Tapping the Source

When I’m home from work, time is malleable, open, a bounty. I can become longwinded. What I meant to do here was offer a little context for Pema’s laying out of the teaching of the Three Lords of Materialism ( Lalos, in Tibetan Buddhism): “the three ways that we shield ourselves from the fluid, un-pin-downable world, three strategies we use to provide ourselves with the illusion of security. This teaching encourages us to become very familiar with these strategies of ego, to see clearly how we continue to seek comfort and ease in ways that only strengthen our fears”

The First Lord – the Lord of Form

“It represents how we look to externals to give us solid ground.” Faced with unease, its that familiar list – sex, drugs, drink, shopping, sports, travel, dancing, parties, nature, TV, internet, work and career, books, having written books. Not the activities themselves, but how we cling to them, how we use them as shields, how we addict ourselves to them to escape a reoccurring pain. Pema notes: “when we become addicted to the lord of form, we are creating the causes and conditions for suffering to escalate. We can’t get any lasting satisfaction no matter how hard we try. Instead the very feelings we’re trying to escape grow stronger.” Suggesting the Stones – they tried mighty fucking hard, but in all their later photos, they look a little sad, a little worn and pathetic (or maybe a lot?), a kind of still-here tired – made simulacrum small by their own (aging) legends. Survivors, sure, connoisseurs of women and rehab, yet financing this by endlessly threshing out diminishing versions of the old hits. Disney (or maybe Miramax) caricatures of their own myth. I Know I’ve felt the same, although been paid far less for it.

Pema adds “No matter how we get trapped, our usual reaction is not to become curious about what’s happening. We do not naturally investigate the strategies of ego.” She suggests that in bodhichitta (awakened heart) practice, the radical act is simply : “to pay attention to what we do.” From this acknowledgment without judging, “we might [eventually] decide to stop hurting ourselves in the same old ways.” I would be interested to know that the Stones were doing a tour with all new material, with none of the old hits, or re-treads of same. Actually, I would be a little more interested if it was Stereolab, but whatev…

The Second Lord – the Lord of Speech

“This lord represents how we use beliefs of all kinds to give us the illusion of certainty about the nature of reality. Any of the “isms” – political, ecological, philosophical, or spiritual [or certainly aesthetic, no?] – can be misused in this way.” And “The problem isn’t with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong, how we use them to avoid the feeling of uneasiness of not knowing what is going on.” Yet underneath that uneasiness, beside it, is our natural curiosity, our instinctive energy and attention which we can apply to the trouble at hand. Our discernment and practice can guide us, we can find ground without faking it through beliefs. This was the fierce, uncompromising, warrior quality that shown through in Derrida. An insistence on avoiding the easy, the obvious, the cheap offered way out – on rather investigating these outs, subjecting them to analytic scrutiny, in the name of seeing what the fuck is going on with all these ruses of power. Like Jacques says, its not so much that we emphasize that “I deconstruct x” as it is that “I note x’s deconstruction”.

Here the sense of always already, a certain timeless karma-in-motion, a sense that we make up in medias res, that there’s nowhere else but this big middle, and that even our best intentioned explanatory stories are just that, and somewhere, somewhere, a narrator is telling them, and that narrator has their reasons… often this very unease with not-knowing is among them. “Beliefs and ideals have become just another way to put up walls.” Who hasn’t been involved in some political crisis (whether domestic or academic or activist hardly matters) and experienced this reactive tendency, no matter how progressive our aim? What else to do again but note, but read, this tendency – chart it exhaustively, compassionately, learn from it? “if we find ourselves becoming righteously indignant, that’s a sure sign that we’ve gone too far and that our ability to effect change will be hindered.” Even in our opponents, even in the pro-life arena, in the Bush White House and their Corporate backers, even in the varying terror camps, their sense of struggle, however perverted, springs, at some obscured level, from a deeply and passionately felt conviction. Even if its only in their self, and its infallibility.

The Third Lord – the Lord of Mind

“the most subtle and seductive strategy of all.” “The lord of mind comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind… These special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more.” Pema’s list of examples: LSD, sports – being “in the zone”, falling in love, spiritual practices… I’d add writing and performing. Wonderfully, I have dabbled in all of these zones addictively, or at least habitually. I have a real knack for this one. Faced with the relentless ordinary, doesn’t the extraordinary start to look sublimely good? “Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can’t integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn to get along with our neighbors.” Once the applause at the big release reading ends, its back to the empty studio, to the blank screen. Once the insight is attained, it passes away, and you are hungry again, and the baby is too. “Since it is inevitable that what goes up must come down, when we take refuge in the lord of the mind we are doomed to disappointment.” So that’s what’s been going on. Literally every book, every movie, every reading, every charged conversation or long walk home in shifting light, and I am full of ideas, inspired, jazzed. And about ten minutes later it’s a puff of smoke, and what was that idea, that scene, that secret twist? I am left with questions, with the longing, which I recognize, I identify – as me. My plight. Fucked up again.

Pema, and I, move on. With one look back:

“Each of us has a variety of habitual tactics for avoiding life as it is. In a nutshell [and I actually trust this nutshell, and its meat too], that’s the message of the three lords of materialism. The simple teaching is, it seems, everyone’s autobiography.”

I could end my life on that quote.

I like my nutshells at the end of the meal, after we’ve been lost, we digress, and they come out with the cheese. Plant it in the ground, or in yr belly, watch it seed.