In All Activities, Train with the Slogans

Dear All,

We have arrived at an apparently simple slogan, #9 of the lojong slogans from our text, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambala, 1981):

In all activities, train with the slogans.

It seems simple, but it does raise questions.  The lojongslogans are a training in compassion or loving-kindness.  So what does the pervasive practice in this particular slogan have to do with compassion?   "In all activities..."; so are these darn slogans supposed to take over every aspect of our lives?  And by the way, if we are continually to resort to slogans from among the 59 of them, how do we know which slogan to use with which activity?

This slogan #9 puts me in mind of the beautiful challenge from St. Paul cited above:
 

Pray without ceasing.

We can take these similar bits of advice in two different ways. 

One way would be the most obvious, that we are to remember to pray all the time, or that we remember to find an appropriate slogan and use it all the time.  At this first level of meaning, Paul and Atisha (author of the slogans) are both advising continuity across activities.  We pray and seek the accompaniment of the sacred whether brushing our teeth or talking to a friend on Zoom.  We practice any slogan (for instance the "Human life is precious" part of slogan #1) whether walking in the woods or washing the dishes. 

It is a high goal to bring to mind such practices in all activities, holding no activities aside as "normal life."  It amounts to nothing less than the re-sacralization of our lives.  Not a goal to achieve in one gulp, but maybe sip-wise.

The second way to understand these challenges overlaps with the first but cuts a little deeper.  Paul and Atisha may both be referring to continuity not only across, but within activities.  That is, when praying, can I do nothing but pray?  When contemplating the inevitability of death (slogan #1 again), can I do nothing but that contemplation?  Can I make my act of devotion seamless within itself, undistracted, bringing my whole attention to it throughout its course?

At moments when we achieve this kind of uninterrupted continuity, the attention itself intensifies.  The rest of the world falls away -- or even turns out to be included in our focus.  The distance between self and other disappears, yet without annihilating self and other.  The new intuitions come raining down, and we don't even stop to catch them.  Compassion or love arises because we have dropped any concern for self, and are instead actually being ourselves.

Hard as all this may be to luck into in normal times, it can seem even harder in strange times like this one of the Coronavirus.   Yet the great injunctions from our spiritual teachers grow even greater, more poignant and more trenchant, in harsh times.   Here's Thomas Merton reminding us, 

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
 

This stony hour of the Coronavirus is as sacred as any other precisely because it is so easy now to get angry, frightened, or confused and these painful states call for their healing opposites.  The global risk of contagion offers a unique prompt to awaken and to help others across all kinds of boundaries.  May the direness of the moment encourage us to practice, if not continually and in all things, then at least so often and so innocently that our hearts crack open.

All blessings to all,

Michael