Profound: A Dot in the Open Sky


We are worthy to live in this world. The Shambhala journey is a process of learning to appreciate and understand this worthiness. The training is based on the discipline of uplifting and civilizing ourselves, which is partly a reflection of the buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhism provides an idea of how to handle ourselves: body, mind, speech, and livelihood all together. The Shambhala training is also a response to suffering and pain, the misery, terror, and horror that have developed throughout what is known as the setting-sun world: a world based on the fear of death, fear of oneself, and fear of others—a world that comes with lots of warnings.

We have no idea how to actually live and lead our lives in today's society. How can we be decent human beings, dignified human beings, awake human beings? How can we conduct ourselves properly in this society, without laying trips on others or ourselves? How can we treat our children better, our husbands better, our wives better? How can we relate with our business partners better, our bosses better, our employees better? In response to those questions, the Shambhala idea of warriorship is quite practical. It is learning how to conduct our lives according to what is known as the Great Eastern Sun vision. The vision of the Great Eastern Sun is perpetually looking ahead, looking forward. Basically speaking, it is impossible not to go forward. You are always getting older—or younger. You can't hold off your death. Beyond that, every day you learn something new. You can't deny that. You may not have a particularly extraordinary vision every day. You may not make a billion dollars in a day—although sometimes such things come up as well! Nevertheless, there is always some kind of forward motion. There is no problem with going forward, but there is a difference between going forward and speeding recklessly. When you go forward, you go step-by-step. Recklessness is pushing yourself to do more than you can, or it is the result of impatience and being fearful. Rather than taking the time to prepare a nice meal, you eat bad fast food and get sick from it. Just go ahead. Just do it. Rebel—against something or other. There is no dignity.

Dignity is having consideration for others and being gentle to yourself and others. With gentleness, you go forward without recklessness, and the result is that you avoid any accidents. One analogy for that is riding a horse. If you have a good seat on the horse, good posture, and proper control of the reins, then as the horse moves forward, you and the horse are synchronized, so that the horse never bucks and throws you off. Your gait is fantastic. Walk, and everything is controlled. You sit in the saddle as if you were on a throne. You have a good relationship with the horse, and your riding is good. In the Shambhala world, when mind and body are synchronized, you never mess up anybody else's situation. Recklessness is destroying other people's state of mind as well as your own. With Great Eastern Sun vision, that is out of the question. So the Shambhala training is learning how to be gentle to ourselves and others and learning why that works better. This particular training process educates us to become very decent human beings so that we can work with domestic situations and with our emotional life properly. We can synchronize our mind and body together, and without resentment or aggression, with enormous gentleness, we treat ourselves so well. In that way, we celebrate life properly.

The Shambhala path involves individual training. You might say that there is no new message here and that you've heard these things before, which may be true. There is no new message, particularly, or new trick. But the point here is to actualize. That in itself is a new message which might be a new trick as well. People may give you lots of advice, trying to help you be good. They keep saying, How're you doing? Take it easy. Don't worry. Everything's going to be OK. But nobody knows how to make that so. Can you really take it easy? Are you really going to be OK? This training presents how to do it. It presents the real heart of the matter. By joining the basic Buddhist-oriented practice of sitting meditation with the appreciation of our lives, there is no discrepancy between dealing with ourselves and dealing with others at all. Our theme here is trust. To begin with, the notion of trust is being without suspicion. That is the idea of trust from the dictionary's point of view. When you trust somebody, you're not suspicious of them at all. Trust without suspicion strangely comes from nowhere, but we are not talking about a mystical experience. When you trust without suspicion, what are you left with? When there's no suspicion, what is your trust in anyway? You are right on the dot. Trust without suspicion.

When you are suspicious of someone or something, then you study that person or situation, and you say to yourself, Suppose this happens. Then that might happen. If that happens, then this might happen. You imagine possible scenarios, you build up your logical conclusions, and you create a plan to rid yourself of any potential danger—which prevents any form of trust. In our case, the idea of trust without suspicion involves giving up any possibilities of a warning system for danger at all. In the Shambhala context, we are talking about unconditional trust. Unconditional trust means, first of all, that your own situation is trustworthy. You are as you are. Karen Doe is a good Karen Doe. Joe Schmidt is a good Joe Schmidt, a trustworthy Joe Schmidt. You trust in your existence and in your training. You are trustworthy; therefore, you can work with others. You don't have to pollute the world or give in to any indulgence at all.

Unconditional trust: we are capable of being good, kind, gentle, and loving, either to ourselves or to others. Why so? Because we have a gap somewhere in our state of mind. You might be the most cruel and mean person in history—a terrible person—but you are capable of falling in love. There is that possibility—not even possibility, but there is that actuality already. We are capable of being kind, loving, and gentle. In the English language, usually those words—kind, loving, gentle—refer purely to ethics or to our actions alone. But here those terms refer to our fundamental state of mind. With the state of mind of kindness and gentleness, we are capable of falling in love; we are capable of being gentle; we are capable of shaking hands with someone and saying, Hello. How are you today? That little capability—how little it may be! But we have something there. We are not complete monsters. We do occasionally smile. We look at someone, and we feel good. It may be only for a short period, but we have something in ourselves, and if we cultivate that experience, that dot of goodness, that spot, then we find that we have a dot in the open sky.

That dot was not produced by anybody. It wasn't part of our education or our upbringing or our relationship with our family or our love affairs. It's not part of our love of good food or good clothing. But that very soft spot, that tinge of something, is a dot in the sky. The dot is always there; it's primordial. We didn't even inherit it. Inherited means that something is handed down by generations. But in this case, we simply have it. Therefore, it is called the primordial, unconditional dot. That dot exists in a big sky. Often, we think it is a small sky, and we think the dot is just a mishap of some kind. We think it's an accident that we have that soft spot. It didn't mean it. We can just cover it up and forget it altogether. But there is a good dot in the sky, and that very dot is primordial, unconditioned basic goodness.

The dot is also the source of basic goodness, its fuse or starting point. Out of that primordial experience, we begin to realize basic goodness. To begin with, whenever there is a dot, it is unconditional. You can't say whether it is bad or good, but it is so. Then out of that dot of unconditional goodness comes the second level of basic goodness, which is the state of mind that is willing, always willing, to do things. To begin with, you are willing to acknowledge basic goodness. The obstacles to willingness are laziness and selfishness, which are a temporary patchwork that covers up the dot. But fundamentally, underneath that, there is always willingness. You are willing to sacrifice yourself for somebody else. On a certain day, you might feel terribly uptight. Then you feel your dot. After that, you might end up saying to somebody, Hello. How are you?

That willingness is almost an automatic thing, not something that you have to crank up, but a basic human instinct that happens all the time. Habitual patterns of neurosis don't provide any real obstacles to it. The pattern of habitual neurosis is to hold back, be uptight, and maintain your thingy. But such neurosis doesn't reach very far fundamentally at all, because willingness is a natural reflex. You're driving with a friend in the middle of the night, and you look out the window of the car and see a shooting star. You think that your friend hasn't seen it, so without thinking, without hesitation, you say, Did you see that? Willingness and the dot take place at virtually the same time. The dot is the inspiration. It provides a connection, an inspiration, to being fundamentally good. Boing! You feel that you are you. Therefore, you can treat other people as you treat yourself. The dot is first thought. There's always the number zero. That's the dot. Otherwise, the rest of the numbers can't happen. That's it: the beginning of the beginning.

When you have children, you have to appreciate yourself as a mother or father and identify with being a parent. You are you, and you are a real parent, a good parent. Then you can relate with your children properly. It's quite organic. Plants, trees, and vegetables treat us that way. First they grow, and then they yield their fruit or themselves to be eaten. We cook them and make a good meal out of them. But human beings are usually more fishy: we haven't been able to yield to the fullest extent. We could actually become more like plants. First, just be—be a person—and then be a person to others. In that way, we can serve others and correct other people's problems. That kind of wanting to share, wanting to work with others, is always there.

When you are willing to relate with a situation, there is lots of room to express yourself, thoroughly and fully. When you realize that you are not frozen or completely hardened at all, that makes you more soft, vulnerable, and gentle. So when you have experienced the dot and the willingness, then gentleness arises. The opposite of gentleness is doubt and lack of humor.

Doubt takes a lot of forms. One of them is the fear that you'll hurt yourself by going forward too much. That is doubt in the Great Eastern Sun principle, thinking that if you go forward, you might get hurt. Another form of doubt is feeling that you have fundamentally misunderstood your life. You feel that you are constantly making some kind of general mistake. You feel confused and condemned. In the middle of the night, if you have insomnia, you wonder when the sun is going to shine. Your clock seems to be made of rubber: time stretches longer and longer, and the sun never shines. There could be many levels of doubt, but all of those are manifested in a long face without a smile.

Freedom from doubt is connected with humor, joy, and celebration. You trust the situation; therefore, you can afford to smile. You don't have to hold back or be uptight. In that way, trust brings gentleness, doubtlessness, and relaxation. You experience the open sky.

This is all under the heading of that fundamental or larger vision of trust. We are not talking about a little trust, here and there, but we are talking about a big trust. In that connection, I would also like to talk about trusting yourself in the practice of meditation. The discipline of meditation is designed so that everybody can become a good person. Everybody should have a regal existence. When you sit on your meditation cushion, don't hesitate: try to be regal. Synchronize mind and body and try to have good physical posture. In meditation, you should keep everything very simple. Work with everything simply and directly, keep a good posture, follow the breath, and then project your mind. Work with your breath. Go along with the breath, which is simple and ordinary. Then include your discursive thoughts in your practice, and continually go back to your breath. At the same time, try to drive yourself. Be there as much as you can—on the spot. The sitting practice is not all that arduous. Just try to relate with the earthiness and ordinariness of it.

We are talking not only about the attainment of enlightenment but about becoming good human beings and good citizens. Goodness comes from your mind. The mind relates with your body, and the body relates with your circulation, breath, posture, and temperature. Try to combine all those things together. Try to have a very good, solid sitting practice. Be on the spot as much as you can. Breath goes out and dissolves. Another breath goes out. With good head and shoulders, open chest, you sit like a warrior. A sense of individual dignity takes place.

If you have any doubt about whether you're doing the meditation practice right or wrong, it doesn't matter all that much. The main point is to have honesty within yourself. Just do what you think is best. That is called self-truth. If truth is understood by oneself, then you cannot be persecuted at all, karmically or any other way. You're doing your best, so what can go wrong? Cheer up and have a good time. You have your dot already, whether you like it or not, so you're bound to do good. That is the saving grace.