"HOLDING ONE'S EXPERIENCE IN THE SPACIOUS EMBRACE OF AWARENESS" - an edited excerpt from oral teachings given by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, April 2001


We've been focusing during this retreat on the six realms: the hell, hungry ghost, animal, human, demigod, and god realms. These are the different realms of existence in which beings can take rebirth. We've seen that we also experience each of these realms in our daily lives through the doorways of the negative emotions that are associated with each realm. Those negative emotions are hatred, greed, doubt, jealousy, pride, and lethargic pleasure.

You can clearly say, "I am in the human realm, I am a human being." Nevertheless, at various times in your life, or even at various times of day, you go through experiences that have characteristics of each of the six realms of existence. Different experiences in your life – in combination with conditions such as age, sickness, relationships and many other factors – can cause the qualities of each of these different realms to manifest in us. There are times when you might manifest strongly the greed of the hungry ghost realm, or other times when it's more the hatred and anger of the hell realm, or times when the doubt of the animal realm is dominant, or maybe it's the pride of the demigod realm, or at other times your experience is more the lethargic pleasure characteristic of the god realm.

Generally in Buddhism, these emotions are considered completely negative, but if you look at your life you'll see that from a conventional perspective we do need to be connected to these emotions. So, what is the best way for us to pass through these various realms of experience as they arise normally from day to day? The best way is when we're equipped with awareness. Without awareness, we so often get trapped by our experience, don't we?

We are born into samsara, and as part of that deal we go through different crises in our lives — that just comes with the territory. As each crisis arises, there is a certain degree to which we have to go through that difficult experience. The only question is: How can we keep it from getting worse? It is through our ability to accept our experience, rather than making it worse by reproducing the karma that created it. And meditation practice improves our ability to simply accept our experience. Practice does this by helping us to develop a strong ground of awareness. A strong ground means that the particular experience does not shake you. You do not lose your awareness in the midst of the experience.

So for example, during a particular experience you may become aware of feeling sad. It can be a deep sadness, but there is a place in you that can hold that sadness, much like when a mother gently holds a crying baby in her arms. She creates a very safe place for the baby to cry. Your base, your essence, your awareness, that is like a mother, and your emotion is like a baby.

Regarding this sadness you are experiencing, there is a bigger space, a more open space of awareness, in which the sadness is contained. Simply holding the sadness in that space of awareness would have very much the same effect as a good session of psychotherapy, where the karma of that experience simply exhausts itself. But instead, we oftentimes reproduce the karma of that experience by reacting habitually to it and as a result, then set up the conditions for it to continue further into the future. However, when you don't reproduce the karma, then that karma simply finishes. It is similar to your having a no-interest bank account, and every time you spend from it the balance drops until one day it gets down to zero and then it's finished. It's good to have a no-interest karmic account. If you have a high-interest karmic account, no matter how much you purify you are still accumulating.

So, let's say you're having a session of meditation and suddenly, Bam! A thought jumps up and you remember a particular person, and then you remember something else as a result, and then maybe your greed arises, "I want this, I need that," and another story jumps up. You are still sitting there and the thoughts and emotions are going on, getting more and more detailed, to the point where you just cannot sit anymore. That is the bad way to relate to those experiences; that's how their karma gets reproduced, isn't it? And in real life you would then go out and act on that karma.

The good way, though, is when you are sitting and contemplating and suddenly you see a thought, and the experience of the thought is weaker than the space that contains it. So, the thought comes; the thought goes. You are very big and your thoughts are very small. The experience comes and goes. The space is very big. The awareness is very big. The emotion comes and goes. You are very big in the sense of awareness and can hold whatever arises. So, whether we're connected to the dharma or not, we all go through crises, don't we? And it's clear what kind of person does well in those crisis situations, isn't it? It's the ones who have a big space of awareness and are able to hang on and not drop everything in the midst of the crisis. They know that eventually time will heal. Their awareness is open and unshaken through it all.