Every day is an opportunity to grow, to develop. When this is clear to me, when it is in the forefront – life is a challenge, an adventure.. There is so much we can do with the days blank canvas to develop ourselves. But we don’t do that instead we are mechanical, on automatic pilot. We spend so much valuable time worrying or afraid, limiting ourselves. Doing the same things, having the same feelings and hoping that it will change.
Perhaps the most common mechanical manifestation is the role of the victim. We tell ourselves that things are happening to us, that its not us creating them, or allowing them – either things are just happening that we can’t do anything about -or things we want to happen just can’t.
The historical Buddha was a lifehacker. Lost Coin is part of his hacker lineage. Shakyamuni Buddha – I like to think of him as Sam to underline that he was just like you and me (the ancient teachers in our lineage said when you say the word Buddha you should wash your mouth out with soap). So Sam took on an incredible set of problems – old age, desease and death and he tried to hack them with all the available means. Eventually he succeeded with a combination of zazen and a method of practice called the eightfold path. But he had to really decide to do it and that he could do it.
The amazing thing is that even if we have been afraid, procrastinating or being the victim it can all change in one moment. We are capable of a complete shift and then what we need is to practice, hack the mechanical patterns – the defaults. Today would be a good day to make that shift. It takes one bold step. That step always happens now.
photo credit: country_boy_shane
This Dharma is a virus. Anyone is reading this is already carrying it.
Like in the movie “Inception”: the idea of freedom has been planted in our minds from way back — in a dream within a dream– and somehow, after a good kick from grace, perhaps. we start to hear music.
It’s a song, a song we recognize… something like Edith Piaf’s “No Regrets”…
And it all starts to fall apart from here.
My question is: do we awaken, still wondering whether or not we are dreaming? Or do we awaken convinced that we still are?
I keep saying i am committed, i keep noticing how i allow myself to be a victim, i keep thinking that today is the day and then tomorrow comes filled with excuse after excuse. Hopefully, one day my step will truly be bold. Actually, I know that day will come…maybe today?
Thank you as always, for your posts.
Oh and – this picture has changed each and every time i have looked at it – about 5 times. The first time it was dark without detail, like a flahslight beams in the darkness, today the light is bright and bold …
As long as I tell myself that life is happening to me, I can pity myself for things that are not as I want them to be. It is so much easier to play the part of the victim mechanically than to admit that ‘I do this myself’ or ‘I don’t have the courage’. Whenever I see things in this way, I just can’t believe that I can be so stupid. Darn ax. But even when the most reasonable thing would be to just change things, I usually just pass on to the next level of being mechanical. I start to blame myself and to doubt my ability to do it. As you write, ‘but he had to really decide to do it and that he could do it.’ Time to go.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this role, and when I can witness it in myself I have a lot of compassion for the me that lands in that stew. It’s a last ditch attempt to get others to really see me, and thus rescue me…it’s a bid for control over a poorly perceived circumstance and reciprocal relationship. The joke is always on me, though. When I am willing to truly experience the victim, the only one not paying attention to me or seeing me…is me.
The more I study what is going on in my mind, I uncover the worry and fear that criticizes what I have done or said in the past. This is paralyzing and stopping the thoughts is a brief relief. I need lots of practice to get it to a dull roar.
Hope you don’t mind me posting here, but I just love the open comments your Sangha has on this site. Please do with this comment as you see fit.
I like this post: it resonates with my inner hacker (as in coding), so I’m going to build on this analogy, so please bear with me and apologies if you’re not into code.
Being a developer often feels like “being God in your own universe” when starting to code something new: you know you can do it, you just need to figure out the best way to code it. And you get to make your own “universal laws”.
However, once you’ve entered your first line of code, every additional line seems to limit your possibilities further and further. After jotting down a few thousand lines, you start spending more time on remembering how you’ve “set up the universal laws” than on adding useful stuff. And if you can’t get something done it’s not because it’s not possible, but because you are not perceiving the solution in the frame of reality you created for yourself. Ultimately, you will start hacking your own code to get things done. A clear analogy to any aspect of life, and hence liking this post.
But there is another aspect I’d like to share, and I’ll stick to the code analogy to try and illustrate it: usually, hacking happens at the “perceivable” level of the code: the lines of instructions you enter in a certain language. However, in a way, this is not the “real” code: that is moving and changing tiny energy fragments in the machine itself. The commands you enter are just an abstract representation of this, just like “disease, old age and death”. Or as Dogen put it, “the picture of a rice cookie does not still your hunger”.
Now Sam was, as you say, an exceptional hacker. And the really good hackers don’t get stuck on the symbolic code level: they dive right into the machine code and hack from there out. This is not for the faint of heart: changing one single bit in the wrong way can literally fry your computer. And Sam had a few close calls: he almost starved himself to death, etc, before he found his “good hack”.
Now, I’ve always wondered, what would be Sam’s first words REALLY have been after achieving the great hack? According to the Theravada Canon, this was:
“Seeking but not finding the house builder, I traveled through the round of countless births. Oh, painful is birth ever and again! House builder you have now been seen. You shall not build the house again. Your rafters have been broken down; your ridge-pole is demolished too. My mind has now attained the unformed nibbana and reached the end of every kind of craving.” (Dh. 153-54.)
Speaking as a developer: I can relate to the “I’ve bested you, you horrible piece of software!” rap. But not entirely, because I WROTE that software, and more importantly, that’s not what a good hack feels like. Granted, I can feel the need to scold my computer if for the nth time it does something wrong – incidentally, exactly like I’ve told it to. But generally, you just feel like shouting “YES!” when you do a truly great code hack.
Here’s the rendering of Sam’s first words after Kensho in Keizan’s Denkoroku:
“Upon seeing the morning star, Gautama became Shakyamuni Buddha when He was, is and will be awakened to His TRUE SELF and said, says and will say, I was, am and will be enlightened, together with the whole of the great earth
and all its sentient beings, simultaneously.” (DKR Case 1)
Now that’s much closer to what a great code hack feels like: you have literally cut through millions of machine code instructions by flicking just a few bits. In essence, the program hasn’t changed, but it FEELS so damn good and gratifying to realize what you’ve accomplished by virtually no effort. The result is instant and affects the whole program (not to mention your mood).
Would that be a good analogy? And by the way, while we’re on the subject of Zen/Hacking analogies: does anyone remember if you should take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill? I always forget.
@Katie
We awaken both gradually and suddenly at different times.
My experience with deep awakening was that the first thing I did was look around at the people near me and see that they were asleep, but the part that hurt was they were having very bad dreams.
@LIz
Seeing all this is part of what we are parcticing. That is good. I would sat that seeing it frequently and deeply will lead to something new. I think we change most of the time because we get sick of where we are at.
@
Seeing it is practice. Then we do things argue with it, evaluate it etc. So the next step is just to let go of it. Then at another time you may see it again.
I was reading something this morning about cultivating courage. The book said, in essence, that building courage is more about being deliberate and conscious in the every moment of every day (when you can remember to do it). and that the only thing that allows us to be mechanical day after day is believing that we must think the way we’ve always thought, be the way we’ve always been. Doen, your post is great because it reminds me that we CAN suddenly shift and do things differently, think differently, be different, be present, be deliberate, be courageous and stop being a victim and blaming. It’s all a matter to being serious and courageous and JUST DOING IT!!!!!!!!!! I want to be that way- but I’m such a chicken-^%&!@#%&.