Lapis Magazine

Infinite Life Part II – Practice: Meditation as Mental Evolutionary Action by Robert Thurman

In  a two-part excerpt from his latest book, Infinite Life: Seven Virtues For Living Well, Robert Thurman addresses the problem of injustice in the world today from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. In the second segment, Robert Thurman argues that meditation on the state of world affairs is not passive behavior. Instead, if we want truly satisfying spiritual growth we need to turn away from our self-preoccupations and take a good look at the reality of others around us. Here the author guides us through an unflinching meditation designed to enhance our ability to see the world clearly and move closer to the practice of living justly.

Robert Thurman is professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and president of Tibet House. He is the translator of numerous works including The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and author of Inner Revolution, Circling the Sacred Mountain, Essential Tibetan Buddhism, and Worlds of Transformation.

Excerpted from Robert Thurman's new book, Infinite Life: Seven Virtues For Living Well, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (c) 2004 by Robert Thurman with permission from the Penguin Group.

Practice: Meditation as Mental Evolutionary Action
Part Two
 
Even if you’re not usually depressed, if you tend to be a cheery and upbeat person, when you look around you at your world, your life, your interconnection with others globally today, you tend to feel quite down. You are clearly blessed in your personal situation, or you wouldn’t be free to read these words and to meditate in this way. But look at most of the people in our world, not to mention all the animals. Register the killing, deprivation, violation, deception, betrayal, distraction, abuse, envy, hatred, and confusion that swirl around every being on this planet. Now begin to meditate upon all this.

As usual, first visualize yourself in your seat of good fortune on the top of the world, calm, comfortable, with your mentor heroes above and all around you in the sky, blessing you from on high. Sit yourself down on your meditation seat, your lion throne, if you wish, with its lotus, sun, and moon cushions, and then become aware of all beings in a vast field around you. In this meditative shrine-space, perform all the preliminary visualizations. Absorb blessings in the form of light, radiate light rays out to all the sensitive beings in the host around you, and equalize your attitude to all of them. Salute and praise the luminous mentor beings, and take refuge with them. Make offerings, confess your sins, rejoice in your virtues and those of others, request liberating teachings and the ongoing presence of the enlightened mentors, and dedicate all your merit to your own full enlightenment for the sake of all.

Now, transform your meditation room into the cosmic newsroom, or a situation room, like the ones in the Pentagon or at the NORAD base in Colorado—you’ve seen enough of them in War Games or other military action movies. Imagine the dozens of TV monitors surrounding you in diaphanous walls, with a huge map of the Earth superimposed and traced in light on the ceiling. Keep the sense of the mentor heroes and heroines in the luminous space above this, but focus on the Earth and the beings on the Earth. Imagine that the monitors are bringing you graphic, in-depth news reports of what is going on with every being imaginable on the planet at that very moment. Not only people being blown up by suicide bombers, as in Israel; civilians caught in cross fire by revolutionary soldiers, as in strife-torn Liberia; search and destroy governmental actions, drug wars, police suppressions, border conflicts, criminal activities, as in Colombia or Sudan; but also children starving in situations of famine and drought, in the Sahel, Bangladesh, India, China, among tribal people everywhere.

See animals dying due to deprivation of habitat, as rainforests are clear-cut; fish and coral reefs dying from pollution, global warming. Scan the people right in your home cities who are homeless, in prison for petty crimes, starving, elders eating cat food, children malnourished in urban ghettoes and rural backwaters. Even well-fed people, note how they are eating unhealthy diets, vegetables grown with chemicals or genetic manipulation, animals fed with steroids and antibiotics and female hormones, living in misery, filled with endocrine substances generated by fear, frustration, pain, and despair. Animals have emotions and therefore negative neurotransmitters permeate their flesh.

Note how prosperous people overeat, overindulge in drink and drugs, live under self-imposed high stress, get into conflicts with their loved ones by having affairs, desiring more and more pleasure and excitement, get into car wrecks, get mugged and killed by desperate criminals, attract assassination by mental cases. Look at all those with birth defects, insane, retarded, deficient in sense organs or limbs. Look at the people in the countries under various forms of overt tyranny—such as the 1.3 billion Chinese people ground under the heel of the Communist Party bureaucrats, living very sparsely while the party members and their families whiz by in sleek Mercedes limos; sent to labor camps for protesting, beaten, arrested, and tortured for seeking to practice spiritual disciplines such as qigong, trying to be a Buddhist or a Christian without following the state institutions; seeing their sons and daughters killed in infancy or forcibly aborted due to population control policies. See the members of the 55 million non-Chinese “minorities” who are basically colonialized, enslaved people who have lost their lands, their relatives, their culture and way of life and belief. Think of those many people who belong to a minority race or religion in whatever country and how they are persecuted. Visualize sniper alley in Sarajevo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and so forth. Go back in history if you want, to the Hitler Holocaust, the world wars—the many wars of the twentieth century—Stalin’s gulag archipelago, Mao’s prison provinces filled with dying people trapped in famines, slavery in Africa and America, and serfdom in Russia, the innumerable conquests and wars, the genocide of the native Americans and Africans, and Australian aborigines, the genocide of Asians under imperialism. Let what you can visualize of these horrors flood over your imagination as they pour forth from the monitors.

Look unflinchingly at all the dreadful things that are happening to all these people, and note carefully how these things connect back to you in your situation. Don’t think right away about what to do—just observe everything carefully, excruciatingly if necessary. Don’t recoil, don’t let your mind veer away in any partial explanations, whether confused or insightful. Just take it in. If you were feeling a little down when you started, you will go through a phase of feeling really down, perhaps angry, then maybe despairing. Try not to shut it off or go into denial. “Why should I pay attention to this? What can I do about it? I am just getting myself dragged into it and adding to the chaos!” Realize that just by attending to it, just by overcoming areas of denial and neglect in your mind, you are taking powerful action. You are remembering the horrors of the past. You are attending to the horrors of the present. You are anticipating the horrors of the future. Just by doing that, you are honoring those who suffer. You are laying the foundation of things that could help them. You are sending out a resonance that will subliminally nudge others to remember, attend, anticipate. You are making mental baby steps that are part of true caring.

People trying to be spiritual sometimes don’t like cultivating this kind of awareness. They think it’s useless, can’t help, just depresses people. Such an attitude is not only part of the problem, it leads to methods of spiritual development that don’t really work, just cover things up temporarily. They may palliate your symptoms for a while, but won’t heal your spiritual malaise. We humans are totally interconnected, intersensitive, naturally empathetic beings. The condition of those around you totally affects your state of experience. If all around are in agony, you will suffer. If you wall yourself off, live in denial, you will be depressed with a nagging, sinking mood. You won’t know why and will seek distractions. But the dominant mood will keep rolling over you. So the first step to overcoming your own depression is to turn away from your self-preoccupation, open the doors and windows of your life, and take a wide look around at the reality of others all around you. This is the first step in truly satisfying spiritual growth.

After an intense period of exposure to these realities, we can start to cultivate good reactions. Analyze the situation and take actions in your mind. The first good reaction is to count your blessings. This is like the classic meditation of developing awareness of the “preciousness of the human life privileged with liberty and opportunity.” You, after all, are not immediately caught in the horrors you are witnessing on your cosmic monitor array. Those so caught are there because of their evolutionary momentum; you don’t have to feel existentially guilty about it, though you should also not make this an excuse to forget about them.

I remember once a dying horse we found collapsed in the road in Almora, an Indian Himalayan town in the Uttar Pradesh state. It was a little packhorse, employed in those hills to carry heavy slate panels used for roofing houses. It had been worked to death, was lying on its side breathing heavily, oozing pus from eyes, nostrils, and mouth, with bad sores on its back and sides. A few crows were hanging around, but no vultures yet. It was in a rocky dirt path right in front of a farmhouse rented by a group of spiritual seekers, what tourists in 1971 would call a “hippy house.” We were driving on a barely better dirt road, nearby across a field, and for some reason we got out and discovered this soon-to-be horse carcass. My wife and I and our two children thought this was a cruel way to die, so we decided to take the horse in our VW bus to the garage of our rented home and call a vet. We got some villagers to help carry it across the field and load it in exchange for piling in and getting a ride up the mountain. They were laughing and making jokes about us, but willingly helped. Once we had lifted it, the horse took steps, and, propped up, staggered across the field. Once we started in, throughout the whole process, a couple of the “seekers” in the house came out and were very upset with our humanitarian efforts. “It’s just the karma of the horse, man! What are you doing! You can’t do anything about it! It’s just the custom around here! Shouldn’t interfere with karma!” And so on. They were a bit irate. I just said, “Well, it’s our karma to try to help in some way, and so it’s its karma to get helped!”

We got the horse home, put an old blanket over it, our three year old brought it water, and we went to get the vet. He came, had already heard about the situation, and after looking over the horse, told me it was too far gone. He then, to avoid problems for us, took me down to a tea shop where he found the horse’s owner. After glasses of tea all around, he scolded him, in a firm but friendly way, about how he had warned him some time back to let the horse rest and get a foreleg problem worked on before it was too late. Then he explained how I had been unhappy to find the horse in the road waiting for the leopards and vultures, and had taken it to shelter and offered to pay for a humane death injection, provided the owner would give permission, and come and get the carcass. The villagers were bemused by my involvement, but not angry. They agreed to the doctor’s conditions, we paid fifteen rupees for the shot, and they came and took the carcass away.

This all happened during the summer when the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army against Bengali civilians were at their worst; the Nixon–Kissinger–controlled U.S. was supporting Pakistan against India; China and Russia were in conflict on the Manchurian border; Kissinger was preparing to join up with China against Russia. The Indian press was full of horrendous news. I remember having a dream around that time, in which I saw my original teacher, a wise old lama from Mongolia, who sat silently looking at me while I protested strongly—“Look at these babies being impaled on bayonets! Look at these suffering beings! Where are the buddhas and bodhisattvas and fierce protectors? How can we talk of the all-pervasive Truth Body of the buddhas, their Emanation Body manifestations, as many as beings need to help them?” He said nothing, but then his body began to grow and grow, and soon it was much larger than the high Himalayan peaks that ringed our horizon at five miles’ height, reducing my sputtering self to less than flea size, impressed with an immeasurable magnitude, my railing away trailing off into inaudibility.

Years later, I remembered this dream when I heard Ram Das tell how, that very same summer, at an ashram near the Himalayan town Nainital not very far away, he asked his guru, “What about the horrors in Bengal?” The guru smiled and said to him, “Don’t you see it’s all perfect!” Ram Das then said, “Yeah! It’s perfect—but it stinks!” I was so delighted at that, as I thought, “There he touches nonduality!” This seeming paradox preserves how it can be seen as perfect from an enlightenment evolutionary wisdom point of view, while simultaneously being unbearable from the sufferer’s point of view, which that same wisdom never allows compassion to ignore.

We might think, “What’s the point of insisting ‘But it stinks!’ when there’s nothing we can do about it?” The point is that by not letting go of our empathy for the victims, by our refusal to accept that such things should happen to any being, we are doing something of critical importance! Our mind is performing an evolutionary deed, it is acting powerfully, sending out tendrils of connectedness, setting up a morphic resonance with other minds and hearts that this must not stand. This must not be. We must intervene. We must help. This morphic resonance reinforces compassion and mercy in other hearts, and a wave goes round the world. Eventually, people with power do change their policies. Perpetrators feel tired, feel disheartened about their horrific acts, begin to pull back, try to restrain the truly insensate ones, ultimately rebel against them, and these things end. It is the callousness itself, the ideologically forced, behaviorally conditioned hardening, the ignoring of the pain, the shutting off of our natural, innate human fellow-feeling, that sets up its own vicious morphic resonance and unleashes waves of violence and causes these horrors. So our not surrendering to the slightest temptation to shut off in our depths of heart, far away and seemingly totally unconnected, except by the wrenching and numbing news, is a powerful act. It is resistance. It is mental evolutionary action. It stirs other minds invisibly, and it will spur our own and others’ speech, and our own and others’ physical acts, inevitably.

After counting your blessings, your second positive reaction is to recognize the impermanence of all these conditions, remind yourself of your special new—perhaps still experimental—infinite life context and vow to stay with anyone who suffers, whether they die or not. If they do die, then stay with them in the between and in all their future lives. If they survive, then wish them well and help them in whatever way possible later in this present life.

In your daily meditations, you should always take a moment to reflect on the beings who have died that day, who are dying that minute, of natural causes or caught in wars, street conflicts, starvation, disasters. You should reach out to their souls that have just broken free from embodiment, wandering in confusion in a dreamlike state while thinking they should be normal, present in their bodies, perceiving their bodies as alien things, or familiar but wondering what happened. Think of them and use the Tibetan Book of the Dead type of address to them. Send them calming lights, sweet soothing sounds, beautiful sights, encouraging words. Urge them to recognize where they are, what a fantastic opportunity to drop the hankering, fearing, worrying, and wondering, realize they’re evolutionary beings, think of the ultimate nature of the light, its wisdom, lovingness, their unity with it; merge with it, seek its advice on how to proceed evolutionarily, how to serve self and others according to its all-permeating loving wisdom. Visualize and project for them portraits of desirable life-forms in useful life circumstances, and impel them to seek such rebirth, in attunement with the great wisdom of the light. In meditating like this, you become liberated from just focusing on the tragedy of the departed one losing her body, you accept the inevitable about it and turn to the positive opportunity of better rebirth. This resonates helpfully to the departed in fact, and she is encouraged to make the best of their dreamlike between-state situation, instead of being caught in the poisonous disappointment and anger and frustration about not being able to cling to her discarded form—emotions that can lead to a painful ghost existence, causing much harm to self and others.

Your third meditation is to investigate the causality of it all, resolve to avoid the causes of such suffering, and not try to solve the situations by adding more to negative karmic patterns. Try to see how the ten paths of evolution operate in specific ways, how someone suffers like this because of having thought or spoken or acted like that. Think of the positive turns people can and do take, how they restrain this or that reactive behavior, how they succeed in acting transcendently here and there.

Fourth, realize that there are no egocentric states you can move these people into that won’t get messed up and that there is no alternative to helping each individual wake up totally. It is very important not just to get caught in utilitarian calculation and lost in schemes about improving the world as if it were merely a linear project. Such thinking will ultimately prove exhausting and unworkable.

Fifth, analyze your personal involvement in changing anything from negative to positive. Are you invested in any companies that cause any of this? Do you buy products from any of them? Does your government, whether North American, South American, African, Australian, Asian, or European, have anything to do with these activities? If not, have you tried to get that government involved in a positive way? If so, have you tried to influence that government’s activities, changing them from negative to positive? Do you find in yourself any attitudes about how, “it’s not my business, it’s all too much, it’s just dragging myself into misery I have the good karma not to have this happening to me right now.” It is not necessary that you run out in the street to protest, though that is not at all out of the question to an aware person. It is necessary that you meditate clearly on how you should protest, become clear how what is being done by the powerful is mostly destructive, and become clear about the alternatives.

Clarity and confidence about the heart of justice is what is necessary here. This is action of the heart. Public actions of body and speech will come later. They will be effective when they come from this wise and compassionate heart of clarity. Here, the practice of confession and repentance is extremely important. Once you face your involvements, personal and collective, you must decide forcefully that you don’t want any longer to do such things or be collectively involved in them. You feel great regret that you have thought, spoken, or done such things on the individual level, or overtly or secretly agreed in your heart when others did them. Thus, repent when you did something violent to another, slammed the door on them, shouted at them, cursed them or made an ugly gesture, hated them for something, coveted their things. When the U.S. president bombed some country or did something aggressive or threatened someone, did you approve it and enjoy it? You must confess and repent and resolve no more to do such things in your mind. When someone is executed, confess and repent if you thought, “Good riddance!” as if that solved any of your problems.

Performance: Living Justly

To live justly is to begin our quest for enlightenment by coming into our true humanity. The human animal is the most other-regarding, empathetic, and imaginatively sensitive in interaction with others. Of course, humans can be just as egocentric as any other animal, and their selfish actions can be far more destructive, precisely because they have greater knowledge of and power over relationality. Living justly requires the three kinds of just activities. First, you restrain the negative actions—of your own body and speech primarily, and ultimately of your mind—focusing on not doing anything harmful or evil. Then you perform positive actions, focusing on doing good for self and others. Finally, you perform liberating actions, those that ultimately fulfill the aims of other beings by leading them toward their own freedom and enlightenment.