Comfortable With Uncertainty Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the face of pain.
Skandha mara has to do with how we try to recreate ourselves when things fall apart. We return to the solid ground of our self-concept as quickly as possible. Trungpa Rinpoche used to call this “nostalgia for samsara.” When things fall apart, instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can use it as an opportunity to be open and inquisitive about what has just happened and what will happen next. That is how to turn this arrow into a flower.
Klesha mara is characterized by strong emotions. Instead of letting feelings be, we weave them into a story line, which gives rise to even bigger emotions. We all use emotions to regain our ground when things fall apart. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using heavy emotion as a way to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else.
Yama mara is rooted in the fear of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. We want to hold on to what we have. We want every experience to confirm us and congratulate us and make us feel completely together. We say the yama mara is fear of death, but it’s actually fear of life. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using the desire to control as a reminder to experience each moment completely new and fresh. We can always return to basic wisdom mind.

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    Nothing Solid
    M OVING AWAY from our experience, moving away from the present moment with all our habits and strategies, always adds up to restlessness, dissatisfaction, unhappiness. The comfort that we associate with concretizing and making things solid is so transitory, so short-lived.
    Moving into our experience—whether it’s the opening experience of love and compassion or the closing-down experience of resentment and separation—brings us an enormous sense of freedom: the freedom of nothing solid. Something about “nothing solid” begins to equal freedom. In the meantime, we discover that we would rather feel fully present to our lives than be off trying to make everything solid and secure by engaging our fantasies or our addictive patterns. We realize that connecting with our experience by meeting it feels better than resisting it by moving away. Being on the spot, even if it hurts, is preferable to avoiding. As we practice moving into the present moment this way, we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called liberation.

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    The Facts of Life: Egolessness
    T HE SECOND MARK of existence is egolessness, sometimes called no-self . These words can be misleading. They don’t mean that we disappear—or that we erase our personality. Egolessness means that the fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem. Self-importance is like a prison for us, limiting us to the world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up very dissatisfied.
    We have two alternatives: either we take everything to be sure and real, or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality, or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world—is the best use of our human lives.
    In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh. For a warrior-in-training, egolessness is a cause of joy rather than a cause of fear.

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    Staying in the Middle
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