Against The Stream

You have the capacity to awaken in this lifetime.

The true Buddhist path is rare and difficult. Along the way you will be asked to face the most difficult of human emotions and challenges. The great news is that you have the capacity to awaken in this lifetime! All you need is the perseverance to train your heart/mind thoroughly. Along the way you will meet many other spiritual revolutionaries. Some will become lifelong friends on the path; many will fall by the wayside, drawn back into the matrix of greed and hatred. Those of us who commit and stay the course are the 1%ers of dharma, the forgiving few, the dharma ninja assassins, the real revolutionaries who can change the world. I hope to meet you along the way. May our paths cross soon on this journey of the heart.

From a Buddhist perspective, we all have a personality type—one of three kinds.

How that personality type comes about—whether it’s karmic (based on past lives) or conditioned (based on experiences we have in this life)—is debatable.

For now, I will simply investigate the truth of our personality tendencies and how we can diagnose ourselves and others, and ultimately how we can use the information we have about ourselves and others to create more harmony and less suffering in our lives.

Traditionally, Buddhism classifies personalities into three categories, each one based on one of the three root causes of suffering: greed, hatred, and delusion.

Most likely we all have a bit of all three tendencies—moments of greed, moments of hatred, and periods of delusion. Although it is true that all un-enlightened beings do suffer all three of these experiences, it is thought that each of us has a core operating tendency toward one or another. Some people react with desire to most situations, some with aversion, and some without noticing what’s going on. You may have noticed that Buddhism diagnoses the personality based on the negative traits, but we don’t stop there. There’s also a positive side to each of these personality types: confidence, discernment, and serenity:

• Greedy/craving/confident type

• Hating/aversive/discerning type

• Deluded/spaced-out/serene type

All of these personality types need to be met with the appropriate heart-response. People of the greedy type will need to put great effort into becoming generous and nonattached to getting more. Those of the hatred-based type will need to focus intensely on forgiveness and compassion. The delusional types will need, through mindfulness, to come into contact with their greed and hatred so that they can offer the antidotes of forgiveness and generosity as their wise heart-response.

I encourage you to diagnose yourself, if you haven’t already. I believe that such diagnosis can be a skillful tool in the process of awakening the heart.

A Shifting Perspective on Relationships

A 30 Minute Dharma Talk & Guided Meditation at Against The Stream Meditation Center

Is this heaven or is this hell?

In Buddhist cosmology it is taught that there are six different realms into which we can be born. Only two of the six—the human and animal realms—are visible to the human eye.

The full list of realms is as follows:

Heavenly realm (within which there are twenty-seven levels):

Jealous gods

Humans

Animals

Hungry ghosts

Hell realm (with only a few levels)

30 Minute Dharma Talk & Guided Meditation at Against The Stream Meditation Center

In striving to understand tonglen and other dharma practices, I think about a simile that my father used to use when teaching forgiveness or compassion. He would say that each one of our unskillful reactions to life—usually some form of clinging or aversion—is like a thin sheet of rice paper that we lay over our heart. Think about how many sheets of fear, of anger, of resentment, of judgment we lay over our heart each day! We do it constantly, until eventually our heart is buried beneath such a thick wall of paper that it becomes bulletproof. Each piece of paper in itself is not a problem; it’s just rice paper—it dissolves in water, or we can break through it with the flick of a finger. But when our habitual reactive tendencies of clinging and aversion go unchecked, the paper becomes thicker and thicker until   it becomes like armor.

All of the Brahma Vihara practices and tonglen have the ability to initiate the process of dissolving the armoring of the heart. Each time we repeat our metta phrases or breathe out compassion in tonglen, we are dissolving the rice paper; we’re getting closer and closer to our true heart’s natural compassion.

“All beings are responsible for their own actions.

Suffering or happiness is created through one’s relationship to experience, not by experience itself.

The freedom and happiness of others is dependent on their actions, not on my wishes for them.”

– Equanimity Meditation

The Buddha addresses karma in his teaching on equanimity. Although the appropriate response to the suffering of the world is compassion, says the Buddha, that response has to be balanced with wisdom. Although we can care for and want to protect each other on a physical and even emotional level, ultimately we can’t do anything to take away the internal attachment and identification with craving and aversion that creates suffering in others. In a desired state of equanimity—balance—we accept that fact: all beings have to do the work for themselves, everyone purifying his or her own karma; we can’t do it for anyone else, and no one else can do it for us. This teaching must be understood on two levels. There is a level of physical suffering that we can and should do our best to alleviate. Then there is the more subtle level of internal suffering, due to clinging and aversion, that we have no control over in others. This second level is what equanimity points toward.

30-minute guided meditation followed by a dharma talk at Against The Stream Meditation Center, Venice, CA.

I’ve always liked the Chinese Buddhists saying, “10,000 joys 10,000 sorrows”.

That there's a **** load of suffering, 10,000 sorrows, and we can get really focused on the 10,000 sorrows right? Most of us are pretty focused on what's wrong.

But there's also 10,000 joys. There's also all of this goodness, pleasure, joy and wholesome happiness; all of these healthy sources of joy.

It’s an encouragement to not forget to practice joy. Don't just always practice compassion. Also practice developing gratitude. Appreciation.

The PMA, right? Positive mental attitude. It’s a practice.

Dharma Talk & 30-minute Guided Meditation at Against The Stream Meditation Center