In most forms of training, whether in The Warrior’s Way, sports, the military, the arts, medicine or spiritual practice, the first task of the teacher or benefactor is to clarify and intensify motivation. "Increase the urgency," they tell us.
When I look back on my own training, Kalu Rinpoche returned again and again to the infamous Four Thoughts: The precious human existence, death and impermanence, the workings of karma and the shortcomings of samsara. All these motivational meditations centered on self-interest, and in that respect, except for the time-scale (lifetimes vs. this life) they are not that different from the endless encomiums to happiness, emotional and physical well-being, and family and career success that are often used to motivate people to practice today.
People start practice for different reasons. Milarepa sought a reconciliation with his murdering of thirty-seven people. Gampopa sought solace from devastating grief when his wife died. Many of us start practice because we are looking (or think we are looking) for some kind of benefit. And our teachers happily oblige. They wave a carrot or two in front of our noses. Or, they say, "You don't want that carrot. You want THIS carrot," and they tell you about a much bigger, brighter, juicier carrot.
For others, however, the motivation is in a different category. For Kongtrul the Great, it was an indefinable yearning. For Urgyen Tulku, it was something that he took to like a duck to water. For Dilgo Khyentse and others, it was just a sheer love for the Dharma. For them, it was more of a calling. That calling may take expression in traditional terms. My own teacher was deeply motivated by the bodhisattva ideal, when he was a young man and constantly seeking ways to form connections with people, animals and beings of all kinds.
At some point, and it may be one or two years down the road, or ten years, or maybe twenty, you realize that you aren't that interested in the carrot. You tried to love practice on those terms, but it just has not worked out that way. You can't make yourself love something that you don't, as a long-term (40+ years) practitioner wrote in commenting on a pre-publication copy of A Trackless Path.
Personally I'm deeply grateful for this book. It has pointed me back to the 'Trackless Path', to the yearning for 'this knowing' which originally started my quest in my teens. I left it decades ago for the fool's errand of a constant search for somebody or something to show me the path. Now I am looking again for myself.
Wherever you are in your life, whether you are at the beginning, middle or end, be clear, as clear as you can be, about why you are practicing. You may or may not be able to put your motivation into words. That does not matter. What matters is that you feel it – you feel it in your heart. That feeling may be warm, it may raw, it may be a relief to touch, it may be painful to touch. It doesn't matter. All that is important is that this is where your motivation, your calling, lies.
This is a different way of increasing the urgency, a way that is not based in possible benefits or achievements. Instead, it is based in what you experience right now.
Each day, when you sit to practice, take a few minutes and feel your motivation. That, essentially, is the purpose of the prayers that are used to begin meditation sessions in the Tibetan tradition-honoring the lineage of teachers, taking refuge and fostering awakening mind. These prayers express the traditional motivations, but if they don't speak to you, then write and use your own.
Then do your practice. Try this, and see if it makes a difference.
When your practice arises directly from your heart, you are setting out on a different path, a trackless path. As Wendell Berry wrote in Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms:
“A certain awesome futurity, then, is the inescapable condition of word-giving - as it is, in fact, of all speech - for we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown. But that it is unknown requires us to be generous toward it, and requires our generosity to be full and unconditional.”
There are many ways to give your word. Not all of them are spoken. And sometimes you only realize you have given your word long after it has, in fact, been given.
TMMK
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