Heart of Sadness

Jeffrey

HEART OF SADNESS

Kongtrul Rinpoche suggested we pray to the guru, buddhas, and bodhisattvas and ask them to grant their blessings, “So I may give birth to the heart of sadness.” But what is a “heart of sadness”? Imagine one night you have a dream. Although it is a good dream, deep down you know that eventually you will have to wake up and it will be over. In life, too, sooner or later, whatever the state of our relationships, or our health, our jobs and every aspect of our lives, everything, absolutely everything, will change. And the little bell ringing in the back of your head to remind you of this inevitability is what is called the “heart of sadness.” Life, you realise, is a race against time, and you should never put off dharma practice until next year, next month, or tomorrow, because the future may never happen.

Here is how I responded to this on facebook:

borrowed it to post elsewhere. Thanks for sharing this. Just an anecdote tonight I wanted to get up from my meditation hard to describe my state of mind it is foggy. Anyhow after getting up I sat back down. There followed a kind of recognition like above^ Thanks so much for posting.
a few seconds ago · Like

taiyaki

chogyam trungpa said the perfect emotion was feeling like crying and smiling at the same time.

Silouan

It is the experience of what we describe as joyful sadness expressed as tears of sadness mixed with joy.

pegembara

And the little bell ringing in the back of your head to remind you of this inevitability is what is called the “heart of sadness.”

This “heart of sadness” is what nibbida or disenchantment is. This sense that everything is subject to change, that all conditioned things are fraught with danger leads to dispassion.

"The knowledge and vision of things as they really are is the supporting condition for disenchantment": As the yogin contemplates the rise and fall of the five aggregates, his attention becomes riveted to the final phase of the process, their dissolution and passing away. This insight into the instability of the aggregates at the same time reveals their basic unreliability. Far from being the ground of satisfaction we unreflectively take them to be, conditioned things are seen to be fraught with peril when adhered to with craving and wrong views. The growing realization of this fundamental insecurity brings a marked transformation in the mind's orientation towards conditioned existence. Whereas previously the mind was drawn to the world by the lure of promised gratification, now, with the exposure of the underlying danger, it draws away in the direction of a disengagement. This inward turning away from the procession of formations is called nibbida. Though some times translated "disgust" or "aversion," the term suggests, not emotional repugnance, but a conscious act of detachment resulting from a profound noetic discovery. Nibbida signifies in short, the serene, dignified withdrawal from phenomena which supervenes when the illusion of their permanence, pleasure, and selfhood has been shattered by the light of correct knowledge and vision of things as they are. The commentaries explain nibbida as powerful insight (balava vipassana), an explanation consonant with the word's literal meaning of "finding out." It indicates the sequel to the discoveries unveiled by that contemplative process, the mind's appropriate response to the realizations thrust upon it by the growing experiences of insight. Buddhaghosa compares it to the revulsion a man would feel who, having grabbed bold of a snake in the belief it was a fish, would look at it closely and suddenly realize he was holding a snake.

http://unanswerables.blogspot.com/2010/11/disenchantment-nibbida.html

federica

Borrowed this off FB too. Kudos to S.K.

Don't think that, if you suffer, you alone suffer. Because if you suffer, you make EVERYBODY else suffer.

Don't think that, if you're happy, you alone are happy. Because if you're happy, you make EVERYBODY else happy.

Citta

I know from my own experience that the more compassion I feel the more my heart breaks. I have at times deliberately toned down my compassion so as not to feel the pain, but that doesn't work. I just become numb.
So now the pain arises and the compassion arises and sometimes the joy arises but none of it is in the end "mine."
I put it in the cloud of unknowing and do the washing up.
To quote a more recent source...
" clouds of sorrow pools of joy are floating through my opened mind " J. Lennon.
I would not be without the sadness given the choice..

zenff

When our heart is open we share the joy and we share the pain other sentient beings feel.
Given there is only one “me” and there are billions of “others”, the number of emotions for me to experience explodes, due to compassion. My emotional life would be miserable and poor without other people’s emotions to share.

Our brain does the trick with mirror neurons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

“How can a drop of water avoid drying up?
- By throwing itself into the ocean.”
(That’s from the movie Samsara.)

We can avoid drying up emotionally by throwing ourselves into the ocean of compassion.