A complete stranger approached me on the footpath and began to pour out her heart. She was deeply upset by the tragedy in Nepal: the horror of the mudslides, the shock of realising that glaciers can collapse, and her helplessness in the face of it all. She felt there was nothing she could do to ease the suffering of those affected, and appalled that nothing stood in the way of such a thing happening again. After talking for perhaps ten minutes she asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
I took a long breath, and the Medicine Buddha mantra came to me. tayatha om, bekandze, bekandze, maha bekandze, radza samudgate soha. “You can say this mantra,” I replied. “It's the Medicine Buddha mantra. I know it sounds crazy to suggest that repeating some unfamiliar sounds could be of any use…”
Before I could finish, she jumped in. "I see how it helps," she said. "Because it calms me, it could help me stop spewing all this anxiety everywhere."
For the first time she met my gaze, and then asked, "Are you a Buddhist?" I nodded, and she began to describe things she knew about Buddhism: "Everything is impermanent, so you shouldn’t be attached to anything, because it could all be taken away in an instant, as it has been for those people in Nepal."
“Maybe there's a bit more to it." I replied. "I think it's about steering between attachment and detachment, because it’s all too easy to go from ‘shouldn't have attachments' to ‘it doesn’t matter what I do.’”
She took a deep breath. “Yeah, I can see there’s a lot to it,” she replied, and then began talking about mindfulness, being present, being in the here and now. From there she moved to the harm she felt phones and social media had done to a whole generation. "They're never really here because they're always absorbed by their screens."
I laughed. “Was our generation here? Were we present? Maybe not so much,” I said. “A lot of the time we were high on alcohol, drugs, sex, or rock ’n’ roll.”
She laughed. “Yeah, we had a drugged presence!”
Suddenly I no longer felt like a listener. Monologue had become conversation, and we began finding our way through something together.
“I think being present might be more than just paying attention to what's happening right now," I offered. "For me, it has something to do with being aware of the space between thoughts. Taking a breath before speaking really helps. When I remember to do that, I'm less likely to react and say or do something I later regret. Do you know what I mean?”
She looked surprised. Then she began to nod and smile. "If we stopped like that and listened more," she said, "then we'd be more human again, not so intolerant and polarised. We all need to be much more human with everything that's happening around the world."
"I needed this conversation today," she continued, and added that what she needs often seems to "appear out of nowhere." We smiled at each other and parted. As I walked away, I felt grateful that pointers from James Low and Ken McLeod were there just when I needed them.
James Low, Integration is a Central Concept in Dzogchen: Sleeping Beauty or Sleeping Buddha?, Starting at 35:35.
And Ken:James: In this tradition of dzogchen a central point is to move into experiencing prior to the arising of thought. In the absence of thought there is a givenness of the continuity of our being but it’s not a being you can speak about because it’s not locked in to the normal signifiers: "I’m male, I’m female, I’m from this country," and so on. This quality can be called awareness or presence. Because it has no fixed content, because it’s not resting on a particular pattern of thoughts or emotions or sensation, it’s not vulnerable to the changing pattern of events. For this reason in the tradition it is described as being indestructible.
This quality of being is an openness, an availability, an openness, a welcome. A welcome to whatever arises. This openness is grounded in the awareness that it’s not improved by the presence of good thoughts, kind thoughts or shining thoughts, nor or is it defiled or debased or contaminated by the presence of what we could take to be negative thoughts.
From Sutra Session 1: Bringing Life Into Meditation
Ken: One is always take a breath before you speak. Now, when you’re having a conversation with a friend, how often do you wait? How long do you wait between the time when your friend stops talking and you start talking? One, two milliseconds, something like that. What happens if you start taking a breath right there? Well, the first thing that’s going to happen is you will never be interrupted and you will never interrupt anybody else. That’s quite a change right there.
The second thing that’s going to happen is that people know they’re going to have to be quiet if they want to hear anything that you have to say. Because if they start talking again, you’re not going to jump in. You’re just going to wait. And then when they stop, you’re going to take another breath. So they’re going to start listening. And this is very effective.