Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of Essence Love
272
Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of Essence Love
272eBook
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Overview
Within each of us resides a spark of unparalleled brilliance, an unlimited capacity for warmth, openness, and courage, which Rinpoche identifies as “essence love.” Timeless and imperishable, essence love is often layered over by patterns of behavior and belief that urge us to seek happiness in conditions or situations that never quite live up to their promise.
Drawing on rarely discussed teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche describes how such patterns evolve and offers a series of meditation exercises to help us unravel them and, in the process, reawaken an energy and exuberance that can not only bring lasting fulfillment to our lives but ultimately serve to enliven and inspire the entire world, as well.
With great humor, intelligence, and candor, Tsoknyi Rinpoche also details his own struggles to reconnect with essence love. Identified at an early age as the incarnation of a renowned Tibetan master and subjected to a rigorous monastic training, he ultimately renounced his vows, married, and is now the father of two daughters.
As he recounts his own efforts to strike a balance between the promptings of his heart and an obligation to preserve and protect the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche provides a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern life, and encourages each of us to rediscover the openness, fearlessness, and love that is the essence of our own life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307888228 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 457,278 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Eric Swanson is coauthor, with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, of the New York Times bestseller The Joy of Living and its follow-up volume, Joyful Wisdom. A graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, he is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction. After converting to Buddhism in 1995, he cowrote Karmapa, The Sacred Prophecy, a history of the Karma Kagyu lineage, and authored What the Lotus Said, a memoir.
Read an Excerpt
One
The Bridge
A few years ago, I visited a pair of giant skyscrapers connected by a bridge made of thick, transparent glass. I could see right through the floor to the city streets hundreds of feet below. As I took a first step onto the bridge, my muscles froze. My heart started racing and I began to sweat. I was gripped by overwhelming terror.
“This bridge can’t hold me up,” I thought. “If I try to walk across it, I’ll fall right through and die.”
Paralyzing fear is not, perhaps, the response one might expect from a guy who was raised and trained in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and teaches and counsels people around the world.
I can’t say much about other teachers’ experiences. I can only say that I’m just as likely as anyone else to stumble upon conditions that frighten, confuse, sadden, or otherwise trouble me. I’m exposed to just about any situation that any other person might experience. Yet among the many lessons I’ve learned from my own teachers, my students, my family, and my friends, I’ve come to welcome such conditions as a means of understanding that simply being alive is a marvel. People around the globe have experienced severe hardships due to war, natural disasters, financial catastrophes, and political disputes, among other things. Such trials aren’t new or specific to the era in which we live. Throughout recorded history, people have faced many of the same sorts of challenges.
Yet the courage people have shown in the face of pain is a moving example of the complex wonder of being alive. So many people have lost their homes, their children, other family members, and friends. But even in their grief and pain, they express a willingness to go on, to recover or rebuild what they can—to live, not just despairingly, day to day, but with a sense that what ever effort they expend will benefit future generations.
Waking Up
Learning to live with such courage presents us with the opportunity to see the nature of the challenges we face, the nature of ourselves, and the nature of reality in a radically different light—a process that the Buddha and the masters who followed in his footsteps likened to awakening from a dream, in which we experience things that are not quite true but that appear and feel true.
I’m sure you’ve had such experiences in your own life. Many people have told me of dreams in which they are chased by monsters, returned to homes that have many hidden rooms, or have engaged in odd situations with people familiar to them. When the alarm clock goes off, when children awaken from their own dreams and look to their parents for comfort and reassurance, when house hold animals bark, meow, or nuzzle to be fed, the dreamers are snapped awake to a somewhat different reality.
This sort of awakening may be abrupt and perhaps a bit disturbing. Thoughts, images, and feelings may linger for a while, like cobwebs waving in a breeze. If the dream was particularly intense, the cobwebs may linger longer, maybe haunting us throughout the day. We try to shake them off, and may eventually succeed in doing so.
Spinning Wheels
But even if we manage to do that, we end up trapped in another dream: the dream of conventional or everyday reality, in which we experience any number of fears and vulnerabilities that appear and feel quite solid and true, but which, upon closer examination, are neither as solid nor as true as we assume. This “waking dream” (of which ordinary dreams are also a part) is known in Sanskrit as samsara and in Tibetan as khorlo. Both terms may be understood as spinning around on a wheel that keeps turning and turning in the same direction.
Samsara is often compared to a potter’s wheel. A potter throws clay on a wheel and shapes it using his or her hands and a great deal of talent while typically continuing to spin the wheel in the same direction.
Likewise, during the course of our own lives, many of us experience a sense of motion, a sense of making something or of making something happen. Unfortunately, as it turns out, what we end up doing is recycling the same old mental and emotional habits in different forms, using the same old technique of using what ever means are available to us to continue turning our mental and emotional potter’s wheel. We keep thinking or feeling that “This time, the result is going to be different.”
However quickly we spin, however skillfully we use our resources to create something beautiful or lasting, we’re bound to experience a bit of disappointment. Our creations chip or break. Relationships fall apart. Jobs and homes are lost.
Recently I heard a quote by the great psychologist Carl Jung: “The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war.” In other words, what we wish for differs from what we’re actually thinking, feeling, and doing. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall into exhausted sleep, most of us are confronted with so many challenges: social, psychological, ecological, and economic. Given the current troubles of the world economy, the harmful effects of global climate change, the occurrence of natural disasters and epidemic illnesses, and the persistence of acts of violence by individuals and groups, the world in which we find ourselves can seem like a ticking time bomb, moments away from exploding.
Our interior lives, meanwhile, mirror the various dysfunctions of the external world. We’ve become experts at multitasking the possibilities of disaster. Our minds work like perpetual news channels, complete with big windows showing the main story of the moment, side windows showing stock and weather reports, and “crawlers” providing the latest, often sensational updates.
Or is it the other way around? Could the trauma evident on the world stage reflect a fractured internal image? A conflict between our longing for well-being, the urge to fight anyone or anything that threatens us, and the inhibitions of fear, loneliness, and despair we acquire when someone or some situation inflicts a wound upon our hearts that seems impossible to heal?
As human beings, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable position of balancing thoughts, feelings, and actions over which we can acknowledge some conscious control, and mental, emotional, and behavioral habits formed by factors beyond conscious awareness. For many of us this discomfort feels as though we’re living a double life. A shadow seems to stalk us, a self behind the personality we consciously acknowledge and present to the world. Identifying and coming to terms with this shadow, for most of us, can be an unsettling experience. But the process does have its upside. A shadow is projected by some source of light, and by recognizing and acknowledging our shadow selves we can begin to trace a path toward the light.
Slow and Steady
Discovering this light is a gradual and deeply personal process through which we begin to see the causes and consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors more brightly and vividly than we might previously have done.
As we engage in this process, a similar brightness begins to emerge in terms of our understanding of the causes and conditions through which the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others evolve. We deal directly with some of these people—our family members, our friends, our coworkers—every day. Others—business executives or politicians, for example—may not interact with us quite so closely, but their choices nevertheless affect our lives. Across the globe, for instance, people in boardrooms make decisions that have significant consequences on our ability to find or keep a job, pay our bills, or, in some cases, go to war. We don’t know them personally and they don’t know us, but their decisions have an impact on our lives.
Through some amazing breakthroughs in technology over the past few years, others produce videos, blogs, websites, and other forums of social commentary and interconnectedness that affect us in many ways—sometimes subtle and sometimes less so—inspiring awe, disgust, disenchantment, or emotional release.
Many people complain that in this era we suffer from “information overload.” There are so many ideas, so many arguments, so many details flooding the world today, they say. I don’t see this expansion in negative terms, however. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to learn and grow from this wealth of expressions and interactions.
Everything I’ve been taught, everything I’ve learned through my own life and through the experiences of teachers, students, and friends, points toward an innate capacity to learn and grow, to extend our ability to dive more deeply than we ever imagined possible into our own thoughts and feelings, and to treat the choices we and those we tend to see as “others” make with respect, courtesy, and compassionate understanding. I see it as a chance to become somewhat less judgmental, a possibility to open ourselves to perspectives with which we may not agree and toward which we may even feel some hostility.
However, if we engage in the process of opening to the possibility of understanding the role of the causes and conditions involved in our development as beings, if we engage in the process of understanding the thoughts and feelings that motivate us and those with whom we share our lives, we can begin to open our hearts.
Table of Contents
Foreword Richard Gere ix
A Note About Tibetan Words xiii
1 The Bridge 1
2 Starting Out 17
3 The Spark 41
4 Mis "I"dentification 81
5 Method 111
6 Minding the Body 123
7 The Subtle Body 133
8 Learning to Ride 144
9 The Inner Speed Limit 155
10 Minding the Mind 167
11 Inner Space 176
12 Putting It Together 193
13 Into Action 202
14 Trust 232
Glossary 239
For Further Reading 245
Acknowledgments 247
Index 249
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