hope and fear | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

What Are Your Hopes?

February 12, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Mindfulness of Cyclic Existence”

Buddhist philosophy speaks of the emptiness, or the illusory quality, of all phenomena. If self does not exist in the way that we think it does and the only true reality is the primordial wisdom state, then phenomena cannot exist in the way we think it does either because all phenomena seem to us to be something external. That perception is born of the belief of self-nature as being separate. All phenomena are perceived as external, as inherently real. The only way that phenomena can be understood is by understanding that they are separate from self. Self ends here; other begins there. And really, that is how perception comes about if you look at the perception of your own mind. That is what your perception consists of. This is universally true. It doesn’t indicate that you are a good person or a bad person; it’s simply universally true.

Buddhist philosophy speaks of a natural awakened state, a state in which perception does not depend on division, but instead is a pure experience that is free of conceptualization, free of focus in the way that we have focus. It is a pristine and luminous state. And in that state, which, of course, is the goal in this philosophy, hope and fear have no place. Again, hope and fear are dependent upon the perception of phenomena as being separate. They are dependent on the belief of self-nature as being inherently real. In this system at least, the idea of hope and fear revolves by necessity around the idea that separation exists in such a form that self – you, I – can either have something or not have something, that happiness can be controlled by having or not having, that all the experiences that are uniquely human actually revolve around having or not having. If you think about all of the goals that we’ve had in our lives, all the things that we were taught by our parents and by our schools, they are all based on that dualistic perception. They are all wrapped around hope and fear.

This is a tremendous difficulty when one sets out to understand Buddhist philosophy. If you say to a Westerner, hope and fear are not so great, they only serve to make the mind unstable, the first thing that any red-blooded American will do is completely freak out. We do that because we were brought up with hope being a noble thing. I was born in 1949, and I remember some of the leftover consciousness that my parents had from the war—something inbred into the society or the culture at that time. Even though they were no longer directly involved in war, it was very noble to be very patriotic, to have a great deal of hope in the American way, to have a great deal of fear that the American way would be taken away. There was something from that time that I think has since been more firmly planted in our society than ever it was before, even though we were founded on revolution. Of course, there is hope and fear involved in that concept as well. At any rate, it becomes so important to us that even now in this New Age, this Aquarian Age, or whatever it is that we are in the middle of, even now a person is considered to be right-minded or to have the right attitude if no matter what life deals us, no matter what happens to us, no matter how we suffer or how sick we are or how miserable we are or how awful we feel, we rise anew every day refreshed and face the day, like a good American person. This kind of attitude is considered really, really admirable, really the way to go. In fact, it is considered that if one has this attitude that things will somehow work out. It’s not for me to judge whether that’s good or bad; I am only trying to isolate the idea so that we can look at it.

We also have the idea that we should have almost a priority list of things that we are hopeful about. Actually, in our society, if you were to walk up to an ordinary, mainstream moral majority person – now, perhaps meditators are a little bit different – but, if you walk up to any one of them and say, “What are your hopes? Come on, what are your hopes? This is America. What are your hopes?” they would give you a list of what their hopes are. If there is a person that you walk up to and say, “What are your hopes?” and they say, “Well, I’m okay. I am living from day to day. I try to remain in the moment, I try to experience each moment in its fullness, and I find that that’s enough for me. I find that if I remain mindful of the fullness of each moment and live right there and don’t really think too much about hope and fear, don’t really plan too much, but remain spontaneous…” In our culture, that person is a failure. That person is considered to be inappropriate. That person’s parents would probably not be too proud of them, and I find that in myself. When my children say I am doing just fine today and that’s all I want to think about, my American motherhood just goes “sssss.” Everything inside of me tenses up and wonders what is going to happen to my poor child. It’s so much a part of us. I am saying that we don’t even realize that.

Pulling the Threads: Hope, Fear and Stabilizing the Mind

February 11, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Mindfulness of Cyclic Existence”

The subject of this teaching is the difficulty that Westerners have in coming to grips with some of the concepts that are foundational to Buddhism. They are so foundational as to be almost invisible at times. Yet the concepts are difficult for us because we have our own concepts and philosophies that argue against these that are also so foundational that they are practically invisible. They are so much a part of the fabric of our perception and our thinking that we often don’t realize these thoughts are affecting us deeply.

What happens is that when we try to get a grip on Buddhist philosophy, or when we try to become mindful in a constant way, we find that there is difficulty. We may not understand what that difficulty is, or we may find that even without our knowing we have a very superficial understanding of Buddhist concepts, or we may find that we feel there is some superficiality about our approach to the path. Yet we can’t seem to get a grip on it. We can’t seem to understand what it is that is bothering us.

I think that this particular subject is not only of importance to Buddhists, or to those that are even thinking about becoming Buddhists, or even to those that are peripherally Buddhists, but I also think it’s a subject that bears recognition by anyone who does any meditation of any kind.

In Buddhist philosophy, a tremendous amount of thought and energy goes into making one understand how to stabilize the mind. In fact, if you could boil down Buddhist philosophy, and even Buddhist practice, the underlying goal would be how to stabilize the mind. It’s a difficult concept to understand because we as Westerners and Americans have our particular idea of what stabilizing the mind must be like. In one way, we could understand stabilizing the mind by understanding the opposite. We think of a person who is unstable as being mentally deranged or something like that. We don’t realize that most ordinary people, according to Buddhist thought, have unstable minds. We don’t realize that this is actually one of the symptoms or conditions that is prevalent in what Buddhists call samsara, or cyclic existence. But in fact this is true, and we must learn to recognize the lack of stability in our own minds.

One of the first ways in which that lack of stability is addressed is by addressing the attachment or the attraction that we have, or even the grasping that we have, toward hope and fear. This is something that you hear about again and again and again in the Buddha’s teaching: how attached we are to hope and fear, how difficult hope and fear are, and how these things lead to an unstable mind. It’s very hard for Westerners to understand. I would like to describe some of the Buddhist thought on the attachment to hope and fear, but more I would like to concentrate on why it is that Westerners have such a difficult time with this concept. If we can understand why we have such a difficult time with it, we may understand that in one way we have never really isolated the ideas of hope and fear, put them out in front of us so that we can really examine how much a part of the fabric of our minds these concepts are.

As a Westerner, there is actually an underlying – and even, I think, overt attitude – that is considered to be admirable or noble. We certainly have our particular norms, our own particular standards, our own particular attitudes that are unique to the Western world and specifically unique to Americans. Without going to the trouble of isolating all of them, I’d like to say that we have a certain picture or image that we’ve grown up with. Of course, it changes from generation to generation, but until very recently not that much. Still, there are some threads that continue generation to generation. We have our own particular image, our own particular ideal. What usually happens is if we grow up with an image or an ideal, it becomes so much a part of us, so ingrained, so woven into our particular emotional and mental and philosophical tapestry, that we don’t notice it, in the same way that you might look at a woven blanket and see a certain array of colors within the blanket. You really wouldn’t pick out the pink in there or the blue, or really isolate them in that way. In the same way, we have attitudes that are woven in. They are part of our structure. Therefore, they are never pulled out. The thread is never pulled out, never really isolated. Hope and fear certainly are in there, and our particular attitude toward hope and fear, as a Westerner, should be examined. When looked at next to the Buddhist ideas about hope and fear, we might come to some shocking awareness.

“Can Do” – Looking Deeper at Hope and Fear

January 10, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Mindfulness of Cyclic Existence”

As a Westerner, in a subtle and also in an overt way, we have a certain attitude that we should present ourselves in a certain way. In our culture, it is considered to be an excellent indication of our status, our development and our maturity, if we have a noble, very obvious and very positive sense of hope. This is normal for us. We must have a good attitude about things. We must think positively or seem to be positive.. We must think with a “can do” attitude. That’s a big thing in America. We really think like that. All our movies glorify that attitude. If you don’t believe me, check out some movies from the video store. I can probably give you some titles. Go home and look at the movies that really honor the American “can do” ideal. We have very strongly in our minds and in our culture this idea of positive-ness, that we can do what we want to do, that we should hold to certain ideals in a very enduring way, and that we should just go onward up the hill—Charge!—that kind of thing. We may not realize it, but this particular and peculiar American ideal,is very wrapped up in the concept of hope and fear.

According to Buddhist tradition, not only is this not advisable, but it also creates a certain instability to the mind. In fact, where we consider it an admirable quality, in Buddhist philosophy it is considered a symptom of imbalance, a symptom of a lack of the realization of the primordial wisdom state, a symptom, in fact, of the lack of the realization of the emptiness or the illusory quality of all phenomena.

In Buddhist philosophy we are cautioned not to engage in the two extremes of hope and fear. We are taught that hope and fear are essentially the same. In the same way that the balancing parts of a scale are part of the same apparatus, or in the same way that both sides of the coin are essentially the same coin, hope and fear are exactly the same and are based on several presuppositions. First of all, they are based on the solidity or reality of self-nature as we understand it with all of its ramifications and conceptualizations. They are also based on the belief in the solidity and reality of all phenomena, and in the belief in the separation of all phenomena. They are based on dividing all that you see—self is here and phenomena are there—the belief in separation. They are also symptomatic of the tendency to consider that happiness can be won or gotten by running after it, that happiness is an external phenomenon. We feel inside that happiness is out there. That it’s something that we can go towards, something we can grasp; or that there is something that we can manipulate to get happy.

According to Buddhist philosophy, all of these concepts are erroneous. Basically, the Buddhists teach that true enlightenment, or true realization, occurs when one realizes the primordial wisdom state. The primordial wisdom state is actually considered to be free of conceptualization of any kind. It is a state that is innately wakeful. It is wakeful, and yet it is not aware of some “thing”. So it is, if we can imagine such a thing, aware but not specifically aware. It is simply awake.

Buddhist philosophy also teaches in terms of realizing the emptiness of self-nature. Now, that sounds really strange. Every time Americans, as a materialistic society, hear “emptiness,” we get extremely nervous, because we don’t understand what that means. The emptiness of self-nature actually means that one doesn’t perceive self according to the concepts that are popular. In other words, one might perceive the primordial wisdom nature, one’s own true nature, or one might perceive self as being separate from others. In truth, the only way one can describe self is as being separate from something else, but self does not exist in that way. What Buddhist philosophy denies, or pushes aside, is the idea that self-nature exists according to the concepts that we put upon it. It does not deny pure perception. It does not deny the perception of the true nature that is one’s inherent reality. But it does deny the concepts that surround the idea of self.