Comfortable With Uncertainty

Christine, one of the dearest people on the planet to me and who knows me better than just about everyone, gave me a lovely book for my birthday. It is Pema Chodron's Comfortable With Uncertainty. The book is a compilation of practical mahayana Buddhist teachings/meditation practices intended to "lead us out of the world of self-preoccupation into the greater world of fellowship with all human beings."

I need this.

I really appreciate Buddhism for its universality; one can apply Buddhist teachings to any religion or lifestyle. But I've always had a problem with what I call Buddhism's "selfish nature." In other words Buddhism, as I understand it (and in an extremely tiny nutshell), is about the self, or rather allowing the self to be part of the universe as one whole entity and finding peace therein; it's about transcending our humanness - the self becoming one with nature, with spirituality, with God - leaving worldliness behind, etc.. And I always asked myself where others fit in in all of this detachment. People are extremely important to me - more important than me, actually. I wondered how Buddhism and caring for others could coexist. This book seems to address this issue.

The first lesson in the book is about bodhichitta - the awakened heart of loving kindness and compassion that is inherent to our natural states as human beings. We are linked to everyone through the bodhichitta. But that is not enough. We must strive to be the 'warrior bodhichitta', which means having forward moving energy that is willing to enter into suffering for others' benefit.

One of my favorite statements so far has to be that many people use the 'climbing the mountain' metaphor to define their spiritual journeys, the peak being awakening. Chodron suggests that spiritual awakening is actually a path that goes down the mountain, "transcending the suffering of all creatures" one that "explore[s] reality."

In going down the mountain, we connect with others in the difficult parts of life (and learn compassion this way); therefore we find that "the awakened heart of bodhichitta is the basic goodness of all beings."