Change

Transcript of 12-17-03 public teaching with Kali Ma in San Diego, California.

At the time of this teaching, students were lamenting the major changes our organization had gone through in the moving of our headquarters to Northern California and birthing the Mandala structure to provide new support for the communities that had arisen in four different cities. Some students felt attached to how things used to be and resisted the changes, other students adapted to the new changes and continued growing within the community in its new form. When asked about we should deal with this change and change in general, Kali Ma gave the teaching whose excerpts follow below.

Our work constantly changes because life constantly changes. Even with the big change that we have gone through by moving our headquarters to Northern California, some things have changed but the constant ocean of change we are in is the same.  Our community is moving and alive, breathing and evolving at every level all the time. Every-time change arises, it is an opportunity to practice and to face up to the inevitability of what is - change happens. There is no question of that. The only question is, how will we relate with it when it arises. In the electricity of dynamic existence and resilient impermanence, we can wake up and encounter what we really are. Or we could also trip out and fall asleep.

Most ordinary people structure their lives to avoid change, to be the most stable and secure as possible. Such an approach is appropriate to some extent, but also many times is extended to the point of inertia. When we do not allow changes, we find the life is drained out of our world. The form is there, but the living-essence is long gone. Yet we as westerns are taught to value the form more than the essence.  We try to look good even if we are rotting inside.  The overwhelming insecurity and impermanence of our open nature is deeply felt in our heart, and all the material comforts and possessions in the world do not numb it.  Lacking any means to accept that annihilating wave of change that this life is, we may do everything we can to fight it, suppress it, ignore it, run from it, force it to be otherwise… Yet it does not work. The more we fight change the more we find ourselves feeling vacant and trapped, alientated from what life really is.

What is INERT is dead. Everything that is alive changes and grows.

Where there is inertia, confusion, delusion, darkness, and obstacles brew and we enter into a deluded state of existence designed to avoid things as they are. In Buddhism we call that Samsara - the endless cycle of dissatisfaction that comes from living a contrived existence.

Our relationships often grow stale because we do not let them go through cycles of birth and death. We are so afraid of open-emptiness and its characteristic insecurity and impermanence that we attempt to protect ourselves from by clinging onto fixed forms and pictures. But this stifles relationships and causes them to end. Our approach makes things back fire. If we do not move with changes, then the situation moves on without us. Even more poignant for practitioners is to recognize the constant birth and death that are arising every moment. On the contrary - opening to this does not catalyze some feared wave of impermanence and loss - those things arise as a fact of life whether we want to look at them or not. Instead what it catalyzes is awareness. We find our wakefulness, our presence and also the opportunity to move with changes, to evolve with situations, to rebirth our relationships anew.

It is fear of change and inability to accept, honor and cope with loss and death of things that causes us to hold onto what is no longer alive and freeze it in time. Instead of allowing it to fall away and die, we remain, hoping things will be different, afraid that they will not be.

The approach of a practitioner is to be with what is. What is inert must die away. When we let it, the cycle continues, and something else is born. Life shows us what else it has to offer us next. We can change with change, and when we do, we find ourselves more present, more alive. Rather than mourning what once was, we can move with what now is. We can learn from it, enjoy it and grow from it. We can immerse ourselves in the present experience and find the unending richness there. If we pay attention, it is form that changes, but the essence does not. Our essential open-Buddha nature remains.

Whatever we have gone through in this last year since the move of our headquarters - our essential focus is still the same. Training, practice, retreats, community that is all happening in a new form now and over a broader geographical span. We have the mandala now that keeps us together, rather than just a physical location. There is something profound about that. We are not connected because we are next-door neighbors, or in the same town. We are connected by our devotion to this path and this practice. If that devotion is authentic, then our connection remains more formidable than physical proximity could ever make it. Because it remains, we can bare the change of external forms with ease. We find ourselves joined together in that steady commitment and simultaneous flood of changes. That is the place we are always together - where our heart-minds meet, in the ocean of all that changes and all that does not.