Tag Archives: buddha

“splitting” continued

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Here’s more of the article I excerpted from last Sunday…

Choosing Peace

By Pema Chödrön

VIA

Let’s say you’re having a conversation with someone. You’re one with the whole situation. You’re open and receptive and there and interested. Then there is a little shenpa pulling-away, a kind of uneasy feeling in the stomach—which we usually don’t notice—and then comes our big thought. We are suddenly verbalizing to ourselves, “How am I looking here? Did I just say something stupid? Am I too fat? That was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it, and I am too fat….”

Some thought or other causes us to split off, and before we know it we’re completely self-absorbed. We’re probably not even hearing the words of the person we’re conversing with, because we have retreated into a bubble of self-absorption. That’s splitting off. That’s dividing in two.

The Buddha taught about this basic split as the birth of dualism, the birth of self versus other, of me versus you. It happens moment after moment. When we start out, we are “one-with.” We have a sense of our interconnectedness, though we might not use that fancy word. We’re simply listening and there. And then, split! We pull back into our own worry or concern or even our own elation. Somehow we’re no longer together. Now it’s more about me and self, rather than them and other. By contrast, being “one-with” is neither about other nor about self. It’s just totally open, present, there.

Settling the Score

If the path of the peacemaker, of happiness, is being open and receptive and one with your experience, then settling the score is the path of making war, whereby aggression gives birth to aggression and violence gives birth to violence. Nothing is settled. Nothing is made even. But the mind of settling the score does not take that into consideration. When you are caught by that mind, because of the highly charged and ever-expanding emotionality you’re going through, you do not see what settling the score is really doing. You probably don’t even see yourself trying to settle the score.

If we started to think about and talk about and make an in-depth exploration of the various wars around the world, we would probably get very churned up. Thinking about wars can indeed get us really worked up. If we did that, we would have plenty of emotional reactivity to work with, because despite all the teachings we may have heard and all the practice we may have done, our knee-jerk reaction is to get highly activated. Before long, we start focusing on those people who caused the whole thing. We get ourselves going and then at some irrational level, we start wanting to settle the score, to get the bad guy and make him pay. But what if we could think of all of those wars and do something that would really cause peace to be the result? Where communication from the heart would be the result? Where the outcome would be more together rather than more split apart?

In a way, that would really be settling the score. That would really be getting even. But settling the score doesn’t usually mean that. It means I want my side to win and the other side to lose. They deserve to lose because of what they’ve done. The side that I want to lose can be an individual in my life or a government. It can be a type or group of people. It can be anything or anyone I point the finger at. I get quite enraged thinking about how they’re responsible for everything, so of course I want to settle the score. It’s only natural.

We all do this. But in so doing we become mired in what the Buddhist teachings refer to as samsara. We use a method to relate to our pain. We use a method to relate to the underlying groundlessness and feelings of insecurity. We feel that things are out of control, that they are definitely not going the way we want them to go. But our method to heal the anguish of things not going the way we want them to is what Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche calls pouring kerosene on the fire to put it out.

We bite the hook and escalate the emotional reactivity. We speak out and we act out. The terrorists blow up the bus and then the army comes in to settle the score. It might be better to pause and reflect on how the terrorists got to the place where they were so full of hatred that they wanted to blow up a bus of innocent people. Is the score really settled? Or is the very thing that caused the bus to be blown up in the first place now escalating? Look at this cycle in your own life and in your own experience. See if it is happening: Are you trying to settle the score?

race is a shenpa

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Excerpted from “Getting Unstuck” by Pema Chodron, from teachings on Shenpa that she attributes to her current teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

So this is a teaching on a Tibetan word – Shenpa. S-H-E-N-P-A, Shenpa.

And actually its taught about a lot in Buddhism but not quite in the style that Dzigar Kongtrul has been presenting it.

The usual translation of the work Shenpa is “attachment”. If you were to look it up in a Tibetan dictionary, you would find that the definition is attachment. But the word attachment absolutely doesn’t get at what it is, and so Dzigar Kongtrul said lets just not use that translation, its incomplete and it doesn’t touch the magnitude of shenpa and the effect that it has on us.

So, if I were translating Shenpa it would be very hard to find a word, but I am going to give you a few. One word might be “hooked”. How we get hooked. We get hooked, and then we get “stuck”. Everyone likes to hear teachings on getting stuck and how to get unstuck because it is so common to feel stuck.

Guess what: you can meditate for a long, long time, and you can still get stuck.

In terms of [the example previously described of] having scabies and the itch that goes along with that, and scratching it, shenpa is the itch and its the urge to scratch. So “urge” is another word. The urge to smoke that cigarette, the urge to overeat, have one more drink, or whatever your addiction is.

And it gets into everyday experience. Somebody says a mean word to you… and then something in you tightens. That’s the shenpa. And then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem or blaming them or anger at them or denigrating yourself, and then words or actions, maybe if you have strong addictions you just go right for your addiction to cover over that bad feeling that arose when someone said this mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you. Hooks you. Another word might not affect you, but we’re talking about when it touches that sore place. That’s a shenpa.

The fundamental root shenpa is what in buddhism is called ego, or ego-clinging. And we experience it as this tightening and self-absorption that gets very strong at that point. So the fundamental root shenpa is ego-clinging, or self-absorption, or “cocoon”*, and then the branch shenpas are all the different styles of scratching and so forth, like that.

Buddha by Octavio Ocampo

So someone criticizes you, they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child and – shenpa – almost co-arising. As soon as those words have registered – boom, its there, and its like a tightening.

Shenpa is not the thoughts. Dzigar Kongtrul made a big thing about it’s closer to an emotion, it’s pre-verbal and then it breeds thoughts really quickly, but shenpa is not the thoughts. He said it’s more like an emotion, but I think its even pre-emotion in a way, its kind of that (makes gasping sound)… so that you can feel it happening, which often, people just starting with this can – you feel it happening sometimes.

Say like at the monastery, at Gampo Abbey, people were finding someone would come sit next to them, and of course you have a kind of intimate relationship with everyone there living in community, and they can feel the shenpa just because this person sat down next to them, because they have some kind of thing going about this person, and they’re hooked.

Now if you catch it at that level, its very workable and then you have the possibility to have this enormous curiosity about this urge to do the habitual thing, to strengthen the habituation. You can feel it.

One thing about shenpa is it’s never new, it always has a familiar taste in the mouth. It has a familiar smell. It’s like when you begin to get the hang of it, you feel like this has been happening forever.

It causes you to feel the fundamental underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in a changing shifting impermanent illusory world as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet.