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About Dharma If You Dare
A Planet Dharma Podcast
Dharma Teachers Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat with to share with you the journey to a life of clarity and bliss. Join them on this podcast of excerpts of their live teachings. They share ancient wisdom updated to speak to the current and evolving paradigm of spiritual awakening in our modern age.
Meet the Speakers
Dharma Teachers Qapel (Doug Duncan) and Sensei (Catherine Pawasarat) are spiritual mentors to students internationally and at their retreat center, Clear Sky, in BC, Canada. They are lineage holders in the Namgyal Lineage, both studying under the Venerable Namgyal Rinpoche and other teachers.
Having lived internationally for many years and traveled extensively, Qapel and Sensei draw on intercultural and trans-cultural experience to broaden the range and depth of their understandings of liberation that they share with others.
Catherine Sensei
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Qapel
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Dharma if you Dare podcast
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Surrender Your Self Image: Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Unchain Yourself: The Benefits of Spiritual Awakening
The perks of becoming more conscious.
Integrate Your Iceberg: Bringing the Shadow into Consciousness
Welcome to Dharma if You Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug ‘Qapel’ Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat’s recent Riding the Dragon online course. In this talk, Doug and Catherine discussed the importance of bringing all aspects of ourselves into consciousness. Through integrating the Shadow we can access greater and greater degrees of freedom and free up huge amounts of energy. Next year’s calendar has just been released in addition to four online courses and several in-person retreats at Clear Sky Center. Over the course of the year, Doug and Catherine will also be teaching and or leading retreats in California, the United Kingdom, and Nelson British Columbia. You can learn more about next year’s offerings by visiting www.planet dharma.com and clicking on Events. And now here’s today’s recording.
Qapel: Today’s topic, as we said, is secrets we keep from ourselves. Perhaps a good metaphor for this is to think of the self, the totality of the self, as an iceberg; and as we know, the part we see of an iceberg is just the top 10%. So our egos are like the top of that iceberg, our egos are the top 10% of our total selves. And it’s that top 10% that we are enamored with, it’s that top 10% that we labor strenuously for to try to improve and fix and make better and make succeed and avoid failure. And so on.
Catherine Sensei: The face we show the world, the persona.
Q: So with an iceberg, only 10% is above the surface. The rest is below. And that’s the unconscious, the subconscious and it is also the realm of the Shadow, which is the repressed parts of our psyche.
CS: In our society, we talk a lot about things – scandals – that get uncovered and things that were hidden, and these can be important to unearth. And really the secrets we want to be most concerned with are the ones that we keep from ourselves. Because those are the ones that are going to cause us the most trouble. So if we put the majority of our attention there, then we’ll come out ahead.
Q: So we’re 90% below the conscious level Right? And therefore what is below that conscious level, below the ego level? It remains unconscious. It’s a secret. It’s hidden – even to ourselves. And when we keep it a secret from other people, it’s usually a conscious decision. It’s a conscious decision we make. I’m not going to tell Eva about the sale down at Macy’s so she can get the cheap boots so I can get there first and get them. So keeping those secrets a secret we keep from others is usually a conscious decision.
CS: That might be a wise, sometimes a wise choice. I’m not going to tell my parents that I did hallucinogens – that might be protecting them from something that they’re not ready to learn for example.
Q: We’re not going to tell the guy down the street about your bank card or your pin numbers. Your numbers are right. So we keep secrets from others. It’s usually conscious. But when we keep secrets from ourselves it’s usually unconscious. We don’t know, we’re doing it. We’re not aware. We’re keeping those secrets.
CS: So the secrets that we keep from ourselves are usually things about ourselves that are contrary to the self-image that we’re trying to conserve. So something that kind of contradicts that. And of course, we all have internal contradictions. You know, I like to really think of myself as a kind person. And so the fact that I can be a flaming bitch from hell is kind of a problem with my self-image, right? Just a tiny one.
Q: Mental and emotional primarily, but also physical secrets of course. But often their conflicting desires are conflicting drives or conflicting aspirations. Things we don’t feel are going to be acceptable. Things that we don’t feel are going to be allowed or tolerated. Either in our community, in our relationships, in our companies, or mostly, in our families. And these secrets that we keep from ourselves nevertheless are 90% of the bottom of the pyramid/iceberg. They’re still functioning. They’re still there. They’re intimately connected to that iceberg. It’s not like you can keep one part of you over here and the other part here for show. This unconscious 90% is feeding and pulling out from and putting into everything we do, every action, every day, all day long. So the argument that we’re expressing is that in order to be a fuller, more energized, more powerful, more compassionate, more loving being, we have to make the secrets we keep from ourselves conscious, we have to bring them up onto the table. We don’t necessarily have to tell everybody, as Catherine said, we don’t necessarily have to share with everybody, but we need to know what those things are.
CS: So another way of framing this is we keep secrets from ourselves because they contradict the self-image that we’re attached to. And part of the reason we’re attached to that self-image is because we’re afraid of the repercussions from people in our tribe. So right? If we’re not so concerned about keeping them secret from others, then we can have more courage a another way of saying this is that a lot of the secrets we keep from ourselves, they’re secret from ourselves because we’re so committed to keeping them secret from others. So there’s a relationship there,nd not keep them secret from ourself either.
Q: And I guess it’s also why we are so suspicious of secrets. We’re suspicious of secrets because we assume there’s something being hidden. And in fact, that’s one of the definitions of secrets: that which is hidden. But there’s another meaning of the word secret: the meaning is discretion, right? That you’re choosing to say or not say something that’s a secret. Like I’m not gonna tell Karen what my pin number is from my bank account, that’s a discretionary secret. There’s also the unacknowledged secret: that which everybody agrees not to talk about. Uncle Fred is a bit funny. Alright. Everybody agrees not to talk about that. We’ll just ignore that.
CS: So these are different types of secrets and different definitions of secrets. So you can see there are some nuances involved here. As Qapel said: hidden, discretion, unacknowledged, remote from the notice is another one, secluded: designed to elude observation. The Sesame caves. And then revealed only to the initiated.
Q: I like the one that’s designed to elude observation because that’s what they do in theater. They do all sorts of things that are designed to elude your attention so that it can affect the magic. So secret doesn’t always mean something bad. It can be a choice or decision.
CS: Yes, so it’s valuable to keep in mind when we talk about secrets, what kind of definition of secret we’re using. Because they are different and they are for different purposes and if we lump them all together it can get very confusing.
Q: We’re going to be talking mostly about the first kind of secret or the one that is hidden from ourselves tonight. But one should remember that the secret has all these different options and they’re some of them very useful. But one of the main things we should know is that in the fully awakened consciousness – people like Buddha and Jesus and uncountable others over the course of history, when they say ‘no secrets’ they’re referring to no secrets from themselves. There are no corners of their psyche that they haven’t seen and there are no corners of their psyche that they haven’t integrated. Doesn’t mean that everything is likable and everything’s nice. It’s just that they know that part’s there. So for instance, you need to know where the saint in you is. That might be as much of a secret from you as where this sinner is. But you also need to know where the sinner is. You need to know you have the sinner capability and the sinner potential and you need to know you have the saint potential and the saint capability.
CS: Now not having any secrets in the context of fully awakened beings – this is fully right. There’s a difference, a significant difference between partially awakened beings and fully awakened beings. We’re talking about fully awakened beings here. That does not mean that a fully awakened being doesn’t still have things to learn because learning, thank heavens, goes on forever. So in that sense, the secrets of the universe are still always there.
Q: And this also doesn’t mean that things are always revealed to others. There are some things that people aren’t ready for. So for instance, maybe if you were in the war and they were running out of food, you don’t tell the population you’re running out of food. It would create a huge panic. There are things that people aren’t ready to meet. So there are levels of maturity, which is what we’re going to talk about in a minute. You don’t tell Children about certain things that are for adult ears right? You have to wait for maturity to ripen. So this other aspect of secrets is learning to become more mature with yourself to what you can reveal to yourself about the forces and powers that are in your being that you don’t want to acknowledge because they seem unpleasant or they seem challenging or they might cost you love or something.
CS: If it costs you love, it wasn’t love. It won’t cost you love because if somebody really loves you, they won’t mind, they might cost a relationship, but that’s probably okay. You know if someone loves you only based on their image of you it’s probably okay if that relationship is not central.
Q: So we’re also talking about Shadow material, things that are kept in the dark. And of course, that’s why it’s called the Shadow because things in the Shadow aren’t non-existent, but they are in the dark. So we keep things in the Shadow to keep them out of the light, so people won’t see them. That’s so that maybe we won’t even see them, right? So that we won’t have to contend with these forces. But we should think of it also as kind of like a battery. If you have a lot of Shadow material or a lot of unnecessary secrets from others you’re running on half or a third of the energy that you can be running on. You can be running on much greater energy if you have the strength and confidence to meet your Shadow and to meet the nature of the secrets that you have hidden from yourself. So this is of course why we’re teaching.
CS: Among other reasons. Yeah. Get a lot of energy and are generally happier. Because when we’re spending a lot of time suppressing our shadow – basically another way of saying that is ‘living in fear’ – because our shadow elements have this funny habit of kind of popping out at really inopportune times. Have you ever noticed that sort of company parties where there’s like Christmas punch available is sort of the classic example, but they tend to pop out at other times too right? And we don’t need to live with that fear or with the repercussions, no side effects, Right? When we integrate our Shadow, we don’t have the side effects of the things that happen when our Shadow makes these untimely appearances.
***
Q: So we think they’re tied to our survival, we think they’re tied to our security. We think they’re tied to our sense of self-worth or self-being or self-identity but largely, they’re just tied to our persona. They’re tied to the way we have shown up in the world and how we show up in the world and how we think we will be accepted or not. So it’s really largely about security. However, the problem is that if your monsters or your Shadows or your secrets are keeping your energy down, you don’t have much security. It’s actually contraindicated that in order to have greater strength in your being, you need to take the risks necessary to bring these things to the light so that you can loosen the energy to manifest in other ways and manifest in other styles. Which will bring you more success in your work, will bring you more success in your relationship, will bring you more success with other people because they’ll feel that. Because the thing about it is that since we’re all icebergs, we all know that we’re bumping into 90% of a person. Because our 90% of our person is bumping into their 90% of the person, so it’s there anyway. So when you have somebody who’s, for argument’s sake, moved their line down from 10% to like 85%…. (CS: Sea level lowering) Q: Yes, or Iceberg raising… Then all of a sudden we feel much more secure. We feel much more comfortable, feel much safer and we feel much more trusting. Not because they’re better people, not because they’re more interesting people even, but simply because we have that intuitive sense that there isn’t 85% sitting below the surface waiting for the storm to flip it.
CS: No monsters in the closet.
***
CS: Okay, So the aspects that our tribe finds unacceptable,the aspects of our being that our tribe finds unacceptable, or that we think our tribe finds unacceptable, are what gets repressed. However, at the same time, these aspects unconsciously drive our behavior. So we hide them, but then we give them the keys to the car – and they drive. It’s a kind of unfortunate combination.
Q: It’s like driving wall shadowed. Driving under the influence of the Shadow. Our Shadow finds amazing ways to work itself out or get out into the light. So it tends to do it through our activities and it tends to do it through activities which are a bit of our obsessions. So if we have something that is an obsession or that we’re really keyed on, the Shadow tends to surface there a bit more than it does in casual areas.
So if you want to go looking for your shadow in certain ways, find the things that you’re most passionate about, you’re most engaged with and look at the far side of it. Look at the flip side of it. What’s happening on the other side of your passion for, say sports? Say you have a passion for sports, so that’s fine, that’s a wonderful thing. That’s a positive thing. It’s a great thing. So, you have that passion, right? And there’s the ego, right? I’m a sports fan, I’m a sports person. So what do you think might be the Shadow side of sports in the sense of like competitive sport, say? Maybe you’re not paying attention to the body because you’re over pushing it. So there’s a kind of aggression against the body, especially for high-level athletes because they have such a short career. Shadow side of that might be aggression against the body.
CS: Do more, do more, do more. Push the body.
Q: Reach for the highest heights. So what’s probably the Shadow if you’re, say, a businesswoman striving to be the best she can be – the alpha female at the top of her company? What do you think the shadow might be? Fear of failing, fear of not being good enough. So we compensate through our impassioned activities. Our more neutral ones, not so much, because we’re not as invested, our ego is not so invested in it. So if I like playing bridge, but I’m not invested in it, if I have a lousy bridge play, I’m not going to worry too much. But if I’m a professional bridge player and I make a lousy bridge play, it’s going to cost.
CS: So the shadow is hiding our fears and our anxieties and our insecurities and then usually overcompensating for them, as Qapel said, with whatever the opposite is. Often a kind of correctness or, I guess in the case of a professional athlete, like, “Oh, are you injured?” “No, I’m fine, I’m fine.” Would be that kind of ‘covering it with correctness’.
Q: Also tied to the security because of their money, getting paid for it.
CS: Yes, for sure. So these are all ways of fitting in and belonging and feeling more secure and more stable.
Host: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on Apple podcasts to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. Today’s episode featured a recording from Riding the Dragon, an online course based on the ideas in Doug and Catherine’s best-selling book, Wasteland to Pureland. You can learn about upcoming online courses by visiting www.planetdharma.com/events and clicking on ‘online courses’. You can learn more about Wasteland to Pureland, download a free chapter or purchase your own copy by visiting www.planetdhama.com/pureland. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Become a Work of Art: Understanding the 6 Paramis
An introduction to the Paramis
Podcast Transcription:
HOST: Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawaserat`s Facebook livestream series: Enlightenup. In this public talk Doug and Catherine introduced the paramis – six aspects of consciousness that have been taught in the Buddha Dharma for more than 2,000 years and allow practitioners to become their own inner and outer works of art. There are qualities that we can grow to feel internally grounded and to act from a positive wholesome place in our relationships with others. To download a free paramis reference sheet and to access more resources on this topic, visit planetdharma.com/paramis. And now here’s today’s recording.
CREATE YOURSELF AS A PIECE OF ART
Q: Our teacher, Namgyal Rinpoche, said “it’s better to be a work of art than to make a work of art”. While we love art, a work of art is a creative process and it links intuition with skill and imagination. Making a work of art is great.
CS: I worked with a spiritual organization in Japan, basically a Japanese shamanistic organization and they said that the way that humans connect with the divine is through art. That’s our pathway between those two realms and that has always really resonated for me.
Q: It’s a visible product that uses paint or music or movement or it’s something that you see outside and in a form. Becoming a work of art is the same process inside, internally, but you don’t see it, at least not directly. It’s only reflected by some feeling you have about being around that person. So maybe Mother Teresa or Saint Francis or the Dalai Lama or just Joe your carpenter down on the corner, he may be perfecting that work of art inside. So they share the same properties, the same skill and imagination and intuition that you go to create a work of art externally. You also use those same powers, those same principles, to create the work inside, to create yourself as a piece of artwork.
CS: It produces the same kind of inspiration and attraction, a feeling of… maybe empowerment.
Q: So you hope that an external piece of work is beautiful. That it is inspiring, that it enriches your environment. Hopefully, not everything is dystopian anymore, but we certainly have a lot of dystopian art, don’t we? But hopefully, also on the inside. Right? By creating yourself as a piece of art, a work of art, then you have the same feeling that you would for an external piece of art that you enjoy. Maybe you’ve looked around here before you came and you saw a work of art you like. Has anybody seen anything they like? Right. So if you think, “what is it that I like about that piece of art? Is it its balance, harmony, color, vibrancy?” Hopefully, that same feeling is what happens when you produce yourself as a work of art. You have that same feeling on the inside.
THE KEY INGREDIENT IS INTENTIONAL MINDFULNESS
CS: So whereas an artist uses different media like paint or textiles or musical notes, to become a work of art the key ingredient is some kind of mindfulness or awareness, which we like to say is mindfulness of being mindful.
Q: Sometimes we use the term attentive mindfulness or intentional mindfulness. I can be mindful that Alex has got her legs crossed but I may not be mindful of the fact that I’m aware of her legs being crossed. Does that make sense? So where meditation separates from mindfulness is just there. Mindfulness is you’re aware that Chris has a cowboy hat on. But meditating on the fact that he has a cowboy hat on, it contextualizes it, with all of what Chris is. It brings it into a higher resonance, a higher vibrational energy. So when you’re around someone who is a work of art, there are four things that are probably happening for you or if you are in a state of being a work of art, there are four powers that you have that are very effective in terms of all of your life.
CS: And what powers would those be?
Q: One is magnetizing, it is attractiveness. People are attracted to people in good states. It just feels good. It’s also pacifying, not in a negative way, like pacifying the masses with drugs, it’s pacifying in the sense of creating a space of calm. I remember I was in the Bahamas waiting for my teacher to show up for a sailboat trip that never happened, but that’s another story. And so my friends and I basically went down to the local bar every night and shot pool and drank beer with the local Bahamians. And it was a rowdy place, I mean there weren’t any tourists, there was just us and the locals and we’re shooting pool and cigarettes and drinking and playing and having fun. Most of us are in our twenties or late twenties and early thirties. And our teacher finally showed up and we didn’t know he had arrived yet, right. And he walked into the bar and he simply walked from the front door to the back end of the bar, sat down and ordered a coke. And you should have seen the effect in this room, right? He didn’t say hi to anybody in particular. He nodded to us because we knew him, but he didn’t get involved. He just went and sat at the end of the bar and had a coke, and the entire bar straightened up. You`d think the cops had walked in.
CS: Except that it felt good. It didn`t feel like fear.
Q: Everybody all of a sudden got a little bit straighter and a little bit more awake and a little bit calmer but still had fun. But that kind of pacification of the disruptions in your being. The peacefulness. So when you’re around somebody who’s in a good state, you automatically get pacified, in a good sense, right, just by being in their presence.
CS: And then the fourth is that any negativities are destroyed very easily. So it`s destruction as a positive force. So for example, you were saying at dinner, somebody had a kind of petty gripe or commentary and you said, “yeah, but maybe not now”, and it very instantly vanished. No defilements allowed.
Q: So you know when you’re not feeling so hot or you’re not feeling so good, you get picky, you get a bit crabby, you get a bit negative.
CS: Probably, nobody here.
THE POWER OF THE POSITIVE STATE – A BALM
Q: That doesn’t happen. I know that doesn’t happen to any of you, but out there in the world with those other people. The power of the positive state is basically a kind of a balm to the negatives, right, it tends to just wipe them out.
So, I remember once I was really angry at my teacher because, I don’t know, because he had somehow interrupted my ego construct in some fashion, right? And he walked in the room and the whole thing just dissolved because he just looked at me and laughed. And he just smiled and said, “yep well, there you go”. So, why hold it? Can you think of a good reason to hold anger? One good reason – you’ve been done wrong. You’ve been hurt. Anybody has been done wrong?
CS: The only good reason I can think of is to write a really good blues song, about how I’ve been done wrong.
Q: ….my babe. Anyway, being a work of art doesn’t only do that, it also leads you into a state of absorption. So when an artist or a musician or whatever, a dancer, anybody in the field of art, of course it could apply to a craft too, it could be a carpenter or electrician, you could even do it as a chartered accountant or a lawyer. You can be in that state very easily. But what does it take to be a good artist? Passion, vulnerability, being in the moment, practice, all those things are good, but you’re not going to be a good artist if you don’t practice. And what do you have to practice, if you’re an artist? Basics! You`ve got to do art, you`ve got to practice, you`ve got to do it, you`ve got to work it.
TO BE A WORK OF ART YOU HAVE TO WORK IT
So becoming a work of art is no different. If you think you could go out and paint a Rembrandt or Modigliani or my favorite guy, the Russian, Kandinsky, thank you. You want to be a Kandinsky or something, you`ve got to work it, you`ve got to work it. So becoming a work of art is no different. How many people would like to be a work of art? I mean on the inside…beautiful…. and how many people think it should just happen like that? Just me?
But the reality of the matter is you`ve got to work it. And so that’s what this class is about. How do you work it? How do you transform the average ordinary paint-by-numbers kind of mind state into a creative work of art kind of mind state?
THE FIRST TOOL IS MINDFULNESS – A SENSE OF CONNECTION
So we started out with mindfulness as your first tool, right? Your first tool is mindfulness, you`ve got to be aware. But this mindfulness immediately brings you into a sense of connection. So that’s the very first thing that you want to look at when you think about mindfulness is, do you feel connected? Do you feel like you’re with what’s going on? Now if you’re in an emotional state or if your mind is confused or there’s trouble in your life, that’s not going to be there right? You’re going to feel unconnected or disconnected. So we need to build the connection.
CS: Together with a feeling of connection is a feeling of love. That’s basically just a good feeling that doesn’t need to be a love attached to a person or even an object. But it’s just a great feeling of well-being that also comes along with a sense of joy. This is one of my favorite things to do is to describe the nuances between the different positive feelings. Because it’s something that we don’t really give a lot of attention to. We can probably much more easily describe the nuances between different negative feelings like depression or rejection. Or… I can’t think of any other bad feelings, but I know there are some. But we don’t often think about the subtle differences between joy and love and well-being and bliss. And it’s a pretty fun study. You can imagine.
Q: That sense of connection brings us a sense of also being more tolerant because when you’re more connected, when you feel connected, you feel more tolerant.
CS: That’s right.
Q: It’s not that you’re oblivious to people’s problems or faults or difficulties, but you kind of have more empathy for them. You have a little bit more sympathy for what they are going through and how they maybe got there.
CS: I think too, it’s a feeling of enrichment. We have a kind of well-being to spare so we feel like we can cut other people some slack.
UNDERNEATH OUR EGO OUR STRUCTURES ARE CONNECTED
Q: And it’s also a form of sharing, right? Because no matter what you do, you’re sharing. So the minute you show up, the minute you get out of your bedroom you’re starting to share, right? You’re sharing every minute of every day in some fashion, either quietly in your car or in your office place or in your place of work. You’re sharing the state you’re in. You may not think about it because we tend to think we’re isolated inside our states, that our states don’t connect with others` states. But there’s something called mirror neurons and mirror neurons allow me to empathize or sympathize or intuit what you’re going through or what state you’re in, right? And this is how we know when someone’s in a good state because our mirror neurons are going – tingle tingle tingle, and when they’re in a bad state, our mirror neurons are going – udah, udah, udah! Can you hear them? Yeah. So the sharing is automatic. As human beings we’re like bamboo or mushrooms or what’s the other one?
CS: Aspens.
Q: Underneath our egos, our structures are connected to each other as a species like those other plants. We`re connected. So this is all part of mindfulness.
CS: So, to become a work of art, we need to combine both the interior awareness, the meditation or meditative awareness, together with the action in the world. It really needs to be both. And then there’s a kind of generator, they`re reinforcing one another.
OUT IN THE WORLD OUR TOOL IS THE PARAMIS
Q: So when we work on the interior qualities, we call it meditation, but when we’re in the world we call them paramis. This is a Sanskrit term, which we will talk about. You need a technology, a methodology, ways of working these things in order to bring yourself into a state when you work with other people because that’s where most of us live most of the time, right? It is with other people. When we’re alone, we’re more in a meditative state.
So you work in the meditative state to clear through your own particular illusions about having problems. How many people think they have problems? Yes, you don’t, I’m sorry. You don’t. Your conditioning has problems, your programming has problems, your family structure might have problems, and your relationships might have problems, but you yourself do not have a problem. Because fundamentally if you go looking for the thing that has a problem, you’re not going to find it. What are you going to find? The problem. You won’t find a `you` to have that problem. So we’re going to leave that aside. That’s kind of the meditation-cushion understanding. But, on the other side of the equation is the world. In the action world, we have these other technologies or these other tools that we call the paramis.
CS: So paramis is usually translated into English as the perfections or the virtues and something that’s really important to keep in mind with Buddhism in English is that most of these words were translated by very early Christian monasteries around the turn of the century, the 1900s.
So the words are a little like `yeah, kind of, but not really`. They are virtuous, we`ll get into that, but it’s very different from Judeo Christian… you’re not going to go to hell if you don’t do it right and you’re not going to be a bad person. But if you do do them, you will probably feel better and the people around you will probably feel better. And they’re called perfections, not in the sense of getting a 10 out of 10 in your ice skating routine, but in terms of completing an understanding. So it’s more perfection in the sense of an integrated or holistic understanding.
PERFECTION AS AN INTEGRATED UNDERSTANDING
Q: Everybody has a different smile and each person`s smile is perfect. It’s not like you have the perfect smile. We think perfect, as Catherine was saying, `oh there’s a perfect smile` but each person’s smile is perfect in and of itself. That makes sense, right? So that when we talk about perfection, that’s what we mean. We mean that your state is perfect. You’re in a clear, relaxed, calm, blissful, happy state. And you’re not carrying any problems or hurt or worry or shame or guilt or whatever you do, that comes up with your life when you associate it with the external object. Or you don’t feel bad about yourself because you did or did not accomplish something, because that’s not in the picture at the moment. All that’s in the picture at the moment is that you’re in a calm, clear, relaxed, good state. So that’s what we mean by perfect. It doesn’t mean there isn’t more to learn, doesn’t mean that you’re driving at 150 mph on the Cowboy Highway and getting stopped by the cops, and the cops are going to let you go because you’re perfect. No, they’re going to give you a ticket. Unfortunately, they don’t recognize the wonderful state, and they write it out.
CS: So `para` in parami means beyond. And it’s the same as in parapsychology. And `mi` is the root for friendship, like amistad or ami, so it’s beyond friendship, beyond kindness or that connection again.
Q: So it’s actually quite easy in essence to be in a state of perfection from the point of view of how we’re talking about it. All you have to do is drop everything, and you should start with dropping all your hurts and all your identities and all your clingings and all your attachments and all your loves and all your hates and all your friends and all your enemies and all your ambitions and all your goals and all your directions.
OUR NATURAL STATE, A GOOD KIND OF EMPTINESS
CS: This is a really natural state that we’ve all experienced and basically, we enter it when we’re relaxed. So if you think back through your life you have memories of beautiful moments that were just kind of perfect and that’s what this state is. And that’s our connection with what we call shunyata, in Sanskrit. In English, it’s translated as emptiness, which again, is kind of a challenging translation because it’s a good kind of emptiness. It’s just spaciousness. It’s not emotional vacuity. But if you think of those times when you were maybe watching a sunset or what happens a lot in nature. Being in nature helps our ego take a break. Also holding a baby, maybe your first baby, your ego usually takes a break and you just have this amazing feeling of space, which is connection and love, which are naturally present.
Q: So where do you have most of your epiphanies? Typically in nature, and typically when you’re alone. Because you don’t need your ego when you’re in nature and you don’t need your ego when you’re alone. You only need your ego when you’re involved with other people.
CS: Or with babies and animals, because they don`t have egos either.
Q: Especially kitties. Have you ever checked out the Facebook thing with cats? If we want to sell meditations, we just hold up the cat. Then we have 150 people show up. And the reason for that is because your ego is not present. So when it comes to your story and when you’re not in parami, when you’re not in a good state, it’s all about your story, isn`t it? `What am I going to do? What should I do? What about my problems?
CS: `I can’t believe they said that.`
Q: But when you’re in nature there’s no room, there’s no need for all that. You can let it go. Now, maybe you can’t let it go because you’ve had a bad day at work. But in general, since nature has no ego, you don’t need yours. So again, we’re back to meditation because in nature you’re almost immediately in the meditative environment. All you have to deal with is your babbling mind. So this idea of parami isn’t really so much about the meditative side. It’s about when you’re with other people, when you’re engaged with other people, how do you work this perfection?
THE SIX PARAMIS ARE THE QUALITIES WE DEVELOP
CS: There are six perfections and basically, these are the qualities that we develop in order to be able to access this sense of spaciousness at will. You know, you want to be in that sense of spaciousness. `It’s not happening. It’s not happening. Damn!` How do we make it happen? Well, we develop these six qualities. We’re going to list them.
DANA – SUPPORTIVENESS
Q: Dana, which means basically generosity. We’re giving you the Sanskrit first, just so you know, we didn’t make it up last week. So dana is generosity. I like the word supportiveness. How can I support you? How can I support myself? Is it supportive to be in a bad state? Does that support you? So you can be generous to yourself, right, by being in a good state. You can be supportive of someone else. That’s a form of generosity.
CS: These are great challenges because sometimes you know, somebody’s really bugging me and really kind of getting on my back. How can I be generous in this situation? And it’s a challenge. It can be kind of fun that way.
Q: The other thing we should mention about this is that these are not things that you just learn and then you’re done. These are things you`ve got to practice and you`ve got to practice them over and over and over again, like musical scales. And they’re also meant to be meditations, in the sense that it’s not like you’ve got one take on the generosity and you’re done. Is it generous to tell people the truth all the time? Is it generous to lie to people all the time? Is it generous to tell people what they want to hear? Or is it more generous to tell them what will help them be more perfect works of art? What’s generosity? It’s a complicated question. And if you get upset, by the way, you know you’re not being generous. That’s a hard one. `I have a right to be upset by this.` When you’re upset, don’t you figure you have the right to be upset? But are you being generous to yourself by being upset? And are you being generous to them for either their failings as humans or for their effort to help you along with something, and you didn’t like? I mean, it’s a complicated thing. This is why it’s work, this is why you`ve got to practice. And this is why it’s a meditation.
SILA – INTEGRITY
CS: Okay, the second one up is sila, sometimes translated as ethics. Again, it’s tricky because we come loaded with these Judeo Christian interpretations already. And ethics is not inaccurate but it’s different from what we normally think of as ethics. What it really translates to is coolness. So think of sila as being unruffled. If your conscience is clear, somebody can say, `you did this, you did this`, but if your conscience is clear, you take it in stride. So that’s like sila.
Q: I like the word integrity for ethics. Integrity doesn’t mean you’re good. Integrity doesn’t mean you’re bad. Integrity means you’re consistent with your behavior, when you’re in a good state and a bad state. If your behavior and your state are consistent, whether you’re happy or sad then your behavior probably has integrity. Anyway, these are ways of looking.
KSANTI – PATIENCE
The next one up is ksanti, translated typically as patience.
CS: I used to think patience was just for slow people. I really did think that. Patience is really about understanding that things have their own time and being able to accept that.
Q: Have you ever waited under an apple tree for the apple to ripen? Just sitting there waiting for the apple, and tapping your foot. Like waiting in a traffic jam, just waiting for the cars to move. We’ll move on to the fourth one.
CS: Viria, which is energy, not the kind that comes from a coffee shop or a Redbull or a pill. The universe doesn’t run out of energy. And so the human organism doesn’t necessarily need to either.
Q: Ever come home from work and maybe you’re doing a course. Maybe you don’t do this anymore because you’re all now older. But maybe you came home from work and you needed to upgrade your credentials. So you try to study accounting 101 to get a promotion. You come home from work after a hard day. What do you think? Ready to study accounting after eight hours at work? And then your friend calls up and says, `hey, you want to go to the bar and go dancing?` `Oh, yes!` What changes between those two? One you’re too tired for and the other you’re ready for. So what’s the flip upon which that switch works? Interest. So another word for energy is interest. When you’re interested you have energy. When you’re not interested, you don’t, and you can’t manufacture it. So the number one principle of the teaching, once we get your attention, is to find out what interests you and then sell it to you. We’re giving you all the formulas, right?
The Buddha did it all the time. The Buddha gave meditations according to people’s interests. A farmer, he gave a meditation on the plowed field – just meditate on the plowed field. And that guy became awakened just meditating on his plowed field.
CS: Something you’re already interested in.
DJANA – ABSORPTION
The next parami is djana, which is meditation, also absorption.
That is when you get into a meditative state, doing something. It might be playing music or dancing or it might be at your computer.
Q: And that’s why it’s connected to interest because it’s really hard to get absorbed in something if you’re not interested in it. If you don’t have the energy for it. If you don’t have the patience to let it find you, as it were. If you don’t have the generosity to give yourself the time and energy to do it. So this is another word for connectedness. Feeling connected. We did that earlier with mindfulness. Do I feel connected with what I’m doing? Then you probably find you can be in great states of absorption. But if you’re not, it’s hard to do.
PRAJNA – WISDOM
CS: And the last parami is prajna or wisdom, and that’s basically all of the previous five. If we have all the previous five, the result is wisdom. It also speaks to the connection between mind, body, and spirit.
Q: It’s kind of an integrated wholeness because when you’re in a state of an integrated wholeness you’re manifesting the right action at the right time, right in quotation marks. Right action at the right time for the right reasons with the right people. And then people go, `oh, you’re so wise.` But it’s not that you’re wise, like you studied some stupid book that nobody ever else read, so you’re wise. It’s more that you’re connected with what you’re doing and who you’re with in a way that speaks to wholeness, right? That’s what wisdom is, in essence.
HOST: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on Apple podcasts to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. And don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device.
Today’s episode was taken from an introductory public talk on the topic of the paramis. Doug and Catherine teach a long weekend retreat called Becoming a Work of Art at our beautiful Clear Sky Center in the British Columbia Rockies. If you are looking to take a deeper dive into this material, this is a wonderful place to start. For more information, visit planetdharma.com/paramis. And as always, you can learn more about Planet Dharma offerings at planetdharma.com/podcast. See you next time, and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Activate Your Creativity: Surrender to Spaciousness
Quantum Creativity and Adaptive Creativity
Podcast Transcription:
HOST: Welcome to the Dharma If You Dare. Today’s recording comes from Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawaserat’s recent online course, Riding the Dragon. In this talk, Doug (Qapel), and Catherine (CS) explore the concepts of quantum creativity and adaptive creativity. They discuss how imagination springs forth from spaciousness and how it remedies the habitual mind. Surrendering or letting go into this spaciousness allows us to move beyond simply running on instinct and tap into our fullest potential. We’re very excited to announce that we’ve just launched a free online course that gives an introduction to the main approaches that Doug and Catherine employ with students to help them find their speediest path to spiritual awakening. It’s called Wake Up: Four Paths to Spiritual Awakening and you can register by visiting planetdharma.com/wakeup. And now, here’s today’s recording.
QUANTUM CREATIVITY ARISES OUT OF THE UNKNOWN
Q: As you may have noticed, if you`ve read the book Wasteland to Pureland, we talked about two kinds of creativity – quantum creativity, that’s the spaciousness, and adaptive creativity, that’s the relationship of objects, how things work, and how that spaciousness gets interpreted in the object and the world.
CS: The relationship between spaciousness and the objects.
Q: Quantum creativity arises out of the unknown. You don’t know where it came from, all sorts of scientists and artists say they don’t know where it came from. It just came out of nowhere.
CS: Didn’t Einstein say that he solved or clinched the theory of relativity when he was looking out of the window?
Q: Yeah I think so, yeah.
CS: He had spent all this time with his chalk on the blackboard but that wasn’t when it happened. Ananda awakened – he meditated and meditated and meditated and meditated and he finally gave up and threw himself on his mat and he awakened.
Q: In midair. Between being vertical and throwing himself on his mat. He awakened in the falling, in the spaciousness.
CS: Right, in the spaciousness and the letting go, in the surrender.
Q: So quantum creativity arises spontaneously out of the unknown, out of the void, out of the spaciousness, based on your question, based on your interest, based on your investigation. Adaptive creativity is what you do with it in the world. How you put it to work, how you mesh it, how you craft it, and how you make a better apple pie.
AWAKENING AS RADICAL CREATIVITY
CS: So it’s worth saying again that when we’re in this space, in this gap, in this spaciousness, there’s no sense of “I” right? That’s the surrender part and that’s really key for what we’re calling quantum creativity, which is like radical creativity, game-changing creativity, such as the theory of relativity, such as awakening.
Q: So we’re suggesting that the British have an advantage. We think the British have an advantage for awakening because everywhere you go in London they say `mind the gap`. Maybe they don’t know what I`m talking about. In the tube, the subway system, there’s a gap between the platform and the train car so there are signs everywhere saying `mind the gap`. So the British must be great meditators, I guess.
CS: But they’re trying to not fall into the gap.
Q: That’s true and we want you to fall in the gap. That’s true. That’s true. Got a problem with that one. Anyway, all mystery traditions, all spiritual traditions have said the same thing forever. Basically, that God or spaciousness, humanity as we know it, without that spaciousness, without that gap, we revert to animal consciousness. We revert to just running on instincts, running on sensation, running on the chemicals or the desire mind. And it’s the spaciousness, it’s the gap, it’s the transcendent aspect of that that makes us human, particularly human. And our ability to work together is because of the gap, because of the spaciousness.
CS: As far as we know, human beings are the only beings on this planet who can awaken. I’m willing to be proven wrong on that. But as far as we know, that’s true. And any of us can do it, it is within all of our reach.
EVERY SPIRITUAL TRADITION SPEAKS OF SPACIOUSNESS
Q: And every tradition has said it. So we’re going to give you a few examples. For instance, Genesis One from the Bible says, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
CS: It`s about spaciousness, in the Old Testament. So these are different ways of describing the spaciousness. So here’s another one from Lao Tsu. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of 10,000 things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source, but differ in name. This appears as darkness, darkness within darkness, the gate to all mystery.”
Q: So that’s Taoism.
CS: That`s about labels.
Q: Then you have the Diamond Sutra from Buddhism. It says, “Lest shall ye think of this fleeting world, a star at dawn, a bubble in the stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream”. How would your life change if you entered into every object relationship that you had every day from that perspective?
CS: And Western science has the Big Bang. The obvious question is what was before the Big Bang? Supposedly nothing, So nothingness.
Q: Nothingness. So we see this in meditation and this is one of the reasons we push meditation so much is because you eliminate 90% of your objects and you’re just left with you on a cushion and you really start to see the mind in its gap and its spaciousness. You really start to feel the space between the arising of one thing and the passing of another. The gap.
CS: That’s later, right. First we see how much our minds are running around and sticking labels on things. And we get tired of that. And so then we start looking for the space.
Q: So if you want to do yourself a favor and get better contact with this, the best way to do it is to look at the end of an arising. So for instance, usually when we’re meditating on the breath we see, okay, a dog, and then our mind jumps to the next thing called a cat, and it just jumps from object to object. So what we’re suggesting here is to focus your mind on the ending of things. The end of the dog, stay there. Then the cat. The end of the cat, stay there. You see how things are always dissolving out from underneath us, always dissolving out from underneath us. And that gives you this contact with the gap. It also teaches you non-clinging, right, because you can’t hang on to anything, ever, really.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SURRENDER AND SUBMISSION
CS: So when we talk about surrender, there’s an important distinction between what we call surrender, which is letting go, and submission, which is kind of agreeing to let go even though you don’t want to. It’s an important distinction and worth reflecting on. So here we’re talking about surrender, surrendering into the space, surrendering into the gap.
Q: I just want to repeat that as I think it’s an important point. The difference between surrender, which is letting it fall through your hands, and submission, which means you kind of go along with it, but secretly, in your heart of hearts, you’re still hanging onto it. And from the point of view of transcendence and from the point of view of the spiritual life, the thing that we keep saying we`ve let go of, is our ego, our self-image. “I’m going to let go of my ego. I’m going to let go of my self-image. I’m going to rest in emptiness. And here I am, doing it.” “I am letting go of emptiness. I am letting go of the object. I am resting in emptiness. I am in emptiness”. Who’s talking? Yeah. You can also do it at the beginning. But the problem is that Westerners are so object-orientated. We are such greedy guts. We`re such greedy guts, we just want… “oh yeah, I want to think about my cousin” or “oh yeah, I want to think about Friday night” or “oh yeah, I want to think about what I’m going to do next week.” But you could do it before those things arise. So it’s easier in a way to do it at the end of an arising because there’s the room for letting go. But you could do it before something arises because of course, they’re the same place. But one, you’re focusing your mind on the end, and one, you’re focusing your attention before your arising. So I think it’s easier if you focus on the end, at least initially.
CS: So for those of you, if you’re not familiar with these expressions, an arising could be a sensation, could be a feeling, could be thought, could be like, “oh, it’s hot today”, “I feel hot”, that’s an arising or it could be “I want ice cream”, that’s an arising.
Q: So like we said, this gap we feel is the origin of creativity. It’s from where creativity comes and in that sense, there’s nobody being creative, there’s nobody doing creative things at the quantum level. At the quantum level, it just happens in front of you. So Einstein, for instance, said that the great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. It’s another way of saying from the gap.
IMAGINATION, INTUITION AND THE GAP
CS: Intuition is more about letting go, isn’t it? You can’t really make intuition happen. He (Einstein) also said, and this is so interesting, this is Einstein, right, the quintessential scientist. He said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Q: So the source of imagination? Remember, imagination means to make images. Imagine that! You’re making an image. The source of imagination is intuition. Intuition is based on a question. From a spiritual point of view, your question is, “where’s the gap?” What takes you into adaptive creativity, into “what is this?”, “what’s going on?” But the question, “what?” comes from the gap, comes from the intuition.
CS: You’re referring to quantum creativity and adaptive creativity and I’m not sure everyone has read Wasteland to Pureland. If they have, they know what we mean, but if they haven’t, they may not.
Q: Do you want to explain it?
QUANTUM CREATIVITY
CS: Well quantum creativity are those world-changing arisings, life-changing arisings. It could be the discovery of fire. Can you imagine being the first person to think about striking flint together, that occurring to somebody? Or it could be just realizing, “oh my gosh, I don’t want to be a doctor, I want to be an artist.” That could be quantum creativity for an individual, if it’s a radical life change. Can you think of any other examples?
Q: Whoever came up with the idea that the Sun was the center of the solar system rather than the Earth? Because for centuries people thought that Earth was the center. And then somebody came along and said “whoa, the data indicates that we’re not the center”. So they used adaptive creativity, the studying of the data, and they went, “oh, the data doesn’t fit with what we consider to be true. What’s going on here? He goes into the question, `what’s going on here?` This opens his mind to not having to hang onto an old object, and the insight comes that the Earth is not the center of the solar system. That was radical, revolutionary and heretical.
Imagination arises from the images that we present to ourselves. So if we present images of “I’m no good” “there’s something wrong with me”, “I’m not smart enough,” then the imagination is going to feed you that data. The subconscious feeds you the data that you’re expecting to hear. So if you put a new imagination…
CS: And there’s not any space in those thoughts, right. So quantum creativity is not going to be able to arise because those are heavy, heavy thoughts.
CREATE A FIELD OF QUESTION
Q: So the important part of imagination is to create a field of question that leads you to new territory, new understandings and new openings, which means you have to let go of the habitual mind, the same old dialogues running on and on. Right? And so the easiest way to do this is – what are you curious about? What engages you? What is it that makes you kind of want to step out of the form, out of the mold of what you do every day and takes you to new territory, new land, where you’re not just running the program.
CS: I like a kind of alternative take on that. What is it you really are not attracted to and don’t want to do or explore? Because if you can get interested in that, then it gets really curious.
Q: Because sometimes what you’re not attracted to is actually your greatest strength, but you don’t know it yet. Or your greatest potential. Because you haven’t met it yet. If you want to transcend the suffering in your life, you have to go back to the emptiness. You have to go back to the spaciousness. You will not resolve the suffering in your life by manipulating, controlling and rearranging the objects. It won`t work.
THE B-MOVIE OF ME
CS: We were talking at lunch today – there’s a kind of B movie of me, right? Not a very good movie, and one that we play again and again and again and again. So we’ve got to get a new movie, right, create a new movie. We’ve got to create the movie that is going to be really good and that we want to see. And to do that we’ve got to challenge ourselves and go to places we haven’t gone before.
Q: Another way to put it is the ego, which means you and me and everybody else, we`re typecast. We’ve been typecast into a B movie and we keep playing the same roles over and over and over and over again and we wonder why we’re bored or we`re restless or there’s something missing in our lives. And it’s because the ego does not want to step out of its self-imaging habitual patterns because it’s afraid that it’s going to fail or not succeed or it’s going to hurt or something bad is going to happen. I think you need to put in your imagination – no no no, something good is going to happen!
HOST: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on Apple podcasts to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. Today’s episode featured a recording from Riding the Dragon, an online course based on the ideas in Doug and Catherine’s best-selling book Wasteland to Pureland. You can learn about upcoming online courses by visiting planetdharma.com/events and clicking on online courses. You can learn more about Wasteland to Pureland, download a free chapter, or purchase your own copy by visiting planetdharma.com/pureland. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Connect to Your World: The Power of Lived Experience
Information vs Lived Experience.
Aligning Your Personal Vision with Absolute Truth
Podcast Transcription:
HOST: Welcome to season three of the Planet Dharma podcast, Dharma If You Dare. We are excited to relaunch the podcast with a new name and new content that speaks to the current and evolving paradigm of spiritual awakening in our modern age. We are very excited to be using this platform to share audio recordings of Doug Duncan`s (Qapel) and Catherine Pawaserat`s (CS) teachings, whether they be excerpts from an online course, a live stream, or a Q and A session. We’re confident you’ll find the content speaks to the challenges of modern life in ways that are insightful, practical, and healing. Doug and Catherine are also big on sharing joy and humor so we expect you’ll also find the material entertaining and uplifting. The last year has seen a lot of exciting developments for Doug, Catherine and Planet Dharma. We saw the publishing of their best-selling book Wasteland to Pureland and a big increase in the number of participants in their signature year-long program.
While the podcast will no doubt evolve over the course of the season, the backbone will be two episodes a month. One, a selection from past courses while the second will be taken from Planet Dharma’s monthly Enlightenup live streams on Facebook. We also look forward to publishing bonus content. So make sure to click subscribe, so you don’t miss out. Today’s recording comes from the recent Pearl Without Price online course and is a continuation of the material that you can hear in the season three trailer entitled Why Awaken? Drawing on material from the first reflection in their book Doug and Catherine explore the topic of personal vision and connect it to the concepts of absolute and relative truth. To explore these ideas further, purchase Wasteland to Pureland Reflections on the Path of Awakening available on Kindle and in paperback on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Indigo. And now here’s today’s recording.
LIVING IN ALIGNMENT WITH OUR VISION TAKES LESS EFFORT
CS: So then we’ll start with the vision – having a vision and fulfilling a vision. The thing about the vision is that it can seem like a lot of work, just making a vision can seem kind of daunting, and then to make it happen can seem even more daunting. But actually, when we get all of our ducks in a row, when we get the cart behind the horse, when we are living our lives aligned with our vision, we find out that it’s actually getting the most beautiful results for the least amount of effort. It’s a very streamlined process. So, let’s talk about that more.
Q: Are you saying then that awakening to absolute truth is less effort than the relative world?
CS: Yeah. Yeah. I had a friend once who said, and he said this at quite a young age, we were still under 30 I think. Some people think that’s young. My friend said to me, “I’m so tired of my own bullshit” and I thought, “yeah, really”. You know, being me full time is hard work, right? And if I can let that go, it’s actually very easeful and I have an easier time, and people seem to like me more, you know, if I’m not making a big effort in being me, right? So that’s one example of how living in alignment with our vision is more beautiful and requires less effort.
ABSOLUTE TRUTH IS JUST THE UNIVERSE BEING ITSELF
Q: But let me question you on this. Are you saying that absolute truth is less effort than relative truth?
CS: I am indeed.
Q: You are. And why is absolute truth less effort than relative truth?
CS: Well, for one thing, this absolute truth is the natural order of the universe.
So when Taoists talk about – be one with the Tao – the whole universe is just being itself. It’s not sort of like, you know, seeing if it matches or seeing if the theme works, seeing if the curtains match, I mean nothing against matching curtains, but the universe is just being itself. And that’s a somewhat effortless process compared to trying to make a production out of me.
So, that’s a little connection with the absolute vision. How about the relative vision?
Q: Yeah, the relative vision. This is where it gets tricky because with the relative vision, we move from absolute truth to relative truth. So we can also call it, as I said earlier, developmental truth. This is where you have to go to work. This is where the training is. This is where the discipline is. This is where the nuts and bolts are worked out. And it has very much to do with how the details manifest and it has very much to do with karma and the strength of your current vision.
KARMA IS INEXORABLE, HOW OUR VISION GETS LOST
- And so in a sense, karma is inexorable. If you make decisions and choices that keep you in the bar, you can expect a bar kind of life. If you make the kinds of decisions and choices that take you to the ocean, you can expect an ocean kind of life. This is just the nature of karma and karma is inexorable. It’s a law. It’s a fundamental principle of the universe. It’s like A causes B, or if this then that, or this choice leads to that result. And part of our problem and relative truth is we’re not often sure where our choices are taking us. We think we’re choosing from preference mind, for what we like, but it may not be consistent with our vision, it may not support where our vision goes. We have a vision that we want to do this and then we act like that and the two can’t come together.
So it’s important to pay attention to detail. And one way that Catherine and I came up with this the other day was we were lying in bed and we’re just kind of, you know that place where you wake up, we’re looking out the window and just kind of asked the question, what are you thinking about? And when you think about it when you wake up in the morning, what is your first dialogue about? Getting your shoes polished? Or you`ve got to feed the horses or, let’s say a lawyer, as a lawyer he’s thinking about his caseload or he’s thinking about his clients, this is his karma and it’s also his vision because he’s filling his day from the very beginning with his karma. Therefore his vision is his clients and his business, it’s not spaciousness, it’s not totality, it’s not the awakened mind and therefore through his whole day, he’s building the vision of the relative truth.
So in a sense, the absolute vision gets lost. The big vision about what you’re going to do for humanity gets lost while you’re busy digging around in the developmental. That uses up your energy and it is your karma. So everything else from the point of view of our lawyer friend will seem peripheral, the sun and the rain will be peripheral. Nature will be peripheral. Human relationships will be peripheral for that particular person because of those choices. So this is the developmental truth, this is the relative truth. This is work in the world. How do I make my decisions? We`re suggesting, of course, that every decision is permeated with spaciousness, with clarity, with emptiness.
Q: So then the developmental work is always reflecting that goal. Everything else gets put on the back burner. Like the family gets put on the back burner. The relationship gets put on the back burner. And so we wonder why we don’t live our vision? It is because everything is getting put on the back burner. Because we’re so busy juggling balls. Depending on how many things you`ve got going, the more the vision gets put on the back burner. We still think the vision is important to us in theory, but we’re not living it, we’re not building it, we’re not constructing it at the moment by choosing to think about spaciousness first or emptiness first. And so backburner, backburner. And then down the road, you wonder why it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because you didn’t make decisions that supported that vision.
STUDENT: With your lawyer’s example, their vision is their career.
Q: Well, that may not be. That`s maybe the point. Their vision may not be their career. Their vision may be their career in terms of helping people, but they’re not actually helping people in terms of their heart because they’re too busy with the papers and the files.
CS: Using your example where the first thing they think about when they wake up is “my caseload”, they’re not thinking “how can I help people through my practice”, which would be more in line with the vision that you’re referring to.
WHAT WE THINK, FEEL AND DO IS A CHOICE, IT IS KARMA
Q: And so what we think about is a choice, what we feel is a choice, what we do is a choice and that choice is karma. So what you choose to occupy yourself with is your karma. So when we get into negatives, it’s because we’ve lost our vision – negative emotions, negative thoughts, negative feelings. It’s because the vision is being lost. I’ve gotten so caught up in how my game is played that I’ve forgotten about my vision. The teacher’s job is not to run your life or tell you what to do. The teacher’s job is simply to remind you of the vision because that’s the thing we tend to forget right?
CS: Yeah. It takes a lot of discipline. It sounds so nice to live according to my vision. But it does take a lot of discipline to make sure our choices are in line with that.
Q: And so in that sense, the negative emotions are the hurt child protecting against the threat to their vision. Their vision was to be, I don’t know, a concert pianist. And everybody told them, “oh there’s no money in that. You’ve got to be a lawyer”. And so they got caught in that trap and now they have emotions about it. But the emotions aren’t helping their vision. They’re just reactive to the hurt child. So you`ve got to get past the negative emotions and the hurt child to really build a vision.
CS: We will talk about how to get past the negative emotions in future classes.
Q: And then in positive terms – oh my family, I love my family, my family, family, family but the vision may not be manifesting in your family because you’re too busy clinging, you’re too busy hanging onto the identity of that. The relationship, hanging onto the relationship may not fulfill what you’re really trying to do, which is to be in a state of love because you’re too busy hanging onto the relationship.
CS: That would be called clinging, in Buddhist parlance, Buddhist language.
Q: From a developmental point of view, there is no perfect love and there is no perfect parent. It doesn’t exist, in relative truth. You need to go back to the absolute truth, right.
CS: So, I think to reference Eva`s question and Qapel`s example, we can have more superficial goals or vision and then we can have a deeper goal or vision. And so some examples would be, if we’re practicing law just to be successful, that would be a more superficial goal, and feel free, you know, nothing against success. But maybe from the absolute sense, a truer sense of success would be, that I want to really help people and the way that suits my personality or my talents is to do that through law and through legal practice, and how can I use the law to do that? Okay, that would be a deeper one.
Another example would be, a more superficial goal would be maybe to make a lot of money and again, nothing inherently wrong with that, go for it, if that’s your thing, but a deeper expression of that might be to create wealth, which is a much broader and much more creative undertaking than just focusing on the money part. Like what is the nature of wealth and what does that look like? It’s more inclusive.
OUR VISION SHOWS UP IN OUR CHOICE OF PARTNERS
CS: As Qapel said “karma is inexorable”. Whether we are really having a deeper vision and living in alignment with it shows up in everything in our life. It shows up in our partners. Do we get together with someone because they’re hot? Do we get together with someone because we don’t want to be lonely? Do we get together with somebody because they fit into our lifestyle? Or do we get together with somebody because we find them really exciting and they challenge us and intrigue us and help us grow and vice versa. So that’s a multiple choice question.
Q: Would you say that if you choose a partner based on developmental truth, you may not get to absolute truth in that relationship?
CS: That’s right, yeah.
Q: So if you picked a partner based on absolute truth…
CS: Everyone’s probably had that experience, right, of getting together with somebody because they were, for example, hot, and then you’re like, whoops I forgot about a lot of other really important things in the relationship.
Q: So if you got together with somebody on the basis of absolute truth, the developmental line could go anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be law or business or it could be anything. It could be heat.
CS: Yes, that’s right. You’re saying there’s more freedom when we have the horse in front of the cart, we have more choices, right? And that’s why they call it liberation because there’s freedom in that.
HOST: We hope you enjoyed this first episode of our new season. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on Apple podcasts to help more people find and benefit from these teachings. Today’s episode featured a recording from Planet Dharma’s first online course of 2019 – The Pearl Without Price. Doug and Catherine run three or four online courses each year. Participants can attend live or watch the recording for one week after each of the four weekly sessions. The next online course takes place in September and covers the material in the final section of Wasteland to Pureland entitled Crazy Wisdom. To learn more about Planet Dharma’s online courses, visit planetdharma.com/events and click on online courses. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
Season 3 Trailer: A Birthday Podcast
Welcome to Season Three.
This week is Doug Duncan‘s 70th birthday. We thought this was the perfect time to launch Season 3 of the podcast with its new title, Dharma If You Dare.
Season 3 Trailer: Why Awaken?
Why Awaken? Today’s episode explores the idea of personal vision and how it relates to spiritual unfoldment. It’s part of our celebration for the upcoming release of more podcast episodes from Planet Dharma.
Season 3 will begin in mid-July to celebrate Doug Sensei’s 70th birthday!
The Season 3 launch will include a new podcast name, theme music and format. It will be all-new content, but will still have the same focus on how to embrace a path of awakening in modern times by leveraging all that life has to offer.
And to keep you engaged in the teachings between now and the launch of Season 3, Doug Sensei and Catherine Sensei will be hosting a 4-part online course entitled Riding the Dragon: Spiritual Awakening in Modern Life. To learn more about this course, which can be viewed live or via recordings, visit planetdharma.com/events.
We hope you enjoy today’s episode and stay tuned for the launch of Season 3 in July.
For more content from the cutting edge of spiritual awakening, including books, blogs, videos and a free minicourse, visit planetdharma.com/podcast.
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