Tis the Season

At this time of year, hope takes center stage. Children draw up lists of presents they hope Santa will deliver. Everyone who lives north of a certain point hopes for a picturesque white Christmas -- enough snow to make it pretty but not enough to make travel dangerous or require strenuous

digging out. Family members hope that other family members will like their gifts, that the sweaters will fit, and everyone will behave themselves. Singles hope for an invitation.

Hope is all around.

Buddhism says the best gift you could give yourself is to give that up.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron describes hope as an addiction to the idea that things would be better if they were somehow different. That keeps us from seeing and working with things as they are, which is the only way we actually can create change.

"Abandon hope" is one of the lojong, or mind training slogans.

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning,” she writes. The hope we’re giving up, she says, is the idea that we could “be saved from being who we are.”

“Without giving up hope – that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be – we will never relax with who or where we are," she writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.  When we do relax and look around without a judgmental eye, we begin to see what is there, to realize that we are sufficient and the world is not out to get us. Life becomes workable.

Abandoning hope relies on a foundation of impermanence. To give up the hope that things will change for the better, you need the refuge of knowing that things will change, whether you want them to or not. The bad news and the good news about impermanence are the same -- things will change.  If you look around at where you are and realize you don't want to be stuck there forever, you can be assured that it won't stay that way forever -- it's already changing. What you do in this moment influences what that change will be. 

Ani Pema notes that hope is the other side of fear, and that pairing is the root of our pain.

“In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.” 

If instead we stay with the feeling of discomfort, get to know our true selves, we can find confidence in our basic nature and our ability to be ourselves in the world. We can identify the source of the discomfort, rather than escaping it or covering it over, and work with that. 

The practice of meditation is based not on how we would like things to be but on what is. We often do not have a proper understanding of what we are, of what we are actually doing. From the beginning, spirituality should be concerned with the actuality of who is involved in the practice. In the Buddhist form of meditation, we try to look at the perceiver of the universe, the perceiver that is self, ego, me, mine.
—The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychotherapy by Chögyam Trungpa

Are we who others think we are?

In the novel I'm currently reading, the protagonist has to go through An Ordeal, one of the tests that's required to fulfill the hero trope. In this story, a work of magical realism in which existence is revealed to be a dream and dreams turn out to be prescient, the Ordeal could turn out to be anything, really. But what it is is the complete loss of everything that seems to be his identity.

Buddhism says we have no fixed, solid self. We do have, as we go about our days, many identities, We are workers, residents, citizens, coffee or tea drinkers. We groom ourselves. Part of practice is to see the ways we grasp onto those identities, and, through awareness, relax our grip.

In this story, a man, a middle-class, white-collar, average guy, one who likely would go unnoticed, is stripped of all that defined him and dropped back into his customary place. He is in a subway station, but instead of being the crisp, clean, worker bee off to an office, he is jobless, homeless, dirty, confused. Friends recognize him, and he has to sit with their pity, their flinching friendship, their averted eyes.

He is unmoored from everything, groundless. Self-less.

What if you lost everything that makes you you? It happens, and not just in fiction. It happens in layoffs, divorces, fires, and other catastrophes. What if you had nothing but the skin on your bones and even that was damaged, even that was not the skin you had creamed and buffed and soaped each morning? If you had, as our protagonist does, a carbuncle? Who would you be then?

I once heard a story from a Zen teacher, who said he had a student who was certain he had gone beyond self, who was not concerned about what others thought of him. Fine, he said. Go stand in front of the group and sing. Without accompaniment. Perform. See if that makes your self conscious. The student stayed in his seat.

Someone commented (on an an unrelated Facebook post) that "a truism in the study of psychology is that we are not who we think we are, but rather we are who we think others think we are." 

What if we are not?

Then others are not who we think they are -- or who they think we think they are. They are, in fact, just like us. There but for fortune (or karma) -- good or bad -- go you or I.

A recent study found that readers who are emotionally transported into a work of fiction display increased empathy. Art can open our eyes to a different way of seeing things. It can change the way we see real people.

Alan Wallace talks about our ephemeral identities in this commentary on the lojong slogan Examine the nature of unborn awareness:

When we seek something to grasp as our personal identity, we naturally arrive at the mind. What Sechibuwa challenges here is precisely this instinctive sense of personal identity that regards the mind as an entity in its own right. He asks us to investigate whether awareness does in fact exist in its own right, whether our minds exist intrinsically, independent of other people's minds, of the environment, and of our bodies.

In the continuum of such mental events we then discover behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns. Out of these patterns we develop a sense of personality, which we identify as "I am". But to equate ourselves with these patterns is fallacious. There is no real personal identity, no "I," no self, in these ever-changing, dependently related events that constitute our stream of awareness. In an ultimate sense, the nature of awareness is unborn; that is, it does not intrinsically arise from some preceding cause. Only on a relative or conventional level can we speak of awareness arising and passing again and again. The concept of mind as an abiding, isolated, changeless entity that performs a variety of mental events-choices, memories, imagination, hopes, fears-that mind as an entity existing in its own right is in fact a non-entity. It is a purely artificial fabrication, and by identifying with that false concept of mind we do ourselves great damage.

an endorsement of cake

Today I learned about the Buddhist practice of "offering cakes," which convinces me even more than I am a born buddhist. "If you think nonhumans might be trying to harm you because you are indebted to them in some way, you can give them 'offering cakes.' ... It is not necessary to make a proper ritual cake. You can offer anything or just imagine that you're making some form of restitution. ...It is not the ritual that is important here, but the psychological process of saying, 'Come in, have some cake, and stop bothering me.'"

The book ("The Practice of Lojong" by Traleg Kyabgon) goes on to say that evil spirits can be seen as our inner psychological states or external being.

so by extension, it's good practice to say, "hey, depression, have some cake and quit plaguing me." offering real cake, or maybe cupcakes, of course.