HHDL

I skipped class today to go see a talk by the Dalai Lama, or HHDL as he is called in some circles. This falls under the heading "you know you are a real adult when you skip one class to go to another." But being the kind of spiritual mutt Camp Winnarainbow raised me to be I really couldn't pass up the opportunity to see the man in the flesh. So I made the drive through the vortex of Silicon Valley to the holy San Jose Convention Center to sit in a sealed, over conditioned, airplane hanger of a room in the hopes of gaining something beyond the ordinary.

To be clear, mostly I saw the man on a jumbo-tron as I was sitting in essentially the last row behind 11,000 other people. But I knew there was a difference between making the trip and getting the DVD when I peered between my neighbors heads and realized that I was sitting directly in front of this man. Albeit, 2 football fields away but I had a direct line to this tiny man sitting cross legged on a huge golden throne and it made me feel like the best was yet to come.

I should pause here to say that Buddhism generally and Tibetan Buddhism specifically, is not just one patch on some kind of spiritual quilt that I have woven for myself out of some vague new age crystal spinning desire for enlightenment. I was taught strands of Buddhist practices when I was a teenager and through a variety of different circumstances have built off of those practices over the past 15 years. Those lessons have carried me through the times in my life where I could not make sense of the world or my place in it and I have found profound strength through the process of meditation. I am deeply grateful for those who have carried this knowledge through generations and great strife so that it landed in my life at a relatively young age. So seeing the Dalai Lama was as much about a curiosity for who he was as a person as it was receiving some kind of teaching.

I wanted to write this post tonight almost as a way of retracing his lessons so that may last a bit longer in the ephemera of my brain. I also in no way can relay all that I learned and saw but you will get the general picture and take with it what you wish.

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I came late, by about five minutes to find 11,000 people in pin drop silence. The Dalai Lama was sitting on a golden thrown with huge mandalas hanging behind him. He sat and rocked and joked about how he was a lazy person who didn't like to read big books and whipped out a visor to protect his eyes from the lights. The pomp and circumstance surrounding him seemed like an awkward fit for a man who clearly was ready to watch the baseball game. Then he pulled out the program that most people had sitting in their lap and looked it over as if he had just got the memo about what he was suppose to talk about and was looking for the Cliff Notes. I guess the thing about spending your entire life receiving some of the most sacred transmissions this earth has produced is that you can just walk into a room, pick up the program and drop some serious knowledge.

The talk was centered around "8 verses for training the mind," with a fair amount of tangents. Half of it was in english and when it started to get really deep he spoke in Tibetan through a translator. He started talking about how people have many different dispositions and therefore many different ways of seeing and this is essentially why there is no right way. That each person and each circumstance is so utterly unique we cannot rely on an idea of being right. He then talked about how the Buddha taught "you should not accept my teachings on faith, but rather through experimentation." Kinda a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to try his ideas on for size.

He talked at great length about how the destruction of negative emotions is central to creating happiness and it is through this that we create a peaceful well balanced world. The destruction of emotions comes from loosing self-centered attitudes, gaining knowledge (for "ignorance doesn't go away through prayers or wishes, you must know the nature of things to know their effect") and through the law of causality. He pointed out that the real trouble maker is not the object of our discontent but rather our mind and our mind, he says, is a bully.

He went on to talk about this conference he went to with many of the major religious masters of the world. (He actually didn't call it a conference, it sounded more like those late night summer camp experiences where you lay in the field or sit in a circle pondering the greatest mysteries of the world but because they are spiritual masters it was probably a legitimate kind of thing where real religious doctrine gets developed.) He talked about questions a Sufi master posed that all religions deal with, which are:

1. What is the self?

2. Does the self begin?

3. Does the self end?

Before you go off to take a nap at the sight of these questions I'll give you the truncated version which essentially say...as far as the Buddhists are concerned there is no self, i.e. there is no soul. What, you ask, does that mean if I am looking at my hands and clearly see a pair of hands? How can there be no self if I can clearly see my hands? His answer would be smarter then mine, but what I got from what he said was basically we spend most of eternity as aggregate and disaggregated energy and that is where the whole idea of I am you and you are me and we are the spider etc...comes from.

Whether you can get with that whole idea or not doesn't totally matter because what he said next seems to make a lot of sense, particularly in regards to happiness our ability or inability to find it. He talked about how there is obvious changing and invisible changing and that the invisible changing leads to obvious changes. In relation to our mind I think he was getting at the idea that if we hold negative thoughts in our heads, they come out in our actions whether or not we let anyone in on what is going on in our heads; the invisible becomes visible. That is the real reason our bully of a mind needs a referee. That referee is developed through a series of strategies to understand our negative emotions.

Here is a partial laundry list of what he said related to this idea:

• Compassion brings inner strength
• Hypocrisy breads unhappiness
• We are social beings and our happiness is dependent on our honesty
• Emotions must be understood from their underlying causes. They can't be dealt with very easily when they are at their peak. You must understand them from their origin and then you can cut off their fuel supply as they arise.
• When you are attacked, unless it is an attack on many other people, do not retaliate and offer the other side victory. (This was the hardest thing to wrap my head around)
• When others who you have given much to or who you have placed great hopes fails you- utilize that moment as an opportunity to further your practice and thank the person as your "precious spiritual teacher."
• For those that do harm or seem on the fringes of socially acceptable behavior, bring them into the center. (He talked here at great length about what he has learned about recidivism in our 'corrections system.')
• May you take on the suffering of others and offer up joy. (Not ready for that, but working on it.)
• Think of taking and giving as breathing in and breathing out

Then he talked about meditation and about how as soon as these kinds of intrusive thoughts enter our mind we are disrupting our spiritual practice. He said that as he sat there in the back of his head he had tiny thoughts about how maybe coming here would bring him more money or more fame. That was so funny to hear him say because it is so honest and yet to hear such a highly devout person say such a thing sounds so scandalous. But his honesty teaches humanity and that is essentially what he spent the whole talk focused around. We must be human and it is only through a dedication to understanding our minds in every moment of every day that we may bring our best selves to be. That it is not what we say, it is what we do and what we do is based on what we think.

I sat and listened, at times I lost my focus and got restless. I did not have the feeling of some profound presence or have a spiritual reawakening. I think it is a mark of a great teacher when the revelation of 'something beyond the ordinary' happens after a period of gustation. So I was right, the best is yet to come...