55 pages • 1 hour read
Pema ChödrönWhen Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Acceptance Leads to Serenity
Chödrön’s premise is that there is much about modern life that causes stress and difficult feelings, and people often will do anything to avoid unpleasantness. They dull themselves with pleasure, search for theories that give them a sense of control, act out angrily when thwarted, and battle futilely against death. Chödrön acknowledges that these activities seem worthwhile but end up causing suffering. When, according to the author, people practice Buddhist Meditation and learn thereby to accept their feelings and realities, they find a sense of serenity; they also discover that many of the problems they’ve struggled against lose their importance or disappear altogether.
Everyone who searches for enlightenment—even the Buddha himself, in the Buddhist tradition—must confront four maras, which Buddhist philosophy characterizes as psychological “demons” that dissuade seekers from the path to liberation. The first demon, devaputra mara, is one’s search for pleasure: It distracts from anxiety and dulls sensitivity to pain. While pleasure may make a person feel less distressed, other areas of life begin to malfunction.
The second demon, skandha mara, is the yearning for control, especially with theories that explain away one’s problems. When bad events shake a person’s confidence, they work hard to rebuild their egos and fortify their defenses against trouble. This prevents people from seeing the world, and the other people in it, clearly.
The third demon, klesha mara, is one’s willingness to fight anything that threatens one’s control or pleasures. It’s an attempt to threaten the world into complying with one’s wishes. The fourth demon, yama mara, is the fear of death, which prevents people from taking risks. Trying too hard to be safe and avoiding the adventures that call out to a person reduces their quality of life.
Each of these Maras, when confronted during meditation, has the potential to transform into an ally that teaches people how better to navigate the world and cope with life’s difficulties. Facing these maras requires a willingness to be present to everything one has been trying to control or run away from. Chödrön says, “It means accepting every aspect of ourselves, even the parts we don’t like” (104). Acceptance, in the author’s view, provides people with a sense of spaciousness that permeates consciousness, unlocking the serenity they were seeking all along. When people stop struggling against reality, they not only find that the capacity for peace was there all along, but also joy. Ordinary life is the source of the satisfaction people have been searching for all along.
Groundless Openness as an Antidote to Suffering
A recurring idea in the book is groundlessness—the inability to find, in life, a solid place to stand. One’s habits, ideas, beliefs, and even religious tenets ultimately can’t protect them from uncertainty and death. Groundlessness is at the core of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and people’s anxiety and insecurity about the impermanence of treasured feelings, things, and people are central to the issues they confront during meditation.
Groundlessness is the sensation that, try though one might, they can’t find permanent, guaranteed safety: “At every turn we realize once again that it’s completely hopeless—we can’t get any ground under our feet” (52-53). Throughout the book, the author reiterates that nothing in life truly is safe, and even the hardest rock surface eventually will crumble. Beliefs, bromides, and attitudes also collapse, especially if examined carefully, and people can only sustain them by ignoring their contradictions. None of one’s thoughts protect them against the loss of dear companions, or from the damage, illness, and death that comes to everyone. The struggle to deny all this merely makes people anxious and stress-filled.
According to Buddhist teachings, life contains four marks, or truths: impermanence, suffering, mindfulness, and peace. Impermanence means that nothing lasts forever, and all things eventually die or disappear. Suffering means that life contains pain and therefore that total happiness is impossible. As the two principal obstacles in life, impermanence and suffering have the ability to “completely pull the rug out, to completely pop the bubble of reality that we have come to regard as secure and certain” (90), contributing to the state of groundlessness.
By observing one’s anxious mind during meditation, Chödrön offers, one can accept impermanence and suffering. This is mindfulness, and it brings about a state of peace that the author compares to “openness” or “emptiness” (104), a willingness to be with one’s experience without judging it or theorizing about it or searching for some kind of safety from its uncertainties.
The ultimate resolution of groundlessness, then, is openness—first, to the groundless feeling itself, and then to all of one’s experience. Ironically, in accepting ultimate uncertainty, people acquire some of what they wish for when searching for ground under their feet: They now can float serenely along with whatever comes their way. A person no longer needs a firm place to stand once they’re willing to roll and spin in the currents of life. People truly are groundless, and that, according to the author, is the best place to be.
Mindfulness Promotes Compassion
Mindfulness meditation promotes the acceptance of everything in one’s experience. Through meditation, one slowly lets go of their resistance to the things that make them uncomfortable. This improves their lives, but Chödrön emphasizes that the benefits aren’t merely for the person practicing: Meditation opens one’s heart to others, promoting a desire to contribute to others and release them from suffering. The author offers three main ways to accomplish this: through feeling bodhichitta, practicing Tonglen, and becoming a Bodhisattva.
Bodhichitta is a feeling of tenderness and compassion for others. People often awaken this feeling during meditation when they learn to be gentle with themselves. In a mindful state, one sees a parade of problems and anxieties when focusing on their usual worries. When a person is able to accept that they’re struggling with illusory beliefs about their difficulties, rather than judging themselves negatively, their hearts open to themselves. This leads to compassion, as one understands that other people, too, suffer in the same way.
To enhance this feeling, the author suggests, “Let[ting] the pain of the world touch you and cause your compassion to blossom” (192). Compassion extends automatically to others, and bodhichitta blooms naturally. Under its influence, people spontaneously become more helpful and understanding. Chödrön suggests that when one lets go of their complaints, they can focus on the suffering of others and do what they can to help.
One way to accomplish this is through the practice of tonglen. With tonglen, as one inhales, they visualize taking in the suffering of others, witnessing and accepting this pain in the same way one accepts their own anguish. As one exhales, they send good feelings toward those who are suffering. This practice doesn’t hurt and increases one’s ability to be mindful, and it expands one’s ability to embrace the hurt and pain in the world, which transforms suffering into wisdom and even greater compassion.
The author notes that these experiences can so inspire meditators that they may wish to commit their lives to helping all beings who suffer. They become the bodhisattvas who stay behind on the path to nirvana to help those struggling to move forward. In this way, they work to the “benefit of all sentient beings” (190), as teachers or simply as helpers doing whatever they can.
Bodhichitta, tonglen, and the path of the bodhisattva each enhance the compassion people often feel during mindfulness meditation practice. These approaches elevate the search for spiritual awakening by extending it to others. The inward-looking techniques of meditation thereby transmute into outward-looking works of kind-hearted tenderness for all people everywhere.
