There's a whole lot of buzz about intending for specific outcomes. Intention experiment folks like Lynne MacTaggart, who have done much good work to compile scientific data on the effects of meditation and intention, etc., ask that people intend for a specific outcome for this or that individual or situation.
A problem with this approach is that it presupposes the discernment and profound wisdom that the outcome we may be intending is in fact the best possible one for the individual or individuals involved at that moment. When you intend for a very specific outcome, you are effectively presuming to comprehend the intricate nuances of a whole constantly shifting causal dynamic intertwined with many consciousnesses.
From another angle, is it legitimate to continue in our relative ease in the face of such monumental suffering all around us? Clearly, many intention experiments are done to alleviate the suffering of others. Harmful intentions will come crashing back on the mind that emits them. Likewise, positive intentions affect us as well.
From another angle, is it legitimate to continue in our relative ease in the face of such monumental suffering all around us? Clearly, many intention experiments are done to alleviate the suffering of others. Harmful intentions will come crashing back on the mind that emits them. Likewise, positive intentions affect us as well.
What's the difference between the mind-training practice of tonglen and intention experiments? Both use focused intention to alleviate suffering. But in the case of tonglen you mentally imagine taking upon yourself others' misery, and giving them whatever they may wish for. Why? To target the pernicious habit of self-importance.
With tonglen practice, you are ideally properly versed and practiced in the teaching on contingent arising and emptiness, and you understand that its practice is a way to get you to a stage of inner development such that you clearly see that you are not center stage in a deceiving play.
With tonglen, though you are cultivating a very powerful altruistic intention toward your own and others' particular circumstances, you are also targeting your own self-importance, an impediment to realization, as well as the ignorance that grasps at phenomena as existing in and of themselves, or causelessly.
A qualified tonglen practitioner cultivates a very heightened altruistic intention as a way to counteract the ingrained habit of self-importance and self-reference. He or she knows that each is the owner of his or her karma. Otherwise, the enlightened beings or the divine which you may call upon would have eradicated our individual sufferings long ago out of the compassion they are revered as having.
Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
By targeting our self-importance through deeply informing ourselves, paying attention to, contemplating, witnessing, and considering the manifold problems and sufferings of countless different living beings, starting with closely observing your own experience, and what those right by you might be feeling, the very habit that bars sustained freedom is undermined.
And through undermining that habit of holding ourselves dearest, which is self-importance, our behavior toward others starts to change; what we deliver to them through our physical, verbal, and mental actions is softened, tenderized, made humane, to include them in our holding dear, since we are no different in our wish to be safe and sound.
The force of the wish to free beings of misery is incredibly powerful. But that wish must be well grounded in a proper understanding of dependent arising and of what causes suffering to begin with.
Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
By targeting our self-importance through deeply informing ourselves, paying attention to, contemplating, witnessing, and considering the manifold problems and sufferings of countless different living beings, starting with closely observing your own experience, and what those right by you might be feeling, the very habit that bars sustained freedom is undermined.
And through undermining that habit of holding ourselves dearest, which is self-importance, our behavior toward others starts to change; what we deliver to them through our physical, verbal, and mental actions is softened, tenderized, made humane, to include them in our holding dear, since we are no different in our wish to be safe and sound.
The force of the wish to free beings of misery is incredibly powerful. But that wish must be well grounded in a proper understanding of dependent arising and of what causes suffering to begin with.
We might think that self-importance is a quality we don't have that much of. Let's say we go to the market to buy some fruit. We get a little bag and we start reaching for the most beautiful, bright apples. We put back the ones that have the slightest dent or bruise or mark. This is automatic. Or, do we automatically say to ourself: if I take the best ones for myself, what will other people here get? What will grandma over there take home?
Of course, it's natural, valid, or perhaps I should say habitual, to say and think: I want the best ones for myself, my family, my friends. Why shouldn't I have the best ones? They aren't for me, they're for my family, my friends. I am paying after all with my hard earned money. I am not paying for crappy apples. I have a right to get the apples I want. Yet do we honor and promote others' same right?
Such is our self importance that, forget crappy apples, what do we do when we are made to wait, or if the service isn't just so, or someone looks at us this way or that, or says one thing to us or another that we don't like?
All these reactions in which we feel an immense and demanding solidity within us are related to self-importance. To say nothing of how we often turn away from, reject, ignore, or otherwise select to remain uninformed about others' real life situations. We plead, "I've got my own problems," and claim that it hurts us too much to go there.
Or, worse yet, some say, "it's their karma." As my dear college advisor Taitetsu Unno unforgettably once said: karma is for oneself. The rest is a field for practicing compassion.
The sometimes crushing fact that I often can't alleviate one other's suffering, much less that of thousands or millions who are undergoing this or that misery, should not preclude paying close attention, since in paying attention, in witnessing again and again, and sometimes joining that witnessing with imagining how does it feel? we devastate the very thing in us that keeps us pinned to the wheel. We learn of impermanence, the limitations of the condition we find ourselves in, and that nothing exists on its own or in vitro. Everything is connected.
A mind training practitioner recognizes that everyone naturally wants the best for themselves; everyone wants to be happy, no one wants problems. What we have to remember is that since everyone feels this way, we have to respect others' self importance as we do our own.
Of course, it's natural, valid, or perhaps I should say habitual, to say and think: I want the best ones for myself, my family, my friends. Why shouldn't I have the best ones? They aren't for me, they're for my family, my friends. I am paying after all with my hard earned money. I am not paying for crappy apples. I have a right to get the apples I want. Yet do we honor and promote others' same right?
Such is our self importance that, forget crappy apples, what do we do when we are made to wait, or if the service isn't just so, or someone looks at us this way or that, or says one thing to us or another that we don't like?
All these reactions in which we feel an immense and demanding solidity within us are related to self-importance. To say nothing of how we often turn away from, reject, ignore, or otherwise select to remain uninformed about others' real life situations. We plead, "I've got my own problems," and claim that it hurts us too much to go there.
Or, worse yet, some say, "it's their karma." As my dear college advisor Taitetsu Unno unforgettably once said: karma is for oneself. The rest is a field for practicing compassion.
The sometimes crushing fact that I often can't alleviate one other's suffering, much less that of thousands or millions who are undergoing this or that misery, should not preclude paying close attention, since in paying attention, in witnessing again and again, and sometimes joining that witnessing with imagining how does it feel? we devastate the very thing in us that keeps us pinned to the wheel. We learn of impermanence, the limitations of the condition we find ourselves in, and that nothing exists on its own or in vitro. Everything is connected.
A mind training practitioner recognizes that everyone naturally wants the best for themselves; everyone wants to be happy, no one wants problems. What we have to remember is that since everyone feels this way, we have to respect others' self importance as we do our own.
That informed respect for others and witnessing of their situations then starts to make a colossal dent in our own exaggerated self-importance, and once we have understood the network of problems and effects of the self-important attitude, the monstrously smug walls built by the disorientation of "me" and "mine," and the incredible freedom and bliss it denies all of us, we can find ways to reduce it.
The problem is that the habit is so deeply ingrained that it's hard to get a handle on how to start. This is what the mind training or Lojong traditions help us to do.
Being attentive witnesses to the situations of more and more beings, and letting their situations effect a shift in our perspective, we can move in the direction of sacrificing our fleeting ease to secure that of many others', and put our own pains and concerns, wishes and "needs" in perspective. Then the ease and security we once felt were so important will pale next to the ease of an outstretched heart.
