by Sogyal Rinpoche WORTHY OF SAVING TO YOUR HARD DISK
Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we don't know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique and separate
identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our
"biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards. It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security.
So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnervig stranger with whom we have been living all
the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring
or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?
Most of us do live like that; we live according to a preordained plan. We spend or youth being educated. Then we find a job, and meet someone,
marry, and have children. We buy a house, try to make a success of our business, aim for dreams like a country house or a second car.
We go away on holiday with our friends. We plan for retirement. The biggest dilemmas some of us ever have to face are where to take our next
holiday or whom to invite at Christmas. Our lives are monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the trivial, because we seem
to know of nothing better.
The pace of our lives is so hectic that the last thing we have time to think of is death. We smother our secret fears of impermanence by
surrounding ourselves with more and more goods, more and more things, more and more comforts, only to find ourselves their slaves.
All our time and energy is exhausted simply maintaining them. Our only aim in life soon becomes to keep everything a safe and secure as
possible. When changes do happen, we find the quickest remedy, some slick and temporary solution. And so our lives drift on, unless a
serious illness or disaster shakes us out of our stupor.
If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called "responsibilities" accumulate to fill them up. We tell
ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Even simplty to get up in the morning, there is so
much to do: open the window, make the bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, feed the dog,do last night's washing up, discover you are out
of sugar or coffee, go and buy them, make breakfast- the list is endless. Then there are clothes to sort out, choose, iron, and fold up again.
And what about your hair, or your makeup? Helpless, we watch our days fill up with telephone calls and petty projects, with so many
responsibilities - or shouldn't we call them "irresponsibilities"?
Our lives seem to live us, to possess their own bizarre momentum, to carry us away; in the end we feel we have no choice or control over
them. Of course we feel bad about this sometimes, we have nightmares and wake up in a sweat, wondering:"What am I doing with my life?"
But our fears only last until breakfast time; out comes the briefcase, and back we go to where we started.
This modern samsara feeds off an anxiety and depression that it fosters and trains us all in, and carefully nurtures with a consumer machine
that needs to keep us greedy to keep going. Samsara is highly organized, versatile and sophisticated; it assaults us from every angle with
its propaganda, and creates an almost impregnable environment of addiction around us. The more we try to escape, the more we seem to
fall into the traps it is so ingenious at setting for us.
So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people.
When they hear the words "egoless" or "emptiness" they think experiencing those states will be like being thrown out of the door of a spaceship
to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify
us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sometimes I think we don't want to ask any real questions about who we are, for fear of discovering there is some other reality than this one.
What would this discovery make of how we have lived? How would our friends and colleagues react to what we now know? What would we
do with the new knowledge? With knowledge comes responsibility. Sometimes even when the cell door is flung open, the prisoner chooses
not to escape.
Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and agression, in competing, grasping, possessing, and achieving,
forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations. Meditation is the exact opposite. To meditate is to make a
complete break with how we "normally" operate, for it is a state free of all cares and concernes, in which there is no competition, no desire
to possess or grasp enything.
It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change. If we shut off this possibility, we
become closed, and we become grasping. Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp
on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live
is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very
pain we are seeking to avoid.
So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow. Usually we assume
we must grasp in order to have that something that will ensure our happiness. We ask ourselves: How can we possibly enjoy anything
if we cannot own it? How often attachment is mistaken for love!
.............
The kind of birth we will have in the next life is determined by the nature of our actions in this one. And it is important never to forget that
the effect of our actions depends entirely upon the intention or motivation behind them, and not upon their scale.
The belief in reincarnation shows us that there is some kind of ultimate justice or goodness in the universe. It is that goodness
that we are all trying to uncover and to free. Whenever we act positively, we move toward it, whenever we act negatively, we
obscure and inhibit it. And whenever we cannot express it in our lives and actions, we feel miserable and frustrated.
So if you were to draw one essential message from the fact of reincarnation, it would be: Develop this good heart, that longs
for other beings to find lasting happiness, and acts to secure that happiness. Nourish and practice kindness. The Dalai Lama
has said: " There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my
philosophy is kindness."
KARMA means our ability to create and to change. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart.
Whatever is happening to us now mirrors our past karma. If we know that, and know it really, whenever suffering and difficulties
befall us, we do not view them particularly as a failure or a catastrophe, or see suffering as a punishment in any way. Nor do we
blame ourselves, or indulge in self-hatred. We see the pain we are going through as the completion of the effects, the fruition of
a past karma.
UNCERTAINITY OF LIFE
Anyone looking honestly at life will see that we live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity. Our minds are perpetually shifting in and
out of confusion and clarity. If only we were confused all the time, that would at least make for some kind of clarity, In our minds, wisdom
and confusion arise simultaneously, they are co-emergent. This means that we face a continuou state of choice between the
two, and that everything depends on which we will choose.
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