The Lotus Still Blooms Read Free Page B

take the crucial first step toward alleviating our suffering.
    When we are willing to mature in our thinking, we can then begin to understand that life is always in a state of flux. Everything is always changing in the world. The only aspect of life that does not change is the absolute—call it God or Christ nature, your Buddha nature, the Holy Spirit. We must draw our strength and find refuge from and in the Divine. All else is impermanent.
    I attended a ten-day retreat based on the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche and his magnificent book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The retreat was held at a lovely lodge in a bucolic setting in Northern California. I personally had gone through much effort and expense to get there, traveling more than six thousand miles in the middle of a long-awaited, three-month sabbatical.
    On the first day of the retreat the approximately 350 retreatants learned that Sogyal Rinpoche had been hospitalized as soon as he arrived in the United States from Europe. His senior students would carry on in his stead. There was much disappointment, myself included, but surely he, a Rinpoche and recognized spiritual master, would be well quickly and released from the hospital to assume his role as leader and teacher.
    But that did not happen. He was released after several days, but he was in need of rest and recuperation. He telephoned the retreatants and spoke very mindfully on impermanence and the nature of illness. He implied that even the great ones can get sick. He said, “Illness is a kind of warning, a reminder. We believe we have time, we believe we have time, we believe we have time—and then we have no time.” He was living for us all in what he called “the ever-present theme of impermanence.”
    When we embrace the universality of impermanence, we are then no longer thrown off our pins when it stops to pay a call in our life or in the life of a loved one. Do you sometimes look in the mirror and see your mother’s face looking back at you? That’s impermanence. Can you barely get out of bed in the morning because of all your many aches and pains? That’s impermanence. A child gets sick and dies. That’s impermanence. A young soldier does not return from Iraq. That’s impermanence. The most glorious vacation comes to an end. That’s impermanence. You now live in an “empty nest” where your nuclear family once lived. That’s impermanence. The examples are endless, and each one causes us to suffer to the degree that we are attached.
     
 
Take some quiet time and consider how impermanence has arisen for you personally and how you have met it. You might want to take a moment to reflect on five major events that have impacted your life. If it causes you to be fearful, release that in meditation over and over. Know that even in the midst of great change, you remain safe because of your eternal connection with God, with your Buddha self, with your Christ self. You and your Divine self are one, and that can never change. That is permanent, and how blessed you are when you realize that this is so.
     
 
 
THE FIRST NOBLE TRUTH
     
During that retreat Sogyal Rinpoche said that the First Noble Truth could be better understood by limiting your thinking to “life is suffering.” It is not simply that life causes us to suffer, but rather “samsara” is suffering.Samsara is this delusional world we have been conditioned to see as real, but it is not real. It is the endless cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth over and over again. The Dalai Lama called samsara “unenlightened existence.” And when we insist the world be what it is not, we cause ourselves to suffer. Why is life—samsara—suffering? It is because nothing in this world is permanent. When we recognize rather than deny the fact of impermanence and its tie to suffering, we have taken the first step.
     
THE SECOND NOBLE TRUTH
     
The Second Noble Truth is quite logical. We experience suffering because we cling, grasp, have