There is a poem about devotion in Dzogchen, which was posted last night on the simplybeing.co.uk website.
James composed this on the final night of the retreat entitled ‘Clarity and equanimity in a time of provocation’ at Emerson college in 2019. In the post there is an invitation to click if you would like to listen to James read the poem.
I invite you to take up that invitation in quite a big way. You can of course just listen to the poem which is at the beginning of the last recording however I really recommend that you continue to the end of that recording and then… Begin at the beginning : )
There is more than enough in that set of recordings to help us to take up ‘the burden of putting things right’ in a way far removed from what Hamlet does in reactivity to his horror at his own imagined situation…
What’s Hamlet got to do with this?
Well, just below the poem on the website you’ll find another post entitled:
Establishing Balance and Harmony do take a look.
In that post referring to the requirement for us respond to the turbulence in the world James references Hamlet with this quote:
The time is out of joint―O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Hamlet 1.5.188
The post goes on to invite – having taken refuge and generated bodhicitta – the creation of tsa-tsas whilst the recitation of Padmashambhava’s mantra or the Seven Line Prayer is running through your heart-mind. Any merit generated in the process is then dedicated to the relief of suffering in all the six realms.
What a beautiful, inclusive, peaceful activity… full of the highest intentions and connected with wisdom and compassion of the highest order.
This energetic engagement, linked with spaciousness ease and the truth of impermanence, inevitably changes the environment and modulates our own tensions and distortions; changing our way of being through our way of participating.
This is far removed from the prevailing deeply egoic desire to ‘tool up and mobilise in'(JL!) to improve things or being completely absorbed in and fascinated and depleted by the suffering in the world in the spotlight today. First thing to do in the morning need not be, as it is for many, check Twitter feed for developments in the drama! Fine if it would help…but it doesn’t and is not a great starting point from which to engage with the day’s complexities.
Returning to the Hamlet reference. I don’t know if you know Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet but in fact, having taken the burden of putting things right upon his shoulders, he made a right mess of things!
You see, he had watched his mother become close to another man around the time of his father’s death. Some thoughts arose around how his dad died. He put two and two thoughts together and these thoughts became certainties. With his dualistic simplistic right/wrong good/bad thinking there were bad people whose bad deeds should be exposed. He decided to expose this ‘certainty’ in publicly…giving those involved no room to manoeuvre, or explain…
That way his father’s death would be avenged as people would then know the (his) truth – which was that, that driven by desire for the ‘new man’, his mother had killed his father.
He formed his story line into a play and arranged for this drama to be acted out in front of his mother, step-father and their assembled court … this would inescapably ‘set things right’!
So we begin the play with a son’s grief and one man’s death. Then in the son’s ignorance, jealousy and aversion arise… and stewing in his own juicy thoughts…aversion becomes hatred…a force which drives him into what he sees as righteous activity.
He follows though with his idea to ‘put things right’ as he sees it, and his play begins before the assembled protagonists and the rest of the court.
However, when his play ends…guess what? Rather than there being some magical resolution of all his tension as ‘evil’ is exposed… overt madness and death is the consequence for most of the main protagonists …the play ends with bodies everywhere and misery heaped upon misery!
I once saw an unusual version of the play which suggested he could have just thought ‘well my Mum is a bit of a slapper…but anyway’ Whatever you might think about that : ) …with a more spacious perspective other thoughts were possible…and his and other lives could have moved on…
Unlike Hamlet we, happily, have the good fortune to bring whatever level of Dharma understanding we have into every situation that we encounter, with the potential to avoid fixation on a story-line with all the rigidity and judgment that goes with that.
From that different basis…rather than believing in our thoughts as veridical…what can we bring to the world in our everyday interactions?
Maybe… a peaceful heart, goodwill, wisdom, absence of judgment, openness, receptivity, tolerance, clarity…Calmness and Equanimity… Harmony and Balance!?
Maybe other qualities?
Certainly our way of being…
May we be whatever is needed!
p.s. Twenty years or so ago I came across, in the Buddhist scriptures, a story of a bird at the edge of a lake having a drink of the water. The bird noticed much increased noise and clamour, screams and agitation coming from the birds animals and other life in the nearby forest and realised that the crackling was of a huge forest fire.
Being just a small bird the options to help were limited but the bird decided to fill its beak with water and fly fast as possible to the fire and spit the water out onto the fire. Then return to the lake and repeat the process over and over again. Eventually the fire went out… the bird died of exhaustion.
I loved that bird… and then thought maybe I can do that? Maybe direct my energy to bring whatever small benefit i could into the world in the second half of this life.
Clearly the fire did not go out just from the volume of water carried in the birds beak yet that strong intention to help set up the conditions for the bird to later speed along the path to enlightenment.
The dharma offers so many methods to revise our views and release from our confusion …we are fortunate, through the practice, to be able to become freer and wiser in the choices we make over how we spend our time. Noticing the pull of old habits – unhelpful ‘thinking about’, the hunger to gather ‘information/deformation about’, the desire to have things be as our ego wishes – and hanging out there long enough without fusing for such, or any, thoughts to vanish so we can rebalance…as openness/ emptiness…the great common denominator!
