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    How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to End Suffering.
    How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to End Suffering.
    How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to End Suffering.
    Ebook223 pages3 hours

    How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to End Suffering.

    By Darren Littlejohn

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    About this ebook

    No experience necessary! This book is for everyone. It offers smart guidance how to apply what the Buddha taught. Learn how to be a compassionate, wise practitioner on a planet filled with suffering and craziness. This book gives you many simple, easy to follow explanations and practices for all aspects of being human.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 14, 2016
    ISBN9780989526029
    How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to End Suffering.
    Author

    Darren Littlejohn

    Darren Littlejohn dropped out of school in the eighth grade in order to “pursue drugs and alcohol as a full-time endeavor.” After a long, rough road to sobriety, he passed his high school proficiency exam and went on to earn an AA in Behavior Science from San Jose City College, a BA in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach, and has completed all coursework but the final theses for the MA Pre-Doctoral Research Program, also at the Long Beach campus of California State University. In his personal journey, he studied Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, later integrating all of his life experience, beliefs, credentials and true passion into his work.

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      Book preview

      How to Gain Nothing from Buddhist Practice - Darren Littlejohn

      Rick.

      Chapter One

      The Three Poisons

      Dzogchen is said to be based on the real meaning because right from the beginning it teaches one to find oneself in one’s natural condition without changing or altering it.

      --Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State

      There is No Foundation

      I’d love to start by setting up a foundation for you to understand Buddhism. But ultimately, there is no foundation. There is nothing to grasp, no place to put your feet and nothing to hold on to. Does that scare you? It scares me. We’re so afraid of not existing like we think we do. The thought of nothingness can be quite terrifying. In fact, some Buddhists freak out at the idea. When my first book came out, I gave a talk at a pretty serious Tibetan Buddhist group in Sacramento. The teacher there, from a conservative Tibetan tradition, commented that he almost lost it when I started talking about emptiness. They usually take a while to introduce that topic to their students. But the experience of and immersion in the sheer, total, immeasurable expanse of nothing is, in fact, the ultimate goal of the first teachings of the Buddha.

      Buddhists who follow this path don’t really talk about nothingness as the destination, but that’s really the ultimate conclusion of the first of the Buddha’s teachings. The way to get to this non-place with no path and no one to arrive is through renunciation of worldly concerns. It’s a hard path and it takes many lifetimes. Why is that?

      Because our karma is very, very heavy. And because we’re so afraid. We cling. We clutch. We hold on by our fingernails. We create a fictitious reality that we think can hold on to. The last thing we really want to do is let it all dissolve, like a dream that dissipates into the morning light. What we really want is to fix everything. Put ourselves on top. Make it better. Feel better. Not just better, but fantastic. And if we can’t feel better, we don’t want other people to remind us of how we feel. We medicate, distract, blame, project. We want life to be something other than what it is. We’re convinced that it should be different. But it’s not, and we hate it.

      I’ll give you an example. This morning I was walking my elderly dog when I was stricken with a deep sadness over the loss of our other dog. He and his friend Zippy were very close, inseparable in fact. Zippy died of heart failure about a year ago. I thought about how badly I missed Zippy and felt so bad for my Mackie because I know his little heart is broken. He misses his friend and I miss my friend and I can do nothing to stop the pain for either of us. That made me feel powerless. Furious. Yet that is how it is. Our friend died. We can’t bring him back like the redheaded witch lady brought back Jon Snow on Game of Thrones. So what are we left with? We’re left with life, just as it is, in this moment.

      This is the practice. Nothing concrete or substantial actually exists, especially our thoughts, beliefs and feelings. The more we hold on, the more acutely we suffer. In fact, the tighter we hold on to the notion that we shouldn’t suffer, the worse it gets. We suffer. That’s what Buddha said. Anyone care to argue that point?

      So, now that we have that fundamental idea, what do we do? Depends on who you ask and what strain of Dharma they’re following. Yes, it may surprise you, but there are different views on how to deal with the main problem of suffering within each system of Buddhism and its interpretation of what Buddha said. Sound familiar? The same could be said of Catholics and Protestants and many other sects and traditions.

      Buddhism, like most systems, has many variations. Within each there are some purists and fundamentalists and hard liners. There are others that live in the essence of the teachings and are more relaxed. You might have met some Buddhists who aren’t much fun. I’m not one of those. I’m really fun, in case you were wondering.

      That said, the ideas that you’ll read about in Gain Nothing could upset some purists. Should we argue? My advice is this: if discussing ideas that are different or threatening or weird to the person you’re trying to discuss them with, don’t discuss them with that person. Perhaps find someone to discuss them with who is interested in that type of discussion. Readers of my work have a website with a member’s area, a Facebook community and a format for local meditation groups that can be used to collaborate with other like-minded souls. Feel free to use those resources. But don’t go out on a mission to convince anyone of anything. It’s quite pointless. Alternately, you could just sit alone and not worry about connecting with others. That is totally up to you. Some practitioners have gone into lifetime solitary retreat for that very reason.

      There’s a lot to forget about Buddhism, but it’s important to learn it first. We don’t have space here to go into all of the similarities and differences of the different Dharma tribes and I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of all those details. I don’t think any one person does. Buddha would. But I haven’t seen him around lately. I follow teachings and the teachings are about the essence. We’ll get into that as we go. Maybe you’re starting to feel it already. Or not. But if you do the practices that I suggest, something’s bound to shift. You may touch emptiness. You might, in fact, gain nothing.

      These are my views, based on teachings that I’ve received and a lifetime of experience. If you meditate on what I’m sharing with you here, I’m confident that you’ll find it to be useful. I only share things that work for me. These tools have great value. It’s up to you to learn, meditate, apply and realize. No one can do it for you. Not even The Buddha.

      What are the takeaways about Buddhism then? The main thing that you need to know about Buddhism is that the Buddha taught about three things that keep us suffering: attachment, ignorance, and aversion. We hold on to some things, push other things away and are clueless as to what’s really going on. If you really understood the nature of suffering and lived by that understanding, you’d be enlightened. I’m not enlightened, so I keep working on this stuff. I’m just a total geek about Dharma and have been into it for decades. Whether this is your first exposure to it or if you’re a well seasoned old-fart practitioner, my intention is to help you understand it better for yourself. If I miss the mark for you, then of course you can read one of the hundreds of watered down books about mindfulness that come out every

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