Dharma means the truth about love
Everything I learned from Buddhism in seven points.
About a year and a half ago I was alone in a friend’s office doing some end of year reflection and planning. Working out what mattered in my work and what I wanted to do more of. This mainly consisted of drinking Coke, eating Doritos and writing things in Very Big Letters on sheets of flipchart paper.
On one of the big sheets of paper I tried to sum up everything I had learned from about six or seven years of Buddhist practice: reading the books, going on the retreats, listening to the teachings, doing the meditation. In the middle of the page I wrote the word ‘LOVE’ in thick green marker pen and then added seven points in a circle round the edge of the page:
1. Dharma means the truth about love.
2. To be a truthful, loving friend is the thing.
3. Love lets life through.
4. Happiness is the spring. Cherishing others is the river.
5. If you look carefully and see clearly, then you’ll see nothing is as it appears to be. There is literally nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of.
6. To love all of yourself you have to love everyone.
7. When you know how love works and you work with love, everything is love and everything works.
And now, at least partly so I can throw away the inconveniently large and crumpled piece of flipchart paper they’re written on, I’ve done my best to sum up what they are shorthand reminders for.
Nothing that follows should be taken as true. I haven’t checked any references or applied any kind of scholarly rigour. Consider it a very lengthy note-to-self and take what’s useful and discard what isn’t. If anything is definitely wrong, let me know.
1. Dharma means the truth about love.
Dharma is the word for Buddha’s teachings. I think I heard someone say it means truth. Buddha said something like: “Don’t treat anything as true just because I said it. Go test it for yourself and if it makes your life better, then carry on doing it.” I didn’t look it up, so he might have said something different to that. Even if you do look it up, it still might not be what he actually said. And even if it is what he actually said, it might not be true. Is the point. It’s a very clear injunction against believing in things. Like, if you believe in Buddhism, then you’re doing it wrong.
I like to think that if you were going to teach a whole body of work to your students whilst also warning them against unthinkingly trusting what you say that you would occasionally slip in some deliberate ringers. “Patience destroys anger. Rejoicing is the antidote to jealousy. There are only three months in a year with the letter F in them.”
So, in a kind of circular argument, it seems reasonable to think of ‘dharma’ as meaning ‘truth’. Not as in ‘This is the truth, so you must believe it.” but as in “If you find anything here that isn’t true, then it shouldn’t be here and it isn’t dharma.”
So ‘dharma’ means nothing more esoteric or mystifying than what you find to be true. And ‘Buddha’? Potentially another equally mystifying and esoteric word. I think technically it means ‘the awakened one’ or ‘seed of awakening’ or something (again, not looking it up…). But, again in the spirit of looking for what’s useful, I figure the most useful translation would be love.
We have this beautiful, rich, profound word — love — and it sums up quite a particular thing. When you work with love, when you live with love, relate to people with love, when you embody love, that’s a way of saying that you are choosing the way that works, the wisest, kindest, most compassionate path. All neatly summed up and labeled as one thing. And, as I understand it, the Buddha is meant to be the personification of all those things: wise, compassionate, kind, loving… So there was a historical person who we call Buddha. But what he represents is a personification of what-any-of-us-would-be-like-if-we-just-became-the-embodiment-of-love.
So the teachings are about Buddha and the teachings are about love. The truth about love. How to choose the way that works. How to keep to the wisest path. How to relate to people with love, embody love, live with love.
And not for the sake of it. And not because you should. But because it’s useful. Because, gradually we work it out ourselves over a lifetime anyway, but reading other people’s best guesses can give us a headstart. And we get to spend more of our time living that way and less of our time working out how to get to the point where we can live that way.
Also, as we’re pretty much limited to reading what other people have written about what other people said the Buddha said, rather than judging any of it as valuable because it’s what Buddha said, it seems more useful to judge it against how far it contributes to answering the question “What is the truth about love?”
I like to know what the promise is before I read a set of instructions. So I know what they’re meant to achieve. So I have something to judge them against. I could just pick up a book about Buddhism or whatever just because, well, it looks nice. And then reading it and finding nice words and maybe going and reading some more books because they feel nice. But then it’s just a pleasant pastime. More useful I think to have a deliberate point of entry like this:
Only read this if you want to find the truth about love. The truth about love may or may not be here, but when reading it you should keep close hold of the question: “Is this helping me get to the truth about love?” If you get to the end and can say “Yes. I think what I have read is true and now I know the truth about love.” then the promise of the text has been kept. If you get to the end and think “No. What I’ve read doesn’t seem true and I still don’t know the truth about love.” then the promise of the text has not been kept. It’s a way to decide what’s worth reading.
Concept number one: Dharma.
2. To be a truthful, loving friend is the thing.
So Buddha is maybe just another word for love and dharma is the truth about love. And if you know the dharma then you know the truth about love. But knowing the truth about love doesn’t do anything and doesn’t change anything. What do you do with it? What is the point? What does it look like to put it into practice?
The word people use to describe a group of Buddhist practitioners, a spiritual community, is ‘sangha’. Which again could be something esoteric and mysterious. But, as far as I can tell, at root, doesn’t mean anything other than friends. And it seems like ‘friend’ is a useful definition because being a friend to someone or not being a friend to someone would seem like a natural boundary to any kind of ‘spiritual community’. So if you know the truth about love and you embody it in how you relate to other people, then you become a truthful, loving friend. Sangha.
And one of Buddha’s teachings (as I understand it) is that there are only three things that are genuinely reliable: love, the truth about love, and truthful, loving friends (Buddha, dharma and sangha). Not money, not success, not reputation, not physical strength, not beauty, not power, not a nice house and lots of stuff.
If you can rely on love, rely on love. If you forget what love is (or how to get there) go seek out the truth about love, so you can get back to relying on love. If you can’t find the truth about love and can’t get back to love, then go seek out truthful, loving friends — then they can point you back in the right direction.
And so this is one thing that you can actually go out and test. When looking for refuge from…anything… try relying on love, on the truth about love and on truthful, loving friends. And see if they are reliable. And then look for other things that look promising (maybe a nice environment? maybe a new job?) and try relying on them and see if there’s a fourth thing that you can add to the list. If you find a fourth thing — go tell the Buddha.
Concept number two: Taking refuge in ‘the three jewels’ — Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
3. Love lets life through.
To draw on an entirely different yet also unreliable source — my slightly made-up rendering of the Tao Te Ching — Lao Tsu says:
“It all starts from having some idea
About who you think you are
Or who you’re supposed to be.
Better to have no idea who you are…”
Think of everything that isn’t love and it’s always hooked to some kind of self-image. Someone trying to protect their reputation. Someone getting defensive about not being respected enough. Someone being selfish and greedy and divisive.
Given that it’s way, way easier to talk about what the right thing to do is than actually doing it, we all basically know what being loving looks like. It’s the hero who takes the humiliation in order to save someone else from indignity. It’s the unacknowledged helper who steps up with no expectation of reward. It’s yadda-yadda-yadda — we all know what it looks like. Every time it’s someone setting aside any usual habitual effort to hold on to a story about themselves and stepping into that big picture perspective where — I don’t just do what’s right for me, I just do what’s right.
The only thing that stands in the way of being loving is holding on to stories about who we are or who we’re meant to be. And it’s because every story we hold on to creates a little bit of resistance. And each little bit of resistance hold us back. And that’s a totally familiar feeling to everybody too. Wanting to do something, but then — urgh — a bit of guilt kicks in, or shame, or pride, or fear, or whatever. And we feel it in our bellies, in our cheeks, in our chests. And it takes us away from what’s actually happening in front of us. And it takes us away from what we know is the thing to do. Instead, we fall back on old habits, old patterns.
The ludicrous thing is we fall back on strategies that have worked in the past without actually checking whether they are suited to the present situation. “I don’t do such-and-such, because I’m not such-and-such kind of a person.” is, if you stop and think about it for one second, the stupidest reason for not doing something. It’s not grounded in anything. With even the faintest acknowledgement for the nature of reality, we have to admit that every single moment is completely different. Every situation is new, so we should make our decisions based on the reality of the present moment. You can play tennis twice, but the weather and the wind will always be different. You can cook a meal twice, but the ingredients — and your own appetite — will always be at least a little bit different. Sure — we can bring past experience and past expertise and knowledge with us when we show up to a situation, but only as an accessory. The most important thing is to remember that every single moment is new and different to every single other. And that means identikit autopilot “I’m this sort of person so I only do this sort of thing” stories are totally inadequate for navigating in the world. And they stand in the way of seeing the world as it is. Without prejudice. Brand new. Now.
And we have to allow our identity to be as flexible and free-flowing as everything else in the world. To be someone different in every moment. And to welcome each new person that we become — and see what we can do starting from there. Because there is no such thing as a fixed identity. Every story that we put after the words “I am…” is ultimately fictional anyway. They’re only useful — in the moment — for telling us something about where we feel we are. “I am sad. I am happy. I am lost.” But they’re nothing to be held onto. Because when we turn all of our attention and effort towards the “I am” and whatever comes after it, we’re turning away from the world.
“Better to have no idea who you are…”
On the other hand, what does it feel like when we have no regard for who we are? When our attention isn’t split between our present situation and some past formula for who it’s OK to be? Those are the moments when everything flows. When you’re laughing so hard you can hardly breathe. When you’re dancing and there is no gap between you, the music, the people around you… When you’re painting or singing or cooking or writing or anything and you lose yourself in it… We know it already. When you ‘lose yourself in it’, you do lose that preoccupation with who you are. And it’s at those moments that we’re at our most alive. No resistance holding up the flow of creativity that wants to come. No split in our attention between now and then, between here and there, between what is and what should be. No thinking standing in the way of doing. Just life flowing and doing its thing.
Love lets life through. And all we need to do to let love let life through is to let go of any story about who we are. To embrace and accept any story that shows up — but not hold on to it. To be happy, to be sad, to be everyone and no one. This is the figure of the hero — willing to play whatever role is required in the moment it is required (with no regard for themselves or how they’re seen). And this is the figure of the fool — the magically free-flowing effortlessly creative innocent who rides the moment with no thought for past or future or self or other. As soon as we notice that we think a story about who we are is important, we’ve gone astray. As soon as we find ourselves trying to hold on to — or push away — a story about who we are, we’ve gone astray. Holding on to those stories trips us up. Love lets life through.
Concept number three: Non-attachment to self.
4. Happiness is the spring. Cherishing others is the river.
This is so simple. So happily, wonderfully simple. It seems to me this is the whole essence of the brilliance of the novel insight to be found in Buddhism. It goes like this:
Nothing out there in the world is a reliable source of happiness.
The only reliable source of happiness is the knowledge that nothing out there in the world is a reliable source of happiness.
It’s so beautiful. It starts off sounding like very bad news, but it’s actually the best news you could hope for. In other words:
The only thing that causes unhappiness is the belief that happiness is dependent on something elsewhere.
The way I understand it is by spiraling into a tenuous world of Norse etymology. In order to really understand what happiness is and (maybe) how it works. My thinking goes like this:
The word happy comes from the root ‘hap’, as in ‘happen’, ‘haphazard’ and ‘happenstance’ — all words related to luck and chance.
In German, the word for happy is ‘glücklich’ and the word for luck is ‘Gluck’.
In Norwegian, meanwhile, the word for lucky is ‘heldig’ and the word for hero is ‘Held’. The hero is essentially ‘the lucky person’.
Both ‘heldig’ and ‘Held’ come from an old Icelandic root ‘hel’ — meaning whole or healthy. (Which, as far as I can tell, is also the root of the words ‘whole’ and ‘healthy’.)
Leading me to conclude that way back when happy, lucky, whole and healthy were all the same word. And that word was a word to describe that way of being where things just work — where you’re free from inner conflict, where you’re not sabotaging yourself, where you’re operating at your full potential, where you’re open to opportunity and — as a result — good at choosing wisely and working in a way that works.
Which leads me to conclude that we’re better off treating ‘happiness’ as a kind of state of being, rather than an emotion. A kind of harmonious wholeness that brings good fortune and good health.
Run the logic again, but with ‘whole’ in the place of happy and the statement looks kind of self-evident:
The only thing that causes not-being-whole is the belief that being whole is dependent on something elsewhere.
It becomes completely simple. Just the thought that you need something from somewhere else has the effect of making you feel incomplete. And that mistaken belief causes a tension — a ‘I need to be somewhere else doing something else’ kind of a tension. And that tension stands in the way of being lucky, stands in the way of being healthy, stands in the way of being happy.
“You cannot touch a man of Tao. Why? — because there is no one to be touched. There is no wound. He is healthy, healed, whole. This word ‘whole’ is beautiful. The word ‘heal’ comes from the whole, and the word ‘holy’ also comes from the whole. He is whole, healed, holy.”
- ‘The Empty Boat’, Osho
What happens when you feel a lack? Your attention turns inwards. (‘Oh god! I’m so damned wretched! What will I do with this gaping void?’) Even if you’re driven to seek things out in the world, your focus stays on the inner tragedy.
What happens when you feel whole? Your attention turns outwards. (‘Well, everything here seems to have been taken care of. I wonder what else is around?’)
So, maybe counter-intuitively, seeing the world not-as-a-source-of-happiness makes it way easier to engage fully in the world than seeing the world as a source of happiness. It just means that you’re walking into the world with something to offer, rather than with hungry eyes and graspy hands.
And it’s not about not enjoying life. When people start talking about ‘attachment’ and ‘avoiding attachment’ they quite often end up feeling like the moral thing to do is to get rid of all of their possessions and live in a ditch. But that is to miss the point entirely. It’s just about looking at the world in one of two ways.
It’s maybe more obvious when you think about love instead of happiness. You’re sitting in your garden. You have two options.
Option one: see the things in the garden as sources of love. It is the job of your shovel and your watering can and your geraniums to give love to you. It’s your job to sit and wait and expect it. When they give you love, then you have love. When they don’t give you love, then you don’t have love.
Option two: see yourself as the source of love. You walk into the garden and, with love, dig the earth, then, with love, water the ground, then, with love, plant the geraniums. Your job is to give love. Their job is to reap the benefit.
In the first option, you’ll be constantly eyeing every thing in the garden with suspicion, checking it is still where it should be and is still providing the love it has to provide. A constant state of uncertainty where any change in the environment brings with it the fundamental threat of your access to love being withdrawn.
In the second option, you’re all well and good regardless of what happens. And when you look around the garden you see the evidence of the love you’ve given in every thing you see.
So, the same is true of happiness. Show up with your happiness and see the effect it has. Or show up looking to everyone and everything to provide your happiness — and see the effect that has. Another test to try at home.
Sometimes I’ve heard people say: “But if the people and things around me aren’t the source of happiness, then why do anything?” To which the answer is obviously: Because you’re happy. Because you can. Because you have something to offer.
But, putting all of this aside, the most fundamental argument is this: happiness isn’t a thing. It’s not a material thing. It is not a physical object in the world that can be lost and found, like a set of keys or a wooden leg. It’s an inner state of being. Of course it has to come from inside you. Of course it can’t come from anywhere else.
Someone can advertise a potato and sell you a potato and you can eat the potato and then you have a potato inside you. That works. But if someone advertises happiness (“Buy this shoe/potato/house/holiday/car/wig/Labrador and it will make you happy!”) you can’t eat happiness. You might be able to buy things that remind you that you have it. You might be able to find things that can act as a little trigger to put your attention back on your permanently-residing-inside-you happiness (after it has been momentarily distracted by an advert for a shoe/potato/house/etc). But the happiness is there all along. And if the arrival of the holiday/car/wig/Labrador appears to bring happiness, it is only because it undoes the temporary sensation of unhappiness brought about by the belief that something external is necessary for happiness.
Nothing out there in the world is a reliable source of happiness.
The only reliable source of happiness is the knowledge that nothing out there in the world is a reliable source of happiness.
And the beautiful thing about happiness being an immaterial inner state and not a physical thing like a Porsche or a cottage is that there is no limit to its supply. You can draw on it as much as you like. It does not get used up. As you offer it to others, there is always more readily arising behind it.
“Happiness is the spring. Cherishing others is the river.”
Concept number four: Renunciation.
5. If you look carefully and see clearly, then you’ll see nothing is as it appears to be. There is literally nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of.
This might be considered a shortcut.
Every drama in the world requires two things.
One thing and another thing.
Tom vs Jerry.
Good vs Evil.
David vs Goliath.
Coke vs Pepsi.
You need there to be two things in order for there to be a conflict between the two things.
There aren’t two things.
The way this works is to try to establish any single thing in the world as being distinct and separate from everything else in the world.
Attempt number one. If you have a garden, try to establish where your garden is. What it consists of. Then try removing pieces. See if you can establish a point where it stops being your garden. Then discover that the label ‘garden’ is essentially arbitrary and could include or exclude rakes / fences / sky / the earth’s core according to your own personal taste.
Attempt number two. Repeat the exercise with your own body. Try to establish what your body consists of and try to identify the edge between it and the rest of the world. Now eat a sandwich. And then clip your fingernails. And get a haircut. And put a coat on. And drink a cup of tea. And sweat a bit. Go to the loo. Shave. Try to establish whether you are getting bigger and smaller with each of these activities. Or if you are a constant size. Find no reliable answer. Get in your car and enter busy traffic. See how long it is before you start identifying with the whole car as an extension of yourself. (“Get out of my way! You’re in my space! Oi! Mush! Leave me some room… Etc.)
Attempt number three. Imagine you are an ocean. And you are attached to your identity as ‘ocean’. Fear evaporation (“I’m disintegrating!”). Take every river and stream as a threat (“Oi! Mush! You’re in my space!”). Look at clouds as an entirely separate and unrelated foreign species with which you share no common ground (“I am so solid and grounded and wavy and heavy and mighty and you are so fluffy and floaty and faraway.”). Then remember the concept of ‘water’ and see every fear and threat and separation reveal themselves as imaginary then dissolve. Try to maintain oceanic dignity whilst sounding like an awful hippy (“You don’t understand, man. I *am* a cloud. I *am* the rain. I *am* a perfect and beautiful snowflake.”). Take comfort in the undeniable fact that there is actually no distinction between your different parts and that treating them as separate lies somewhere between convenient convention and unexamined superstition.
If you look carefully and see clearly, then you’ll see nothing is as it appears to be.
That’s not to say that nothing exists. It’s just that we tend to see everything through the lens of the convenient conventions we use to describe them — whilst forgetting that those are just convenient conventions. If you ask the ocean if it’s going to rain today it’s not very helpful if it just replies, “I am the rain, man.” It’s useful to have stories about what’s happening where. The risk is just in forgetting that it’s all made up.
Look at some clouds in the sky. Pick out faces. Spot dragons and old boots and castles. And remember it’s your mind telling stories. Or draw a scribble on a page and look for patterns. Or look at the stars and find goats and fish and bulls and all sorts. And remember it’s your mind telling stories. And don’t take it too seriously.
The trick is to be like a skilful director. Who can sit in the back row of the theatre and be absolutely enthralled by the action — entirely present for the minutiae of the human dramas played out on the stage. But who can still keep a little corner of their awareness available to check whether the third spotlight should be a little brighter or if the third pirate should come in a little earlier.
Be like a skilful director. Not a lifeless technician obsessed with how it’s done, constantly pointing out the mechanism (“Of course none of this is real, you know?”). And not the four year old in the front row who is Genuinely Terrified that the pirates will come and take him away and has no choice but to suffer through the whole thing.
Neither extreme is a pleasant place to be.
“…nothing is as it appears to be. There is literally nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of.”
And the strange thing is that our everyday way of appraising reality owes a lot more to the extreme of the terrified four year old than any kind of grown-up middle ground. And it’s only the perspective of the terrified four year old that can generate the vivid dramas of “That’s mine and you can’t have it.” or “But what if I lose my teddy / job / lover?”
All that’s required to unpick the stitching on those very important dramas is to hold a tiny corner of the mind open to the perspective of the skilful director. Who can live life and feel everything, but who also remembers to see through the dramas as well as see them. And who, when faced with the inclusion or exclusion of a rake or a lake or a fingernail or a pirate, isn’t obliged to take it very seriously at all.
Concept number five: Emptiness.
6. To love all of yourself you have to love everyone.
All of which leads to a kind of useful progress check. If you see anyone as actually separate from you, if you see them as a source of happiness, if you judge them as having some undesirable trait, if you are not able to be truthful or loving or friendly, then you have lost hold of one of the previous points.
The fundamental is this: the personal is universal. There is no characteristic you can find in anyone else that isn’t also in you somewhere.
You might be offended by someone angry, and might feel that you don’t exhibit anger. But everybody does. And even if you feel like you’re a master at repressing it, everyone can always tell when you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re angry. There’s nothing less convincing than an “I’m fine” said with a dead face, gritted teeth and barely concealed apoplectic rage. And if you think you’re different and you just don’t get angry, you’re wrong.
You might find someone irritating or annoying or upsetting or childish or whatever, but none of those are actually descriptions of the inherent nature of another person. They’re all descriptions of what they do to you, how they appear to you, what effect they have on you. You only have to change from “You’re irritating.” to “You’re irritating to me.” to see where the locus of responsibility actually lies. And to remind yourself that there will always be someone else in the world who doesn’t find said annoying/irritating/upsetting person to be any of those things at all. If you follow the thread back though, you’ll always find yourself. You’ll find the bit of you that finds that bit of them unacceptable.
And that’s the real gift of people who are annoying. They point with absolute precision to the bit of you that isn’t able to be loving, that can’t be accepting. They find the limit of your love and they show you exactly where it is. In that moment, the only thing we need to do is to follow the thread and we’ll find the mysteries of our unconscious mind laid bare. Because the formula is always the same: whatever we find unacceptable in someone else is some part of ourselves that we do not find acceptable in ourselves. A part of ourselves that some part of our lunatic mind has deemed unacceptable and rejected — despite it obviously being just part of ourselves. And despite rejecting parts of ourselves having absolutely no benefits whatsoever. It’s like pretending you don’t have a foot. Or objecting every time you see that you have eyelids.
Here’s a trick I learned from my friend Peter Koenig. He calls it reclamation of projections. I’ve started calling it identity yoga. It goes like this:
- Call to mind anything that annoys you. A person or a thing. A friend, a relative, money, work, traffic jams.
- Or choose anything that you perceive to be negative in any way. Or that you feel any kind of resistance to. (It doesn’t have to be annoyance specifically.)
- Be as straightforwardly judgmental as you like about the object of your irritation. make judgments. Tell it like it is. Throw rational thought out of the window. Be prejudiced, unthinking, unloving, cruel. Whatever’s necessary just to articulate how that thing appears to that part of your mind that is offended by it.
- Test whether you are yourself OK with exhibiting that quality by inserting it into the sentence “I am [insert description of thing] and it’s OK.” and seeing if it feels true when you say it.
- For example, if I meet someone and I feel somehow resistant to them and I check and find it’s because I see them as a self-aggrandising, arrogant idiot, then the test would be for me to say “I am a self-aggrandising, arrogant idiot and it’s OK.” And then to see whether that’s true or not. Whether it does feel OK that I am a self-aggrandising, arrogant idiot. (FYI: It does feel OK.)
- If it doesn’t feel OK, that means that we’ve mounted a kind of blanket ban on some part of our own character (regardless of context). And it means we’ve correctly identified a part of ourselves that we do not love.
- If it’s not OK, then actively, deliberately pretend that it is OK. If necessary pretend you’re on stage playing the part of a person who genuinely thinks it’s OK.
- The process is complete when you can say that it’s OK and feel that it’s true.
- Advanced users can opt for “I am … and I love it.” The “…and it’s OK” requires the speaker to admit the quality in question. (Admit in both the sense of ‘say aloud’ and ‘let in’.) The “…and I love it” requires you to go a step further and actually fully embrace it without resistance.
In the process of finding your way to it being OK, you will almost certainly feel your resistance to it as a physical sensation in your body. This is in itself a happy and hilarious revelation. That you can say words to yourself that are completely unrelated to what’s happening in the world around you and your body will have a full and completely convincing physical reaction to them as if they’re real. Just try saying the words “I’m sad and it’s not OK” and (if you’re anything like me) you’ll feel a wave of emotional activity moving through you, quite possibly followed by a whole world of stories starting to outline all the reasons why you’re sad and why that’s not OK and what that says about you and what that says about the world and so on. And you actually have to remind yourself: “Oh. I’m not sad. I just totally made that up.” I think it’s a staggering revelation: when I’m talking about myself, my body believes my voice. Of course, in this instance, it comes across as a kind of unfortunate but forgivable mental malfunction. But actually, this simple discovery — when I’m talking about myself, my body believes my voice — provides us with a ferociously effective mechanism that allows us to love everyone, everything and every part of ourselves. All that’s required to make full use of this capacity is to:
- notice when you feel any resistance to anyone or anything
- let yourself be judgmental and notice what the quality being judged is
- admit and embrace that quality as part of your own identity
- repeat forever with everyone and everything until there is no resistance left.
Now, ‘repeat forever with everyone and everything’ may sound like an arduous task. But it doesn’t have to be any more taxing than breathing, which is also something you have to repeat forever. (Or, if not forever then for as long as it matters…) The good news is that, as far as I can tell, the resistance doesn’t grow back. So you only have to embrace being a self-aggrandising, arrogant idiot once and that’s that basically ticked off forever. Also, maybe, gradually over time, the urge to judge everyone and everything gets less, because it has no benefit whatsoever.
What it does mean, though, is that everyone you ever meet is part of your practice. It’s not enough to become all perfect and shiny and clear sitting on the top of a mountain and then look down on everyone else with disdain. Because if there’s one person who you can’t stand, there’s one part of yourself you don’t love. And if there’s one part of yourself you don’t love, then that gets in the way of being alive.
Also, given that nothing is as it appears to be, and any attempt to identify yourself as being inherently and definitely separate from everyone else is ultimately impossible, trying to make it so everything is OK with you and forgetting about everyone else is futile.
Concept number six: Compassion.
7. When you know how love works and you work with love, everything is love and everything works.
To summarise then… Nothing is inherently good or bad. Everyone is essentially the same. Loving every part of yourself is the same as loving every part of everyone. Love is the word for living in a way that lets life through. No one and nothing are inherently separate from anyone or anything else. All drama is based on illusion. All unhappiness is based on trying to hold onto a story about who you are. The only thing necessary to be permanently happy is to remember that nothing out there can make you permanently happy.
And, from a certain point of view, that might feel like kind of an empty place to be. Potentially a kind of disoriented “Well, now what?” If all the usual reference points of judgment and blame and self and other and good and bad are gone, then how am I meant to decide to do anything?
Especially when you can just say “I’m a success and I love it.” — without having to go build a career or anything like that. Especially when you can just say “I’m a horrible person and it’s OK.” Especially when you remember that the whole pursuit of happiness is the root of unhappiness. Especially when you remember that protecting and nurturing a story about who you are brings nothing good ever.
Even the spiritual path. You can devote your time to practices and progress and sitting and meditating and rituals and ceremonies, but what’s to stop you just saying “I am a fully enlightened Buddha and I love it.”? Nothing’s to stop you just saying “I am a fully enlightened Buddha and I love it.” Try it. Go through the identity yoga steps. See what happens with the subtle emotional energy inside you when you say it. See if it feels true. Pretend it’s true. Then, when it feels true, just choose what would be appropriate to do next, given that you’re a fully enlightened Buddha and you love it. I believe this is known as ‘bringing the result into the path’. And, as I understand it, this process of working directly with identity and working directly with subtle emotional energy and deliberately employing every identity (regardless if they are conventionally seen as ‘good or bad’) is what’s known as Tantra. You can call it ‘self-generation as a Buddha’. You can call it imagination practice. You can call it just pretending. Just remember to remember that it’s just pretending and, ultimately, all of it is just made-up stories anyway. It’s not a substitute for all the rest of how to be a loving person, but it’s a way to skip ahead to see what the end looks like.
But even if you do that, it still leaves you with a question. If you can’t rely on surface appearances and you can’t rely on conditioned prejudice and you can’t rely on socially ordained concepts of right and wrong, then how do you decide what to do?
All that’s left is to choose. For ourselves. In each moment. Afresh.
The advantage being that we can do so unburdened by drama and delusion.
The challenge being that we do so fully aware that no one else is responsible for the consequences of what we do.
So we’re left with responsibility for everything we do, but also authority over everything we do.
That means rather than a blanket ban on ‘bad things’ like being angry or being selfish or being violent, we’re faced with the more challenging task of deciding in every moment — with as much wisdom and compassion as we can pull together — when the best thing to do is to be selfish and when the best thing to do is to be selfless. Or strong or weak. Or aggressive or accommodating. Or anything and the opposite of anything.
When you know how love works and you work with love, everything is love and everything works.
Concept number seven: Tantra
1. Dharma means the truth about love.
2. To be a truthful, loving friend is the thing.
3. Love lets life through.
4. Happiness is the spring. Cherishing others is the river.
5. If you look carefully and see clearly, then you’ll see nothing is as it appears to be. There is literally nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of.
6. To love all of yourself you have to love everyone.
7. When you know how love works and you work with love, everything is love and everything works.
