Shocked Aware
By Michael Erlewine
My Dharma teacher for 36 years, the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, said this:
“There are many stories about this. We cannot assume that recognition is going to happen only in some kind of elegant pleasant way. For example, there was a young tulku who was becoming very well educated. He was well-behaved and very impressive in every way. He was good looking and personable. He was charismatic. He was very, very smart, and he was becoming very much respected in his area. As he was often called upon to do, one time he had to give a large public empowerment where he would be seated wearing his finest clothing on a nice tall throne in front of a truly large crowd of people. He knew how to do his job very well. He could chant with a loud and pleasant voice, give the empowerment properly, and so on. As he took his seat and prepared to give this empowerment to this large crowd of people and adjusted his posture on the cushion, all of a sudden to his great surprise he let out a huge resounding fart. [Laughter.]”
“This is even worse in Tibetan culture than it would be in ours. Imagine, if the President farted during a White House press conference. It was that degree of, “Oh, oh!” Everyone laughed. This could have been a crowd of some 5,000 people laughing at him. They laughed because it was unheard of. He was incredibly embarrassed, and because he had been trained, his response to embarrassment and the only way he could deal with the suffering of his embarrassment was to look at the nature of his mind. That was the day on which he decisively recognized the nature of his mind.”
End of quote
This is a traditional story. In other versions of this story, it is noted that it was of some concern that a high ‘tulku’ or incarnate lama had not recognized the nature of the mind at his age.
I find it of particular interest that Rinpoche points out that the event of definitive recognition as to the nature of the mind is not precipitated by some grand epiphany or “pleasant” moment but can occur or be provoked by hardship and difficult times. This was true in my case and happened in one of the hardest and most difficult life experiences I have ever encountered.
In other words, it took a hardship like that to bring me down from my high horse and to my senses, just cruising along down to where the rubber meets the road.
And in my case, it did not occur sitting on my meditation cushion for 39 years or so, as I always imagined it would. It was like a complete non-sequitur, a break from ordinary life, and a hard one at that.
So, what I am saying here is that it was not the next ordinary step in my life path, but rather a complete break with my normal path, which of course makes sense. There is no way I could have anticipated “Recognition” because I had no inkling as to what it was like and no way to anticipate it. It was a clean break with everything I had known up until then.
And, as mentioned, even my carefully groomed and maintained practice of dharma by definition had no idea of what it was like, because in my entire life (and according to the Dharma texts, perhaps innumerable lives) I had never experienced what is called Insight Meditation (the Vipassana of Mahamudra) and all of my intellectual imagining what it would be like, that and a ticket would get me a ride on the bus.
Just as for the young tulku it took an extraordinary event to shock or jot him into recognizing the nature of his own mind, so for each of us we have no idea what it will take for us to experience recognition.
Being a “good” and dedicated practitioner as we imagine what ‘Recognition’ is like is just an idea we have, a conception we have concocted and it will be washed away at the first sign of actual recognition as to the mind’s nature.
And this is why all of the pith dharma texts say that shock, surprise, a jolt, or intense hardships are your friend, being perhaps the only way we will ever by popped out of the groove we currently float along in. When something untoward happens, something shocking, use that moment to look at the nature of the mind.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.