Meeting the Buddha

In 1986, two months after resigning from my first and only employment position, I flew to Boston to meet my friend, Paul. For weeks before the trip I had worked on my fears about it. I slowly weaned myself off foods I would not be able to eat the ten days that we were going to spend at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, two hours from Boston.

As it turned out, food during the retreat was ethereal. I fell in love with organically grown, vegetarian food fixed mindfully and with love by the volunteer staff at the center. Ruth was the perfect teacher. I struggled with sitting motionless day after day, the body reacting with intense, unbearable pain from the unfamiliar discipline.

The pain did not go away but one day suffering was gone. It was as if someone had wiped the window clean of years of dirt. I saw clearly.

The most important insight came one evening when ruth gave a dharma talk about karma. This morning, before meditating, the insight took form again as I read Tarthang Tulku's Openness Mind:

"As we observe our fears, we can see that they form no essential part of our natures, but instead are patterns that we have constructed," writes the tulku. We create our experience from karma shaping physical sense and mental stimuli into perceptions, feelings and patterns. Seeing this is to realize I don't have to respond to them in the habitual way I do. Seeing them as constructions of the mind I can choose what to respond to and how to respond when I decide to respond.

What is real is redefined as the mind stuff I choose to respond to. All that a person needs then is to develop the value system upon which that choice depends. It's a huge task that may require one's lifetime to discover and evolve impeccably but not as huge a task as when blind to our ego's creation we respond willy-nilly and create more patterns and make life more complicated than it is.