideva's brilliant work and find a way, through reflection on his metaphors, to evoke my own method to work with my peculiarities?
My sticking points are around passion and ignorance -- the hallmarks of padma and buddha energies, if one is inclined toward the maitri or wisdom energy model derived from the Bon tradition via Tibetan Buddhism (they teach classes on it at Naropa, it's curious). Regardless of the systems of relating to these root kleshas, passion and ignorance are identifiable in anyone's experience. How I delve into the Bodhicaryavata as a way to work with my own bodhisattva path might be beneficial to others who find that passion in particular is more generally a "thing" for them than anger.
What is passion? In my experience:
- desire to connect intellectually, emotionally, physically
- palpable chemistry/energetic connection with an other
- vigorous enthrallment
- heady intoxication with the other/love
- falling in love with love/the other
- rhapsodic reflection and related busts of creativity
- tendency to relate to that which conveys meaning with a strong heart-filled warm emotion, often teary-eyed
- relying on my heart as the arbiter of truth and meaning
Bodhicitta is the inseperability of wisdom and compassion in our experience. It's an experience, not a thing, arising from a direct realization of emptiness, from which we can cultivate a richer and deepening compassion. It is a blaze which can be kindled from any spark of love or heart-felt-ness. My particular spark arises in intimacy. From/within that ground of loving another in a way that is not about me or them or us or selves or good aspects or ignoring bad aspects but simply the shared recognition of our interdependence, impermanence and potential to be awake in any and every moment, love/compassion/wisdom may take root and grow.
How did I get there, that loving that is not about selfish attachment or self-structuring or self-reinforcing or ideas of what that person can do for me or what I do for them or how we are as a pair or what the point of it all is or a sense of goal or a sense of relationship as a solid reference point or something permanent or any of the usual ways of codifying and normalizing and regulating relationship?
For myself, it begins with the disconnect between intimate relationship and the heteronormative modes of marriage and family. While "marriage" of a sort and family are now recognized by American society as reasonable possibilities for "same-sex" couples, in the timing of my development of a sexuality and sexual identity, these possibilities were divorced from my horizon. For me now...well, that's a divergent topic. But let us say for now that my formative experience relates to view separate from the "traditional" and "normative" models of relationship.
A key piece is a recent remembering: when I first heard the names Santideva and Nagarjuna, it was at a Mahayana Buddhist retreat, from an ordained monastic. A woman on the retreat had recently lost her husband, and was asking the monk if she would see her husband in a future life. He told her that it was very unlikely, and that the more she wanted it in this like the more unlikely it would be that they would ever connect. This was, of course, heartbreaking for her to hear.
It occurred to me at the time that the monastic perspective on human intimate relationship might be a bit lacking in the realm of sensitivity and understanding. I developed a fierce sense of relationship being an important thing to understand, to have and share in healthy ways, and that it necessarily must relate to and contribute to a larger spiritual journey. In a sense, this was a conceiving of the spirit of enlightenment, an awakening of my heart with a fierceness of conviction: what my heart knows is the path and provides fuel for the journey.
A sudden flash of enlightenment does not need training. It does not require an educational system. It is inborn nature, not dependent on any kind of training at all. The whole concept of needing training for things is a very weak approach, because it makes us feel we cannot possess the potential in us, and that therefore we have to make ourselves better than we are; we have to try to compete with heroes or masters. So we try to imitate those heroes and masters, believing that finally, by some process of psychological switch, we might be able to become THEM. Although we are not actually them, we believe we could become them purely by imitating -- by pretending, by deceiving ourselves constantly that we are what we are not. But when this sudden flash of enlightenment occurs, such hypocrisy doesn't exist. You do not have to pretend to be something. You ARE something. You have certain tendencies existing in you in any case. It is just a question of putting them into practice.
from Crazy Wisdom by Chogyam Trungpa
I went to the dentist this morning, for the first time in about 5 years. Cleaning didn't take too long, and x-rays show no cavities.
As per usual, dentist and technicians alike were surprised that I have all of my wisdom teeth, and that I've had them since I was 12.
Free passion is radiation without a radiator, a fluid, pervasive warmth that flows effortlessly. It is not destructive because it is a balanced state of being and highly intelligent. Self-consciousness inhibits this intelligent, balanced state of being. By opening, by dropping our self-conscious grasping, we see not only the surface of an object, but we see the whole way through. We appreciate not in terms of sensational qualities alone, but we see in terms of whole qualities, which are pure gold. We are not overwhelmed by the exterior, but seeing the exterior simultaneously puts us through to the interior. So we reach the heart of the situation, and if this is a meeting of two people, the relationship is very inspiring because we do not see the other person purely in terms of physical attraction or habitual patterns. We see the inside as well as the outside.
from Myth of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
