Wizzywig

Apprentice Why is there suffering?

Ngala Rig’dzin & Tsalgyür Wangmo Good question. The Buddha asked himself the same question, after witnessing the evidence of old age, sickness and death, and what emerged in his answer were the facts of the interplay of emptiness and form. In Buddhist View everything can be explained, because everything is empty; but nothing can be explained away, because it is form.

One‘s perception and experience of suffering depends on one’s karma. Karma means perception and response. You are a graphic designer, you work in WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get: that is what karma means. Also, What You Get Is What You See. Karma is a function of one’s mindstream, and mind is beginningless and endless, therefore so is karma. Karma cannot come to an end, it can only be transformed: one could possess enlightened or unenlightened karma. Struggling for happiness keeps beings in a steady state of alienation from their enlightened nature – which is already present and available without struggle. This tension of estrangement is dualism, or what is called unenlightenment. Other than this, unenlightenment does not really exist.

Beings project their sense of self-alienation onto the universe and blame it for being a place of suffering. Old age, sickness, death and natural disasters – tsunami, earthquakes, global warming, bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting caught in the crossfire – which is how one of the sons of Kyabjé Chhi’med Rig’dzin Rinpoche lost his life – these are painful bardos. Pain is suffering, to be sure, but not fundamentally ‘wrong’ in the sense that somebody needs to be blamed or responsible for pain and ought to make it illegal. Bardo is practice. If one practises with death in every moment then perhaps even the painful bardo of dying will need less explanation or ‘apology’.

Apprentice I have difficulties with practise because of my ego. I always have to think and be very conscious of my self – of what I do and what I say. However, this problem was bigger when I was not practising at all. What is there to do with this?

Lamas Turn outwards. In post-meditation practice, when you catch yourself internalising, thinking about yourself, remember to turn the flowers of the senses outwards again. Relate to phenomena more in terms of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. During meditation, this ‘turning outwards’ means, in shi-ne, finding presence of awareness not in your thoughts but in the spacious dimension of mind in which thoughts move. This is the emptiness of self. Drop the thoughts and you find yourself instantly in that space. In envisionment and mantra practice, integrate with the feeling of being Padmamsambhava. This is the transformation of the sense of self.