Turning Toward Awareness: Stop Suffering Start Living

By Ven. George Teng

Turning Toward Awareness posthumously shares wisdom from a western monk ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Written in 1974, Ven. George Teng's incisive writing and unique insights into the workings of the mind still provide an excellent foundation for spiritual practice. Buddhists as well as those who follow other faith traditions will find the author's thoughtful reflections inspiring. Even those without any faith tradition will benefit from his presentations on developing a meaningful life that brings happiness in the present and hope for the future.

The author shows how human growth becomes arrested and dysfunctional when our awareness is misguided by distorted beliefs. His work sheds light on the ways we try to protect ourselves, such as hiding our ignorance because we feel it is shameful; reacting to fear with cowardice; and embracing weakness as a lifestyle to gain others' energy and attention. His wisdom helps us become aware that our unhealthy mental habits are obscuring our innate nature of wisdom, compassion, and power, which have the potential to manifest in every moment through our intelligence, love, and creativity.

Turning Toward Awareness will help readers stop the suffering arising from wrong views and start living a life of true happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480857032

Ven. George Teng

Ven. George Teng was born in Estonia. After fighting in World War II, he headed for California where he turned his mind toward spiritual transformation. After renouncing worldly activity and pleasures, he became a Tibetan Buddhist monk at age fifty-four and devoted the remainder of his life to practicing dharma and teaching others of all faiths. Ven. Teng maintained a silent retreat for eight years prior to his death in 1997. Francis Paone met Ven. George Teng, his first Dharma teacher, in 1969. After receiving a BA in Study of Religion from UCLA in 1978, he continued to study Buddhism with Ven. George Teng, Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen and other Tibetan masters. In 1997 Francis and his wife Jean began a long meditation retreat under the direct guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Currently they retreat most of the year and teach occasionally.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-5702-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5704-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5703-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018900470

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/09/2019

Contents

Preface

Note to the Reader

1 Right Views

2 Action

3 Communication

4 Roles

5 Problems

6 Relationships

7 Cowardice

8 Perfection of Speech

9 Perfection of Mind

10 Self-Image

11 Drama and Mind

12 Reactions and Stupidity

13 Pain

14 Purification of Mind

15 Prayer

16 Love

17 Purity of Thought

18 Conclusion

Editor’s Acknowledgments

Author

Editor

Dedicated to Monk and teachers of all faiths who show the way to freedom through their teaching and example. May they continue to inspire us to love life unconditionally and walk in their footsteps, honestly and fearlessly.

Preface

It was the summer of 1969, and I was in California searching for a spiritual guide. But my search was proving futile until one evening in a beach coffee shop I noticed a man sitting at the other end of the counter. He was glowing, and his presence conveyed wisdom. I realized he might be the person I was searching for. He took no notice of me. When he left the restaurant I followed him from a distance until I worked up the courage to approach him. He asked what I wanted, and I told him I needed help. He said his name was George Teng, and he invited me to come to his apartment the next day.

When I arrived the first thing I noticed was that his apartment had nothing in it: no furniture, no chairs, no pillows, no bed. There was a built-in bench seating area without cushions; on the walls were beautiful photos of the five Dhyani Buddhas. That was it. Needless to say, there was no clutter. In fact, it was like a vacant apartment.

When I saw George I was again struck by his appearance. He seemed to be a true ascetic, with a longish white beard, wearing simple clothing. George’s eyes were very blue and penetrating: he looked right through me. He was obviously well-educated and extremely intelligent. He was very relaxed, though his speech was somewhat formal. The voice was a joy—deep, resonant, with a slight British accent, but just a tinge of it, and cultured, with very few words. His words were precise, and his language was extraordinary. That first time, and every time after, I left our meeting wanting to write down everything I could remember, to go back over it later. I did not want to forget anything he said; his every word seemed to be a revelation.

The more I got to know George, the more I admired him. All his actions were precise and disciplined. He wasted no time but was always focused on and engaged in some meaningful activity. He lived like a monk. He was silent for months at a time, and he fasted for weeks and months. Yet he never seemed to tire. He would swim and run every day, and he could run for miles and miles on the soft sand at the beach. Evenings we would sometimes walk along the strand until well past midnight while he gave spiritual advice. His explanations penetrated issues like an x-ray. He was by far the most extraordinary person I had ever met. He changed my life.

In the winter of 1974 George went to Dharamsala, India. He was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in April 1975 and was given the name Jampa Thupten. True to his pre-ordination style, Ven. Jampa Thupten wanted to keep things simple and preferred to be called Monk.

In 1975, not long after he returned from India, he began a year-long presentation of his teachings. The original presentations were made to a handful of students. It was my good karma to be one of them. More than forty years later those teachings became Turning Toward Awareness.

In the years that followed, Monk continued his studies and meditations, received teachings from many of the great Tibetan masters from all four traditions who came to the Los Angeles area during those years, and gave spiritual counsel to a few close students.

His last eight years were spent in silent retreat. When students wanted to see him we would have to call and set a time. Monk responded to these requests by tapping on the phone: one tap was yes, two taps no, three taps meant repeat the question. When we arrived for a visit, the door was unlocked and we just went in and sat down. Soon, he would come out of his room with a smile and piercing blue eyes. He often seemed in an exalted state. Just being with him gave us a contact high.

During those visits, we would do all the talking, and he would reply in writing. This was a bit awkward, but we got used to it. You will see how creative and insightful his writing is. What you will not be able to see, but what I can attest to, is his ability to see right through you and go into the heart of any issue. He was a no-nonsense teacher and a bit stern, especially in his younger days. But as he got older, I am happy to say, he became very jolly.

Monk died in June 1997 in the same Hermosa Beach apartment where he studied, meditated, and taught his fortunate students. When he became sick I asked him if there was a final message he wanted conveyed to his students and friends. He thought for a moment and said, Tell them I loved them.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama recently said, about teachers who have passed on, that although they are gone, their teachings are still with us and we can keep them alive through our study, contemplation, and meditation. In that way, may we create the causes to meet with our teachers again and again in all our lives to come.

Now we will turn to Monk’s teachings. His teachings have a foundation in the buddha nature, so it will be helpful to discuss the topic before reading the first chapter.

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In the third turning of the Wheel of Dharma, the Buddha taught that all beings have a buddha nature, and because of their buddha nature all beings have the potential to become enlightened. Even insects and animals have this potential. The buddha nature is like a seed that needs to be cultivated or awakened to fully manifest. The practice of Dharma is the cultivation of that seed. Of course, the Buddha had fully realized the buddha nature. Unenlightened beings such as we have the complete buddha nature, but we remain largely unaware of its presence and ultimate potential. By following the Buddha’s teachings, we too will be able to fully manifest or awaken to the buddha nature.

The main qualities of the buddha nature are wisdom, power, and compassionate love. Like sunlight filtered through a clouded sky, these qualities illuminate our existence in a diffused manner. Our own experience of wisdom, power, and compassionate love—no matter how obscured—can never be totally eliminated from our lives. As Monk mentions throughout his writing, the buddha nature lives in us like a life force. Not only can these qualities never be totally absent, they can be enhanced limitlessly by removing obstacles to their full realization.

The diagram above shows the three major aspects of the buddha nature. These aspects are not isolated but are connected and support one another. For example, when loving, we become more powerful, we become more intelligent. When we’re honest we’re able to love more fully, which enhances the potency of our actions. These three aspects connect, and they support one another. In a sense they are one-energy manifesting in different aspects.

When our actions contradict one aspect of our buddha nature its other aspects are affected. If we are dishonest, it affects our ability to love. It also affects our ability to create, think, and have power to do things. Dishonesty brings stupidity with it. It also brings weakness, anger, and malice and the other afflictions.

We know it is not good to make decisions when we are angry because we do not have full access to our intelligence. We are misinformed to think that hatred and anger bring more power because they actually decrease our power, intelligence, and love.

When we play weak, or we abuse our power and become a bully, or when we become angry and create ill will, we are at odds with our buddha nature. The consequence of acting contrary to our nature is suffering. As a result of acting in accord with our buddha nature, peace, happiness, and fulfillment are experienced. We begin to truly live.

Monk’s writings help us remain aware and uncover our innate qualities by consciously participating in creating our own happiness, our own enlightenment. At times he explicitly mentions the buddha nature, but often it is not spelled out. Either way, the buddha nature teaching is the foundation stone of Monk’s teachings.

Francis Paone

Note to the Reader

Monk’s use of grammar and punctuation is at times unconventional. It has been left unchanged. He often omitted a or the before nouns; these and other aspects of his written and spoken voice have generally been retained.

1

Right Views

The basic starting requirements for creating a channel to free our energies are removing weakness of feeling, removing fixation of thought on ourselves, removing fixed sexual denomination, remembering we are part of an everlasting creation, and remembering our buddha nature.

Weakness of feeling causes a pattern of relying on and therefore needing weakness. This undermines everything we do. Removing this weakness uproots hopelessness and helplessness, which are our fictions imposed on reality. Nothing is created helpless, and a feeling of hope is the way to acknowledge that everything supports everything else and that only form changes.

Fixation of thought on yourself is thinking about a mental focus called me. This me has reality only conventionally and temporarily as a naïve device for action. The real self must be discovered by what is happening, and in what is happening, to the supposed me in action, and re-action. This way we remove the mental tension that the fixation on me creates.

Fixed sexual denomination is removed by recognizing that the male and female manifestation of energy is present in men and women alike and is very difficult to define. Again, only by happening and action do we see male and female tendencies in ourselves. Nor must we ever play men or women or keep reacting as if we were in fixed roles of men and women. By this we free ourselves from the subtle misuse of weakness and strength, and we shift from preoccupation of thinking about our supposed selves as something fixed and requiring fixed ways of acting and reacting. Maleness or femaleness expresses itself by itself. We need to observe this and then free such expression completely.

Because we are part of an everlasting creation, and we are continuously and irresistibly creating. This is something we should never forget. The questions before us are always: What am I creating now? What am I building? Do I know what I am doing? It follows that we need to become more and more aware. We have unwittingly, unawares, created a chain of difficulties that plagues us and will continue to plague us until we see what we are doing. This we can never accomplish until we honestly dispense with weakness, often masquerading as self-love with thinking endlessly about ourselves, like forever standing in front of a mental mirror, which makes us self-centered. Likewise we need to dispense with playing any kind of roles, the root and deepest one being sexual roles in social relations, and even the role of sometimes being human beings. Becoming aware is a gradual and graduated process, else we could not live and function. The chain of past deeds, past creations by ourselves, extends beyond the scope of this birth, so how can we do anything about it ourselves?

We must remember the lord Buddha, whose nature is infinite wisdom, love, and power. Our striving to become aware means striving to become aware of our own Buddha nature. Our striving to free ourselves from the confinements of self-created and ignorant deeds means striving to realize a union with our Buddha nature.

Thought and Feeling

Thoughts and feelings are parents of the deed. Feeling seeks thought in order to be able to create form. Thought, in turn, as idea, must find full feeling to materialize as creation. Both thought and feeling are usually on the level of dream state, but their functions and attributes are different. Nor can one reject or distrust the other and be free or successful. Both are mind, both happen in response to action of consciousness. Misuse of feeling, as self-love, and misuse of thought, as self-fixation (egoism in both cases), impede and delude our conscious response and cripple us. Ordinarily mating forcibly corrects this error in us, but cannot do so completely until we ourselves, with feeling and thought, begin to seek our inner mating of yang and yin, Shiva and Shakti, yab-yum. Play weak, and you corrupt your feeling-power. Play thought-fixation on yourself, and you corrupt thought-power. How and what to feel and think are therefore the two great concerns of every religion, or method of fulfillment, or finding freedom to live fully and creatively.

Feeling-energy requires right direction of thinking, or ideas. Thinking needs full feeling in order to create. This is why we seek perfection of feeling (love) and of ideas (wisdom). Together they bring forth prajna, real understanding, and therefore freedom of creation.

Neither feeling nor thinking is right until it is no longer restricted. But freedom is not what we, prisoners and ignorant men and women, imagine. Freedom is a kind of union, or mating, or yoga of feeling and thinking which gives birth to action that resolves and dissolves our holding karma, our previous creations, the shortcomings created before and present now. This means that we may change the process of feeling and thinking now, in the present, as we go along, and not later. Previous feelings and thoughts support me and hold me; these are my parents—parents of this given moment of myself happening, and of this situation. I may not remember these parents yet I am their offspring. Often I want to get rid of them and my ancestors. But I am their creation—what can I do? I need to begin conscious creation, self-creation so to speak, by my own feelings and thinking, but with awareness.

How can I know their rightness? By seeking in my heart the feeling that is pure and untouched by weaknesses, deceptions, self-love and self-watching. This pure feeling and corresponding clear thought is the buddha nature. It is in everyone. Similarly, seeking rightness of thought, ideas in scriptures or teachings or teachers, is the search for truth, which exists and lives in everyone, and is also the buddha nature manifesting. Therefore we can and do find right direction and right correction.

Remember: right thought finds the note of right feeling; and right feeling brings forth right thinking. They are after all ultimately the same thing.

Good Sense / Good Feelings

You feel that you have common sense. And you are a person of good will. (Even though you have lapses in both.) Your common good sense and good feelings are our intelligence (ability to understand) and love (freedom of feeling). They are real.

How do they become my nonsense, which gets me into trouble, and my ill-feelings, which bring calamities on my head?

The problem is avidya, our unawareness. Our ignorance. Our intelligence (good sense) and our love (good feelings) remain impure while covered by illusion and delusion and are still underdeveloped, veiled. Since love and intelligence are right-impulse-makers, our very rightness appears to mislead us. These impulses of thinking and feeling have a right origin and are right, but they come out in both actions and expressions as I’m right (and hence, others are wrong). The stumbling block is subtle. Instead of believing that the intelligence and love, felt and experienced by us, are right, we believe we are right. The rightness, the intelligence, and the love become clouded and misused by the me we are so fixed on thinking about.

In this manner, subtly, we become opposed to other people, and misuse our intelligence and love, and our own thinking and feeling. Look at childhood: when others deny or abuse or bully or ridicule our good sense and good feelings, we become proud or cocky just to be able to still rely on, still trust and use our native good intelligence, and our good, right feeling.

We become sensitive to the slightest criticism, or to anyone questioning our good sense and good motives, to how people treat our views, intelligence, and loves. Does not this tell us how to treat, and not to treat, other people and their feelings and thinking? Or how to bring up children? We should help others use and feel their good sense and their good feelings, always. Never block them, imply or show that perhaps your intelligence and feelings are better and nobler, because you must not, by comparison, belittle theirs. Why not?

Their good sense and feelings and love? Our good sense and good feelings? Where do they originate? Good sense and good feelings, intelligence and love originate in the absolute and unbounded wisdom and love and compassion of our buddha nature. That is the source from where right thinking and good feelings come, originate and are. They are ours only because we are lived by the buddha nature and are living in the buddha nature. That is the creative thinking and feeling in us. Or, if you like, that is our true experience of life and creation. To experience full creativity we must live our buddha nature, and therefore fully, openly, trustingly, and effortlessly, doubtlessly, fearlessly, joyously use our intelligence and love. By doing this we unite with the absolute and boundless wisdom and compassion. As we open to love and intelligence they become freed in us. Right thinking and right feeling become easier, we become more creative, more spontaneous, more natural. We feel more free. We gain more awareness of what is; simply of what is.

All of us suffer through our unawareness, fear, consequent self-concern, and through what follows these. Therefore we must never belittle anyone’s intelligence or love, be they dull or bright, adults or children, doing this or that. Because whenever we belittle anyone’s intelligence and love we ignorantly belittle the buddha nature; and since the buddha nature is one and universal, part of everyone, and that of which everyone is part—even the least of all sentient living beings—we then belittle ourselves and our own good sense and good feelings. Our desire to belittle others, their intelligence and good feelings, is strong when we ourselves feel weak and are obsessed with thinking about ourselves. When we are least secure we pounce on others.

We unite with the buddha nature, reality itself, only by freely and fully uniting with wisdom and love, and by this discover our own powers. Our power? It is always the creative power, the creation we all are and share, but it is ours only when we yield to it. We get it by giving ourselves away to it, uniting with it, and since we already are it and it is in us, this is a mysterious and difficult process to explain—but it is not so difficult to enact, and of course we do this daily, otherwise we could not live and function at all; only we do it without awareness and therefore not consistently, not strongly.

But when we do it with a will, the usual happening becomes a very unusual happening. We are always creative, but creating unawares is one thing, and creating with full awareness is another; one is usual and the other is unusual indeed.

When we unite with the buddha nature, trusting and freeing our wisdom and intelligence, we become truly creative; then creativity, so variously expressible, and as expressed by us, also means the discovery of our true nature. In us we feel this wisdom, love, and rightness. If we deny this, we are unwittingly denying our own growth and evolution; and the result is always a great discomfort—illness, suffering, and insanity—and this the sutras and scriptures say very clearly.

When we rely on pride, cockiness, and arrogance to use our intelligence and love we are only showing a child’s way of enacting them. This way must make us dependent on pretense—and when we pretend where we should be real we have falsified what is real, and lost faith, and do unwittingly (unawares) deny our buddha nature. We need to understand this simple act of ignorance—in it we may discover what regularly and mysteriously makes us foolish, what thickens our ignorance into delusion.

Each of us becomes foolish and unloving only when he believes himself weak, feeble-minded, somehow unable to think properly when necessary; or believes that he is somehow unable to cope with life by relying on good feelings and love. Remember that when we pretend, the real thing may be lost; while pretending we should be more aware than ever. When we are proud, arrogant, cocky, we believe that being natural and real will not do, will not carry us through. But pride and arrogance are put-on things, and they cover up our real abilities. They interfere with real creativity and prevent us from discovering it. We need to grow. To grow means to increase and develop our good sense and good feelings, until on all levels of experience through body, speech, and mind, we uncover wisdom, compassion, and power dwelling within us, and always present in all living beings. We should be eager to discover our limitations so we can transcend them. Growth of awareness is the most important aspect of our gradual ripening.

Admitting Ignorance

The need to admit our ignorance always, whenever we feel or recognize it, is great because this is the only intelligent (aware) thing to do; this is real intelligence, right use of our good sense.

Ignorance is the same thing as knowledge, because these are opposites. Enlightenment, supreme understanding, has no opposite. It manifests itself as ignorance when veiled, and as knowledge—which is only the act or process of unveiling truth. This is why knowledge keeps changing and must be constantly revised. True understanding (and not mere knowledge) is what we actually seek.

We enjoy creativity, acts of real creation, because they liberate us. These are acts of true happiness since true creation frees us from holding karma, and opens awareness of wisdom.

Never hide ignorance. Never pretend knowledge. We have been fooled by others and have fooled ourselves into believing that ignorance, the cause of our fears and sufferings, should or could be hidden. All we have done is distort our thinking and pollute our feelings and undermine our gift of creativity.

I don’t know is the most noble sentence in our language. It is a declaration of freedom. It means I am free to discover and to know. Shame of ignorance is the seed of all pride, arrogance, and cockiness. Be ashamed of pretense that leads you to believe you can be all-knowing without first having grown to be all-honest and all-loving and all-trusting in the buddha nature.

Adult with a Child

If the more aware is, or acts together with, the less aware, this is always like an adult being with a child. You remember how crushing an experience it was to be with your parents and elders at times because they knew so much (and sometimes seemed to never let you forget it either). Being more aware means an ability to see into things. It is overpowering to be with such awareness, unless it is loving and (therefore) understanding—and patient with the less aware. We should remember this when we are with the unaware, with children for instance, when we have comparatively overpowering minds. It is difficult to remain patient if we are to do something other than merely play, unless we love them, and see how their unawareness makes them seemingly stupid (that is, powerless to think, and hence frightened and often unloving or arrogant).

Teacher-pupil relationship is also like that. The greater awareness, capable of crushing the pupil, is not easy to be with, unless we relax into complete love, and give up all pretense and all pride, and all claim to not being ignorant, and through this discover our intelligence.

A child is not inferior to an adult. It is as good or better, provided it is genuine, truthful, and loving. Every adult instinctively admires such children. What do grownups find so charming in children? Genuineness.

We have different capacities. And the requirement is not that we pretend to have the attribute or status of a higher development or capacity, but that we simply, honestly, and faithfully follow and experience our own. Each mental capacity, once in human form and with enough awareness to see a need for spiritual growth, is capable of fulfillment and liberation. It must not think about itself as weak, but needs to turn trustingly and fully into its inevitable course of flowing, and to understand its destined goal.

Creative Cycles

We create constantly. There are cycles in our creation, and there are cycles in our lives. Reincarnation is such a cycle. There are also shorter cycles.

In the creative cycle, the subtle body, the psyche, is the gestation state. It is often compared metaphorically to female state. With women the psychic experience usually dominates or is more developed than in men. Therefore St. Paul, and the Buddhists, seem to insist that women are secondary. St. Paul wants them not to talk in church or preach; and Buddhists often say that a woman must first be reborn as a male to gain enlightenment. But the reference is to the psyche as subordinate to a higher state, sometimes compared to the idea-making predominant in the male. All this can be confusing so long as we are dominated by our own maleness and femaleness, and this is why it is important to transcend, at least intellectually if not completely, our sexual roles as images.

We should grasp clearly the principle of self-creation through creativity. What we create, we become. Therefore what we think and what we feel we grow to be—or continue to be as long as we continue to think or feel it consistently, i.e., continue to create it.

Creation goes on eternally, and we also are creation that creates continuously. This activity cannot be stopped, and it cannot be reversed. But it can be