Reggie Ray
When you are studying the dharma, you are studying a tradition and a view, a way of looking at things that causes a tremendous amount of upheaval. The upheaval is the breaking down of our habitual patterns and our solid way of doing ourselves. And, in my experience, the only way to work with that, and I really mean this, is to some kind of contemplative practice, meditation practice. What happens if you don’t do that? If you study the dharma, even become a Buddhist, and you are not working in an ongoing, continuous way through the practice of meditation, you will either turn Buddhism into some kind of religious trips or you become very cynical and negative toward the whole tradition. And those two responses are both ways of not relating directly to the energy within the tradition.
If you want to really understand and assimilate what this is all about personally, which you may or may not. But if you want to do that, you have to meditate and you have to commit yourself in the ongoing process of meditation and you have to be willing to make a journey. You can’t really study Buddhism without the practice because what comes out the other end is actually the opposite of Buddhism and you just end up using the tradition to just reinforce your own way of going about things and your own solid view of yourself whether it is “I’m a Buddhist and I am great, very devotional. I love Buddhism and I am a Buddhist,” which is spiritual materialism or the other one, which you see a lot of people doing, is…if you look among people who have been around Naropa for a while, you find this other one actually amazingly present on campus. You become very cynical, very negative, and very critical of the tradition and of the teachers in the tradition because that is another way to hold it altogether and not really relate to what it is all about. What Buddhism is as you know from our work together, it’s neither sort of cynical, negative, arrogant thing or the identifying with the tradition which you know as self-identity. You know from our work that it is in the middle, in the no man’s land where you don’t have any ground. You work with your life, you work with your own groundlessness in an open and direct way, which you can’t do it without meditation practice. It just can’t. It doesn’t work. And that was kind of what the Buddha was teaching during his whole life. As Trungpa Rinpoche said in the Fabrice Midal’s biography, “Meditation is the whole reason I am alive. It’s the whole thing of what I have to teach. And it embodies everything that is important about the Buddhadharma.” It is really that simple.
And I also want to say that although Naropa itself does not have extensive opportunities to study and practice meditation, there are definitely doorways at Naropa to do so. They are definitely here in this environment and it is kind of up to you what you want to do with the whole thing. But there are definitely opportunities here and I hope that as many people as possible will take advantage of those opportunities and not just get your degree, get your knowledge, and then walk away with certain memories of Naropa. I hope that what this place really is as its heart, which is to work with the groundlessness of one’s own life, will become part of who you are and part of your whole life. In my opinion, that’s the essential dharma.
I know that it takes time to sort of figure it out what’s going on here and in terms of your own life, a lot of times the timing isn’t such that you would immediately connect with what I’m saying. You may have intellectual understanding or have a lot of other plans in your life of how you are going to be happy and how you are going to make it all work. I understand that and I have no problem with that. But at some points, things are going to fall apart because they always do. And when that happens, I hope you will remember what I am saying right now. The dharma is not a way to keep it together, but it’s a way to work with things when they fall apart.
(Transcribed from the Three Jewels Class, November, 3 2005)
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