One of the skills we can develop as a meditator is to be able to pick things up, practice with them and put them down again. It can be very useful to use external prompts to help us to do this. I am sure people will remember the stories of the miners stuck down the mine in Chile or the kids stuck in the cave in Thailand. Both of these were brought to my attention and I made it a practice every day to chant and spread mettā to the people underground and their families. Someone gave me photos from the newspaper and I put them up on my shrine for my afternoon meditation. Then I would take them down until the following day. In this way I managed to pick up these events and use the pictures to focus my mind. Then I could put the whole thing down and not carry it with me the whole day. It was actually a patient on one evening shift in the hospital, many years ago when I was a student, who taught me the importance of this skill in a way I never forgot. I said to him with great enthusiasm, “if there is anything at all I can do for you this shift please let me know.” Actually there was very little I could do and he knew it. He said very firmly, “what you can do for me is to go out tonight and have a really great time.” At times when we feel sad, we can take this sadness and suffering away from the proliferating mind that will always drag us down. We can instead consciously practice a ‘soft melancholy’. This is a favourite practice of one of my best monk friends, an Italian. We think thoughts that have this quality to them, such as “this whole affair is such a shame,” with a big soft sigh. Or try an accepting thought in the same spirit, “it’s the way it is.” Melancholy can be a beautiful form of sadness, steady and clear. The softness is an antidote to the righteous anger we can feel over finding ourselves in a difficult situation, especially one that is not of our making. We can also stroke our sadness with the breath to make it soft and steady. Picking it up on the in-breath, raising it up to a finer state. Then letting go and calming the mind on the out-breath. In these ways we may replace a sadness full of suffering with a humble state of mind that has acceptance and compassion. Paradoxically, perhaps, we can then be happy to feel sad for the sake of all sentient beings – but not too sad. Now I have a health reason with the virus for keeping clean and I would have to admit – as a scruffy, leftist Englishman – that I actually appreciate feeling cleaner. I had been someone to point at the weird associations between cleanliness and right-wing attitudes, showed up in a few psychology experiments, and to struggle living with people from cleaner cultures than my own. Again it has taken a crisis for me to find a more wholesome perception and, in true Buddhist fashion, to turn this around. Clean, it seems, can feel rather refined in a good way, raising up the mind. I had noticed already the steadying effect on the mind of going through some of my more refined monk’s duties, washing the alms-bowl, for example. Now, through the regular hand-washing and domestic cleaning I can also find myself thinking of the soldier cleaning his boots before the battle, preparing for the worst, hoping for the best. My Mum tells me the whole family used to join in preparing her father for his military parades in the ‘Home Guard’ during the Second World War. She, aged only six years old, used to polish his boots and the brass buttons on his coat. They were all very proud of him. At night they would all snuggle under his big thick coat to keep warm. This is like the use of the monks robe which is also worn proudly one moment and used as a bed-sheet the next. At times of crisis resourcefulness is often an antidote to pride or attachment. We can be proud and strong, dignified, without taking on the vulnerability of conceit. And these can become qualities of the community of which we are a part, not just a personal thing. It can help us all keep our spirits up in a time of crisis. The Buddha referred to the sights of sickness and death as two ‘Heavenly Messengers’. Why on earth would heaven send us such signs as these? Why not send beautiful angels to inspire and guide us? The answer is to help us to let go. Letting go of the body is not so easy. A friend of mine who is a doctor in an intensive care department once told me a joke: there was a man hanging on to the edge of the cliff by his fingers, about to fall, and he called out in desperation, “Is there anybody up there!?” Then God appeared from behind a cloud and said to the man, “Do not be afraid! Let go and I will catch you!” There was a pause and the man replied, “Is there anybody else up there!?” That’s how difficult it can be to let go. This is why we need such messages as the sight of sickness or death to motivate us while we are still able to practice Dhamma. If we can face these messages head on and learn how to let go we find heavenly bliss and security in the open, empty mind. All we need to do is to keep the mind calm and peaceful through meditation and keep looking and looking, and the process of letting go will happen, gradually, all on its own. The situation right now can be quite scary. All of a sudden we have something dangerous in our midst that we cannot even see. We can have to change our perception of the world from a safe place into one where we must take care. Let me tell a nice friendly story that will not add to that fear but perhaps help us to see what we are up against, trying to change our perceptions from the norm. The nature of the story fits in many ways what we are facing. My mother likes to tell the story of a lady, blind from birth, who visited her primary school many years ago. She came to tell the kids about her life as a blind person and brought her guide dog. The kids were fascinated. First of all they were surprised that she was so smiling and happy, surely it must be terrible to be blind? Or, more generally, surely people who are sick must look or feel sick? The blind lady gave out certificates to the kids at the end of the little course. She held them out. Still the kids had to be reminded that they had to take these from her because she could not see them. They had to overcome their usual manners to act appropriately. These stories illustrate so well just how difficult it is to form a new perception of something we have never encountered before and then act accordingly. How we have our preconceptions to overcome first of all, then our habits. It’s not so easy. It is also the case that people if they are sick or disabled have to rely on the help of others. This is also not straightforward, the helpers can have their own feelings: The blind lady’s guide dog was very well trained. It could take her everywhere she needed to go in the local town. Yet whenever she had to take the dog to the vet, she knew she would have to ask someone else to go with her because the dog would always take her the wrong way. I offer this for your reflection Ajahn Kalyāno http://www.openthesky.co.uk At a time of stress there can be different skilful attitudes or reflections for our active mode on one hand, and for moments where we let go and rest on the other. We have a great opportunity during our active time to help out, especially if we are part of essential service provision. At this time we can find a lot of joy in simple acts of kindness and in taking care to prevent the spread of the disease. We can use a mantra like, “May you be well and happy,” to keep us going. When we have done what we can, we can rest back into a mantra such as, “I have done my best, now it’s time to rest.” And the bottom line, where we can find most peace if we reflect in the right way may be, “At the end of the day, we all have to go sometime.” We can all need someone in our lives who can manage to say this with an accepting smile. Often that is the job of the monk or nun, we train for that. As Ajahn Chah says, “If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace.” Actually the ideal is that we maintain both these attitudes, the active externally and the restive internally. We are the nurse outwardly and keep a little bit of monk or nun inside; or we are the monk or nun inside and keep a little bit of nurse outside. This will come naturally if we are training ourselves both ways. If we can thus keep our refuge during times of stress we will have it always with us. My mother told me a story today of a time when she was in a supermarket just before closing. Everyone was tired and rushing. One little boy became very upset and was lying on the floor kicking and screaming, his mother unable to console him. My mother got to the cash-out and the lady at the till looked exhausted. She said to her, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to lie on the floor and kick and scream sometimes.” The cash-out lady agreed and started to giggle. Word went down the queue. Yes it was unanimous, everybody agreed it would be nice. At a time like this I am sure many of us are going to feel like that, maybe especially those working in the hospitals. Perhaps we should set up rooms especially somewhere with nice thick mats on the floor where anyone can have a kick and a scream, and serve tea to people afterwards. The fact is that, when it comes to the body, life’s not always very fair.
My mother told me a story today. She used to have a kid in her school with Down's syndrome who needed help with things like dressing and so on. Someone always needed to hold her hand when she went out. My mother told the other kids (aged 5 to 6) that they could all be the teacher for this kid, not just my mother on her own. She put it over to them in such a skilful way that the other kids in the class got a big kick out of being able to be the teacher. They were great with this little girl. Perhaps this could be a way to get our kids happily on board at a time like this? I might have thought at one time that it would be unfair to ask a child to do such things, to take responsibility. However, since living in Asia and seeing how kids are raised there, I have had a different idea of good child-rearing than I had before. It seems to me that if kids have moments where they have to grow up, even when they are very young, then they seem to carry some of their innocent, child-like quality into their adult life. In poor parts of Asia children are often looking after a grandparent while the parents are working. People from this kind of background tend to be very natural and playful in their caring for others, especially the elderly. One thing that is particularly highlighted by the character of the coronavirus is the vulnerability of the elderly. At this time, if we are still young and strong in ourselves, it can be good to reflect that one day, if we live long enough, old age will come to us too, we will find ourselves in their shoes. If we reflect skilfully, this will cause our compassion to strengthen and we will be further moved to help and protect those at risk. Drawing closer to the elderly we can find or be reminded of the knowledge and wisdom of long experience, the power of the story. We are so used to turning to the computers these days for the answers and find ourselves flooded by abstract facts. In contrast the knowledge of the elderly is real and well-seasoned, calm and realistic. Especially at a time of crisis such wisdom can be of great benefit to us all. In a situation where the elderly are needing help this also gives them something to offer in return. We are living in a world of a massive amount of information, a world that generates statistics. We can find ourselves frightened or excited, convinced, sceptical or overwhelmed. Or all of these on the same day. Statistics can also be so impersonal. Given all this we can need to reflect to bring ourselves back to the realities behind all these numbers. Yet do we dare to do so? Actually to consider large numbers of people is recommended by the Buddha for someone contemplating death, looking for peace of mind in the face of death. There can be a good side to an impersonal view, we can take this in a good direction and calm the mind. How so? First of all there is something about large numbers that overwhelms the mind, so many! Then, if we have faith in rebirth and can consider how many lifetimes we ourselves may have been through, that all these bodies could be our bodies, this gives us a different impression. Rather than inspired by sorrow, by individual deaths we can feel disenchanted, weary with the whole process of birth and death, over and over. This perception may not sound so uplifting either! But there is, in this same perception, a refuge to faith in reincarnation rather than annihilation at the time of death. To a mind ready to let go, such a perception of the whole story could enable us to let go of the whole mass of suffering associated with the body, all at once. This is liberation. |
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