“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. …live in the question.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
~ Gilda Radner

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
~ Max Ehrmann, Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life

“Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh quotes from Being Peace

“Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh

Dear Friends,

Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. The plans we make and all our efforts fall short. We see this repeating in the political arena, in our relationships, and at work. The world doesn’t behave the way we want. Of course, we know as grownups, that this is life. Not getting our way is an aspect of dukkha, the suffering of not getting what we want, or getting what we don’t want. It’s understandable and easy to fall into dejection, to give up in defeat, to remove ourselves when we find the situation we find frustrating and uncomfortable. The untrained mind can react with rage, or create despair, or anxiety. As mindfulness practitioners we are supposed to know better. So, what can we do? How do we practice when we get shut down? A gift from Thich Nhat Hanh is the question, Am I sure?  If we answer yes, we ask again. The purpose of asking “am I sure” is to free the mind from the stories we make about the future. This is called papanca, or mental proliferation that originates from the notion of a self-construct.

 

When we ask, “am I sure,” we pause and look deeply into our situation. We can observe the arising causes and conditions that have created what we see as a problem. We can also examine what we believe the future will be. Almost always, the future we create in our minds is not the future that actually happens. How many times have we prepared for a conversation or an interaction that unfolded in a totally different direction than we planned? Our minds want to know the future to keep us safe and protect us from all dangers, but the truth is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. As sensitive and vulnerable organisms, we want to be certain we will be safe. We want to arm ourselves with just what we need. We are all boy scouts at heart determined to “Be Prepared.” But we don’t know. That is the frightening and wonderful truth. This realization opens us up to the Buddhist idea of Don’t know mind. In this space, there is possibility, because of impermanence.

You may know this teaching from the Chinese proverb of Sāi Wēng:

Sāi Wēng lived on the border and he raised horses for a living. One day, he lost one   of  his prized horses. After hearing of the misfortune, his neighbor felt sorry for him and came to comfort him. But Sāi Wēng simply asked, “How could we know it is not a good thing for me?”

After a while, the lost horse returned and with another beautiful horse. The neighbor came over again and congratulated  Sāi Wēng on his good fortune. But Sāi Wēng simply asked, “How could we know it is not a bad thing for me?”

One day, his son went out for a ride with the new horse. He was violently thrown from the horse and broke his leg. The neighbors once again expressed their condolences to Sāi Wēng, but Sāi Wēng simply said, “How could we know it is not a good thing for me?” One year later, the Emperor’s army arrived at the village to recruit all able-bodied men to fight in the war. Because of his injury, Sāi Wēng’s son could not go off to war, and was spared from certain death.

We see in this story what looks like loss can be gain. If we can tolerate abiding in Don’t know mind, like Sāi Wēng, we can learn to relax into uncertainty. This is not what our innate neurobiology tells us and the initial encounters with uncertainty are unpleasant, but with practice we can relax this grip of needing to have it our way.

Just as we cannot see the energy building beneath the ocean until it manifests as a wave and we do not see the enormous oak quietly waiting in the acorn, we cannot know all the innumerable conditions that affect outcomes. It is beyond our comprehension. As mindful practitioners, our highest priority is to maintain the purity of our consciousness. In mindfulness, we can come home to ourselves and recognize our feelings of disappointment, our sadness or dejection, without repressing them. With gentle mindful attention, we stay with what is arising with compassionate presence. Tending to our wellbeing in the moment, we come back to what we need now. Creating stability in this moment gives us solidity to meet whatever will arise in the future. As Thay says, “The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” This is the truth that the quality of consciousness in this moment determines my next moment. This week please join me in inclusiveness, the practice of bringing friendliness to all of our emotions and thoughts and coming back home to the present moment. The amount of happiness, stability, and trust I possess right now contributes to my next moment. Am I sure? Yes!

May we all have the courage to abide calmly with uncertainty,

Celia

 

NOT-KNOWING

We do not fear that,
what we usually think of as death,
but the uncertainty, that may accompany it.
It’s the not-knowing that scares us,
because our whole, past life was built upon knowing
– to be safe from the sudden loss of our self,
even if this loss is only seemingly,
because it is not possible to lose that, what we truly are.
Every effort, as well that, what we may regard as very noble,
is ultimately an attempt to escape this uncertainty.
It is the look into this abyss, which bottom we don’t recognize,
we are afraid of,
because this look brings us in contact with that feeling,
that feels like a fall from those heaven of being borne.
All our fears always go back to this primal fear.
However, we will always fall again
– if we search for those heavens, which are coming and going.
And yet, those who think they die, maybe they are closer to the truth,
than those, who never consider themselves to be fallen from that heaven,
because their illusion is exactly proportional to the realization.
Then a miracle may happen,
as it might only happens once every 1000 Eons,
and a great sinner becomes a great saint,
and in the midst of death blossoms life,
and the world and God are no longer different from each other.

© Barbara-Paraprem, 2014