Sat, 19 Jun 2010
Nothing to Change
Sorry for the long absence. I've had a hard time focusing my thoughts. I've wanted to write something for a while about the misunderstandings people fall into about the spiritual path. My thoughts on the issue have finally come together, and I plan to write three posts. Here's my first.
One of the most profound, yet easily misunderstood points is that all the qualities of enlightenment are already present within your mind. There is no difference between you and a perfectly enlightend being, except for one. You do not see this and a perfectly enlightened being does. So there is nothing that needs to be changed, everything as it is is already perfect.
But although there is nothing to change, we still need to practice, because we don not see this truth. There are many analogies that explain this. Here is one that I heard from Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche. Suppose you wake up in the middle of the night and hear a sound. You imagine the sound is a burglar and can't get back to sleep. There is no burglar and no need to catch him. But even though the burglar is non-existent, the false idea creates a definite effect: you are unable to sleep. So to get back to sleep, you need to get up, go through the house, and turn on the lights to convince yourself that there is no burglar. Then you can finally get back to sleep.
Similarly, even though we all have buddha nature within us, we do not see this nature and have doubts about it. So to clarify these doubts we need to practice. What obscures our understanding is our thoughts and emotions. And for most people the best way to clarify their confusion is the practice of shamatha meditation. Shamatha is a Sanskrit word that means calming. It is not a single style of meditation, it is the name for a class of related meditations that aim to concentrate the mind by focussing on a single object. By temporarily calming the thoughts and emotions, it is more likely that one's true nature will be seen.
Sometimes it's said that the desire to attain enlightenment is an obstacle to enlightenement. That's half-true, because all desires obscure our nature, including the desire for enlightenement. But it gets you no closer to enlightenment to abandon the desire for enligtenment and keep the the thousand desires for eveything else. It's deluded o think that merely by giving up the desire for enlightenment and holding onto a conceptualized idea of the enlightened state that one has attained anything. Instead it's better to hold onto the single desire for enlightenment and use it a motivation to pursue the practices that will tame the thousand other desires. Using desire to conquer desire is not a contradiction, it's only skillful means.
