Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

That doesn’t mean that some of the dissatisfactions with specific aspects of our life may not be valid, and in fact they often are quite valid. However, these relative issues get mixed in with a far deeper issue, that of who we really are and aren’t, and until this progress of insight has been completed, this mixture tends to greatly exaggerate our specific criticisms of those things in our life that could actually stand improvement and work. Learning this lesson can be very hard for some people, and the dark irony is that they may wreck their relationships, careers and finances, as well as emotional and physical health, trying to get away from their own high level of insight into the true nature of reality. Until they are willing to work on a more direct, sensate level, there is no limit to the amount of angst and negativity they can project onto their world. I have seen this play out again and again in myself and in the lives of my dharma companions. It can be a very ugly business.

My advice for such situations is this: if, after careful analysis of your insight practice leads you to the conclusion that you are in Re-observation, resolve that you will not wreck your life through excessive negativity! Resolve this strongly and often. Follow your heart as best you can, but try to spare yourself and the world from as much needless pain as is possible. Through sheer force of will, keep it together until such time as you are willing to face your sensate world directly and without anesthesia or armor. I have seen what happens when people do otherwise, and have come to the conclusion that, in general, things go badly if people do not follow this advice, though some unexpected good can always come from such situations.

The framework of the Three Trainings and the three types of

suffering that is found within each of their scope can be helpful here as well. Since people are generally not used to facing fundamental crises of identity, i.e. the basic issue in Re-observation, they are not familiar with the pain of fundamental suffering. Being unfamiliar with the pain of fundamental suffering, they are likely to imagine that it is actually suffering produced by the specifics of their ordinary world. However, if you have gotten to Re-observation, in short, if you have found these 200

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techniques to be effective, have faith that the remaining advice may be of value and try to fulfill this part of the experiment. That is, if you are in Re-observation, the task that confronts you is to dissociate the fundamental suffering you now know all too well from the specifics of your life in an ordinary sense.

Following this advice may sound dangerous, heartless or bizarre to some people. It is a valid criticism. In an ideal world, we would not have to go around second-guessing ourselves and the sources of our suffering in the specific way that I advocate here. In an ideal world, we would really have our psychological trip together, be able to stay with the practice during these stages, and thus cross quickly through the Dark Night and finish this practice cycle. It definitely can be done.

However, we are not always ideal practitioners, and thus the Dark Night often causes the problems mentioned above that need to be dealt with somehow. My solutions to what happens when we cannot or will not do insight practices in the face of the Dark Night are also not ideal.

However, the outcomes are likely to be much healthier in the short and long term than those that come from simply allowing unrestrained Dark Night bleed-through. Strangely, I have come to the conclusion that simply practicing is often much easier than trying to stop Dark Night bleed-through if we are willing to just try it, though it can easily seem otherwise. The old kindergarden evaluation, “Follows instructions, plays well with others,” is still a valuable standard in the Dark Night.

Not restraining one’s negativity and reactivity in the Dark Night is a bit like getting stinking drunk and then driving in heavy traffic rather than just sitting down and waiting to sober up. Not continuing to do insight practices in this stage is like going into surgery, opening up an incision, making some repairs, and then freaking out because the patient now has a big, bleeding incision and running away from the operating table, leaving them there to suffer. You could think of many ways to make the patient happy and try them all, but until you close up that wound they are gonna’ be pissed! Unfortunately, in this case you are both the surgeon and the patient. Face the wound and close it up! You obviously have the necessary skills, as you have gotten this far. Use them. The operation is nearly over.

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