Hopelessness and Death

Hopelessness and Death
by Pema Chodron

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.

In Tibetan there is an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means “totally, completely” and the rest of it means “exhausted.”  Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out.  We might say “totally fed up.”  It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope.  This is an important point.  This is the beginning of the beginning.  Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

We could say that the word mindfulness is pointing to being one with our experience, not dissociating, being right there when our hand touches the doorknob or the telephone rings or feelings of all kinds arise.  The word mindfulness describes being right where you are.  Ye tang che, however, is not so easily digested.  It expresses the renunciation that is essential for the spiritual path.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.  To seek for some lasting security is futile.  To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions.   Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking.  One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction.  Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there is anywhere to hide.

Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together.  We may still want to hold our trip together.  We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and ground just keeps moving under us.  Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can’t be done.  Turning our minds toward the dharma speeds up the process of discovery.  At every turn we realize once again that it is completely hopeless we can’t get any ground under our feet.

The difference between theism and non-theism is not whether one does or does not believe in God.  It is an issue that applies to everyone, including both Buddhists and non-Buddhists.  Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there is some hand to hold:if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us.  It means thinking there is always going to be a babysitter available when we need one.  We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves.  Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.  We sometimes think that dharma is something outside of ourselves something to believe in, something to measure up to.   However, dharma isn’t a belief; it isn’t a dogma.  It is total appreciation of impermanence and change.  The teachings disintegrate when we try to grasp them.We have to experience them without hope.  Many brave and compassionate people have experienced them and taught them.  The message is fearless; dharma was never meant to be a belief that we blindly follow.  Dharma gives us nothing to hold on to at all.

Non-theism is finally realizing that there is no baby sitter that you can count on.  You just get a good one and then he or she is gone.  Non-theism is realizing that it is not just babysitters that come and go.  The whole of life is like that.  This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

For those who want something to hold on to, life is even more inconvenient.  From this point of view, theism is an addiction.  We’re all addicted to hope.  Hope that the doubt and mystery will go away.  This addiction has a painful effect on society:a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.  What a relief.  Finally somebody told the truth.  Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it is happening because we personally made the wrong move.  In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong.  As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa.  More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two.  Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides.  As long as there is one, there is always the other.  This re-dok is the root of our pain.  In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, and change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.  You could even put “Abandon Hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty.  We can’t simply relax with ourselves.  We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.  We feel that someone else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.  That is the compassionate thing to do.  That is the brave thing to do.  We could smell that piece of shit.  We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?  We can explore the nature of that piece of shit.  We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there is something wrong with that.  We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge.  We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.  It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears.  Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.

This is where renunciation enters the picture, renunciation of the hope that we could be better.  The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters.  We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and to distract ourselves.  The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.  Renunciation is teaching to inspire us to investigate what is happening every time we grab something because we can’t stand to face what is coming.

Once I was sitting next to a man on an airplane who kept interrupting our conversation to take various pills.  I asked him, “What is that you’re taking?”  He answered that they were tranquilizers.  I said, “Oh, are you nervous?” and he said, “No, not now, but I think when I get home I’m going to be.”

You can laugh at this story, but what happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, and queasy: Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.  That grabbing is based on hope.  Not grabbing is called hopelessness.

If hope and fear are two sides on one coin, so are hopelessness and confidence.  If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.  This is the first step on the path.  If there is no interest in stepping beyond hope and fear, then there is no meaning in taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.  Taking refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha is about giving up hope of getting ground under our feet.  We are ready to take refuge when this style of teaching, whether we feel completely up to it or not, is like hearing something hauntingly familiar, like the experience of a child meeting its mother after a long separation.

Hopelessness is the basic ground.  Otherwise, we’re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security.  If we make the journey to get security, we’re completely missing the point.  We can do our meditation practice with the hope of getting security; we can study the teachings with the hope of getting security; we can follow all the guidelines and instructions with the hope of getting security; but it will only lead to disappointment and pain.  We could save ourselves a lot of time by taking this message very seriously right now.  Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet.  Begin with hopelessness.

All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death.  Fear of death is always in the background.  As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink.  But it’s very hard, no matter how much we hear about it, to believe in our own death.  Many spiritual practices try to encourage us to take our own death seriously, but it’s amazing how difficult it is to allow it to hit home.  That one thing in life that we can really count on is incredibly remote for all of us.  We don’t go so far as to say, “No way, I’m not going to die,” because of course we know that we are.  But it definitely will be later.  That is the biggest hope.

Trungpa Rinpoche once gave a public lecture titled “Death in Everyday Life.”  We are raised in a culture that fears death and hides it from us.  Nevertheless, we experience it all the time.  We experience it in the form of disappointment, in the form of things not working out.  We experience it in the form of things always being n a process of change.  When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that’s death in everyday life.

Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things that we don’t want.  Our marriage isn’t working; our job isn’t coming together.  Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out.  As the years go on, we don’t call the babysitter quite so fast.

Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation, proper motivation for living an insightful, compassionate life.  But most of the time, warding off death is our biggest motivation.  We habitually ward off any sense of problem.  We’re always trying to deny that it’s a natural occurrence that things change, that the sand is slipping through our fingers.  Time is passing.  It’s as natural as the seasons changing and day turning into night.  But getting old, getting sick, losing what we love, we don’t see those events as natural occurrences. We want to ward off that sense of death, no matter what.

When we have reminders of death, we panic.  It isn’t just that we cut our finger, blood begins to flow, and we put on a Band-Aid.  We add something extra to our style.  Some of us just sit there stoically and bleed all over our clothes.  Some of us get hysterical; we don’t just get a Band-Aid, we call the ambulance and go to the hospital.  Some of us put on designer Band-Aids.  But whatever our style is, it’s not simple.  It’s not bare bones.

Can’t we just return to the bare bones?  Can’t we just come back?  That is the beginning of the beginning.  Bare bones, good old self.  Bare bones, good old bloody finger.  Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones.  Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time that is the basic message.

When we talk about hopelessness and death, we’re talking about facing the facts.  No escapism.  We may still have addictions of all kinds, but we cease to believe in them as a gateway to happiness.  So many times we’ve indulged the short-term pleasure of addiction.  We’ve done it so many times that know that grasping at this hope is a source of misery that makes a short-term pleasure a long-term hell.

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what is going on.  Fear of death is the background of the whole thing.  It’s why we feel restless, why we panic, why there is anxiety.  But if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.

Excerpt from When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Difficult Times, by Pema Chodron, Shambhala Publications, 1997, pp.38-45.