The genius of Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s How To Meditate book is that he takes ideas that we already know and repackages them in such a way that they are infused with his kindness and lightness of touch, along with western psychology borrowed from his friends, and this inspires us to practice them.
However, the latest one that our small sangha is looking at - “Essence Love’ - is beginning to look a bit tricky. For those of us who have not heard of this before it is the idea that we are born with a basic sense of psychological and physical well-being that becomes lost or obscured by all the different stresses in our lives. Tsoknyi Rinpoche brings to this observation the tantric idea of a subtle body. The existence of non-physical channels and the life energy that runs through them, and how it is these that are responsible for whether we flourish or not. When these are mal-functioning we don’t feel well in ourselves and when they are working well we do, we experience essence love. To help us with this Tsoknyi Rinpoche offers some exercises that when practiced rebalance our subtle body and reconnect or mend our sense of an underlying ‘all-right-ness’. A kind of background inner warmth that suffuses all our experiences.
Sounds good, no? Well, yes, but we have discovered that there is at least one big bear trap waiting for us when we practice these exercises to restore our essence love. The first is how to be with the experiences that the practices create. On the surface it seems that we are doing the exercises to achieve all the lovely feelings described above. I want to feel well in myself, in harmony with a rosy glow. However, this goes against absolutely everything we have learnt about freeing our meditation from the picking and choosing, wanting one experience and not another. About establishing a deep acceptance of whatever emotion we might find within us. In fact the kind of flexibility and openness that is one of the characteristics of having essence love. This being so, the avoidance of the bear trap is when we can do the exercises without any concern for their outcome, knowing that they are not there to make us feel good, to create a particular state, but more profoundly, feel able to be with anything with a warm open heart.
A second hiccup is the notion that there is a type of love that is an ‘essence’. Apart from both words being complicated because they means different things to different people, Buddhism as a whole is keen to avoid any suggestion that anything has an ‘essence’ because this suggests something at the centre that does not change. Were such a thing to exists it would contradict the Buddhist belief that there is absolutely nothing that is not impermanent and transitory. There is no unchanging self, soul, spirit or essence in anyone or anything. So ‘essence’, were it to suggest this, is misleading. Maybe one of Tsoknyi Rinpoche's words describing what he is getting at is better - wellbeing, flourishing, basic okayness?
And finally there is also the thing of immediately turning the term essence love into the ‘essence of love’. Attractive as this may be - getting to the very core or foundation of all the different forms of love - this instantly falls foul of the problem above. From the Buddhist perspective love cannot have an ‘essence’ - its immensity is always in a process of becoming, anything unchanging within it would kill it dead because it would make it static.
So there we have it: the tricky term essence love is okay just as long as we don’t mistake it for a state or an experience that we are trying to create or maintain. It’s actually something that naturally arises when we stop stressing ourselves. And the word essence must not seduce us back into the habit of thinking of things as discrete unchanging entities - yes, they appear to be like this but in reality they are not. It’s as Tsoknyi Rinpoche says when his friend is saying how good he feels post-retreat. “It won’t last”.
NW. 27 June 2024
Words and associated meanings can be so full of different meanings so this has been so helpful to mull over in how to sit with the notion of “essence love”. When you suggest how to be with the experiences the practices create, I did notice that I’d like to sit in the rosy glow . So letting that go as a wanted outcome, would be perhaps a practice ?
Also I found how you mentioned the view of the word love from the Bhuddist perspective , as “ it’s immensity is always in a process of becoming “ , really beautiful. Would this be something the mind can’t construct ?