The introduction of such wisdom into North American culture is an historical landmark – the wisdom of Shambhala.
from Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala by Chogyam Trungpa
I ask myself why this quote caught my attention. Back in the 70′s when I went to college at Berkeley, it sure caught my attention and has held on all this time.
I wrote in my last blog about movements in the manufacturing community that have caught my eye and not let go – Japanese Manufacturing Techniques like one piece flow, just in time, etc. and now the Toyota Kata as it is put forth by Mike Rother.
Most would say that I’m approaching the end of my career, but I feel that I just reaching a level where I have something substantive to contribute because I know enough to be confident and am still curious and excited about learning.
But I guess it does bring up a point about new things that are always coming up in every field. Every field has it’s aha moments and I just happened to wind up in manufacturing. It has always been a mystery how I wound up here. I don’t think it is destiny or anything like that. I guess wherever I could have wound up, I would have approached it in the same open minded and curious way to find out the way to make it authentic and not just go through the motions.
But what about the Shambhala – what is it? I must say at this point, I can’t even put a finger on it. I thought it was important enough to make it the central focus of my life but it has been a silent focus, not shared with a group, a community or another person except in this blog.
The reason that the Kata shook me as it did, is because it brought together my personal secret life with my public professional life. The idea is to look at the work that is being done and then take a step back and open yourself, be present. This little step is the whole difference. It isn’t religious. It isn’t intellectual. It isn’t mental. It is in the whole body. Then after that moment, go forward and take another step and then do it all over again.
It is taking the dichotomy of our western approach of “either/or” and turning it on it’s head. Now we are looking at the present, we aren’t making power plays to see who will “win”. We are looking at the situation and doing scientific experiments in real time and then stepping back and asking what happened? and then doing it again and again.
The process is what is important, not the goal. It isn’t goal oriented, it is process oriented. It is living. Maybe that is what I see in the Shambhala that I hadn’t been exposed to in my Western upbringing.
Up until the time I was exposed to the Shambhala in college, life was a popularity contest where you were rewarded for achieving goals.
I found out that living in poverty wasn’t such a thrill. But now living on the edge of disaster with too much debt in America is a little too much of a thrill. But still the teaching is the same. Be in the present, breathe, be compassionate to yourself and others. And the main teaching that really turns things on their heads is that when you care for others, you get happy. And of course there is Buddhist logic that explains that whole thing but it is the next law of nature. If you serves others, you stop suffering.
If you’re interested in what’s behind this, you can look at the Four Noble Truths and I especially like the way that David Whyte has translated it into western thought in his book The Three Marriages and Pema Chödrön’s Start Where you Are. Chödrön frames her teachings around fifty-nine traditional Tibetan Buddhist slogans (called lojong in Tibetan), such as: “Always apply only a joyful state of mind” and “Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your own happiness.” . There is so much now that we have at our disposal translated not only into our language but also with metaphors and examples that we can relate to.