Irrigators channel water,
fletchers fashion arrows,
and carpenters shape wood.
Skilled practitioners tame the self. (145)

– Dhammapada, verse 145. (All today’s Dhammapada translations are mine).

I was driving home from Sydney, and, coming off the freeway, I ascended the hill near Lapstone. I stayed in my lane, but didn’t pull back my speed very much. As I drove up alongside a truck, I noticed that he was starting to pull over into my lane. He must have caught sight of me, because he suddenly swerved back into his lane. As I went on past him, he blasted me with his horn. That could only have been – given that the danger had passed – a protest. I immediately got angry. Seeing this, I brought attention to my breath, and restrained the impulse to any outwardly-directed reaction. It was clear to me that I had quickly disconnected from the peace of an open heart. If, in that frame of mind, I focused on his wrong-doing, I’d be fanning flames of a habitual, ‘me and mine’ style of interaction. No freedom in that, and plenty of road-rage.

If one focuses on other’s
deficiencies, always complaining,
one’s own toxic impulses grow;
one is far from their ending.

– Dhammapada, verse 253.

After recognising that I needed to calm my body – and knowing that to give free reign to my inner judge wouldn’t support my authenticity, even a tiny bit – I came to my breath.

I was sharing with friends in our poetry group recently that I’ve followed my breath in daily activities, unwearyingly, since the mid nineties. I blush to say that before that – despite reading book after book by Thich Nhat Hanh for the preceding decade – I thought that tracking the breath was too basic for me. All I had to do, I conceitedly thought, was rest in the nature of mind.

However, I’ve learned: the body is always in the present. If I’m aware that I’m breathing, then I have a sure connection to the present. I remember that around that time, my Zen teacher Subhana said to me, in interview, “You know what it is to be present.” I thought to myself, “I’m not sure I do.” It turned out that I was often living a dissociated state and thinking that it was wholesome – spacey, not spacious. So, now I make it a practice to be aware of my breathing all the time. (Except, obviously, in my dreams). I carry mala beads, so that when I’m under pressure, stressed, or I’m ill, or giving a public talk, I can use one bead for each out-breath. The great thing about this is that it helps me stay in touch with, and live from, my felt sense of situations, too.

It’s easy to mind the faults of others,
yet hard to grasp one’s own.
One sifts the faults of others in fine detail,
but one conceals one’s own,
as a crafty cheat conceals bad luck.

– Dhammapada, verse 252.

Next, I said “Hello” to the feelings. I use sub-personality work to dis-identify with fashioning-tendecies (sankharas). This fits super-well with the Buddhist theory of identity creation (‘the twelve nidānas’.) It enables me, too, to have mindfulness of the body in a broader sense than mere mindfulness of breathing. However, that’s not all it does. it allows me to release aspect of the luminous heart-mind, which are particular to situations. (I’ll write separately on this another time). I’ve found that one can focus in too close to the breath, losing the wider field of dynamics of consciousness (loka), and blocking the opportunity to discover aspects of the wisdom-mind particular to the needs of the moment.

The process of calming that rage on my part took me another half an hour. “What?” you say. As I said, I didn’t just want to calm it, and contact spacious mind again. I wanted to understand what kind of personality beliefs were under it, and what kind of wisdom-energy was concealed within the rage. On the way down deep, I was able to acknowledge that I had contributed to the traffic situation – namely, by travelling too fast.

I have ways of ‘delving’ (as the Nikāya Buddha calls it), derived from the sub-personality work which I’ve learned from various sources, and by using Focusing. I won’t go into the details of what I found in my psychology, but the exploration was worth it, because it came down to the root conceit: ‘I am my separateness.’ Underneath all the self-justifications was a threat to a fiction, and the fear of voidness.

I’ve seen this in myself and others, many times, that: in relationship situations (which even this incident was), the personality’s fear is that if one dwells in voidness – instead of in anger, lust, or some other kind of reactive state – then one won’t have what one needs to meet one’s situations. I am so grateful for my years in the Diamond Essence work for showing me that this isn’t the case. One has much more intelligence available, when it’s not squandered in reactivity –  including strength, power, compassion, fearlessness, personal love, and many other dwelling-places of the gods.

As I stayed with the layers of feeling, every layer of discovery brought more space, more calm, more love, and eventually – by the time I got to Lawson – I had a spontaneous uprising of compassion for the truck driver. “It’s a habit,” I thought. He was just reacting in the normal way that people deal with their feelings. There’s no point in my giving away my treasure, by meeting him in kind. As the Nikāya Buddha says to a lay-follower:

This is of old, Atula, not just nowadays:
They disparage one who remains silent,
They disparage one who speaks a lot,
and they disparage one who speaks in measure.
There is no one not blamed.

– Dhammapada, verse 227.

I understood that he must have got a fright, and needed to gather his ‘separating resources’ together. Blaming me seemed a good way to go, no doubt, to keep him from humiliation or some other uncomfortable feelings. That’s a huge loss to him, packaged as a necessary life choice.

“In fact, most of the time people are really expressing their egos and superegos  [inner judges] through their gait, their posture, their words, their emotions, their work, etc. Even the inhibition of certain emotions is an expression of the superego. Most people live and die expressing their egos and super egos, and rarely does the real person get expressed.”
– A.H. Almaas, Work on the Super-Ego, p. 16. [My parenthetic comment.]

(That’s a whole other story: the role that the superego – or, the inner judge, the inner critic – plays in fabricating our usual sense of separateness, our rejection of inter-being; and, therefore, our resistance to death).

For now, I share this story to give a little indication of how we can work with situations so that they transform into unfabricated qualities. By the time I got home, I was peaceful again, and didn’t bring any bad feeling home to my beloved partner. I may die, any moment. I wouldn’t want to drag along into the sacred space of death – a sacramental space – the resentments of the little, constructed self.

There’s no path in space;
there’s no contemplative outside [of space].
People indulge in separation.
There is no separation for
those who come and go in suchness.

– Dhammapada, verse 254.

Next time, I’ll talk about Torei Zenji’s Bodhisattva vow, which someone amusingly referred to as a “road rage abatement program.”