Tearing Down the Hut of Hope & Fear
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche used to tell his students: “Tear down the hut of hope and fear. See Sky.”
He didn’t say to stop trying to feel hope or fear but to dismantle the way we have hemmed ourselves in through concepts and fixations that come out of our reactions to those emotions.
The ‘hut’ he talks about is the story line that we’ve created with rigid boundaries in relationship to what we hope and what we fear. He often pointed out that hope and fear go together. We hope this will happen, but fear that it won’t. So we go back and forth between dualistic extremes, ignoring the wide grey space in between. Also much of what we fear is in the future, not the present. But through fear, we imagine the worst case scenario and then believe that it is true and climb into that box. In truth, the reality of what is going to happen is still in the future, but we’ve created this bleak loop for our thoughts that keep spinning around and around.
The same is true with hope. I know I created a hopeful world of having a woman president. It denied the shadow. Thinking back, it wasn’t so much a hut as an igloo with six-inch thick walls of solid ice that I was sitting inside of. Through excessive hope, I felt protected on all sides and thus felt very let down when I found the walls were just a figment of my imagination, a product of my own projections.
So the ‘hut’ is our fixated story line created through fixation on and believe in our dualistic thinking, but the way out is to see sky.
By ‘sky’ Tibetan Buddhism mean to experience an expansive awareness that gives us a realistic way of dealing with our hopes and fears which have kept us in a polarized stasis through our dualistic thoughts.
Sky is often used to represent “view,” as in the traditional Vajrayana categories of View, Meditation & Action. View is open, spacious, and non-verbal. It is a special kind of knowing that is always present and accessible when we tone down our discursive thinking. Clarity, openness, and essence love are spontaneously present within view.
One way to become familiar with the experience of sky, rather that just the idea of it, is to practice sky gazing.
Pick a cloudless day, sit facing away from the sun, look out & up. If you are used to meditating with your eyes closed, you might want to start with closed eyes and establish calm through following the breath for a few minutes, then open the eyes and fill them with sky. One of my teachers used to say “Breathe out your mind and let it stay there. Merge with sky.”
You can also lie flat on your back and look up into the sky when the sun is not directly overhead. The traditional teaching on sky gazing is that merging with the outer sky activates the inner sky, allowing us to tear down the hut of hope and fear and to see things as they are.
KS