As a reminder, the Four Reminders are contemplations - things to think about as you go about your day, or as you sit on your meditation seat. They help you stay clear about your path, your growth, your exploration of life. When you find yourself stuck, lost or wasting time, they are helpful truths to remember. Spending a little bit of time every day thinking through these will help keep your life on track.
The Four Reminders: A Quick Overview
The four reminders are:
1) Life: How incredibly fortunate we are to be alive and to have the time to develop ourselves spiritually.
2) Death: How this situation will absolutely, positively end. Death comes for all of us. We don’t know when and we don’t know what it will bring.
3) Karma: What comes around goes around - the way we live our life and treat other people affects us.
4) Desire: Accumulating more things, getting more famous, accomplishing great things all in order to build up your identity, is a huge fucking waste of time. Building up our identity leads nowhere. In fact, doing so distract us from what’s important - using this opportunity to wake up, see clearly, and help others.
It’s a subtle point.
Working with the Fourth Reminder
Personally speaking, this is the reminder that I struggle with the most. I argue against it in my mind.
The traditional way that I learned this Reminder was with the following framing:
The homes, friends, wealth, and comforts of samsara are the constant torment of the three sufferings - [they are] just like a feast before the executioner leads you to your death. I must cut desire and attachment, and attain enlightenment through exertion.
“No” I say to myself “No, the homes, friends, wealth and comforts of my life are not constant torment.”
But I’m leaving out a key word in that first phrase - “samsara”. It actually says “The homes, friends, wealth and comforts of samsara are the constant torment.”
What Is Samsara?
So what is samsara? Samsara literally means “cycle”. The word specifically refers to the cycle of birth, death and rebirth - of wandering around from moment to moment, life to life, looking for happiness in all the wrong places, suffering and causing suffering wherever we go.
If the basic truth of the universe is that “Everything changes”, the key insight of Buddhism is that “attachment causes suffering”. Attachment to what? Attachment to everything, but most importantly attachment to Self, or Ego - a confused and incorrect belief in who we actually are. Attachment to our beliefs about ourselves. Attachment to our identity.
The Problem: Attachment to a Changing Self
The more you look at it, the more you realize that the thing I call Matthew Bellows is a temporary hodge-podge of thoughts, feelings, blood, guts, relationships, legal documents, web pages, and so on.
Getting attached to that collection of transitory parts is going to cause suffering. Because that collection is going to change. It’s going to fall apart.
But that’s what we do, over and over. We get attached to these things again and again. We define ourselves by them. Since we are attached to a static version of them, and they change all the time, we suffer.
That’s what Trungpa Rinpoche means when he says “The homes, friends, wealth, and comforts of samsara are constant torment…“ The things themselves are not constant torment. The attachment to them, the self identification with them, the way we use them to reinforce our fake, false, confused version of our identity, is constant torment.
It’s very simple. Those things don’t last. Nothing lasts. We’re wasting time if we are building up our identity with fame, fortune, possessions and friends because no matter how great they are or how much we love them, they will disappear. We will die.
All these things are “Just like a feast before the executioner leads you to your death”.
Does that mean you don’t eat the food? NO!
It means that you enjoy the food, you share the food, you celebrate with the food, but you don’t use it to reinforce something that doesn’t exist.
You’ve probably heard that story about hell - there’s a huge room full of starving people at a huge feast table, but the forks are too long for them to hold in their hands and also reach their mouths? Heaven is when they figure out how to feed each other.
The Practice: Releasing Attachment
So let's examine the situation carefully, see the transitory nature of everything, see our attachments to it all, and release, relax, let go into the feast of the pure moment of now.
In other words, let’s meditate.