Gate of Truth

When we meet the energy of our desire, it can seem like extremely out of control. It’s as if we’re trying to hold onto a kite in a storm, only the kite is so huge and the storm so violent that it’s difficult to stay grounded and still: the storm lifts us right off our feet. As the Tibetan Buddhist Master Chogyam Trungpa points out “Usually we are so overwhelmed by such happenings that we deliberately put off going into the depths of the psychological aspects of the chaos”. The storm seems too chaotic to relate to it.

The 8th century Hejavra-tantra offers the advice that the storm itself liberates the storm. There’s no point in resisting it. “Those things by which men of evil conduct are bound, others turn into means and gain thereby release from the bonds of existence”. But it is difficult to hold rage, terror, lust like a tool. No less difficult than trying to grab hold of lightning.

But that said, we are not victims of our rage and lust as much as we might think. All of our powerful emotions have a satisfaction to them - even when they don’t at first seem that way. Even the emotion of terror gives us the refuge of knowing ourselves as the one who is terrified by forces beyond our control. It feels good to feel powerfully enraged; it feels good in a different way to be the righteous victim of unfair circumstances. When in a given moment we derive our sense of identify and stability through our relationship with these powerful emotions, we help ensure their chaotic quality will stay at maximum.

One approach to meeting this situation is to let go the satisfaction and stability of this way of knowing yourself, and find something else that feels more important, more vital. Aligning to a sense of “truth” is one such way of knowing yourself. The sense of dignity we might feel in a thunderous rage is loud and obvious, but also ultimately “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. The sense of dignity we might feel in attending to what’s true in a given situation is much quieter, much more subtle. But it is powerful in the way a mountain is powerful: it is immovable in all situations. In the center of the most humiliating, unbearable shame, there can be the dignity of being aligned to truth. In the center of violent self-hatred, there can be the dignity of being aligned to truth. So that…no matter how uncomfortable one’s emotions are, there is a point of refuge from which they can be met without flinching.

The extraordinary thing here is: the storm quiets. From the orientation of truth, the chaotic energy of powerful emotions is still present. But it’s as if a person is meeting some transparent, subtle quality underlying the surface drama. It becomes possible to meet what’s there. Or - it becomes possible that the universe meditates on what is there through you: acknowledging the truth of what’s there with laser precision, and coming to know every atom of what’s there by permeating it like water learning about a sponge by experiencing it from the inside.