Deep Hope

Intro

• Not a path to deep hope, but a way to engage through deep hope.
• No attachment to the outcome. No guarantees for any particular outcome.
• In the midst of impermanence and interdependence, we can only do our best.
• Skillful action with fortitude and courage that is grounded in patience and clarity.
• Dwell in the unknown — that open, spacious realm of possibility.
• The hope that springs from knowing that everything is in a constant state of change, and because of this fundamental truth, all things are possible.

What are the Paramitas?

• Nothing special, just using what is at hand and putting it to good use.
• The paramitas in verb form: Giving and Receiving, Taking Skillful Action, Practising Patience, Engaging Effort, Meditating, Seeing Clearly.
• We are all so skilled at discerning how we’re different, but we don’t know enough yet about how we’re all the same. … who and what we are at the core of our collective being.
• When we run into our own resistance, rather than judging it or trying to manipulate our thinking, we approach it with openness and curiosity.

Giving and Receiving

• The mistake of our thinking—that which keeps us enclosed in our circle, is not a lack of what is offered, but a blindness to seeing all that we offered.
• It is a rare gift to simply meet with openness and clarity what life brings our way, to meet ourselves and others, to give and receive as we are at any given moment. We have the very mistaken belief that it’s simply not enough.
• We meet the conditions of our work, our relationships, our politics, and our finances not as they are but wrapped up with glitzy ideas about the way they should be.
• Much of life is invisible. Do we see a plant grow?
• Magnanimous mind is also sometimes expressed as “not-knowing mind,” for it only arises when we’ve leaned into and released the parameters of our fixed view of ourselves and the world.
• Zen master Seng-ts’an reminds us: “Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”
• Freedom from the boundaries of self brings true joy. This is not the usual kind of joy we think of when we get something we want or have worked for. It’s more like what is called “sympathetic joy,”
• In this way, we can receive people and their stories, and even our own stories, with open arms, with compassion. We can receive them, openly and without judgment, but we don’t have to believe them.
• This is what practice teaches us—always question, and never look for the answers. Just let them come forth and reveal themselves to us.
• It is the offering of the gift and not the gift itself that connects us to others.
• Clench your fist. Take a close look at it. Notice the effort it takes to hold the hand tightly closed in this manner. Then relax into allowing the fingers to open, and see that the palm has become free and open to give as well as to receive.
• What do we do? The answer to this question is different for each of us, but it always begins with our willingness to bear witness to the event, even though it may be painful.

Taking Skillful Action

• When we bow, we are bowing with, not to.
• Taking care with our actions is not intended to become an eradication of human tendencies. Rather, to cool or calm has a different connotation than to uproot or destroy.
• The precepts … serve as warning lights—sometimes like a stoplight that reminds us to put on the brakes rather than hurtle forward into hurtful action or like a lighthouse beacon that warns sailors that they are entering dangerous waters and keeps them on course.
• The precepts … encourage a mental attitude of taking action that is supportive rather than harmful.
• The precepts … reveal the ways in which we fall into vicious cycles of thinking and acting, causing suffering to ourselves and others. The precepts are never intended to make us view these actions as moral defects but rather as the root source of suffering. To practice with the precepts is to begin opening a passage through which we can be free of that suffering.
• Become aware of untruthful situations. Begin paying close attention to how and in what situations you hedge on the truth or tell outright untruths. Also notice times when you keep silent when it might be better to speak up.
• Don’t demand an answer. Just invite it.
• Stop the action but then begin the inquiry.
• Fear and shame inside push critical words outside.
• Consider what your relationship with this person would be like if you simply acknowledged their behaviour without finding fault with it.
• Alcohol, drugs, and TV—or whatever it might be for you—are not escapes in and of themselves. What makes them escapes is how we use them.
• It’s not the substance we’re using that’s key here; it’s our intention in using it and the harm and suffering it causes when we use it to cloud our ability to take clear, intelligent action.
• As in all inquiry, you’re not demanding or measuring. You are just inviting by purposely bringing awareness to your point of inquiry. The power of this exercise is in the posing of questions that seek no answer.
• Keep your inquiry at the level of invitation. You are not demanding that anything reveal itself. You are simply removing veils that may be covering a more earnest experience.

Precepts

• I take up the way of speaking truthfully.
• I take up the way of speaking of others from openness and possibility.
• I take up the way of meeting others on equal ground.
• I take up the way of cultivating a clear mind.
• I take up the way of taking only what is freely given and giving freely of all that I can.
• I take up the way of engaging in intimacy respectfully and with an open heart.
• I take up the way of letting go of anger.
• I take up the way of supporting life.

Practising Patience

• Intelligent practice remembers that the value of practicing with the precepts lies not in how it measures our distance along the idealized path to enlightenment but rather how it helps us live in the everyday circumstances of our life.
• We risk missing the precious unfolding of life as it is right now in the pursuit of an imagined future outcome or destination.
• The word tolerance, meaning “endurance” and “fortitude,” implies nonjudgmental acceptance.
• Tolerance is action, not inaction.
• Practising Patience is also acknowledging that we are human and can easily get caught up in intolerance or impatience.
• Patience is what we have with the people driving the cars behind us, and impatience is what we have with the people driving the cars in front of us.
• Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
• Take refuge in just continually knowing that no matter how things turn out, we will engage fully in life’s circumstances.

Engaging Effort

• It invites us to engage our capacity for perseverance, determination, and wholeheartedness in whatever life sends our way.
• Question our beliefs about what we think our life should be and to turn our effort toward full presence of how it is.
• The function of a vow is also to support us in a basic contradiction, which is that we can never fulfill our vows completely. This contradiction, however, is not an obstacle but rather a path, a gateway for us to meet life with an open heart and clear seeing.
• Behind every emotion, there is a physical sensation, and by making the effort to turn our attention toward that sensation rather than avoiding it, we can come to know it wholeheartedly in a way that is open and free.

Meditating

• Silent stillness in the presence of whatever conditions are arising.
• Train in the skill of saying yes to each moment.
• Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher.
• Simply accepting that the mind wants to go off and do all this thinking. It’s not that it’s wrong or bad. It’s simply doing what it is designed to do—think. Just like the birds want to sing and the dog wants to bark. It’s okay.
• Meditation is not about getting somewhere but about being where we are.
• Learning from someone with more experience can be critical in differentiating a helpful eclecticism from simply indulging our preferences.
• Even the slightest unconscious shift of a muscle will change the mind’s perception. Even the slightest shift in the mind’s focus will cause the body to move with it.
• Each time we bring the attention back to breathing, even if we do it a thousand times within a few minutes, our ability to be present deepens, and our resistance to just sitting in the present moment lessens.
• What’s important is not how many or what type of thoughts we have, but what we do with them.

Seeing Clearly

• There is no permanent entity we can call me, you, it, or them. There is only arising and falling away in each and every moment.
• Our senses convey a picture of reality that narrow our understanding of its fullness.
• Seeing clearly means that we first need to recognize that all that we think we know is but a limited perspective.
• Seeing Clearly has two aspects: seeing clearly into the vast, open expanse of no-self and manifesting this insight as action in the world.
• The paramitas bring us to the awareness that our sense of what’s true has come through a matrix of interweaving conditions.

Conclusion

• Indra’s net is a compelling image illustrating unceasing, unobstructed interpenetration and mutual interdependence of all existence.
• If we sincerely want to touch a deeper truth about who we are and how we are all interconnected into something greater, into life itself, then we’ll need to bring to light the ways in which we can quite innocently and subtly become entrapped in perceptions of separation.
• Our biases are ever so subtle.
• Whatever is being experienced, let the awareness become intimate with it, and see if it labels itself.
• Over time, as we ripen, we are more and more able to meet situations that we might have considered a burden as opportunities to engage.

Notes from Deep Hope: Zen Guidance for Staying Steadfast When the World Seems Hopeless by Diane Eshin Rizzetto

Added 2024-02-18.