This book uses Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Daoism, and plain old reason, which, in a Nietzschean sense, attempts to unwind the perplex dualistic assumptions which cause us to bump up and down towards andn ditches, trying to find a solid path in a world world in which we try to make sense of this topsy-turvy existence.But usually this path ends up having us follow extremes of good and bad, passion and compassion, light and dark, etc.. Without finding a medium between the two which can give us a healthy psychological understanding of self;he force at work which drives us to stupid decisions and humiliation, as well as glory and pride in our achievements, which even themselves are fleeting. Without these two first factors first realized and then brought under control and eventual consummation, we are trapped in a world of hurt people hurting one another other. Hurt people continue this cycle and its fed to our kids, and we are constantly stuck in a society of extremes where nobody can get along to advance the human race which is surely headed for doom. The main themes of the book as previously listed previously are those of an intellectual acceptance based on reason and ommon sense (which is not so common these days.) maturity, It is an and off attempt to find a balance between the "self" and the "no-self" which is the ego. This book was written spontaneously, isnpired due the realizatiosn of the author and study of the the Buddhist Sage Nagarjuna’s OM AhmtiMadhayamaka Buddhism on the other
Original Title
Making the Darkness Conscious- by James Portocarrero
This book uses Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Daoism, and plain old reason, which, in a Nietzschean sense, attempts to unwind the perplex dualistic assumptions which cause us to bump up and down towards andn ditches, trying to find a solid path in a world world in which we try to make sense of this topsy-turvy existence.But usually this path ends up having us follow extremes of good and bad, passion and compassion, light and dark, etc.. Without finding a medium between the two which can give us a healthy psychological understanding of self;he force at work which drives us to stupid decisions and humiliation, as well as glory and pride in our achievements, which even themselves are fleeting. Without these two first factors first realized and then brought under control and eventual consummation, we are trapped in a world of hurt people hurting one another other. Hurt people continue this cycle and its fed to our kids, and we are constantly stuck in a society of extremes where nobody can get along to advance the human race which is surely headed for doom. The main themes of the book as previously listed previously are those of an intellectual acceptance based on reason and ommon sense (which is not so common these days.) maturity, It is an and off attempt to find a balance between the "self" and the "no-self" which is the ego. This book was written spontaneously, isnpired due the realizatiosn of the author and study of the the Buddhist Sage Nagarjuna’s OM AhmtiMadhayamaka Buddhism on the other
This book uses Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Daoism, and plain old reason, which, in a Nietzschean sense, attempts to unwind the perplex dualistic assumptions which cause us to bump up and down towards andn ditches, trying to find a solid path in a world world in which we try to make sense of this topsy-turvy existence.But usually this path ends up having us follow extremes of good and bad, passion and compassion, light and dark, etc.. Without finding a medium between the two which can give us a healthy psychological understanding of self;he force at work which drives us to stupid decisions and humiliation, as well as glory and pride in our achievements, which even themselves are fleeting. Without these two first factors first realized and then brought under control and eventual consummation, we are trapped in a world of hurt people hurting one another other. Hurt people continue this cycle and its fed to our kids, and we are constantly stuck in a society of extremes where nobody can get along to advance the human race which is surely headed for doom. The main themes of the book as previously listed previously are those of an intellectual acceptance based on reason and ommon sense (which is not so common these days.) maturity, It is an and off attempt to find a balance between the "self" and the "no-self" which is the ego. This book was written spontaneously, isnpired due the realizatiosn of the author and study of the the Buddhist Sage Nagarjuna’s OM AhmtiMadhayamaka Buddhism on the other
By James Portocarrero ** Please take your time to read through each line of this book deliberately, allow yourself to drift away into meditation when the urge arises, and only read when you are calm and focused.. ** I pray to you, whom Majughosha with his sword empowered And said, "Cut off the tongues of evil speech That flicker like the jags of lightning in the gloom of false belief- With reason's blade more keen than weapons of the gods! Introduction/ Ch. 1 There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. - Carl Jung
One day that distant childhood haze which caused you so much pleasure, or pain, and all of the antecedent events which fill your memory with meaning about you and your life will be completely and utterly annihilated. Gone. Finished. Kaput. All of your fears and hopes, dreams and nightmares, all of your great accomplishments and colossal failures, all of them will be brought to ruin, as you slip into the obscure blackness from whence you came, all alone, with no one to accompany you on the journey of your life. Who are we? Where are we going? What are we doing? What is life? What is reality? If we dont spend any time inquiring about these fundamental questions of existence all we will end up doing is burning out the candle of that existence and having it utterly annihilated. Nothing will be left of us. We are nothing but prisoners to our bodily desires for food, sex, sleep, et cetera, and mostly live a life of obscurity spent cultivating these desires and accumulating money to support the cultivation of these desires. Even our higher yearning for achievement; family life, liberal arts, fame and status; these are also phantasmal desires which are fleeting and exist only in our minds and achieve no real merit or lasting benefit for anybody except our own selves, nor do they provide any stable or trustworthy fulfillment. For in the drop of a hat, spouses may turn on one another and rip apart that family life, fads in art could change, and fame and status could turn into infamy and ostracization. We live in a world which walks on a razors edge between paradise and hell, white and black, and either one could turn into the other at any given moment. At almost any time we could fall into ruin when we least expect it; get bitten by a snake on vacation or while hiking, done, over with. Why are we running around every day acting as if our making it alive through the day is something that is so sure? We are so hardwired and cemented into our cultural and biological zeitgeist, that we dont even notice these things. We walk about smelling the flowers, not realizing that this flower, the smell, and my experience of myself is all within, reflected in my own mind, and cant be experienced outside of it in any way, it is an utter illusion performed very cleverly by means of electrical signals transmitting information into our brain. We just look at the flower, accept that that is the flower, it exists really outside there as a set determinate thing, and in no ways is my mind involved in the equation of what that experience is like to me. As I begin to accept my own presumptions as being the same as the actual thing which I presume to be witnessing, we are not experiencing the actual thing, but actually a simulacrum or a copy of the actual thing. As time goes by, our simulacrum causes us to become blind to the great majority of what is actually happening in reality within us and around us. Some of us even begin to lose track of what is real or what isnt, and become schizophrenic, or in lighter cases egotistical maniacs, like politicians, for example, and these type of people have the potential to seriously screw up the world for those of us who are actually in tune with what is and isnt real and a priority. Instead of accepting these things as being inherently real and existing forever, we need to be shaken awake to see that they are NOT! Humanity are nothing but characters in a dream-like play, but these actors are not aware that they are playing characters. When this show is over, the person will not know his true self, except that very temporary self which existed, and then perished on the earth. It is a great tragedy, so many human beings are living this dream-like actor existence, relishing in their role like a fool who mistook their character for their self after the play is over. They lust for more, and more, and then some more, never tiring from accumulating materialistic toys which act only as an extension of its egoic confusion and provide no real happiness or bliss which is lasting. Even the ones who make it to the very top of the pyramid of material success will come crashing down one day. When a President of the United States is put into a box and lowered into the ground, he leaves all of his acclaim and status behind him with him. He can take any of his Presidential powers or Secret Service with him into the afterlife. Likewise Joe Shmoe is laid bare and not able to take with him any of the stuff that he doesnt have in this life and certainly wont be having in the hereafter. All of it is gone, you are removed of your corporeal form, and, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, reduced to the very subtle form which you experience in dreams. But even that is not permanent, and if you have not cultivated your soul above the body and mental reflection of the body there will be nothing left for you, as you slowly start to slip into a very perilous, and hellish indeed, psychological reality. The only option at that time will be to give that form up and accept rebirth in a new form based upon your karma (reincarnation is accepted in both Eastern and Western traditions). Whether you end up as an animal, as a god, as a netherworld creature, or another human being, you will still be trapped in the cycle of the finite material existence, which is born, lives, and dies. (The life of a god is even more depressing when it ends as one could imagine!) Trapped in matter you will wander on endlessly until you attain the means by which to snap yourself out of your self-imposed dreamlike state. Sadly, this is the state of every being which is born into this realm of continuous flowing of birth and death, with the extremely rare exception of those ones such as Jesus, Buddha, who come to us from the abode of what Ibn al-Arabi calls The Real. Nearly 100% of the life forms that we observe in this material world are trapped in this self-imposed simulacrum existence of creation, preservation, and destruction. From the lowest worm in the dung pile to the highest king with all his pomp, all are nothing but deluded souls wandering from dream to dream, completely unaware of the fact that they are wandering or that they are dreaming, but utterly lost to the wandering and the dreaming. (Interestingly enough, from this angle, actual dreams can be seen to give more insight into the real nature and meaning behind such a persons existence then their real life!) All of them meet their fate just like everyone else, none is spared from the gaping maw of death, which swallows up gods and devours universes; so why do we think that we are going to be any different? By our logical deduction weve seen that inquiring about these questions is more important and priceless than all of the trappings of all the royalty on all the worlds in all the universes combined. All of the priceless gems in the entire universe combined could not equal the value of simply inquiring about the nature of reality, and if we die without inquiring thusly, on a planet in which great Masters of the Truth have appeared and made the path blazingly obvious, we would have given up a tremendous opportunity for gaining the most wonderful treasure that ever could be gained; that which is transcendent to death, being unborn, which is not limited by any object of the senses or encapsulated by any object of the senses; existing outside of the capacity of any created thing to totally encapsulate it of its own limited volition.
Ch. 2
The Roots of Suffering
Life in this world means to endure suffering. This neednt be interpreted in a traditionally nihilistic sense, but there is no escaping it; your body and therefore your comfort is not made to last forever, your friends are not made to last forever, your wife or husband is not made to last forever, all of the external effects that you would label as your LIFE are not made to last forever, up to and including the very planet that you are currently occupying. None of it is made to last forever, so at some point you will suffer the loss of that which you were attached to for your well-being and sense of identity. There is no escaping this, no matter which way that you look at it. But this is not how we like to think of ourselves, we like to think of our lives as existing forever. So we get really upset with people when they betray our attachment to them and interrupt our static image of how they should be behaving, and we lash out violently at them to try to get them back in line. Likewise with money, when farmers in India are unable to pay their debts, they simply commit suicide. People cant handle the up and downs of life when they are utterly attached to the ups and utterly averse to the downs, and therefore all of the things in our life which seem so stable and seem to comprise the everything of our existence are actually only those things which cause our continued delusion and wandering in the endless cycle of birth and death. Our transient life is comprised of nothing but that which will one day be taken away, swallowed up by the great gaping jaws of time. Death is closing in on all sides, circling us all like a vulture, and yet we go on like a big dumb animal just trying to make the best of things. Is it any wonder why our world is the way it is? Full of people who care about nothing except satisfying their every urge, about pillaging the planet until she is completely drained of resources, about getting yours over the next guy? That this way of behaving is destroying our environment alone should be enough to shake us from our slumber to realize that we are living an utterly self-destructive existence, both inside and outside. These effects of our ego have locked us into a death march to hell, and the whole world is being destroyed because of it. If you say that isnt the case, then youre happy to be one of the lucky few who werent born into the third world. Even our apparent advancement in the West is built on the backs of exploiting others and is completely unsustainable as we are now finding out. That is because no civilization is sustainable which is based around the egos every whim; a complete attachment to that which is impermanent. As long as we go on demanding to be provided cheap consumer crap and endless streams of novel garbage to fill our otherwise void-like existence, there will always be equally endless streams of predatory merchants to feast like sharks upon the bleeding carcasses of the consumers, and of the planets resources. It will never end. Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. This life was not made to last forever, and as such we should not act on the basis that we will be here forever. We should live with how much we need, not more, not less, and stop exploiting people and resources in the futile attachment to what can never last. As long as we live in such a way that we believe that our sense of self-identity and existence is permanent, we will go on being a slave to the necessary involvement of that self- identity in all of those apparently permanent activities which mean so much to it. Again, please dont mistake this message for being nihilistic, the point is that if you believe that this self-image and life is permanent you are bound by the apparent realness of that illusory mirage, which has practically already dissolved back into the black abyss from whence it came. You lose completely the connection with the true state of reality and become instead absorbed into a false state of dreams. In this state your life becomes more and more of a cramped and stuffy room, and you try more and more novel ways of letting in air, only to become disappointed when it seems like the more you try to let in the air, the more stuffy that it gets inside the room. It seems at this state that a lot of people develop mental diseases, addictions psychological and physical, and a general discontentment with their life and the way things are. They try to mask it in various ways, and put on all sorts of various masks, but really inside they are a stuffy room which just gets more and more cramped until they become a dry cantankerous old man or woman, lashing out at the drop of a hat and full of wrath. Even though they invent all kinds of novel ways to bring joy into their lives, or may occupy themselves with apparently attractive types of lifestyles, all they are doing is chasing a carrot on a stick which they can never catch up with. They accumulate more and more karma, and through that karma arises more karma, and continuously it goes on and on and on endlessly. They can never reach the peaceful repose where the karma is dried up called Nirvana. The attachment that we have to ourselves and our image of reality (simulacrum), combined with the endless reactions of karma arising from previous actions in this life and before that, are like the man with a carrot on a stick attached to his head. He tries more and more to get that carrot, but finds that with every push the carrot pulls away from him, and with every pull the carrot pushes away further. Hes chasing his own tail but cant see it. Attachment to our pleasures and aversion to what displeases us is like the carrot on the stick which is hanging in front of our heads. Its through these that poisons seep into our mind and contaminate the purity of our innate nature with the stain of that which is death and falsity. It is this which causes us to fall into the trap of duality, caught in the net of delusion, the real reality is covered by the dust of our own conceptual thinking. We follow these conceptual patterns like well-beaten trails in a forest, and so the only parts of the forest which we see are those parts which we always see, and on and on this goes. Sometimes we get the urge to go off onto an offshoot of the trail and explore some new territory, but we always return to our well-beaten path. Over time, it sucks us in, draws us in further and further into it with magnetic draw, rendering us unconscious and under the firm grasp of this dream-like film being played through our minds. We completely lose the ability to actually be a real self; because we have fully identified with that self which is completely impermanent and cannot go on existing. The sooner that we let that dead non-self be the dead non-self that it eternally is, the sooner we can escape the limitations of being attached to our conceptions of that self, and the sooner we can transcend those conceptions and touch the true nature of what that self is made of. This non-self certainly has came into existence at a certain point, and will certainly go out of existence at a certain point. Because we find that it is comprised of things which are only finite, as such it must have come into existence at some point from a previous series of causes and conditions. This is the only explanation for something which comes into existence, because if it comes into existence it cant come into existence from itself, as it cant exist before it existed. Even if we consider previous lives, still it makes no sense to say that we could have existed before we existed; there is no end to the previous lives required to give birth to more lives and more lives up until the life we are presently living. Therefore, each and every one of these lives are impermanent, phasing in and out like the cycles of the moon. So what are we? If nothing about these lives lasts to identify ourselves with them, this simply means that our self is not identified by any one thing that we observe in our life. We are not the eye, or the objects of the eye, not the ear or the objects of sound, and so on with all of our senses, we are not thoughts, we are not white or black or brown or purple, not the body, nor any other apparition of the clear light of mind. We will cease chasing our attachments to the pleasures and fleeing from that which we are averse when we cease identifying with the non-existent existent things which arise from that clear light of mind and start identifying with that Source. We will find the deathless nature which is being reflected in the various lives, but not touching any particular life at all, just like the Sun shines on what is seen but is not touched by it. This doesnt mean that we should ignore our lives, just the opposite; we will cease limiting their potential when we cease believing that they exist as things outside of that clear mind, as substantially real in and of themselves, and defined by our very limited conceptual thinking. Then we abide in the great Nirvana, free from our limitations, experiencing reality in its purity, navigating life and self with wisdom, reason, and detachment instead of prejudice and ignorance which arise from attachment to that unreal conceptual truth. Then when we see something in ourselves or in the environment, we dont just accept that it is what it appears to be at face value, but gain the ability to discern illusion from the real, and perceive the true, real, unborn nature within all things. Thus we see behind the fragmented, illusion-like external nature of things into the cohesive unity of conditions and causes which binds them together at their core. We no longer experience ourselves and one another as concretely separate and different things bumping up against one another and making conflict, but rather everything becomes part of a divine synthesis. In this state we can abide within this clear light at the very center of all things, the unborn nature, the Nirvana, and cut off delusions from their very source, before they give rise to further karma being generated. Thus we cut off the tie to the realm of continuous flowing of birth and death at the root, and gain the ability to use our mind as an extremely powerful friend, rather than as the deadly foe that it had previously been. No more does the mind generate attachments and aversions automatically and unchecked, and become covered by previous attachments and aversions, and then deluded by its own conceptualizing; after Nirvana, ones mind no longer gives rise to such kind of conceptual thinking unchecked. That is not to say that you become some kind of lifeless zombie, exactly the opposite, the lifeless zombie is one who cant see past what cannot and does not exist, namely the idea of the self and the simulacrum. The one whose mind has gone to Nirvana has been freed from seeing things in the way that they are not, and therefore has found the root of the way that things actually are. This is the beginning of inquiring and finding the Way, and also finding your true Self, deathless and free from delusion. The Tao (The Way) is infinite, eternal. Why is it eternal? It was never born; thus it can never die. Why is it infinite? It has no desires for itself; thus it is present for all beings. The Master stays behind; that is why he is ahead. He is detached from all things; that is why he is one with them. Because he has let go of himself, he is perfectly fulfilled.
Chapter 3 At every turn of the road, we are confronted with an array of dualistic choices. Whether we choose to indulge in copious amounts of food five times a day, or whether we choose to fast during the day, whether we choose to mock our friend when they fall down, or whether we choose to help them get up, whether we get lost in the simulacrum of the apparent reality of objects of our senses, or whether we absorb ourselves in meditation and overcome attachment to these objects; constantly we are presented with this situation, this double-edged sword which cuts through our bare nature and divides it into righteousness and unrighteousness. The choice is ours whether we would respond to the call of the soul to righteousness or the call of the ego to unrighteousness. The wise are not troubled by this life which is like walking on a razors edge, because by abiding in the pure clear mind, and not in the conceptual simulacrum of our personal pleasure and prejudice, we are free to act and respond intelligently in a way which is not simply reacting unconsciously. In this state we can carefully navigate the various dualities of life in the way which is most helpful to us, and start to develop a sense of of the drawbacks of existing as an unconscious vegetable. That sense will guide us from the dying, transient, suffering, nature of the dark polarity within us into the deathless, eternal, blissful nature of the light polarity, and everything around us will follow suit. Every experience and interaction will be changed from a dull and dark affair to a magical touchstone which transmutes dull and dark affairs into radiant enlightenment. Even people around you who have no idea who you are will feel this transmutation happening inside of them just from standing near you, this is the actual power that we are dealing with, which is infinitely within and around us all at all times. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present. When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you. All of us have the experience of drawing this infinite power for suffering from within us. Whenever we are deluded by our own unreal prejudices and ignorance, we enter into a realm of unreal emotions and feelings, which in turn tend to fuel and feed further prejudices and ignorance. Where is all of this power coming from? Certainly these conditions on our minds generated thusly stem from a power which is dark, turbid, black, focused on death, greed, envy, and all of those things which are the scourges of human nature. These dark demons torment our souls with various types of tortures, both in this life and the next, and seek to completely overwhelm or mind and senses and deplete our existence until it is completely drained of all life force; this is the nature of death, the jungian anima. But death is also liberation, and when our mind is grounded in its own clear light rather than in conceptual dogmas of thought, these effects of death can actually produce great transformative changes to the positive, but only when we are unwaveringly grounded in the truth and not the lie. The dark demons will be seen and feared due to memories of previous suffering and death inflicted by them; therefore these dark demons of the egoic non- self become great allies on the path of transcending them. With this in mind, there is nothing to fear from these dark demons, because they only will serve to further your determination to stay on the path when you remember firmly through experience the suffering that they cause. Not only do these poisons of the dark nature within us produce meaningless suffering, which causes us endless torment for no reason at all, other than ignorance, they strengthen the ignorant reactions of the mindless simulacrum programming, and we become further entrenched in self-delusion which veils the true reality, and our own selves, from us. More and more we partake of the nature of the world, and veil ourselves from ourselves with the corruption of sin and excess. Our self-respect and self-worth takes a back burner as we prostitute out our souls to the whore of worldliness. From this angle, we are under control of the dark, with brief moments of the light popping up as a kind of inverse reactionary process whereby the overwhelming pointlessness of our existence causes us to question it periodically. However even though we might question this darkness from time to time (or we may not!), we are so overcome by it that we very rarely make any progress towards the actual goodness in ourselves and in reality. We think that we are so in control of our lives, that we are living such a personal existence which is of our own making, but this is just our utter absorption into illusion and lies. In reality we are being controlled by powerful forces of inversion and darkness, forces which we are completely helpless to and which govern our lives and ourselves with an iron fist and take no prisoners. We are thinking that we exercise so much autonomy and independence, when in actuality we cant bear the thought of being away from the TV or our cell phones for half a second. We cant even sit in a room by ourselves quietly for more than 10 minutes without having a complete anxiety attack. We are utterly dependent on satisfying the urges of our body and ego, addicted to chasing the carrot that can never satiate the cravings we constantly feel to reach out and touch life, to touch the Real. Only when we stop reaching out for the real and realize the one doing the reaching is actually being reached to by the Real itself from the other direction, we will experience the inverse of the inverse, everlasting life out of neverending death. When we turn the tables on the apparent reality that we have heretofore accepted as being an eternally existing static matrix, it will become what it truly is, impermanent, dead, unreal. Once it becomes like this, then it becomes permanent, alive, and real, because these truths are unchanging. We experience reality then as it is, impermanent, as well as the unchanging truth which underlies it, deathless and unstained by the delusion of believing our conceptual thinking to be ultimate. Rather than passing from one conceptual fragmented dualistic mode to another, searching for fulfillment, experiencing our life as a choppy series of messy strewn together endeavors, we will experience life, reality, and self as the perfect harmonious motion between all extremes. The impermanent will be obvious to us, and we will not choose to indulge in needless wastes of the peace and serene energy of our innate clear mind and being. Dwelling yet not dwelling in the deathless, we can perceive the impermanent and beyond the impermanent, and therefore, perceiving both impermanent and permanent side by side, we perceive that our nature is a middling between all dualistic extremes which transcends and unifies them all into itself. With this universal skeleton key in hand, this universal unifying harmony which underlies all of reality will be at your fingertips, and not separate from your own nature. Freed from the trappings of pleasure and pain, from fame and infamy, one abides within and beyond them all and therefore neither within or beyond or both or neither. We are free to express our individual qualities which are good and blissful, and yet not be bound by conceptualizing them in an objectified way; they exist as a continuum, a motion, a process, a state, not an object. For weve seen that objects cannot exist by creating itself from nothing, but is generated through a process of interdependent conditions. They cant exist before they exist, so therefore that which gives rise to them is not other objects but a process which is deathless and bornless and dwells within the unity of polarities. Experiencing the deathless amidst the impermanent, one is beyond the range of either of these, utterly transcendent. The deathless nectar of the absolute reality is experienced in a non- conceptual state which both unifies extremes and transcends them. We are qualified by those unspeakable qualities which dwell within the soul of man, in a way which is alive, not conceptual or dead but fully living and synthesizing the whole of the blissful enlightened nature into itself. This is experienced as an expansion to wholeness, to totality, which becomes like a blazing, superconscious light filling all of space. This light is alive and flickering with luminous wisdom which stems from the pure experience of reality as it actually is, rather than as the fragmented conceptual thing that we had experienced before. From this state we begin to discard our bad qualities which are connected to desire for what is impermanent and unreal. Gradually becoming aware of things as they are, one by one our attachments to the side of nature which is affiliated with that which is death and suffering begin to fade away, and yield to that inverse of the inverse, that which is full of life and bliss, without being attached to or conceptualizing that bliss in a dualistic way. Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child's? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from you own mind and thus understand all things? Pride gives way to humility, anger gives way to compassion, greed to generosity, as we gain the clear light minds perspective of duality and observe vividly the suffering that is caused from the egos narrow conceptual reality, which was forged around objects of death and which will resolve into objects of death. The clear light of wisdom perceives the futility of such a narrow and dogmatically conceptualized way of existence, sees how it merely causes one to choke on ones own poisons, as it ruts around like a wild hog or like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Utterly pointless, nobody cares about the concerns of this childish ego except its own self, and so it inflates itself to an apt level of illusory self-importance to compensate for the fact that it has absolutely no justification for going on like it does. Slowly, being detached from the tantrum through knowledge of its unreality, we take the energy away from this temper tantrum process and make it go away completely, resolve it into the blissful clear peace of the pure primordial mind beyond all dualities. Gradually we gain a foothold on the soul from the ego, and slowly the scales are tilted from the side of the dark over the light to the side of the light over the dark. The dark side of our self and reality becomes not a source of suffering but a source of bliss, by illustrating to us the principles of conditional existence and causing us to see the innate deathless nature which is their opposite. Our resolve is only strengthened by our delusions at this point, rather than the opposite. Each time we see darkness within ourselves it tells us of another knot in our psyche which remains to be untied, to leave the affinity with the eternal non-conceptual deathless process-like totality as it is, and not bound to conceptual perception. Gradually the dark qualities of our ego are lessened, and the bright qualities of our soul are strengthened. At this point one doesnt need to be told the difference between right and wrong, one doesnt need to understand morality as a conceptual thing, but one BECOMES morality itself, the pure nature of the conscience as a living and breathing experience, not just as a dead set of rules that nobody follows rotting away in a book somewhere. You dont need to have anybody tell you what is and isnt moral, but your moral compass will be of the very nature of Wisdom and Justice as living realities. Vision of inner primordial wisdom, which knows correctly and knows completely, is pure. Unbound by any conceptual morality whether dark or light, one experiences naturally the pure essence of truth as morality, as a living, flickering flame. This flame synthesizes all qualities of brightness into itself, as these qualities are really expressions of the nature of the flame of the luminous enlightened mind. Grasping at these qualities conceptually right now will do nothing for you except create delusion and arrogance, because, again, the absolute reality is not conceptual, but living breathing Primordial Wisdom-Awareness which must be gained through experience of realization and not simply imitated. It cant be faked, fake it till you make it, only works in the world of illusion and fakery, not in our lucid luminous world of the Real. This can only be gained when the grasping at what is not real is dried up, and one gathers ones energy and consciousness into ones self to be used creatively rather than expelling it externally on pursuits of the ego to be used destructively. Those are the two options on the table, to expend this life force you were given destructively and pointlessly, or to use this life constructively to conquer death and expand that life force endlessly and infinitely. Both potentials for infinite decay and infinite nourishment lie within us, like two streams veering apart from one another around a common origin; the stream of mind. Nowhere is not interpenetrated by these endless streams, and they course through everywhere within and around us. When one stream is rushing, the other is drying up, and while one is drying up, the other is rushing. You cant have darkness and brightness as equals occupying the same body. Where there is one, the other is absent, and where there is the other, the one is absent. We are really helpless in the matter of where we want to go, one of the streams or the other is going to carry us away, our only real choice is which of the streams we want to carry us away with it, endless life or endless death. Gradually as we take energy away from the stream of darkness it will naturally raise itself within the stream of brightness, opening up a world of the clarity of the perfection of wisdom. Chapter 4 One who holds a concrete image of themselves based on fragmented, finite, linear forms becomes themselves fragmented, linear, finite, and engrossed in form. We become stubbornly set in our ways, in order to deal with a shifting, fearful, and impermanent world. Habits of dealing with this shifting reality form which then also become a seemingly permanent part of a fragmented, objectified identity, but which are really built on very shaky foundations. Due to never having found the stable ground of perceiving emptiness, this identity forged in a chaotic shifting existence becomes a matrix for ourselves and we become trapped in a twilight land of chasing mental ghosts, emotional phantoms, and physical demons of desire, caught between yet another balancing act of duality between the depths of utter ruin and despair and the heights of temporary pleasure and synthetic ego-joy. This Seal of Solomon of dark and light is itself exactly the nature of the earth and the realm of continuous flowing of birth and death. Underneath us (the dark pole of any spectrum) are arrayed the armies of darkness, ripping and raving like the goat Pan, smiting who they may, and sowing chaos all around. Above us (the light pole of any spectrum) are the angels of light, each endowed with a power of the Real, able to defeat the dark demons, and grant blessings to the devout. Everywhere on all sides, throughout every facet of our existence we can experience these forces at play. This is why that the ancients conceived of the absolute reality as a battle between forces of order and righteousness, angels, gods, or devas, and forces of darkness and disorder, demons, asuras, jinn. This means that within the garden, on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is a poisoned apple, an apple called sin, which taints the pristine purity of the natural garden, namely, our luminous enlightened mind. By cultivating the dark stream of our existence, namely those actions and thoughts which are tied to matter and selfish desire, we get drawn into the death nature of the dark and become consumed, by the only cause to suffering that ever has or will exist, the ultimate force of decay, ignorance. Under the sway of this force, our very life force is warped and distorted and misshapen beyond recognition until it depletes itself and reverts to a panic button of seeking a new body to be born into. Even the good things which we seek out in life are more often than not simply a lighter shade of this darkness, owing to the fact that our dualistic conception of good always entails the opposite of evil and bad. Seeking after pleasure, being averse to pain, all the while dwelling in our false conception of ourselves, we are bounced back and forth on the waves of hope and fear. Filled with the hope of expectation for selfish pleasure gained through the various idle trappings of this life, which are either pursued in the name of necessity or amusement, we cast a prejudiced gaze over the world and its peoples and behave just like a tyrannical king or a warring barbarian. Or just like a young child in a temper tantrum, our minds throw fits and cry and complain in various sorts of ways when things are out of step with our prejudiced dualistic desires, and become confounded by further nescience and ignorance. Stomping our feet and lashing out at whomever happens to be near us; we cant handle it when our internal objectified prejudiced image of reality, or simulacrum, is out of step with our expectations. Whether its something that someone says about us that defies our egoic self- image and elicits an arrogant and ridiculous response by us, someone cutting in front of us and stealing our parking space, or any number of effects which result from the cause of the simulacrum, we will continue to exist in a persistent state of dualistic tension between dark and light until the simulacrum is transcended, and pure primordial awareness realized. The problem with such a mind full of hope and fear, is, like that of a toddler or adolescents mind, ignorance. As a child mistakes every shadow in his room at night to be a monster lurking in the corner somewhere about to get him; the nescient mind which swivels powerfully on its axis of hope and fear mistakes what it cant understand for a monster which is about to devour it. No matter at which spectrum or situation we apply this truth, our hopes and fears behave like scales obscuring our eyes with the swinging weights of dualistic judgment. Instead of seeing things as they are, things become divided into absolute good and absolute evil. Fenced in with a mind losing itself in conceptual thinking, we provoke reactions in ourselves and in the reality around us from the pure poison of ignorance, and all of space becomes infected with darkness from our discordant vibrations. Both good and bad provoke negative reactions, whichever side of the poisonous polarity of strictly dualistic thinking that our mind swings to, it only finds suffering. The hope to hold on to fame or high status automatically entails the creation of the fear of losing said fame or said status, for example, and so on with all of the myriad impermanent things and situations and people which we hope to enjoy permanently. Nowhere is our mind safe when it is caught in the grasp of dualistic conceptual thought, and nowhere can we hide from the reactions of the karma we generate from acting upon these thoughts. Always we will be swung to and fro in the dizzying play of opposites as our life is depleted in chasing fleeting desires of the senses and fruitless material work. This is the nature of the beings who live in the realm of the ceaseless flowing of birth and death; birth entails the death, and death entails the re-birth. Beginning with the manifestations of Spirit of THE ALL it will be noticed that there is ever the Outpouring and the Indrawing; the "Outbreathing and Inbreathing of Brahm," as the Brahmans word it. Universes are created; reach their extreme low point of materiality; and then begin their upward swing. Suns spring into being, and then their height of power being reached, the process of retrogression begins, and after aeons they become dead masses of matter, awaiting another impulse which starts again their inner energies into activity and a new solar life cycle is begun. And thus it is with all the worlds; they are born, grow and die; only to be reborn. And thus it is with all the things of shape and form; they swing from action to reaction; from birth to death; from activity to inactivity and then back again. Thus it is with all living things; they are born, grow, and die and then are reborn. So it is with all great movements, philosophies, creeds, fashions, governments, nations, and all else birth, growth, maturity, decadence, death and then new-birth. The swing of the pendulum is ever in evidence. The one who holds these extreme dualistic views of absolute good and absolute evil, as set-in-stone pre-defined dogmas, such as in the case with fundamentalist religious sects, (although secularism too often can itself be a type of fundamentalism) sends the mind on a rollercoaster ride of expectation and guilt. The person tosses and turns on the dualistic axis of the relative, conceptual right and wrong, constantly manifesting their aversiveness to the perceived wrong, and their fear of losing what is right. However, right, and, wrong, are imputed by the mind upon reality, which is impartial, and so long as the mind is wrapped up in conceptual absolutes of its own creation, it plunges itself into dark and light shades of emotional and psychical energy. This energetic reaction further substantiates the minds deluded judgment, and re-enforces our mental judgement, which in turn generates more karma in its direction, which in turn propels us on to further situations of its kind. However dark and menacing a situation may be, and however much we try to justify our emotional reaction to it, the simple fact is that all of these reactions, both good and bad, are temporary. Even the most horrible heinous crime that you can imagine that would seem to necessitate a dark reaction, or the most wonderful earthly pleasures that seem so real to us, exist only for a very finite time, and then fade away. All of the people who are involved in said actions, they all also fade away as the wheel of time grinds them to smithereens. In the karma-bound world of continuous birth and death, all is lost, and nothing lasts. Bhumaiva sukham, nalpe sukhamasti; Whatever verily is vast is delight, whatever is limited does not give everlasting happiness. Therefore, its utterly nonsensical to attach ourselves to that which is lost, that which can not last, that which does not truly exist. Doing so we absorb ourselves more and more into the illusory energy of maya, and maya absorbs herself more and more into us. Our judgments become clouded, our reactions and lifestyles become more extreme, everything we experience passes through the darkened prism of ego and dogma, sapping it of its natural light. This darkened prism of our subtle bodies draws us like a magnet to further darkened situations in the world around us. This cycle may cause us to cling even more to the things which give us hope, causing us to become neurotic and anxious, or we may lose ourselves in the darkness manifesting around us and be drawn into a snowball effect of black energy which destroys everything good in our lives completely and renders us into a miserable wretch. Even the narrow boundaries in which we define the good in life, and attempt to live up to that good, cause us to experience suffering and bad. These conceptual good judgments about life are held up to be the ineffable unalterable truth, again as in the case of fundamentalism, and anything which arises from within or without which contradicts the definition of the good causes us to have a reaction which then is automatically bad. Whatever responses that we have, again, cause us to become either more neurotically holding on to the good, while displaying increasingly violent outlashes against the bad, or more corrupted by the bad itself. The mind is like a television camera pointed into the TV screen, it gives an infinitely recursive feedback loop of reaction, when you focus it on a heavily dualistic judgment of good vs. bad. We generally get the sense of good vs. evil from our parents, from our society, from our religion, and this extreme absolute sense of bad and good, does serve a very important function in the time and place which we currently find ourselves. It allows the nascent mind of the human being to develop, re-enforce its sense of individuality, and begin to fine tune itself to the nature of natures design. It causes the nescient intelligence to spin and twirl two and fro along the polarities, and ultimately within the neutral core of its being to find equipoise between all extremes. The idea of good and bad on their own are not necessarily wrong in and of themselves; the problem lies in our not being grounded in the clear light of the neutrality of mind, and being sucked into a mental and emotional tailspin of grasping for the good, and running from the bad, and the styling of our lives around this dichotomy. This relative idea of good and bad for the most part, (besides some phony instructions in morality we receive as a child from our parents or society or religion, that cause even further dualistic tension), essentially boils down to pleasure vs. pain. That which causes us pain generally we define as bad, and try to avoid, and that which gives us pleasure generally we define as good, and seek out. Although we may not see any harm in seeking our own pleasure, this is all that our life ends up becoming. The seeking for pleasure becomes a consistent karma which repeats over and over, and each time it repeats we become entrenched further into the seeking, and further away from the pleasure, which only becomes more and more fleeting due to its illusory nature. This is when something which formerly was fun and pleasurable becomes a vice or addiction. Family life becomes a burden, relationships strain, habits turn into addictions, etc. We are all familiar with the cycle. Chapter 5 While appearing to turn on a polar axis, to swing constantly back and forth, up and down, left and right, in and out, the mind itself remains neutral and unattached, just like a gyroscope. Remaining in itself neutral, the swiveling mind sends us into dualistic states derived of our attachment to what we like, and aversion to what we dont. When in this weakened state, not able to rest within its foundation, namely, neutrality, the mind is easily sent into a tailspin by the slightest headwind. If a little breeze hits the weakened mind, in a spot which is sensitive to the kinetic energy, it begins to spin, and spin, and spin itself into various impermanent and shifting negative and positive mental and emotional states. As previously noted, these mental and emotional states then serve to reinforce our habits, and an onslaught of sticky karmic attachment is the result. Clogged up by these impressions which are scratched on to the mind, like writing on chalkboard by the oscillations of our thoughts, all of our mental processes are tinged with the poisons of ignorance. Our entire reality is projected out from the state of ignorance and dis-ease in our minds; whether it be a mental, emotional, or physical state. Our mental habits become tinged by attachment and aversion, causing some to assert their egoic pride, others to back off and become antisocial. Thought becomes filtered through the cracked lens of polarity-mind, and we find ourselves naturally gravitating towards people to whom we are like-minded, around whom our polarized mental condition is able to interact more smoothly, as energy tends to naturally follow the line of least resistance. If this polarized cracked lens were to implant itself into a situation which is foreign to it, physically, emotionally, or mentally, the mind will swing itself to the polarity of aversion, and while doing so would also be indicating the counter-swing to the pole of attachment, and create a corresponding effect in the fields of emotion and action. Emotion reinforces our ignorant judgment, and action is carried out to remove us from the situation, adjust it in a way which we deem appropriate, or react negatively from our discomfort. This also in turn reinforces our mental and emotional conditions. In this way our self and our life becomes extremely limited, narrowly confined in small boundaries which only repeat previous patterns. Attachment to the pleasurable turns into attachment for the familiar, and aversion to the displeasurable becomes aversion to the unfamiliar. At this point, the phantoms that we are chasing turn into phantoms which chase us! Illusions which we absorb ourselves into begin to absorb themselves into us! Identity is lost, and following the line of least resistance, is seen to be the same thing as following the brainwashing of pop culture. Ego holds a carrot dangling over our own heads, but the carrot is never really reached. Even if someone does manage to get everything one wants, one is never satisfied, and there is the persistent aversion of losing grip of what we are attached to. What we think of as pleasure contains within it the opposite, always. Being enticed on, to party and go to clubs or bars, to use an example appropriate to our generation, may seem like only a pleasurable experience, and that nothing bad can come from it. However, we will find that we crave for more and more outlandish parties and alcohol and drug taking in order to satisfy the craving for a pleasure which can never be kept for long. After a night of pleasure partying, one appropriately experiences a morning of displeasure being hungover and sick. Additionally, the next party will need to be even more exciting, otherwise we get bored with it and are unable to exact the pleasure to which we are so neurotically and unhealthily attached. We try to repeat the process over and over again, but every time our experience of it is more and more dulled, unless we crank up the intensity each time. If that we do crank up the intensity each time, we will find that our hangovers are more intense also, and we begin to run the risk of getting into some dangerous karmic territory and experiencing something violent such as a car crash, or a bad injury during a drunken brawl. These type of violent events which happen are cent-percent related to previous karmic cycles; because nowhere in this universe is there an action without a reaction. So we will find our normal non-partying life also adversely affected, as slowly we become an old washed up burnout who has wasted their lives in pointless drunken revelry. Colors blind the eye. Sounds deafen the ear. Flavors numb the taste. Thoughts weaken the mind. Desires wither the heart. The Master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. His heart is open as the sky. Worse than pointless, chasing after such pleasure-attachments causes a significant worsening of our position karmically, which can either serve as a catalyst for transmutation into the good, or an anchor which sinks us even further into the bad. Usually, even the most dense of people begin to learn from the constant swing back and forth that the process of chasing after these phantoms is destructive. They start to develop some detachment with regard to their former attachments, and lessening of aversiveness to their former aversions. This is the resolution of poles into their neutral core, into a depth corresponding to the depth of the poles themselves. The gyroscope of our being is constantly being re-calibrated, depending on hard-headedness, in such a way that we are thrown further into our delusions through ignorance, or freed from delusions into the perfect harmony of neutrality through wisdom. The being thrown into ignorance is divided into aversion and attachment, which in turn feeds back into the clear light of our mind and produce further reactions and dualistic divisions based on further aversion and attachment. The gyroscope spins and spins to and fro upon its axis, becoming further subdivided and further complicated, in such a way that it carries the potential for delusion or insight. Depending on the frequency and modality of the way in which we engage the reality within and without (whether making many connections, or few, and whether we are acting and thinking consciously or unconsciously), we will experience currents of ascension or descension (ascending within descending, descending within ascending, etc.). Choosing to be close-minded, and lacking curiosity, our internal processes suffer from stagnation. Ignorance breeds all of the attachment and aversion that become the snares which bind our mind in Samsara. Without keeping an open-mind, and flowing within the current of curiosity and mental exploration, we tread on the static path of that which is material and dense. That which is born and dies, is created, and is destroyed, hopes, and fears, is not that unborn clear light of mind which resides in equipoise in the middle of and beyond all opposites. This clear light which is your true being, the absolute reality, full of infinite potential of the resolution of all extremes, is that awareness which is the basis of the two poles. The awareness becomes lost in the knots created by that illusory tapestry displaying the story of the wrong view of the self. Woven with the needle and thread of attachment and aversion, by the hand of ignorance, this static and seldom-changing scene of our self and life perpetuates its own story and drags the pure awareness along with it into its tangled fabric. Seldom does anything become manifest other than a continuation of what has come before. Even the novel things which people do are more often than not nothing but things which they have seen others of like polarized-mind do and are replicating unconsciously. Unconscious is really the key word to describe this condition. The part of the awareness which is underneath, bound up with attachment and aversion, becomes the strongest motivating factor within the mind, emotions, speech, and actions. The whole pattern of life is submerged into the unconscious of unconsciousness, no different than an apparition appearing in a dream. Yet awareness does not disappear, it is merely bound up within the dream. If there is complete and utter static mind, than we have reached the state of animal consciousness, and we abide in our animal desires and not much else. Only a fluid and dynamic mind, which is observant, and curious to discover and learn, will not victimize itself with self-imposed limitations. Then we will be able to use the mind, and not be used by it, and attain that shining primordial tranquility which neutralizes all opposite extremes. For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy. For one who has conquered the mind, the Supersoul is already reached, for he has attained tranquillity. To such a man happiness and distress, heat and cold, honor and dishonor are all the same. By being covered with the static forms and unable to properly perceive higher interconnected dynamic truths, ignorance, attachment, and aversion ensue. But by being detached from the transient static forms one can perceive the higher truths at play, and not being caught in any one side or the other, resolve any situation, and enjoy living consciously and riding a natural harmonic flow. Everything naturally resolves itself and one sees the order and finely tuned balance inherent in all reality. By distancing ones self from the dualistic conceptual framework of seeing things, true and primordial wisdom naturally develops. Things are seen as they are, void of any ignorant distortion on our part, and one need only maintain the balance within this neutrality to flow with all of the swings of the gyroscope and resolve them before they become uncontrolled and carry us away into creating further karma and samskaras (engraven images in the mind). The latent psychic and emotional energy that was frozen up being misused in keeping alive the phantasmagorical illusionary tapestry of our self, is freed and transforms into the bliss of our natural mental state. Detachment from that which is perceived clearly to be impermanent naturally arises, as thread by thread the tapestry of attachment to the unreal is unwoven. The unrealness begins to cease fogging the mind, and pristine wisdom of perceiving all interconnected truths united together within emptiness arises. Gradually the strength of the swing of polarity is taken away from these uncontrollable mental oscillations, freeing us from the bondage of attachment to impermanent pleasure and pain based on the objects of our mind and senses. For, if all objects of the mind and senses, are perceived, with wisdom, as they are truly, not existing independently and permanently as objects with own- being of their own, as the conditioned mind perceives, then the mind will cease to depend on and obsess over these mental objects and senses as if they were substantial things which lasted forever. Indeed, for who would there be to crave, and what to be craved? One cannot expect to extract pleasure from the same husband or wife forever, someday they will depart their bodies, and all of that pleasure will turn into unbearable pain. This attachment will be brought to naught sooner or later, no matter how hard we kick and scream. Drugs, alcohol, food, or other addictions only hide and cover our malaise with a temporary pleasure that requires a higher dose of substance each time round. Chasing after the rush of these substances only causes one to become further entrenched in the swamp of karmic action and reaction, staining our pure mind and polarizing it into increasingly extreme oscillations, which in turn lead to more and more divisions of dualistic extremes. Violence and struggle to attain the addiction, shame and guilt of becoming pathetically disempowered, these effects of the dark polarity are clearly undesirable whether you have faith in transcendence or not. Work and social life provide a temporary distraction from our hollow meaningless existence, but excess attachment to or indulgence in these things also leads to their own plethora of dualistic extremes and prevents them from being enjoyable. Likewise any of the multifarious novelties that people occupy their lives with in order to escape from the uneasiness they feel with their existences. You can spend as much time as you like playing the polarity game of attachment and aversion, but in the end you will have realized that you have really only been going around and around and around in circles all your life. Afterwards, when that life is over, all of the pleasure and pain, attachment and aversion, love and hate, etc. is dissolved by death, the great equalizer, death. All of these impermanent things which previously appeared to be the all-in- all of our self, reality, our total existence, are revealed to be the non-existent voidness that they truly are. Where then has gone all of those weighty, heavy burdens which we thought of as being so objectively real? Where is our wife or husband? Our job? Our kids? Where is our country? Our world? Where has it gone? If it is seen that all of these things which we previously thought of as being so objectively real and permanent are reduced to non- existence upon death, then it must be concluded that these things were always void-like from the very beginning, existing like phantoms within the mind. Something which is truly objectively real and permanent cannot cease to exist, but we find that all things in the material world including our very selves are constantly ceasing to exist. Therefore, while in existence, the forms and feelings and thoughts were nothing more than the voidness of the pure mind. Voidness being a complete lack of objective self-existence in the way that we typically think of it. Just as clouds float through the sky, but do not stain the sky, so forms, feelings, and thoughts float through the void of the mind, but do not stain the mind itself. The mind projects the illusion of dualistic extremes, and is caught up in the oscillations back and forth, identifying with them and forming concrete identities from them, but the whole time, the forms and feelings and thoughts of our material life were no different than those experienced while in a dream. Believing that the phantasms thus experienced form part of an eternal, objectively existing self-nature, the pure mind exacts dogmatic rules and overbearing limitations upon its own infinite nature, and is lost in the tides of the world of continuous birth and death that it asserts itself into with this process. That same mind, when released from the entanglements of duality, swings itself from the oscillations of aversion and attachment, and resides in the pure equanimous bliss of the sameness of all phenomena. Think of neither existence nor nonexistence, neither progress nor regress. Think of neither front nor back, neither left nor right. Think of neither nonexistence nor existence, neither far nor near. Think of neither pain nor itch, neither hunger nor thirst. Think of neither cold nor hot, neither pain nor pleasure. Think of neither birth nor old age, neither illness nor death. Think of neither body nor life, nor longevity. Think of neither wealth nor poverty, neither nobility nor lowliness. Think of neither sense objects nor desires. Think of neither large nor small, neither long nor short. Think of neither beauty nor ugliness. Think of neither evil nor good, neither anger nor delight. Think of neither rising nor sitting, neither proceeding nor stopping. Think of neither the stras nor the Dharma. Think of neither right nor wrong, neither grasping nor abandoning. Think of neither perception nor consciousness. Think of neither cessation nor continuation. Think of neither emptiness nor true reality. Think of neither heavy nor light, neither hard nor easy. Think of neither deep nor shallow, neither broad nor narrow. Think of neither father nor mother, neither wife nor children. Think of neither friends nor acquaintances, neither love nor hatred. Think of neither gain nor loss, neither success nor failure. Think of neither clarity nor turbidity. Everything is recognized as not existing on its own, but existing through the one stream of mind which flows through all space, the same stream of mind which is realized as the neutral clear light of your own awareness. The temporary manifestations of form, feeling, thought, which were previously imputed to be objective, and permanently existing of their own-being, recognized as voidness in the end and voidness at the beginning, are seen clearly to be non-different from the empty clarity of our own minds. Emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Recognizing all things as having the mark of non-being, the restful equipoise in which we dwell is able to relate to all things, people, and effects of this life as belonging to ourselves, belonging to non- being. The walls of separation and isolation which were imputed upon the infinite and clear nature of mind transform into sort of instantaneous and shifting guidelines for our thought and expression, rather than a strict, real and permanent self-nature, that we feel obligated to maintain. Shifting and twisting and changing shape, the gyroscope-like wheel of our mind tears down old structures where they are not needed, and refines and sharpens the ones which are needed. In reality, there never was a concrete set in stone identity, but what there was was a pattern of mental oscillations, samskaras, which were repeated over and over and over again and embedded onto the memory. Mistaking this pattern which has arisen like a light over empty space for something which is substantial and real, all sorts of suffering derived from attachment and aversion arose. The patterns flickering in the mind and memory however are nothing but a streaming movement of minds energies, in the same way that a current of electricity powers the light of a light bulb, or like the little devices which are made with a LED light which moves back and forth repeatedly to give the illusion of a picture or a phrase. In that same way, our mind is flashing like lightning moment to moment, re-creating and building upon what has came before it. When things are seen as they really are, and our minds become free of attachment and aversion, all of the rough parts of our minds and emotions become smoothed over with the peace of equipoised neutrality. Wisdom, compassion, and all good qualities are allowed to be drawn out naturally, in equanimity as opposed to related to perceived dualistic absolutes. This forms into a healthy and flexible stream of identity-non-identity, which is an entirely different process, free and unlimited instead of trapped and bounded. Freed from grasping at the flickering instantaneous image, that which is impermanent is entirely transcended, and with it ignorance. With this sword of perfect wisdom, all of the roots of delusion and suffering are severed from the mind, leaving the crystal clarity of itself, shining like a well-sharpened blade made of the hardest diamond. This diamond-bladed mind of perfect wisdom and clarity cuts through all illusory dream-like perceptions. It is called diamond-like because it overcomes all weaker substances like diamond penetrating glass with its hardness, and yet at the same time there is nothing which can overcome it. This is the neutral state of mind, returned to its primordial, primeval, original spotlessly pure condition, tempered with the wisdom of the opposites and their resolution in harmonious neutrality. Chapter 6 - middle way/emptiness Perceived through the cracked lens of ignorance, forms, feelings, and thoughts appear to exist from their own side as real, substantial, objectifiable entities, in and of themselves. But if this objectified substantial form, feeling, or thought, is imputed to exist as such, than this it must arise at some point, from previous causes and conditions which give rise to it, for a thing which exists cannot give rise to itself, because it would have had to exist before it existed, which is impossible, and we do not experience that forms, feelings, thoughts etc. remain forever unchanging. If this is the case, judging from the purview of our cracked lens which objectifies impermanently existing phenomena in a way which makes them appear to be existing in and of themselves, we would presume that there would be a previous thinker, feeler, and seer, etc. to give rise to and experience the thoughts, feelings, and forms. But, then, how can an impermanent phenomena such as thought, or feeling, or form arise from an objectified, permanent, and unchanging thinker, feeler, or seer? If the objective seer, thinker etc. is unchanging, described as such, then it follows that its impossible for something that is changing such as an impermanent sensory phenomenon to penetrate its unchanging sphere. No independent thing can exist, in an objectifiable sense, that is unchanging. The two objects, seer, and seen, cannot penetrate one another, or interact with one another, seeing as they are unchanging, static, and independent. If it were changing, then it would follow that this seer thinker etc. couldnt exist as a permanent and objectified independent phenomena capable of being called a seer, thinker, feeler, etc. It makes no sense to say that this objectifiable independent, it, is both changing and unchanging, because the one cancels out the other. "The nature of the mind is absent from nonmental things. How then could self-cognizing consciousness Know other things? For you have said That known and knower are two different entities ******** Therefore these objects of mind and senses, the things, we objectify, are seen to be empty of any sort of objective essence or, own-being which can be appropriately described as such. Things cannot possibly arise from more things, because you could never reach the beginning of things arising out of other things. Yet, things appear to arise, and we cant say that nothing exists either. Neither from itself, nor from another, Nor from both, Nor without a cause, Does anything whatever, anywhere arise. The things which arise are not things, and when perceptions of things as things cease, in place of perceiving things as arising, we will, with perfect wisdom, perceive the non-arising nature of that which is erroneously perceived to arise when viewed as an objectified phenomena from the purview of the relative dualistic extremes. When this exists, that comes to be. With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the cessation of this, that ceases. If a thing which arises were to have objective existence, then it must have arisen certainly from another thing which gave rise to it, for as mentioned earlier, a thing which arises cannot give rise to itself. So it certainly must be established that things which arise must arise from other things, because something cannot arise from nothing. But if this is the case, what gave rise to the thing which gave rise to the thing which arose? It must be imputed that the thing which produced the thing which arose has to exist eternally, externally, and independent of those things which arise, in and of itself, because otherwise it must be that things arise from other things in an infinite regress, and nothing could ever arise to give rise to the thing which arose. However, logically, a thing which exists and gives rise to another thing cannot exist eternally and unchanged as an independent thing, because then, being unchangeable, it would have to be independent of the experience of that thing which has arisen in the sphere of the changeable and transient. Either it is co- dependent upon the arising thing, affects it, and is affected by it, or it is independent of it, and is incapable of changing to accommodate the shifting experience necessary to give rise to a thing which exists in the world of the changeable and transient. If it were possible to change that which is unchanged, then why refer to it as an objective self-existing and independent thing? ******** From the angle of perception of the things which are seen to arise from other things do we perceive a limited experience of arising things. But from the angle of that non-perception-perception, they are seen as having the nature of non-arising. Seeing as it is not possible for things to arise from other things, nor to arise from themselves, nor to arise from a non-thing, it must be concluded that there can be no independently objectifiable entity which arises and then ceases to arise. "Contemplate empty space, attain to non-perception, non- distinction, the elusive, beyond being and not-being: reach non- space." All phenomena are like flashes of lightning, possessing no objectifiable essence in and of themselves. Like the illusions of a magician, or light reflected onto a mirror, they are essenceless, empty, illusory phenomena. The light is not within the mirror, nor is it not not within the mirror. The mirror and the light are empty of objectness; they are none. If things did not exist Without essence, The phrase, When this exists, so this will be, Would not be acceptable. Likewise, the phenomena exist, but not at all in the way in which they initially appear. ******** When the idea of a self and independent and permanent own- being arise, it does so in relation to the conditional dualistic subject-object, reaction to the objects of the mind and senses, perceiving them as independent and substantially existing from their own side, rather than merely as imputations in the mind. Therefore With the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be. With the arising of an object of dualistic objectification, arises the whole gammut of interdependent conditions which appear to exist as dualistic objects, with the cessation of the dualistic objectification, the whole gammut of interdependent conditions ceases to exist as anything more than an illusory conceptual imputation of the truth, and are seen to be empty of real own-being. When we see that the dualistic self has no true essence, the perceived independently existing phenomena will also be seen as essenceless. All of the conditions which arise from the object- based perception cease to be perceived solely as separated objectified events, choppy like a boat tossed back and forth on the ocean, but appear as they are, mutually interdependent, smooth like a wave, essenceless like a dream in their own independent natures. With the perception of the phenomena as lacking essence, of the nature of the void, no longer does the illusory dualistic subject-object perception arise as it had previously, but the underlying sameness of all things is experienced. Our attachments and aversions to the senses and their objects, and the experience of things as separate phenomena which condition and appear to give rise to one another, are cut off from the pristine, primordial mind at their root, ignorant attachment to falsely perceived self-natures. All objectifiable things are seen without essence, being perceived co-dependently in relation to one another, having a nature empty of self-being. The label which was imputed onto the apparent mental or sensory object is nothing more than an illusion of our mind, as the way in which we presume objects and things to exist has been proven to be impossible. With the cessation of ignorance, comes the cessation of the view of things as arising, and therefore the cessation of falling prey to the illusory web of conditions which covers our perception with dualism of subject and object. With the cessation of that which is created, comes the cessation of that which is destroyed. With the cessation of that which can be created or destroyed, is the cessation of fear, and hope, arising from clinging to attachment and aversion. With the cessation of clinging to attachment and aversion, is Nirvana, the cessation of suffering. Nor can things ever cease. ******** Here, O Sariputra, Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form ; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Here, O Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness ; they are not produced or stopped, not defiled or immaculate, not deficient or complete. Therefore, O Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness ; No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind ; No forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind ; No sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to : No mind-consciousness element ; There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to : There is no decay and death, no extinction of decay and death. There is no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. There is no cognition, no attainment and no non-attainment. Therefore, O Sariputra, it is because of his non-attainmentness that a Bodhisattva, through having relied on the Perfection of Wisdom, dwells without thought-coverings. In the absence of thought-coverings he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can upset, and in the end he attains to Nirvana. All those who appear as Buddhas in the three periods of time fully awake to the utmost, right and perfect Enlightenment because they have relied on the Perfection of Wisdom. Therefore one should know the prajnaparamita as the great spell, the spell of great knowledge, the utmost spell, the unequalled spell, allayer of all suffering, in truth -- for what could go wrong ? By the prajnaparamita has this spell been delivered. It runs like this : gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. ( Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail ! -- ) This completes the Heart of Perfect Wisdom." Chapter 7 Perceiving with perfect wisdom, the whole chain of conceptualizations arising out of the notion of the impermanent self as being permanent seems to evaporate, to fade away like a shadow before the rising sun. The strangest thing happens, the fog of our self-imposed ignorance disperses, or is absorbed, and as such the numerous things to which our false ego was attached or averse to, no longer seem to move us in the same way as they did before. Indeed, who would they move? The one who is capable of being born, is not the one that is capable of overcoming death, while the one who resides in the extinction of the view of themselves as the body, or objectified as an image based on the body has already conquered all that is connected to the polarized phenomena of birth and death. The one who can become angry and averse cannot truly exist, only being perceived in relation to the interdependent connections of attachment and aversion between the falsely seen external objects and the imputation of a separate internal subjective ego. When awareness absorbed within only the impermanent ceases due to perfect wisdom, the attachments and aversions are cut from their root of ignorance which has perceived them as objectively real and existing from their own side. Only in relation to the perception of the externalities and internalities existing in and of themselves is the realm of continuous birth and death encountered at all. *** Besides that, what is perceived and experienced is the deathless Nirvana. However, one in perfect wisdom does not only abide in Nirvana, nor does one only abide in the realm of continuous birth and death, existing free of essential being or non-being. The real sky is (knowing) that samsara and nirvana are merely an illusory display ******** If the wrong view in regards to the essence of the stuff, perceived in the mind in relation to its objects, is transcended, then the interdependent inner and outer conditions which affect and give rise a concretely objective self will not arise. The stuff is seen to be without objectifiable existence, and the self is seen to be without objectifiable existence, and so what, per se, will affect what, and how? If the things perceived through the purview of dualistic extremes truly existed as objective permanent entities, then why would they not squelch out their opposites entirely? If one opposite were to be substantially and permanently real, it would follow that the other opposite could not exist whatsoever! Therefore opposites can never exist in the way in which the dualistic mind perceives them, canceling each other out before they could come into being. ******** In the same way, all of the ignorant views of dualistic extremes self vs. other, here, vs. there, etc. are held in a tenuous balance when perceived from the perspective of the relative, but completely cease to exist as such, when the absolute truth of the matter is perceived. The momentary phenomena of the dualistic extremes may then seem to arise along with the relative finite perspectives, but in actuality they never existed from the beginning in and of themselves, and were an all imputed by the mind. These phenomena are empty of being in and of themselves, flashing instantaneously like lightning in relation to the other imputed interdependent conditions. Pure awareness naturally gives rise to these magical displays. This is why that the mind rushes to and fro between the dualistic extremes; when they appear to be substantial, they are actually empty, and therefore, it becomes possible for the substantial polarity to shift and change to the implied opposite substantially existing polarity. All along these polarities were created only by our conscious awareness and had no existence in and of themselves, as has been deducted. Being checked against the gyroscopic swivel of memories of previous polarized perceptions, the mind then, using the memories as a background, makes a choice to enact an illusory attachment to one of the imagined extremes, while at the same time becoming averse to its opposite. Thus is an identity formed out of nothing more than our conscious awareness perceiving that which cannot exist as actually existing, and becoming lost in dreams and fantasies of our own creation. All along nothing existed substantially, but all appears to exist in that way to our mind due to the perceived interdependent relationships of things. That mind, swiveling to and fro, to and fro, checks itself, is drawn upward or downward from ignorance to wisdom, and in the end transcends all or falls back into further cycles of birth and death. The apparent substantial existence of the dualistic things provides our mind with the food it needs in order to expand to perceive the essence of its own nature. This empty mind, though pure from the beginning, had become covered by the illusory thought-coverings. Expanding beyond objectification, it transcends the illusory limitations which were imputed on it in ignorance; or, lost in the objects, it becomes weighed down and falls. Either way, one is required to pass through a labyrinth of attachment and aversion which has formed out of our beginningless karma, from this life and previous ones. When one fails to recognize the nature of things, and instead clings to its erroneous attachment to objectifying essenceless phenomena as permanently existing, falls into all of the associated fears and hopes of the dualistic existence. The more that the apparent self, or ego, asserts its own attachments and aversions in the field of experience, the more it becomes an automatic unconscious behavior. The more this unconscious behavior goes on, the more strongly we react, along the lines of our dualistic extremes, to what enters our awareness from the environment. This can cause even more entanglement in the world of continuous birth and death, as the reactions to our actions gather more and more weight, for with the arising of a polarized judgment or perception of phenomena, always arises its opposite. The person who thus exists in their own little illusory bubble of permanently objectified phenomena is unable to recognize their errors and change. Like attracts like and they may be trapped in an ever-increasing downward spiral. Those who are willing and able to see beyond themselves, however may use the swinging polarities to recognize flaws in ones self, and make adjustments. To this person, the one who exposes a negative reaction in themselves is a great teacher, worthy of veneration! As long as one is not, quite literally, wrapped up, in the tangled web of ones own extreme absolutist prejudices based on attachment and aversion, one can be free of the exhausting cycle of wheels spinning back and forth between aversiveness and attachment. This does not necessarily entail that by perceiving in a way is free from the ignorance of believing the finite and unreal to be real that we will no longer care to interact with the world, and perceive all of our relationships as being meaningless nothingness. This is a common nihilistic mistake for those who attempt to understand what is called the Perfection of Wisdom. Its not such that the apparently internal or external objects that we perceive are necessarily not real and dont exist in any sense at all; but being that they are perceived in relation to the other finite phenomena that we objectify as having an own-being, when the perception based on those finite impermanent phenomena ceases, the internal and external objects defined as such are seen to cease to exist as objective phenomena. They are seen as a self-created, self-liberating magical display, and as such one is free from being tyrannized by the creation of ones own mind. ******** Freed from the self-created maze of polarity connections which governed ones perceptions, feelings, reactions, etc. of/to the internal and external, spontaneous wisdom is seen to naturally arise that perceives from a total field of awareness. Not perceiving any essential difference between ones self and others, or the environment, one sees all beings and ones self as space- like, free, appearing as self-begotten mirages of mental forces. Thus, seeing things as they actually are, one is never a victim to ignorance. Never being a victim to ignorance, one does not generate the further actions and reactions that accumulate within the attachment to name and form. For one who has no essence, how is it possible for them to remain attached to karma? Whom would the karma attach to? Being freed from karma, one is liberated from ones sins entirely and attains causeless non-dual peace and equanimity. Perceiving the nature of the essenceless self to be thus, one comprehends the Buddha-nature within all things. Any thing, or self, which could be described as such must not be the fully enlightened one, and yet, the fully enlightened one contains the things and selves. Thus it is only ignorance that veils all beings from their true nature. This wisdom is the nature without a nature, the completeness, the Logos, the Buddha. Whatever is dependent on another entity, Its selfhood is not appropriate. It is not tenable that what lacks a self, Could be a Tathagata. (Tathagata means one gone to or come from the realm of suchness) ******** Through the realization of the emptiness of forms, feelings, perceptions, etc. the attachments and aversions which have formed the web of your conditional ego, that which has been the ignorant noxious fog clouding your pristine awareness will fade away, as if a clear cool breeze has blown through and purified the air entirely. Its not that the forms, or feelings disappear, but the separated, choppy sort of dualistic experience of them will cease, as the swing of endless action and reaction is seen to lose its grip along with its essence. Arising without essence, the forms and feelings are then seen as they are, and gradually one is able to shift from the ignorant view to the wise. The wise who know that in phenomena there is no self, Become accustomed to this absence of intrinsic nature. And thus they effortlessly spurn Defilement arising from mistaken thought. Rather than walking with ones head down, staring at the ground, or staring into the space ahead of you blankly, being lost in thought or lost in your music or your cell phone, one perceives all that is happening in the field of the senses in the highest and clearest way possible, free from any distraction or illusion. Free from the dirtiness of conceptual thought, the mind perceives in a way that touches the very suchness of essenceless reality as the instantaneous and miraculous play of all-creating, beautiful, luminous wisdom. Freedom is the basic condition for you to touch life, to touch the blue sky, the trees, the birds, the tea, and the other person." As expressed in the quote above, when freed from the chains of purely conceptual thought, the naked mind absorbs the pure essenceless sense and mental objects as spontaneous expressions of highest joy. Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them. Free from attachment and aversion, the primordial blissful nature of reality shines through unhindered. There is something which as long as left unknown Results in lifes three planes of vicious circle. Beyond all doubt, it dwells in every being. To the Dharmadhatu [Truth-Element] I devoutly bow. When that which forms the cause for all samsara Is purified along the stages of the path, This purity itself is nirvana; Precisely this, the Dharmakaya [Truth-Body], too. As butter, though inherent in the milk, Is mixed with it and hence does not appear, Just so the Dharmadhatu is not seen As long as it is mixed together with afflictions. And just as the inherent butter essence When the milk is purified is no more disguised, When afflictions have been completely purified, The Dharmadhatu will be without any stain at all. But as we are born into this polarized state by our karma, and grow and form matrices of judgment, attachment, and aversion, the pure element of reality (Dharmadhatu) is covered by our internal and external habitual tendencies, and its light is obscured from shining. Chapter 8 Whether one born into this world is raised in a nurturing environment in which one is not overindulged, or over-disciplined, but kept in a middle way between extremes, raised in a nurturing environment that still provokes extreme patterns, or in an abusive environment, etc. will determine how the field of polarization is structured within ones psyche. As has been discovered by psychology, its at the crucial time of childhood when the core structures of personality are put into place. Structures which, although manifesting in this life, are only the continued momentum of beginningless karma. Beginningless because it is ignorance. The insecurities we feel, the judgments we make of others, all of our attachments and aversions formed from past lives and carried over into the beginning formative experiences of this life, tangle themselves into a deep psychological framework which acts as the screen for our experience; a noxious cloud of ugliness when darkened by ignorance, and a luminous field of essenceless wisdom when enlightened by right knowing. One who feels punctured must have been a bubble. The one who feels as though they have gone through this abuse and neglect, or lack of love as a child themselves, or other traumas have nourished this illusion of the self being a punctured one, a victim of extraneous conditions which left it in its present dissatisfied condition. However, were that one have been truly existing from its own side as a permanent phenomena, how could it have been punctured? Only if the phenomena itself were an illusion would it be possible to feel as though it were punctured by the lack of love or abuse it experienced, and thereby develop personality faults and hard, entrenched psychological disorders based on it; all of which exist as phantoms or illusions inside of the mind, reinforced by the ping-ponging polarizing. If the one had been real, permanent, objectively existing it would not have been capable of being made to change its state of being by something which has arisen from outside of it. Believing it to be real, the dualistic reactions of desire to be loved, or to have been treated other than we had been, whatever plethora of mental formations it may have been, have worn in dualistic attachments and aversions into our psyche. These evolve into insecurities, personality disorders, psychological dysfunctions, etc. This is especially so in the relatively extreme cases of abuse, neglect, or other trauma which most of us at present currently experience so often we become numb to it and forget we are even experiencing trauma. The patterns in which those relatively rare people who did not experience such unnerving unstable shifting extremes and had a stable upbringing, in most cases, still form over time into constrictive limitations and prejudices of aversion and attachment, from the other side of the pole. However the aversion and attachment is positively formed, and therefore based on slightly more stable foundations, but still the attachments and aversions always tend to entail the opposites of themselves within them, and they are full of desires, making for an unsatisfied kind of unbalanced existence. For those who are not observant, and do not seek to struggle towards the righteous and truthful expansion in all spheres, the idle limitations and curiosities may degenerate into stiff and unchanging habits which cause us to become cantankerous old fogeys who will react negatively and hostile to those who dont support our narrow ways of doing and seeing things. Because, the gyroscopic mind behaves like a vitalizing current, it doesnt rest but continues to animate and create its magical creations. So whether the stream is flowing down, towards that which is impermanent and dualistic, or up, to that which is real and non-dual, will determine whether it moves within the real and true wisdom, or illusory impermanent dualistic extremes, and experiencing all of the resulting effects of either path. However, its going to keep moving, restructuring itself, because it is an instantaneous phenomena with no real essence, like a reflection, dependent upon its objects and senses. This movement of mind has gone on from the beginning, has never ceased, and will never cease. Without it nothing would exist. Its swinging and polarizing and giving life to what is unreal grounds the ignorant cloud of karmic knots formed into a temporarily existing thing we call a person within a self-imposed dream-like but necessary fantasy, without which it could know nothing. Its forced into this reflexive action due to a grasping at that which is not real in ignorance. None who are born into this world are free of its power, nor should they be, as its this process which yields the potential for a karma-bound being to overcome that very same bad karma by dint of seeing first hand how bad it is, and eventually to realize the voidness in the material side of things. But until this process is transcended, it remains the one driving force in our lives, consuming us whole, and defining who we are for us into narrow limited constraints. This has gone on endlessly, the term in sanskrit is anadi karma meaning beginningless karma, implying that because it is dependent on our ignorance, and not on a set beginning time, it has no temporal beginning. As long as our ignorance is in place, this karma will continue reverberating throughout the aeons, as this is from where the aeons themselves arise. This causal web of action and reaction is linked interdependently with ignorance, and the more we can overcome that dimness and cease acting and thinking based on that ignorance, which takes the unreal to be real and loses itself in a net of mental formations, the more that we can overcome that web of karma. Overcoming this web of connections, that which is not real no longer automatically guides and directs our actions and thoughts and forces them into the repeated patterns which caused us to arrive in the suffering state of continuous birth and death in the first place. Believing the sense and mental objects to be fundamentally real, ones pure nature becomes covered by webs of illusion based on dualistic clinging. This is what we call the psyche, the self, our life. This house, in which we think that we dwell cannot live forever. Forever is an awfully long time, and so it doesnt exist in any way at all forever, outside of our illusory attachment to believing that it does exist and causing it to rise into being instantaneously along with ignorance. If the house which we identified as our self and life were to go on forever, unchanging, it would follow that we ourselves would go on unchanging forever. But if we were unchanging forever, how is it that we could become old, get sick, and die? How would it be that we experience new things and grow and change and learn in response to what we see in the changing environment? If our house were a totally independent and objectified phenomena, it would be impossible to change and interact with other changeables. Therefore, our house does not exist as an object, but is an interdependent web of parts which arises and ceases to be perceived as such along with our ignorance rising and ceasing. In actuality all of these things are without essence and are phantasmagorical displays, as in a dream. The obsessing with forms and objects and having things our way is nothing less than the pointless asserting of an illusory fiction by a blind character of some random dream with an inverted truth. The character, the dream, the whole fiction is a self-created manifestation of mind in every way. So we really have nobody to blame for our good or bad upbringings, which have given rise to this particular house, in which we are struggling to live, and having a perfectly normal childhood is not necessarily a perfect thing in terms of realizing the truth and overcoming illusion. Sometimes, those rough swings of the pendulum through the dark turbulent areas of life serve to unnerve our sense of comfort and cause us to question our existence in a productive way, sometimes they push us further to down the pole towards doing so eventually. Seeing the lows of the low, one has much more appreciation for the suffering of this world, whereas one who has sat comfortable all their life not seeing the suffering is certainly in a worse position, paradoxically. For example, the foremost disciple of the Buddha was not found amongst the ranks of his elite Brahmin Sakya family converts, who had been dulled by their privileged existences, but in Upali, the slave-boy who insisted to become a disciple of the Buddha in spite of his societys prejudices against those of his lower caste. Because Upali had been a slave, he was more humble than the Shakyas, because he hadnt any wealth, he was more eager for the treasure of the Buddhas teaching, because he had been abused and mistreated himself, he knew the pain of abusing and mistreating others. Likewise those of us who come from very humble beginnings, or even moderately abusive beginnings, in all likelihood have an advantage over those who didnt, at least when it comes to abandoning that which is worldly, and seeing the darker sides of the realm of continuous birth and death. If one has come from impoverished beginnings however, conversely, one might feel bitter and commit crimes and violence in order to achieve their desires for stability and wealth. Anything at any time can become switched in the realm of the dualistic and relative. That is important to understand; one thing always entails the opposite, which is again, only possible if the opposites are essence-less, as seen with perfect wisdom. One who is raised in a nice household with a lot of money and material comforts might have had the good karma to be also blessed with an aptitude for the truth and take to it easily, never having to have experienced many violent swings of the pendulum, but when goodness ends and the good karma is used up and if that one has not attained complete Nirvana, the ending of that satisfying life will result in us to be born into a much lower one. Thus is the predicament of those higher godly beings who are born into dimensions above this one which have much more material comfort and sense pleasures than this one. Losing everything we are attached to and having to leave it all behind forever does not sit well with that person who is comfortable with the worldly. Either path that is trodden, rich or poor, prince or pauper, or either way that both are trodden together in the same life, the actions and reactions that arise carry with them our ignorance and attachments from countless aeons. How much that we can balance ignorance with wisdom will be determined by the development of a certain introspectiveness, a sensitivity, a curiosity, humility, and eagerness towards the truth at all cost. No matter how firmly our egoic attachments and aversions may appear to push back, and no matter how long it takes, if we can develop this sincerity, with regards to the truth both within and without, we will be making byways into overcoming ignorance and attaining to perfect wisdom. Chapter 9 The perfect system of polar balance, that magnetic, swinging mind, tends to auto-correct by checking itself against its memories and ideals of truth that it has retained from observing the surround and reflecting. At any point it may swivel between dark or light reflections of pain/pleasure, attachment/aversion, love/hate etc., and reflections within reflections, and connections within connections. A mind which is unaware of the power of its own volition and going about its existence unconsciously is potentially very dangerous, because there are no limits to the knots and unfolding webs of karma which one can find oneself entangled in, or the highs and lows which can toss one about. It will go on fumbling and bumbling in ignorance, attachment feeding action, and action in turn feeding into attachment and aversion all over again. Each time which we allow our materialistic habits of thought and action, based in the ignorant objectification of the inner and outer reality as a substantial, static, and independent objects, to take over our consciousness, a chain of causality is nourished which has caused us to be bound in this world from time immemorial, and which will cause us to continue to be bound in this world forever. Therefore to accept ignorance and cultivate it is the same as cultivating death and rebirth in the world of suffering from taking illusions to be real. As previously explained, our ignorance and tendencies of behavior good or bad are all inherited from previous lives, and so there is an ocean of former action which is to be overcome. The people, situations, lifestyles which we attract and cultivate are little more than carry-overs from previous people, lifestyles, and situations which we have attracted and cultivated. These karmic seeds are carried from previous lives and embed themselves into the present, and, being watered by our attention, begin to sprout into great trees of attachment. Qi follows Yi, where attention goes, energy flows. As attention goes towards our attachments, energy flows towards the crystallization of their essence into patterns and habits. The thought being cultivated having to do with desire, that idea which we are desiring carries a lot of energetic weight in our consciousness and lives. Being of the nature of desire the idea or pattern always creates a yearning which is observed to steadily increase. Being of the nature of duality, the attachment is always connected to its opposite of aversion. For example, the desire for prestige, wealth, and sex seem to be universal amongst the dim, pitiable people in our fallen age. When one cultivates the thought pattern, I desire for prestige, wealth, sex, one is cultivating the notion that one does not have these things, and so a type of stress or tension then ensues between the wanting and the having and the fear and aversion of not having. If one, having attained the prestige, wealth, or sex, cultivates the thought I have attained such and such, begins to develop a steady crassness and pride in the attainment, which may be viewed positively or negatively by others, and which inflates our illusory ego to try to hang on and identify itself with the holding on to that which we are attached. This leads to an even further shell-game of self-inflation and grasping at these attachments both mentally and physically. Grasping at that which is capable of being taken away leads to more fear of losing, and gives rise to avariciousness which wants to hang on to that which is needed to sustain the inflation of the ego amongst the swell of the rising dualistic tide; hence the situation of the world today. When that person loses what they were so greedily attached to forcefully due to death, disease, or disaster, it will not be a pretty scene to say the least. There is no way to sustain the rising tide of our ambitions in a shaky unpredictable world, like there is no way empty water from a boat with a hole in the bottom. Wealth, prestige, having sex with many different partners etc. appear attractive to the ignorant who have no experiential knowledge of what these dreams are like when lived practically. Wealth generates more attachment to this world, if it is not purified by charity. With it, one knows no restraint in the world of continuous birth and death. One is able to indulge every idle desire of ones ego without any restraint, and living an extravagant and flamboyant existence, forgets the simple and basic things about life. That ones life becomes some kind of fantasy which is far away from the hard truths which can free one from such delusion and attachment. The wealthy one has no need to rely on anything or anyone to live their life, because of course money can always solve every problem, and so comes to take everything for granted and live in a sheltered cloistered existence that is far off from the lives of those poor people on whom the wealth was built. Far away from seeing the dependence on others for ones being, ones ego becomes that much more hard and resilient, and ones discipline and sharpness becomes dulled. That egoic bubble becomes bloated and static, and desires ever more extravagance in order to amuse itself. This is a self-generated cycle which creates more and more desires, which are less and less satisfying, and generate more and more tension. When I was a kid, I loved seeing how rich people lived. Now that Im older, I know a lot of high net worth individuals. I know guys worth over $500 million that wear t-shirts everyday and drink beer from a can. I also know a lot of entrepreneurs who have sold companies, some for over $100 million. Guess how they feel when they retire? Bored, restless and unfulfilled. Their early days of scrapping it up with little money and long hours are some of their best memories. Sitting on a beach and checking your bank balance gets old quickly. All the while that wealthy one is corrupted by indulgence in sense pleasures and the arrogance of his perceived position in relation to the common people. The swiveling mind is raised into octaves of haughtiness and disingenuous pride. This goes to show the hollow nature of this kind of lifestyle; its perpetuated by a constant sense of lack, and disenchantment that paradoxically is another reverse symptom of its apparent utter abundance and enchantment. If one has all this wealth with which one is enchanted, that implies a limitless array of desires which one will then feel compelled to act out, and a limitless uneasiness of desiring new things and being averse to losing them. This is due to the fact that we are the ones all along creating the illusion of requiring wealth, being wealthy, desiring extravagance, living extravagantly, being averse to poverty, etc. Suppose we are now sitting in the shade for too long. We feel cold, so we move out into the sun. We seem to feel happy for a while, but this is not happiness. If it were, it would be like suffering: the more we encounter, the more it would increase. If going out into the sun were happiness, no matter how long we sat there, our happiness must grow the more, not become unhappiness. This is not what happens, we suffer again a little later and have to go back into the shade. Our suffering has gradually risen above its threshold, although this is not in fact obvious. Seeking to alleviate suffering momentarily with a pleasure which never lasts long because its not really pleasure but just a momentary alleviation of our suffering. Like a dog chasing ones own tail, the low comes into being along with the high, and one can never escape that cycle, because the desire for the highs and aversion for the lows, never objectively exist independently and were formed originally in duality, and were maintained in duality, and duality never entails the possibility for true peace without its opposite. King Mabhavata ruled over the four continents and the celestial regions, yet he was still dissatisfied. Eventually his merit ran out; he fell to the continent of Jambudvipa and breathed his last. Desires do not satisfy, and there can be no greater fault than this. If you ruled one land you would think, If only I ruled over two! You would not be satisfied, no matter how many you ruled. No matter how much wealth you get you still wonder if you can get more, and you are prepared to wear yourself out to achieve this. If you lack contentment, no matter how much wealth or how many possessions you have acquired, you will be no different from a beggar. Once in India, Surata the beggar found a priceless jewel and said he must give it to another beggar. He gave it to King Prasenajit, saying, Oh king, you lack contentment, and so are the poorest! In the end, it all comes crashing down anyway, in the rare case that one is even able to hold on to ones wealth without it being taken or lost. Eventually the good fortune is going to run out sooner or later, and we are going to experience the reverse, and therefore all living beings experience suffering. All along that we thought we were the richest man, we were actually the greatest beggar. Our riches were all in our dreams, and, placing them externally outside of ourselves, we became the most needy indeed of those phantasms which have no real true existence. Craving after that which is not real, Your attachment to the objects of the senses increased, leaving you discontented; you then accumulated sins for the sake of those things, and went from lower realm to lower realm. With more wealth one acquires more problems and people trying to take advantage of ones situation. With more problems and people trying to take advantage of one, comes more fears and anxieties of being taken advantage of, and more paranoia and sinful greed concerning ones assets. A proposition which initially was supposed to free us and give us an easy and happy life has rapidly degenerated into the sticky desire quicksand of attachment and aversion; its like the story of the fisherman on the beach in Mexico. A rich businessman was on holiday by the beach in Mexico when a small fishing boat docked nearby with just one man on board. Inside the boat were several large tasty-looking fish. "That's quite a fine catch," noted the businessman. "How long did it take you to pull those in?" "Only a little while," said the fisherman. "So why don't you stay out fishing longer and catch more fish?" said the rich man. "This is enough to take care of the needs of my family," replied the fisherman. "But what do you do with all the rest of your time?" asked the businessman. The fisherman said, "I sleep late, I fish a little, I spend time with my wife and play with my children. Then I rest in the afternoon. In the evening, I visit the rest of my family or stroll into the village where I have a drink with my friends. I have a full and busy life." The rich man scoffed. "I have a business degree from one of the best universities in the world. I can help you. If you spent more time fishing, you could buy a bigger boat with the profits you make. With the profits from the bigger boat you could buy several more boats until eventually you would own a whole fleet of fishing boats. Then instead of selling the fish to a middleman you could sell the fish directly to the processor and increase your profit margin. Eventually, you could open up your own canning factory and become a wealthy business owner. Of course, you would have to leave this village by the sea where you live and move to the capital and maybe even later to another country to manage your business." "How long would all of that take?" the fisherman wanted to know. "Oh, at least 15 years," replied the businessman. "But what then?" asked the humble fisherman. The businessman laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right, you can sell your company. You would become rich. You could make millions." "Millions!" exclaimed the fisherman. "Then what?" "Then you could retire to a little village by the sea," said the businessman, "where you could sleep late, you could fish a little, spend time with your wife, play with your kids, then rest in the afternoon. In the evening, you could stroll into the village and have a drink with your friends. You see how wonderful things would be!" Prestige is as much a curse as a blessing, especially in the present era. Many celebrities say that they wish they never would have become famous because they have become sacrificial lambs to the raving zombified masses who obsess over them. Being well- known also invites ridicule from all sides so if you and your life is not perfectly in order, fame can become infamy very quickly, as we see happening over and over again. Likewise sex or any other indulgence or trapping of this material world is full of associated problems, and only leads to a snowball effect of more desire evolving out of more desire, our satisfaction being reliant on increasingly hard to maintain circumstances, sinful qualities such as overly indulged lust, avarice, spite, and pride being conditioned into us, and the exhaustion of our good karma from previous lives until we sink back into a pit of darkness in some hellish place whether in this life or in the next or both. "In the high rebirths you spent much time in pleasure, Caressing the breasts and waists of women; Then in hell, you felt instruments of torture That crushed, cut and tore you - What constant and intolerable pain!" As long as ignorance goes on unchecked, as it does in all four corners of this world, there can be no ending to our hard work, our burning unfulfilled desires, our frustration and our dissatisfaction. Desires do not satisfy, and there can be no greater fault than this We project our own state onto the world around us, and so give rise to cravings and attachments that are based often on nothing more than our own sense of lack and dissatisfaction, and which augment our state further along those lines of desire, and infect the world with our disease. None of this provides any lasting happiness or real pleasure, but is just a temporary reprieve from our suffering. There is no ending of the constant cat and mouse game of chasing these non-pleasures in a land without any meaning in sight. This is the state of everyone in the world of contintuous birth and death. Struggling in quicksand pools of action and reaction, chasing after phantoms and never finding real happiness, losing themselves in activity towards the light and the dark and being tossed around on waves of their own attachments and aversions. This will go on forever, and ever, and ever, as those karma bound entities are causing these worlds to come into being over, and over, and over again. As long as the illusory desires which are based in lack and ignorance are cultivated there will be infinite amounts of worlds filled with life which is trapped in self-imposed dreams and nightmares. Like a character in a dream, it will be impossible to wake that person, until they begin to suspect that they are dreaming, by noticing something is not quite right. This world being like a great field of experience which goes both up and down, down-down, down-up, up-up, up-down, and everything in between, and there are plenty of opportunities for our lives to be shaken up and our minds to be shaken awake; but unless wisdom is given to the person to understand what is what, all that shaking will only cause us to feel shaken up. Always there is the opportunity for transcendence, were never far cut off from it and all of the effects of our life are carefully arranged in such a way that one by one they can cause us to realize our ignorance as we overcome the attachments which have given rise to them. The only way to do this though is to exercise detachment and have the right insight to discern the real from the illusory. As has been previously explained, that which is co-dependent upon something else can not accurately be described to be a truly real and independently existing entity, and so thoughts, forms, feelings, and perceptions all partake of the nature of a magical illusion. Instantaneously arising with perception, these manifestations such as thoughts and feelings appear to be hard and substantial, but they arise just as quickly as they cease, like flashes. Therefor being void of own-being, their power as real and objective things ruling our lives is taken away once it is seen that it is impossible for them to be really existing with their own essences. With this diamond sword of perfect wisdom, the sticky tentacles of attachment are cut one by one, and a sort of alchemizing effect naturally occurs to purify one of their influence and establish one in a peaceful equipoise beyond duality which is not an illusion at all. Not bound by the constantly shifting poles of the attachments anymore, true peace is established in the mind that one has never before dreamed possible. Desires fade away, and actions become expressions of spontaneous joy rather than need, lack, and suffering, and therefore one begins to have compassion for those people who are stuck in the cycle that one has become freed from. Not suffering automatic feedback in the mind due to the previous basing of ones existence on shaky dualistic foundations, ones decisions, actions, reactions, and the like all descend from the pure plane of primordial wisdom-compassion-mind. If the things of this world, riches etc. matter not to one, than there is no pride or arrogance which can manifest, and one is freed from the delusions which arise from the viewing of ones self and others through the lens of material value, no hankering, no craving, no insecurity or anxiety. Nothing and nobody can stir one from ones equipoise, and everything which one encounters is transmuted, as if one where the very philosophers stone. In such a state can one move about in the world external and internal and not suffer from becoming lost in it, and even go on to do a true and real great good for ones self and others. There is no way to sustain the rising bubble of affliction of greedy desire, so why not abandon it from the get go and instead seek to transcend all suffering for the sake of ones self and for all living beings? These mundane desires we have for this life are not so meaningful that they should be thought of as the be all and end all of our existences. No, you dont only live once, and no, you dont have to act like a fool in this life. Those pursuits which are so important to everyone in this world dont weigh out to even one tiny grain of sand amongst the dusts of infinite time, and those pursuits which are not important to the world actually outweigh millions of such achievements which this world believes are so valuable and worthwhile. Chapter 10 With a sense being developed for what is real and right and what is not, its possible to adjust the wheel of our minds in the proper way and calibrate it to the truth and away from the lies. This sense, conscience, insight, what-have-you, can open the door to the immaculate wisdom of seeing things as they actually are. Re- adjusting bit by bit, attachments based in ignorance become experiential knowledge gained through wisdom. Like a meal, the resolution of ignorance is digested and processed as essenceless nutrients which feed our insight and consciousness. "I consume concepts of duality as my diet." Our karma arising internally and externally reflects back to us exactly those mental states within ourselves which are in turn reflecting that particular ignorance which remains to be transmuted. Whether from within or without, negative states and events magically transform into positive ones, with the touchstone of perfect wisdom. Guiding us away from negative tendencies, displaying to us our own false beliefs and actions, all of the apparent negatives which manifest themselves to us contain within them them each a seed knowledge which we need to overcome our ignorance. Like a snake eating its own tail, the way in which this interdependent and interconnected reality works is a repeating cycle of its own feedback; as has been explained. Nothing that we experience is not the feedback of previous actions in this life and others. Therefore, whatever it is that comes to us in this life are like reflexive reactions to movements and patterns of our mind and body which are expressing simultaneously that which has trapped us in death and rebirth, and that which has the possibility to liberate us from death and rebirth. For each person, place, or event which comes our way there is the potential for a push or a pull of force, away or towards the view arising out of ignorance. Either way, we have nobody to blame for the status of our life and our being but ourselves. Reality is going to keep reflecting us back to ourselves until we either find the resolution to our suffering and attain to nirvana, or that we succumb to our suffering and ignorance. Were not capable of changing this process, however we are capable of changing our reaction to it, and using it instead of being used by it. "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." This is the same injunction that Matthew records Jesus as giving; when we perceive enemies, we are really perceiving our own prejudices. Even those who perpetrate the most vile and grotesque evils imaginable are worthy of our compassion. They are bound to experience the dark karmic reactions to their evil deeds, and this is why Jesus has said pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven, because if you instead allow those who are a really only a test to you in this illusionary world of karma to embroil you in malice you will be dragged down and not born as a child of the Father, Immaculate Wisdom and of the Mother, the Ultimate Sphere of Reality. Knowing the truth about the fate that awaits one who is a persecutor, that that one will experience his karma, or the retribution for his sins, whether in this life or the next, we should have compassion on everyone who we hate; especially the ones that we really hate. The more hate, or aversion, (and we should really look at it as a byproduct of the opposite side of attachment) that we have towards people, events, etc. the more that we should examine what we it is that we are attached to which is producing this effect. For instance, someone insults us and we think, how dare them, how dare they insult ME!, puffing ourselves up into the atmosphere, following the dualistic reaction to whatever heights that we are willing to take it, based on the vertical axis of ignorance and wisdom. Instead, we should bypass this redundant counterproductive madness and use the circumstance to train ourselves in overcoming this tendency in ourselves, by humility, sincerity, that is to say, good old fashioned strength of character. One will find that they are untying all sorts of knots in the ignorant areas of their ego, and opening up blissful wisdom which transcends all subject/object differentiation and reaches into the very heart of immaculate non-dual truth; the sun which rises on the good and the bad. In doing so, we will transcend our bad karma bit by bit, digesting and growing from the nutrients of this psychic food, into a larger person with stronger bones of character! The idea of the other person and your own self are completely essencelesss anyway, the whole going back and forth between comparing them vs. others, or self, is complete ignorance and superstition. Our image of our self is superstition, and our image of the other is superstition, and usually in the heat of the moment of a vitriolic exchange, whether extreme or subtle, we lose site even more of the nature of people and see only in small narrow ways. People are much more than what we are even capable of thinking about them, anything that we can impute conceptually is not the thing which touches the true essence of the heart and mind of any living being. There is a beautiful saying which seems to echo a similar sentiment, its said that Ananta Shesha, who is depicted as a serpent with thousands of heads, with all of his thousands of mouths, cannot finish speaking the glories of the Supreme Soul even if he were to speak for thousands of aeons. This is the nature of those small labels which we apply to others, there is no way to fully describe everyone, in a satisfactory manner, which encompasses their entire essence. So when we break ourselves and others down into small blocky bits and then fling them around at each other it ends up making a mess, and then we have to search and pick the pieces back up and put them together. None of this strikes at the real truth of the matter, but merely is the reflex of karma working nearly automatically like clockwork. In the times we live in, its important to keep remembering this, because people are becoming more and more shallow and fickle and prone to arrogance and avarice and all the rest of the so- called deadly sins. The dark side of the moon is shining intensely on the Earth now, which means that not only is it a dangerous environment, its also a very potentially rich environment for transformation; as they say, fortune favors the bold, and if it is that noble souls who are predisposed to hearing the message of this text do indeed choose to come here during this time, they are quite bold indeed. The influence of this dark moon is coloring all aspects of the world with a darkly-aspected shade; and at the same time is giving rise to an interesting contrast in the other side of the spectrum, when it is that the wisdom-light is allowed to penetrate the thick veil of ignorance and poke its head out. The darker that it gets, however, the more powerful that a light appears. Just by radiating this light and choosing not to succumb to the darkness, you will be healing yourself, inspiring others, and resolving the issues which must be resolved if you, and the world, are to attain true and lasting peace. This doesnt mean to try to impose artificially some image of morality or righteousness, but to try to make the darkness conscious, by realizing it exactly as it is. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Realizations will lead to expansions of our nature past the limitations which bound us in ignorance and attachment, fear and aversion. Our desire and aversion for objects of the mind and senses decreases, and we will find ourselves becoming less reactive to situations that we formerly would have reacted to in a harmful manner. The poison is removed from the river of our mindstream, and what is left is pure clear refreshing water. Each poison being purified, leaves a nectar in its wake, each nectar which flows forth is capable of remedying another poison, both in ourselves and others. Our actions, becoming less reactive, generate less karmas, and the karmas that we have from before also influence us less. That is why that the masters of the past have spoken of instantaneous realization, happening all in a flash. The more that we can persist in this instantaneous realization, of the non-dual, within the sphere of the relative, in a constructive way which tends towards experiential wisdom and not merely dryly refuting everything as being unreal, the more that this instantaneous realization can manifest fully and completely. Situations, places, people, events will all come in turn, and through this intuitive wisdom, one is guided along the straight path from the crooked one. Negative karmic situations which we formerly found ourselves in will be transforming, empowering situations, causing us to ascend from the ashes of our former self like the phoenix, the ancient symbol of immortality. When we get a degree of this reflexive action of non-reflexive action, the ignorance which has bound us in the land of continuous birth and death is cut off from its root, by the ever-sharpened sword of intrinsically pure wisdom. Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? The Master doesn't seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, he is present, and can welcome all things. Peace is tasted at last, a pure peace which is deathless and birthless and knows no bounds, a peace which is then spread to every living being that it encounters because it touches to the very core of every living being. Abiding in this peace, the possibility of the destruction of the false bubble-ego is transcended, and pure equanimity beyond all conceptual boundaries is attained. Nor is the peace abided in, because it is essenceless and pure, and we still accept the reality of the world as existing but also without essence. In this way we begin to exhibit qualities which are not formed in relation to anything in the mundane world of illusion and impermanent things, seen through the improperly objectifying mind, but in relation to a deathless eternal blissful reality that transcends all description. The world of continuous birth and death, and the world of the eternal, merge as one phenomena which is beyond both, somehow even while still in this body. This is called the Buddha- nature. Ones whole array of motivations, sense of responsibility, perceptions of what is and isnt important, changes drastically. Instead of thinking and acting and having allegiances only to the illusory idols of our own devices, namely our ego, our allegiance changes to the universal truth, the real ego or self, and that spirit of truth manifests through us in every sphere. Free of desire, what could draw my mindstream towards the dark material world? Free of aversion, what in the material world could block the progress of my path to full enlightenment? Clear on the straight path to Nirvana, no ignorance can stop the force of your wisdom and action. Seeing the suffering of your fellow living beings, and containing within yourself the medicines to allay their suffering, you feel like a mother cat nursing its poor injured kitten. The remedies to allay their suffering jump out of the soul surrendered to the Spirit of Truth. That Spirit is a balance and a scale to harmonize every aspect of the mind, speech, and actions. This is the intuitive wisdom that is referred to as The Perfection of Wisdom in Buddhism, which is also the name of the key sutra associated with the doctrine of emptiness, the Perfection of Wisdom of the Heart Sutra. Because it exists outside of the confines of the grasping at that which is impermanent, it is a spontaneous wisdom formed in the transcendental unborn reality, and because it is not not confined by grasping at impermanent things, it transcends even the unborn, to seeing the whole diversity of creation exactly as it is. It in itself is like a great reflexive upward moving momentum, which consumes concepts of duality for rocket fuel, and spreading out into an expansive matrix of harmonized truths, reflecting the truth of the universe back to itself. While wielding this perfect thunderbolt of truth, illusion is overcome in the end, and a reality of infinite blissful quality pours out through you into the world. Nobody can perfect this thunderbolt which comes to be held in your hand for you, but only by holding yourself to the truth, listening to the conscience, the voice of intuitive wisdom, the inner guru, can you perfect it. Seek after the truth always for the highest good of your self and others, and nothing will be able to stop you on the path. Chapter 11 Societies soar into the sky, and crumble and fall, what matters is not the affairs of this world, but how you conducted them. This world is nothing but an illusion in our collective minds, its forged of nothing but dreams, somewhere along the line though, the dreamers began dreaming dualistically and falling under the influence of their own illusions. Trapped in endless cycles of birth and death, travelling through millions of species of life, self- propelled ignorance can last for trillions and trillions of years. Almost everything in our material world has this kind of history, and yet paradoxically this history has no own-being whatsoever, yet we believe it into existence with our minds, when apparently reified objects appear to form composite phenomena. Only by cutting off the power of these self-propelled illusions at their source, by the proper realization of the emptiness of their apparent own being due to the way in which all things are posited to originate dependently upon one another, will we be able to find the deathless unborn peace. It will become reflexive to abide in this peace, and yet one will continuously enter into the sphere of duality, working to overcome the karma that has accumulated over time both in ones self and in the world. One is not fettered, either by nirvana or by the illusions of the material world, one walks perfectly in the middle of the path, acting for the greatest benefit of self and others, while at the same time recognizing them to be without essence in a relative sense. Their essence is recognized as the same non-essential Buddha-Nature, that one has recognized in ones own self. See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things. As such, everything arranges itself naturally without much input from our former controlling ego. One feels more in tune with the natural earthly and celestial cycles as they occur, and becomes like a wish-fulfilling tree to serve the best needs of all humanity, with compassion for their suffering and identification with them as being intrinsically the same as yourself. Instead of a dull and grey, flatlined existence, one perceives the beautiful shades of dark and light cascading through our society, and in ourselves, and is able to make more powerful transmutations from one into the other for the benefit of all. The things that formerly captured your attention no longer interest you in the same way as they did, when formerly your life was a game of hot potato between various escapes from our suffering. We feel more simple and satisfied with little rather than complicated and never satisfied with anything. Nevertheless, you act in whichever way is the best for the benefit of all, because one perceives naught but the primordially pure enlightened nature all around one, covered for no good reason at all by pointless ignorance and needless suffering. To see living beings trapped in illusions of their own device, and suffering greatly, to the extent of even wanting to take their own lives, creates a frustration in you that can only be quelled by taking action to help others. Nor does one perceive any living beings. O Subhti, no one is to be called a Bodhisattva, for whom there should exist the idea of a being, the idea of a living being, or the idea of a person. Yet one perceives the intrinsic enlightened nature covered by ignorance, and merely makes the connections between our own state and the person suffering in ignorance, hoping to bring the person into closer proximity to the one truth nature. There are many ways to do this, and for various situations they will become apparent naturally and spontaneously to one who is surrendered to this truth nature. That is why that its said that such a person is compared to a wish-fulfilling tree, a tree which grows fruit based on the desire of the person who plucks it. The truth nature is not different from the universe and all things, as has been demonstrated, and so the universe and all things flow along with the truth nature like leaves down a stream, only they are oblivious to the fact that there even is a stream, and some try to flow up the stream with their own will instead of allowing the stream to carry them naturally. The only reason you will have to hate or be averse to situations or people will be that they are flowing against their own nature, and even then that hate or aversion is a positive force for self and others, and will be seen to have no substantial basis. People who are trapped in believing in the permanent objectification of impermanent things make statements such as He is so awful, I dont like this person, etc. and proceed to impute illusory permanent natures on illusory permanent natures, and so become even more lost in confusion and separated from one another and from reality. This is exactly the current which feeds into the cycle of continuing birth and death in the material world. Subject and object are perceived to be objectified entities, separate from one another, and so the pristine experience of reality as it is is lost in a mental maze of increasingly complicated polar opposites, which make us distanced from external reality and the other. The material world is an external reflection of this mental maze, full of confused creatures living the destiny of their dualistic karma. We will find that these objectifications that we make exist merely as transient phenomena in our mind and have no static own being of their own. Moment to moment our mind is reformed and reshaped and moment to moment everything returns to nothing. The minds eye twitches, and a faint twinkle issues forth from it, summoning into being concrete memories and abstract ideas which whirl around the aura like a dust storm. Whatever arises in the present does so in relation to the gaze of this eye. Prejudices or praises, hate and love exist merely as thoughts, when we recognize them for what they are, we can have no ground for hating or loving people based on what we judge of their apparent objective identity. Instead our hatred or love for them arises in relation to the higher noble experience which lies beyond the veil of words, and is never a hatred or love that intrudes on the intrinsic experience of ones unity with all life, but is seen as the ephemeral temporary phenomena that it is, subservient to that which is permanent. The false duality of objective, apparently permanent aversion and attachment is made subservient to the experience of things as they are, non- dual and devoid of subject and object essence; some have called this God, some Buddha-nature, or Brahman. This is merely reality as it actually is, and duality as it actually is, as seen from the perspective of the Real beyond the relative, rather than just the perspective of the relative. The Third Eye opens, weaving subjective experience itself into an intrinsic absolute unity with each moment. This is what it means to cease worshiping idols, and submit ones self to the One Reality. Peoples idols are their separate attachments and aversions which cause them to seek out an existence apart from the True Reality. Endless is the ignorance of such idol-worshipers, until they come to recognize the intrinsic truth of all things. At that point all idols are put to use to describe the face of the Lord, the one primordial eternal truth and reality. "My goal in the idol-temple is the image and beauty of Your face. The idols of our former dualistic experience are put to use to embellish the beauty and truth of our intuitive wisdom, the face of God. With the overcoming of each poison a nectar flows forth, until one is a garden of various nectarine remedies that cure ones body and heart-mind of disease. Like the churning of Mount Mandara by the Hindu Gods and Anti-Gods, the amrit nectar of immortality is produced along with the halahala poison. The higher forces of enlightenment win out over the lower forces of decay, and one is established in the Heaven of those Gods. Overcoming suffering with the peace and security of the realization, one has sympathy for those who suffer, likewise for overcoming ignorance, and all other poisons of the material world. So contradistinctively with being established in a higher blissful reality, one is inspired deeply by ones own transformative process to compassion towards the infinite sea of suffering people in the realm of continuous birth and death, while at the same time knowing that the people and the suffering are like the misty phantasms of a dream. Transcending both being and non-being, one can always find the middle way in life, never being trapped in destructive dead ends along the path, but always navigating perfectly with the blessed intuitive wisdom of self-revelation. Not only does this help one to avoid the chaos of ignorant thoughts and actions, but by this process our core experience of reality, the mind, is broken up and expanded over and over again, opening up our inner and outer lives to more evolved and comprehensive potentials. Who we are can grow and change in this way, leading us to discovering the hidden transcendental essence within ourselves and all things. Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don't realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready. This experiential wisdom must be gained through practice and application, it cant just be imputed conceptually and then copied. Take the knowledge in hand, and put it to use; you will light up the world with the warm glow of your black sun rising.