Compassion and Openness

2. Regarding all dharmas as dreams:

This slogan is an expression of compassion and openness. It means that whatever you experience in your life --- pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, grossness, refinement, sophistication, crudeness, heat, cold, or whatever --- is purely memory. The actual discipline or practice of the bodhisattva tradition is to regard whatever occurs as a phantom. Nothing ever happens. But because nothing happens, everything happens. When we want to be entertained, nothing seems to happen. But in this case, although everything is just a thought in your mind, a lot of underlying percolation takes place takes place. That “nothing happens” is the experience of compassion.

TRAINING THE MIND

And

Cultivating Loving-Kindness

Chogyam Trungpa

(p. 29)

*****

It would seem that compassion would be a rather simple matter to project but it is harder than I thought. Isn’t compassion a natural human attribute? I suspect that it is more easily accessed by women because of the maternal experience and/or instinct. Is it possible for the rest of us to open up to it? Chogyam Trungpa thinks so and so do I. But, because of all that which keeps me so damned busy, it takes training. I also believe that the reason most of us shun religious discipline is because it is easy to see that dogma and ritual can make us too busy to see each other’s needs. We think that getting it right (God’s name, political beliefs, scripture, mantra, prayer or guru, etc.) is how we access whatever it is that we think is “the way”. In our minds, we dismiss and even damn those who have taken a different path than us or none at all. It is because I think of myself as “us” that separates or can unite me to others of my family, clan, clique or nation. But, it is a concept that is ultimately divisive and as detrimental to union with the Heart of Compassion as my own skin.

geo, 4,842