Please do not read this if you are currently suffering from anxiety or depression.

If you do read, please remain alert to your body and emotions, and if you find yourself becoming unwell, please stop and take care of yourself.

I found writing such as this very galvanizing in my own practice. If it doesn’t resonate, pay it no heed.

All quotes in italics taken from Patrul Rinpoche’s The Essential Jewel of Holy Practice.

Maintain revulsion—nobody can be trusted.

Maintain despondency—nothing has any substance.

Stay resolute—there’s no time for all your plans.

These three attitudes will make you useful.

As I’m incapable today of speaking with my red raw vocal chords, now seemed a good time to write about the function of Saṃvega in Dharma practice, sometimes translated as urgency, though I would prefer shock, terror, or woe to better get the point across.

This isn’t going to be long, the argument is simple:

If you don’t feel an overwhelming dismay at the condition of your own and other sentient life, why would you arouse the requisite effort to awaken to the emptiness of all things and work selflessly for the benefit of all life?

Well, you probably won’t. You’ll return to numbing, distracting habits of body, speech, and mind, and continue to spin endlessly, fruitlessly in the revolving wheel of psychophysical misery that is samsara.

Dharma is medicine. If you’re not sick, don’t take it.

The diagnosis from the Great Physician, though, is that we are all terminally ill and running heedless and headlong into ceaseless perpetuation of suffering, day and night, without any hope of release but dropping off this body and mind completely and acting only as the compassionate wisdom which arises therefrom.

What else is there?

Temporary pleasure, fleeting achievement, passing recognition, maybe.

Not for long.

All these things will abandon you.

They will not last.

Nor will you.

There’s no time for happiness; it just disappears.

No one wants suffering; cut it off through Dharma.

All happiness or suffering is governed by karma.

So please place neither hope nor doubt in anyone.

Some people perceive traditional teaching of this sort as a kind of nasty trick, a juiced inducement of psychological instability that then makes the recipient vulnerable to induction into Buddha’s cult.

Well, sure.

Now, though, take an honest look around you. Homeless, friendless drifters die on the streets daily. Millions live in absolute precarity, and if predictions are correct, hundreds millions more will soon migrate away from the climatic chaos our industry has wrought, destabilizing governments, economies, and ideologies the whole world over.

Nowhere is safe. You will not escape this but through premature death.

What separates you from them, sincerely? Your finances? Your friends? They could all die tomorrow. Your investments may collapse. Your property may burn. Absolutely no thing is for sure.

In any event, health and youth will surely leave you, and you will soon be at the mercy of whatever caregiving you, your family, and friends have managed to arrange, or, in the absence of that, you will die alone and uncared for, forgotten and friendless, perhaps in great pain and regret.

Where, in the end, where, even now, can you turn?

There is no rest nor refuge in chasing phenomena, in building up this thing you call your self, your life.

Even if you die today, do not grieve—that’s the way of samsara.

Even if you live to be one hundred, don’t rejoice—youth will be long gone.

What does it matter if you live or die right now—what good is this life, anyway?

So, for your own sake, just practice Dharma from now on.

There is release, though, from all this. The constant churn, the grind of life.

Never enough, never enough, never!

ENOUGH!

You, dear reader, can lay all this down to rest.

This bloody bag of bones can dance deathless freedom through every moving moment.

Nothing good has come from your useless knowledge.

Nothing good has come from working for this life.

Nothing good has come from your delusional thinking.

Now is the time to do some good: Chant the six-beat mantra.

Saṃvega, if it is not to turn to senseless, nihilistic despair, must be paired with Pasada, serene confidence that you, yes YOU, can, in this very life, in this very moment, liberate yourself from all that binds you to this whipping wheel of birth and death.

You can!

You can!

You can!

Immerse yourself in ceaseless practice, work tirelessly for the welfare of all, see this crumbling assemblage through to the utter ending of every thing, then alone and all at once you will know joy that does not perish, peace that does not pass, life that does not live in fear of death!

May you!

May you!

May you!