Fri, 16 Apr 2010
No Fear
Sorry for the long absence. I've been busy on Twitter promoting World Homeopathy Awareness Week. Today is the last day and I've tweeted my last tweet on it, so it's back to the Heart Sutra. The next line says:
Because there is no impediment, he is not afraid, and he leaves distorted dream-thinking far behind. Ultimately Nirvana!
This verse covers a lot of ground on the Buddhist path. As explained before, when we come to a positive understanding of emptiness, we overcome the impediments, the emotional and intellectual fixations that obscure our true nature. This positive experience usually get called "enlightenment," but the term is more properly reserved for something much further along on the path. In any case, "enlightenment" is not the end of the path, it is the start. Having the positive understanding of emptiness, one cuts through what are called the "perversions," translated here as "distorted dream-thinking." What are the perversions? Taking what causes suffering as pleasant, what is impermanent as permanent, and what is empty as real. As life situations come up, we continually cut through these perversions with the sword of emptiness. The last barrier to cut through is the subtle sense of a watcher or an experiencer of this practice, a voice that comments "this is happening now." When one is about to cut through this last barrier, a strong sense of fear arises, fear of annihilation. But with strong wisdom, one overcomes this fear and makes a leap onto the path of the bodhisattvas, leaving the perversions far behind. Because when the sense of me and mine is totally overcome, so are the coarse forms of the perversions. Only a subtle habitual tendency remains. This is gradually overcome on the bodhisattva path until ultimately we attain enlightenment.
