Writing As Daily Meditation

The Four Reminders: Part 3

The Four Reminders practice is the first lesson I took from a young monk named Lama Pema. They are 1. Precious Human Birth, 2. Death and Impermanence, 3. The Law of Cause and Effect, and 4. The Flaws of Samsara. You needn’t be a Buddhist to benefit from thinking these through.

Before going over them, though, I pause my meditation between Rabbi Hillel and Lama Pema for some good, old-fashioned Human Potential Movement self-talk. Know your demons, I remind myself. We all have them, though not all demons are created equal. Part of my daily meditation is to give my demons a good talking to. This is a highly individual, highly personal part of the daily practice. What I say to myself in the few minutes set aside for this is roughly scripted and has evolved over time. It’s not numbered like a 12-step program, but it could be if I wanted to do that. Because what we need to say to ourselves can feel somewhat undignified, it’s not necessary to share it out loud with anyone but yourself. I’ll leave mine unsaid here with the note that this is an important step in my meditation before going on to the Four Reminders.

Precious Human Birth

I’m usually happy to arrive at this point in my practice because what it means to me is embracing my life with gratitude. That’s gratitude for all of it. For my rather inept, dreamer parents. For the failed loves that led me to the maturity that made possible the love I live now. For my boyhood working and playing in the woods and farms of Pennsylvania. Even for the tragedies that made me feel forever different, that made me a loner. As unrealistic and incompetent as my parents might have been, they had a vision of life that I value and to some extent share.

In this life, we have intelligence and agency. With practice and the willingness to look at our lives, we can begin to understand the interdependence of all things. We can define and redefine ourselves. In existential terms, we project ourselves into a self-invented essence. In Buddhist terms, we discover our dharma, our path. In doing so, we begin seeing the magic of actively embracing our lives. All that we have been given or had taken from us, all that we have tried and failed at, all that we have accomplished, our friends, enemies, places we’ve loved or felt indifference to—all of this brings us, if we are mindful, to a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. “I am large,” declared Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.” Finding our path makes us feel greater than the sum of our parts. We are therefore grateful for the experiences that life has given us, even put us through. This is not looking at life through rose-colored glasses. When we look closely, we see that life is characterized by suffering. Not one of us is exempt from suffering. But look around. There is also joy. We all know which of those two we would like to maximize.

Death and Impermanence

Appreciating and feeling grateful for our lives brings into higher relief the fact that we all will someday die. The Tibetan saint Milarepa said, “Life is brief and the time of death is not known.” Death and impermanence are motivators. We simply don’t have time to waste in getting right with life.

Remembering that life is brief has given me a sense of urgency. Twenty-five or so years ago, I had a serious heart attack. It was a strange experience. I was a mere 49 years old. When people ask me if I had had any warning, I almost always answer that I did not, but didn’t I?

A week or so before the event I had a strange dream. It was one of those lucid dreams where you know you are dreaming and have some control over what happens. I dreamed that I was sinking. It felt light, one of the most peaceful and pleasant feelings I’ve ever had, and it went on for what seemed like a long time. At one point, though, I realized that, if I allowed myself to sink too far, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself back. I considered that. The feeling was so carefree, so serene. Did I want to come back? I did, and so I willed myself back to how I had been before the dream, and I thought no more about it.

That is, I thought no more about it until I was on my back in the middle of the living room floor waiting for the ambulance to arrive. A truck seemed to be parked on my chest, a classic heart attack symptom. I could feel my life draining out my left side. Oily sweat covered my forehead. I watched my breathing, such as it was, going into meditation mode. And I was sinking. I felt the pain on my chest, but I neither clung to it nor fought it. My thoughts were passing clouds. Again, meditation mode. The sinking felt rather nice, just as in the dream. And, again, the question occurred to me—did I want to keep sinking or did I want to live?

As I had many years earlier during a terrible crisis, and as I had in the dream, I chose to live and willed myself back. It was a simple decision. In the ambulance racing to the hospital, the medics couldn’t get a pulse or a blood pressure and yelled at the driver to hurry. The siren wailed, but I felt fine, had no worries. I had chosen life. Afterwards, of course, knowing how fragile life is, I did what many people do after such an event: I drove like a madman! Not good. But I got busy living. Very good.

That little story felt like an ending to this section, but I want to do justice to impermanence. Life is brief. That’s true. Death can cut us off in the middle of something we thought we would get to finish. But life is long, too. Sometimes very, very long. We have to live with our choices, and bad choices can lengthen our days rather unpleasantly. That’s why the next of the Four Reminders is so important to consider. 

The Law of Cause and Effect

This is the big one. Just as life is long and we are stuck with our crimes and misdemeanors, we can live past them, too. Everything comes together in The Law of Cause and Effect. It reminds us that our thoughts, our words, and our actions have consequences. Some cause a ripple. Some cause a wave. Some cause pain. Some are healing. The effects have a way of accumulating into a life tendency. Generally, that’s what we refer to as karma. Go around making enemies, and your life may very well become generally miserable. Build a reputation as a decent person, things are likely to go better.

We’ll need to interrupt the Four Reminders in a bit to fully take in the implications of the Law of Cause and Effect. First, though, let’s circle back to motivation. It all starts with motivation.

Life is indeed characterized by suffering and there certainly is joy. We would prefer to minimize the one and maximize the other. With very, very few exceptions, we would prefer to live in what Martin Luther King called “The Blessed Community.” I don’t think he meant by that that we would all be playing harps and dancing on clouds, that nauseating view of heaven some of us were raised on. But if fear and delusion were largely removed from our lives, I’m willing to bet we’d be happier. Who wouldn’t prefer living in a world where greed and hatred were minimized and altruism, friendship, and forgiveness were maximized? “May all beings be happy,” teacher Kabir used to say, dedicating the merits of our meditation sessions. “We all do better when we all do better,” Paul Wellstone liked to say.

So, while understanding that the world is what it is—too often an ugly, nasty place—I know I’d rather live in a better world, so I am motivated to contribute to creating something I know I’ll never see in its fullness. Motivation is the beginning of the Law of Cause and Effect. This begs the question How? How do we put that motivation into action?

To begin answering that question, we have to put the Four Reminders on hold (there’s only one left anyway) and discuss the Six Paramitas.

Drop in next Wednesday for the beginning of that discussion.