Training in Compassion 4: Don't Get Stuck on Peace

We’re drawing on a list of ancient Tibetan teachings called Lojong, and Norman Fischer’s explication of these. We had the teaching “See Everything as a Dream." And then we had "Examine the Nature of Awareness." If you took those practices to heart and plunged into them, then we may now need a caveat: Don't get stuck on peace.

That’s our training in compassion this week: Don’t get stuck on Peace. Every truth, no matter how important, can also become something you get stuck on – including the teaching to see everything as a dream and examine the nature of awareness. It's important to grasp that our senses create for us mere useful illusions of the world, and that our brains generate a subjective sense of a self which is also an illusion, but these truths can make you feel a bit removed from your life.

You begin to focus on the uncanny feeling of time passing, and time begins to seem strange and profound. It begins to dawn on you that your usual sense of self is some kind of mental habit that might not have any actual basis. You notice how clunky and crude many of your self-thoughts actually are. You might find this a little bit disturbing.

Or, on the other hand, you might be thinking, "This is great! Everything really is a dream!” That’s an important and liberating truth. At the same time, it quickly becomes the next trap to escape. Don't get stuck on peace.

Seeing clearly that what is naively taken for reality is an illusory dream -- and that there is no self at the center of that illusion -- is a crucial step. But it is not the last step.

The point of "don't get stuck on peace" is: don't get excited about the empty, dream-like nature of everything, because you've now conceptualized it and made it into something, an idea, and soon that idea is going to trip you up. Forget about how great it is to be nobody, because that's just another excuse. It's too easy to make these slogans into belief systems. The important thing is to hold them lightly. Don't think you have understood them. They are just devices. Take them with a grain of salt.

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More detail on this spiritual practice is in this longer version here.