Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Part 2: The One Who Leaps Beyond All Fear

“I mean, everybody panics. Everybody. Things get tense. It’s human nature. You panic; I don’t care what your name is, you can’t help it. But, fuck, man, you panic on the inside. In your head, you know? You give yourself a couple of seconds, you get ahold of the situation, and you deal with it. What you don’t do is start shooting up the place and killing people.”

-Mr. Pink, Reservoir Dogs

“Work on the acceptance of everything, including non-acceptance.”

-Koten Benson, The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of All Beings

    Over the last week, I have had a couple dreams about my partner having sex with other men, and not just other men, but specific other men, men with whom her sleeping with would be painful to both her, me, or both of us.

    In Transformers fiction, there is a heroic character named Silverbolt, leader of the Autobots, and and evil Decepticon named Dirge. They are secondary characters, rarely seen too closely or developed too deeply, and they have no real connection to one another. But both of them have a relationship with fear. Dirge is known as using fear against his opponents, but his secret is he uses it to hide his own fear. Silverbolt--who turns into a plane and leads a group of robots called the Aerialbots--is afraid of heights. He keeps his fear at bay by remembering his role as a leader and his sense of responsibility towards his team.

    A recurring them in the second section of Koten’s The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings is dedicated to the exploration of fear and leaping beyond it.

     Fear happens when we feel unsafe. It wants us to run, and it convinces us that what we are running from is the thing that his making us afraid. But what we are running from is the feeling. What we are running from is fear itself. It stands between us and the object or person and distorts it so we can’t see it clearly.

    Fear travels through the same pathway our body as safety. When we feel safe, we are able to connect with ourselves, others, and the world. We listen better. We seem more. Our faces and voices soften. We are safe, and when people know we are safe, they are more likely to respond to us and us to them.

    There is appropriate fear. Coach Popovich I first heard say this. It’s okay to be afraid when there is something to be afraid of.

    Often leaping beyond fear involves recognizing the fear is in us. Leaping beyond fear does not mean banishing fear from our lives or not experiencing it. It means transcending it.

    How do we do this? How do we leap beyond all fear, and enter the mandala of our hearts? Benson tells us to “look squarely at ourselves, sit still as if looking in a mirror and not look away whatever arises in front of us.”

    It’s not always easy to look in a mirror.  More specifically, it’s not always easy to look in a mirror and see what’s there, because we’re too busy having thoughts and feelings about what we see. I like this. I want to be more like that. Has this changed? Are those lines, or grey hairs?

    It’s worth looking at ourselves and simply seeing what’s there. It may at first frighten, but it will eventually free us.

    It’s a quiet thing, looking at the shape of you. We can make eye contact with ourselves or notice the outlines, where our body ends and the world begins. We can notice the gentle sway in our bodies when we stand. We can notice the way our wrists and elbows move, how our head tilts and swivels and what our necks and shoulders do to make that possible. We can notice our chests and our stomachs. We can see hints of the gifts of our bones and muscles wrapped in skin and dusted with hairs. And when we’re finished we can let go of what we see, turn, and go about our day.

    At my old condo, which I miss very much, I had a full length mirror, and I would often dance in front of it. For a while, I did it, because I wanted to improve my dancing. Later, I just liked seeing myself. It wasn’t admiration so much as celebration, or maybe, recognition: That’s ME. I have a body. I AM a body. How wonderful!

    Fear locks me in my body. I think of words from an Arcade Fire song: “My body is a cage, that keeps me from dancing with the one I love.”

   Fear is also the way to freedom. If we don’t run from it, if we don’t let it break us, it goes on its own and in its wake is everything that we are looking for.

    “We must realize that our own muddied water is the Pure Water,” Koten says.

    Silverbolt turns to his values to overcome his fear of heights, while Dirge is a master of projective identification--getting others to feel his terror for him.

    Being in front of the mirror is not enough. We must look.

    Reservoir Dogs’ Mr. Orange tries to talk himself out of his fear in front of a mirror. “They don’t know. You’re not going to get hurt,” he tells himself. “They believe every word ‘cause you’re super cool.”

    Later in time, but earlier in the movie Mr. White stands in front of a mirror washing his face and combing his hair, while Mr. Pink talks about fear. He’s combing, he’s grooming, he’s talking…but he isn’t looking. Certainly, he isn’t seeing himself. He’s not acknowledging the muddy water.

    We need to acknowledge the muddy water, because the muddy water is the pure water. Removing it is nearly impossible, and it won’t help us. Thinking otherwise is thinking the only way to see the forest is by moving all of the trees out of the way. “Rivers exist in water,” Dogen tells us, not the other way around.

    Dirge and Silverbolt are Transformers, Robots In Disguise. The can convert their bodes from robot to vehicle. Some of them can combine with four or five other robots to form one giant robot. Their bodies can be destroyed and rebuilt, making them virtually immortal. As fictional characters in long-form entertainment they can be imagined and remained to the demands of any story. They do not age or get sick and death for them is both rare and rarely permanent. They can transform, but they can never change.

    We are made of skin, bones, muscles, and reality. We change. We change whether we like it or not, but instead of being dependent on writers, artists, and animators, we can direct the way in which we change. We cant control it, but we can influence it.

    I can`t know if famous, world-class stand-up comic is in my future, but I can show up to open mic nights and write material. I don’t know if the students will learn what we are trying to teach them, but I can present it as best I can. I don’t know how long or how well my partner and I will be together, but I can listen, show up, be as honest as possible, and try to avoid reacting in ways that make things worse. I don’t know if this piece of writing will be good or even finished, but I can write the next sentence.

    Twelve-step programs tell us we are powerless, and that is true, but powerlessness is not helplessness. Also, being powerless over many things does not mean we have no power. Success is recognizing where our power lies and exercising it effectively and wisely.

     I don’t have power over my dreams, and I have no control over my partner’s sexual choices. I also can‘t make myself not be hurt if she makes choices that cause harm to either of us. Relationships, like so many things, are fragile. We can learn to trust and have faith, or we can learn to try and control and hold on--and in doing so risk creating the very situation we are trying to avoid.

    In one sense entering the mandala means taking an unfamiliar step forward. It means moving on faith. In another sense entering the mandala is having the courage not to step forward. It is not to move at all. It is to accept that sometimes the fastest way forward on our journey is to stop.

    Freedom from fear is already inside us. So is joy, peace of mind, faith, courage, generosity…We don’t need to create this qualities or find a way to make ourselves have them. All we need to do is to notice and nurture what’s already there. Nothing needs to be forced.

    The water will carry us. Bobbing on its surface, we’ll float towards the mandala-gate that will best help us. If the fear intensifies, if the anger intensifies, if the greed or jealousy intensifies and intensifies for no discernable outside reason…this could very well be a sign that we are on the right track.

    Feeling better doesn’t always mean feeling good. It means coming to terms and forming a relationship with the uncomfortable emotions. It also means allowing the comfortable and good ones to be there whether it feels like we’ve earned them or not. It’s okay for whatever comes to come.

    Bad feelings are okay, but that doesn’t mean feeling bad is better than feeling good. We’re not seeking out discomfort for its own sake. It’s okay to feel good. It’s okay to feel bad.

    Everything is fine.

On Uji

You are not only a ‘who,’ but also a ‘when’ and a ‘where.’ Each of us marks a place in space and time, and that place is moving. Math, our minds, and our imaginations allow for negative times and distances, but only positives exist in reality. Three steps forward and three steps back always total six, never zero.

    What else can we learn about time, just from experiencing it?

     We notice it has both continuousness and continuity. In our minds we can move backwards in time or leap forward into the future, but we can only live time in its moment-to-moment flow, whether we realize that is how we are experiencing it or not. Furthermore, past moments connect to the present which connects to the future. Each moment is influenced--though never controlled--by the moment before. We can only act, speak, think, remember, feel, and set intention now; we have no control over the person we were and our only power over the person we will become is in the choices we make now.

    When answering the distress line, we were taught to focus on the immediacy of the situation: what is happening now, and what is the thing that needs to be done? What is the question that most needs asking? I started practicing this on the lines and eventually brought it into my day to day life. It was a valuable and helpful lesson. It was helpful whether I experience time as a line from past to future or an ever-unfolding nowness.. Helpful things, valuable can be helpful and valuable in many contexts. Sometimes it doesn‘t matter what‘s true, what‘s absolute, or what‘s relative. Sometimes helpful and valuable is enough.

    What is valuable about understanding time and change? How does it help to “see each thing in this entire world as a moment of time”?

    On one level, it doesn’t matter. The truth will stay true however we understand it or not. We can be kind, and we can be still, and we can find peace, whether or not we understand the workings of the universe. It’s okay to not understand and it’s also okay to be not all that interested in understanding.

    It’s just fun.

    I started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It’s  a form of martial arts that takes place primarily on the ground. Learning means discovering a new way of moving, of examining and developing a deeper relationship with gravity. Something I rarely think about and often take for granted takes on new, exciting, and undiscovered dimensions.

    The geography of time and is the same. The geometry of change. We can be points in space, but we can also be free of points. Instead, time and change flows around us. I was there and then and ten minutes later I am transformed to here and now. Where will the next ten minutes take me?

   I can never know. I can never predict with certainty the next ten minutes, ten seconds, ten years. And yet I can influence it. I set an intent to go from my basement to the library downtown--and here I am. I have exerted the only power I have over time and change and it has borne fruit.

     I woke up this morning knowing my job will end this week. I am afraid of my employment future, and I want to control it. But I have no hold over the future. The way to deal with the fears of the future and the regrets of the past is to learn to deal with now, with immediacy. This isn’t because now is a different and better place than the past or the future. It’s because now contains the past and the future; the thing I call now is already fading behind me and something else is beginning to materialize.      

         

Mandala Of the Buddha Mothers: Part 1

    Imagine a great, circular labyrinth suspended in space. There are four entrance points, one at for each of the cardinal directions: north, east, south, west; from these entrance points, our goal is to find the center. This is Koten Benson’s The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings.

    I first came across The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings in the form of a small printed booklet, transcribed from a series of talks Benson gave at Shasta Abbey in California in May 2004, at Lion’s Gate Buddhist Priory, a small monastery nestled deep in the Botanie Valley near Lytton, British Columbia.  Since then, I’ve been studying it, copying and recopying it by hand into notebooks: at home; at a bus station in Kamloops; after the kids have gone to bed while babysitting at my sister’s house; watching playoff basketball at my parents’ place, pen moving across paper leaving curves and lines of ink while the Jazz and Clippers or Spurs and Grizzlies trace patterns across the court, screening and cutting and curling and passing, accompanied by the squeak of sneakers on wood and the practiced flow of the announcers‘ voices. The booklet is short but deep, simple yet thorough. It begins with an introduction and a series of offertories, and then transitions into the main part of the book, about forty pages divided into six sections, before ending with three diagrams and a chart.

    Koten Benson is from Newfoundland, a culturally distinct part of eastern Canada. He studied in America under Jiyu Kennett, an English woman who combined her background in Western church tradition with the Buddhism she learned in Japan. She trained with the Soto Zen sect, which considers its founder a man named Dogen, who himself brought his style of Buddhism from China. The Chinese Buddhists trace their lineage to Bodhidharma, a monk who introduced Buddhism to China from his native India, where Buddhism got its start under Siddartha Gautama, Shakyamuni Buddha.

    From India to China to Japan to England to America to Canada. It’s been a journey, and as a result, The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers Refuge of all Beings has a sense of placefulness that is both blurry and precise--grounded in thousands of years of tradition and yet distinct from those traditional boxes, seamlessly a part of the Buddhist mosaic while also not quite fitting in.

    It takes time to see things in a context. It’s easier to pretend they stand alone. It feels safer. This is what this book means. This is what this movie or piece of music is worth. This is who this person is. This is the event that happened and why, and here is the beginning, middle, and end of it.

    Context comes slower, and only to those who look for it. It makes things less certain but more clear. And context has depth as well as breadth: we are shaped by the past and the present.  We‘re pulled outwards by our present circumstances, and pushed along by the rivers of the past, the momentum of the generations that preceded us. Nothing and no one stands alone.

    Yet we experience consequences alone, and we alone experience our lives. Context may shape the people and things around us, but we can still find meaning in those things and experience those people even when that context changes. Things might not mean what they did, or even what the person behind them intended them to mean, but that doesn’t make them less meaningful. It all stands on its own…and so do we.

    By the time this sentence ends, our context will have changed. Your inhale has become an exhale, or vice versa. Your eyes have moved. You’re hearing a new sound, or an old one has vanished or changed. You are experiencing a feeling or a thought. Maybe it’s about what you are reading or about something else going on in your life. You might be aware of it, or you might not have noticed it until you read these words. But it is there, and it is changing. And if you were to go back and reread that first sentence, years, months, or even only seconds later, you will find that context has changed again. It’s the same words, but it has become a new sentence--or at least, a new experience.

    Understanding this matters.

    Or rather, it matters if you want to understand. This changing continues to happen whether we understand or not, so understanding doesn’t really matter. But it’s helpful if we do.

    Helpful isn’t a word we often use much to describe truth. But we feel it when it‘s there. Helpful has a sincerity, a quiet strength. It puts a gentle hand on our shoulder and without calling attention to itself, points to something we can see clearly for ourselves now that we know where to look. Such is The Mandala of the Buddha Mothers.

    Let’s come round again to our great circle in space. It’s immense, but if you reach out, you’ll find it small enough to explore with your two hands. Do this. Feel it under your palms and fingertips. Get to know it, and then draw it in and hold it against your chest. The mandala is large, large almost beyond comprehension, but it can be contained within the vessel of your own heart.

    Find it there.

*  *  *

    Sometimes it is easier to find something in ourselves after we’ve first seen it in someone else. For me, that someone was Rod. Such people are not necessarily hard to find, but they are not necessarily easy to recognize. The qualities they’ve grown don’t advertise themselves; we have to look for them. This is a solitary journey, and yet we can’t do it alone. Rather, we can’t do it completely alone.

    We need more than teachers. We also need the community of those that walk beside us, and we need those that walk--not against us, nobody walks against us--but at cross-purposes to us. The ocean of others lifts us up and batters us from side to side and in the end, we swim alone and together.

    The times we most want to be by myself are often the times we most need others. The things I try most desperately to get from other people, are the things I can only provide myself.

    Rod is much more a people person than I am. We are different in many other ways as well. We aren’t looking for someone who is like us, or different. It’s not about having things in common. It’s not about sharing a personality or worldviews. It’s not about being like each other, and it isn’t always even about liking each other.

    Nor is it about a meeting of the minds. This connection is not about words, nor is it about roles. Yesterday, I felt it daubing at an accidental paint spill on a fifteen year old special need student’s shirt. She stretched her shirt down to make it easier for me; I daubed gently with a paper towel. That was all there was, and there was connection.

    We expect connection from our families and loved ones, and it’s there, but often they and we are too busy living our lives to notice it. We also receive helpful messages that do not help: find the right people, the right relationships. Working on and perfecting relationships takes priority over experiencing the joy in having them.

    We have intimacy with strangers as well. Both performers and audiences at comedy shows, at pro wrestling events, at burlesque performances experience this. This spring, the hockey team in my home city made the playoffs for the first time in over a decade. Friends and strangers were dressed in the same colors, in the arenas and in the bars, on the streets and in schools and dentist offices and grocery stores. During one game, the microphone failed before the national anthem. The crowd in attendance sang it together. This is intimacy. This is joy. Intimacy is simple. Connection is not complicated.

    Recovering Couples Anonymous, a twelve-step program for partners, says this:

    “Each of us is responsible for the presence or absence of intimacy between us. As soon as each of us accepts responsibility, we are ready for Step One of RCA. Step One involves taking full responsibility for the health or disease of the relationship. Each person carries 100%”

  We can contemplate this advice will all our relationships in mind, not just our committed romantic ones.

    No one can tell you what to do. Some people try anyway. Sometimes we want them to. We don’t always want to decide for ourselves. But we are deciding, even when we think we aren’t, even when we think we’re just doing what we are told or what we have to or what is expected of us.

    The mandala tells us the truth. It doesn’t tell us what to do, but it will describe what happens. This is not a prescription. We do not have to do anything we don’t want to do. We don’t have to take anyone’s advice. We can do whatever we want, and the consequences will find us. We don’t have to worry about them or try to force them to happen or not happen. They will happen anyway. Relax and choose your choice without worrying or anticipating what will come. What will come will come whether or not out we worry or anticipate. But if you are worrying or anticipating, don’t worry too much about that. What will come will still come.

    Around again we walk. We’re seeing the same mandala, but differently, because even though we’re only walking in circles around it, each circle brings us closer, and as we get closer we notice new things.

    “Splash some water on your face,” Mr. White tells Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, a plain, quietly-spoken sentence in a movie woven from flashier, louder ones.

    I know water best from pipes. I engage my wrist; there is a moment of resistance; and then the tap turns and water emerges in a sparkling stream. I like to drink straight from the faucet, feel the water on the side of my mouth.

    But water lives in other places. I see it in the mornings, fat drops on leaf blades. It swells the river a few blocks south of where I live. It gathers in clouds. It fills the oceans, though I’ve only experienced the ocean from the city shores and airplane windows. It came in through an iced up pipe in my old condo building. I couldn’t sleep from the sounds of it dripping through cracks between my window and walls. I find beads of water in bathtubs and sinks, dampening the mud in the field by my parents house. I exhale it; my partner and I fogged up the entire inside of her Mazda one summer night.

    Water is everywhere, and how often do we notice it?

    We’re another turn closer to the mandala now, but as we circle again, before we enter, we need to contemplate water. What is it? What does it do? Where do we find it in our lives? It’s such a common substance we barely notice it, but I’m asking that we notice it now, as completely and thoroughly as possible. What does it look like? How does it feel? What is the sound and smell and taste of water?

   What do we know about water? Not what we know from books or science teachers, but from what we’ve experienced, our personal relationship with it. What is our understanding of water?