SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN WHEN YOU LET GO
(From a book in progress)
“You do not have to change to awaken, you need only awaken to change.”
Adyashanti
‘Awaken to change’ is a useful thought to keep in mind as every instant of our lives change appears. We are not always aware of those changes, and, all too often, not being awake to change causes suffering. Expecting things not to change is what Buddhists know as attachment. One way to express the dilemma of our relationship to change is the quip: “Let go or be dragged.”
The dharma is not going to stop because of change. Change is the dharma, and the more awake we can be to change the less suffering there will be. Those who are awake to the change from pleasure to pain, happiness to sadness, health to sickness, youth to old age without trying to hang on to pleasure/happiness/health/youth are awake to changing. From one perspective, our practice began about 2500 years ago when Buddha decided to sit under a bodhi tree until he got it right, whatever ‘it’ was. There have been a lot of changes, suffering and awakening between Buddha’s sitting under the bodhi tree and our most recent sitting, and even that significant event more than 2000 years ago was not the beginning. It was part of the change.
From another, much closer perspective, each of our individual practices, whether began a day or fifty years ago, has been filled with change, both ignored and awakened to. All of it is part of the dharma, part of the awakening. During that time some people dropped out of the practice, others expanded theirs’ both within the sangha and on their own, though, of course, even solitary monks and nuns in the caves of remote mountains are never entirely on their own as they awaken to change.
My old friend Lito Tejada Flores has written a lovely book titled: Four Noble Truths, Almost Buddhist Poems, which ends with this:
Four Noble Truths – OK, I think I get it, but
why noble? Why not four simple truths?
They do seem pretty basic, don’t they?
Who can argue with the Buddha? Not me,
not you. Buddhism came afterward, didn’t it?
Noble came afterward. Four simple truths
that (maybe) add up to one. Pogo said it,
I think the Buddha would have agreed:
“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
We are the source of our own suffering,
our discontent. The harder we cling
to what we think we want, the worse
we feel, the harder it is to let go.
Four simple truths in one? Let go?
This is very timely for me, as I leave behind my career of the last decade, at the end of the month, and do not have a plan for what comes next. I think Dick is right when he describes wanting things to not change as a kind of attachment, and, equally, I would add that wanting a specific kind of change, namely career change and ambition, is also a kind of attachment. This post reminds me, NOT to fill my mind next month with attachment, and to let the future unfold as it will inevitably do, without my attachments.
Thank you, Dick!
Ha, just read this again. Amazing how quickly, like me, one can forget.