BUDDHA IN THE MUD is a blog – a living book based on the Dzogchen teachings. Our teacher is life, and life is karma. We are all Buddhas in the mud of concepts.

Being Kind To Our Self

Self is a misunderstanding in the mind,
something that consciousness picked up.

When we think that we’re thinking, we are actually observing thinking taking place.

We can see this clearly in meditation.

Thinking is consciousness relating to things, which forms an imprint in the mind to which we constantly refer to make judgements, thus creating a feeling of self.

The essence of mind is pure, and free of all contamination. It’s what we are – pure ethereal consciousness. There’s no feeling of what we are; there is just pure being. It is timeless, like space, but aware.

The moment consciousness relates to anything, this timeless awareness is forgotten.

So how do we become kind to the mirage?
By knowing the process.

When we were young, we picked up experiences that created the wiring in our brain which consciousness adopted. We then call that ‘my self’. We may like or dislike this self, but it’s what we have to work with.

The path to happiness is seeing this patterning – which we are holding onto and which distracts us – as our teacher. Our practice is letting go of the past, and being spontaneously intuitive.

Being kind is the conscious practice of empathy, having compassion toward our self and others’ selves regarding the predicament we’re all in.

Being kind is understanding how we all work.

We Are The Purpose Of Life

The purpose of life is to realise personally what we are, rather than having some philosopher tell us what we are. No book, teacher, or external authority can hand us this understanding because realisation is a direct, first-hand experience, and not second-hand intellectual information. We don’t have to copy others, adopting their measures of success, or accepting their definitions of who we should be.

When we see through our own eyes that we are the awareness behind our thoughts, it changes everything, and we no longer live by others’ standards.

Someone else telling us that we are consciousness is just a concept; discovering it ourself is freedom.

The moment we realise that life is consciousness, the pressure to conform fades away. We see that most people are simply playing out their conditioning which they’ve never questioned – but we are all free to step out of that loop.

Others’ timelines, wealth, or lifestyles has no bearing on our internal peace. Chasing things that we’re told we should want rather than what genuinely aligns with awareness leads us astray.

Seeking validation from people who are, themselves, asleep to what they truly are is … daft. 🙂

Evolving Instead Of Revolving

Evolving is breaking free from repeating negative cycles to achieve genuine positive maturity, having the ability to adapt. It is a mind shifting from repetitive patterns to direct realisation of our reality that is ever-present. If we haven’t noticed, it’s consciousness.

We have evolved when we realise what we are.
We then address our conduct to match this realisation.

Revolving is being stuck in relative truth, always relating to material and mental phenomena. We may be very clever talking about things or ideas, while never realising the pure uncontaminated observation taking place.

We evolve the moment we stop revolving in the vicious cycle of existence,
which is our personal hell.

This Blog Should Be Secret

The problem with blogs like this is that if people don’t practise the words and merely acquire information, it can work against them. They can become arrogant and competitive; this is why the blog isn’t advertised on social media.

The dilemma is wanting to share experiences, because truth and evil affect all of us. People find their way here through their own inner investigation, but the meaning of the words has to be contemplated and practised to be realised, otherwise it’s just intellectual consumerism.

Why The Obsession With The Past?

Life just repeats itself. People repeat themselves too, so we all go round in circles.

It’s just a programme which is the automated predictable nature of the human mind; we talk constantly about the past. Our brains are essentially prediction machines. They take everything that’s already happened – the past – and use it as a script to project what will happen next – (the future). Rarely are people in the now … in the know. 🙂

When we live entirely inside that mental loop, we follow a habitual pattern, repeating the same emotional reactions, relationship dynamics and behaviour over and over.

Wars are being played out now due to the past. It makes one wonder if these scenarios are the intentional precursor for the next war to happen.

Breaking out of that loop requires understanding why we are obsessed with the past, and how presence acts as the ultimate circuit breaker.

The moment we rest in the spontaneous present unburdened by what happened five minutes ago or five years ago, the programme stops running us. We can take a fresh look at life and stop following a predicted pattern; we’re no longer part of the world, but just a traveller.

Viewing ourself as a temporary visitor rather than a permanent fixture completely changes how we interact with everything around us. Our daily experience shifts in several distinct ways: less pressure, more detachment, an understanding that everything is temporary, wonder, focus, zero expectations, quiet observation, being comfortable sitting on the side lines … giving space for more what and why. 🙂

The Mud Is Just A Dirty Lens

When we seek the truth of phenomena, we ignore that which is seeking. As we continue to look for something more interesting, our lens becomes dirtier and dirtier, and so we cease to see with any clarity.

Seeking truth creates a duality of the subject (the seeker) and the object (the sought). By constantly striving for something more interesting, we introduce more dust in the form of fixations such as desire and attachment, muddying the lens of pure perception.

Our obsession with external answers blinds and binds us to confusion. The mud represents our psychological attachments, our rigid beliefs, our identity narratives and our desires for specific outcomes.

The path isn’t found by adding more information or adopting a better system. Instead, clearing the lens requires a radical letting go, ceasing the outward chase, allowing the mud of mental activity to settle naturally and resting quietly in the clarity of simple unattached awareness.

Just do it and see.
Then drop the seeing, and allow pure consciousness to pervade.

The mud is an illusion.
It can never obliterate consciousness.

Realising this is pure consciousness.

Starving The Monster

The establishment can only exploit whatever we give it access to. Like Mara, it feeds on our desires, aversions and ignorances; us becoming content starves it. Practising compassion destroys its leverage. Developing mindful awareness cuts through its propaganda.

The ultimate act of defiance is not reacting to the Mara establishment of deceit, thus rendering ourselves un-manipulable.

The establishment of Mara knows about the three poisons of desire, aversion and ignorance; its entire survival depends on weaponising these in the form of endless consumerism, tribal conflict and superficial entertainment. By systematically triggering our desires, hatreds and delusions through the media, it ensures that we remain distracted and dependent.

Mara feeds off our stupidity.
Realising the stupidity starves the monster.

The Novelty Trap

Our minds possess an inherent bias toward novelty, constantly demanding something more interesting to maintain engagement. This restless searching produces a steady stream of concepts, expectations and spiritual consumerism.

Every time we chase a flashier philosophy, a more charismatic guru, a deeper state of meditation or a more complex explanation, we accumulate mental and emotional clutter.

This clutter acts like dust on the mirror of consciousness, scattering the light and distorting the simple reality of the present moment.

Reality Is Contentment

Paradoxically, hitting absolute rock bottom brings a strange, quiet sense of relief. The exhausting struggle to keep up appearances, protect the husk, play the game and force life to fit concepts is finally over.

We no longer have to carry the weight of the world around with us, because we have reached ground level, and the door is open.

In this space, we no longer worry about reincarnating. We are just here, grounded. Nakedly awake to what is. This is not defeat; it is the ultimate clean slate.

If we go to a spiritual centre of seekers, we say nothing. They have their way. Silence is golden.

The Danger Of Adopting Stories

When we adopt stories created for us,
we live in a borrowed version of reality.

Stories are just gossip – the architecture of human civilisation, functioning both as a tool for mass conformity and a catalyst for conflict. When shared narratives – whether political ideologies, national myths, or religious dogma – are treated as absolute unshakeable realities rather than abstract human constructs, the results are frequently catastrophic. We live in borrowed truths by believing in imagined realities / stories.

When people mistake ancient stories for the ultimate truth, they begin dehumanising those who subscribe to a different text, leading to the tribalism and warfare.

It is all just gossip?

Stories are primarily social grooming. Recognising that narratives are constructed tools rather than absolute truths allows us to engage with them critically. People think they are achieving something when they are still engaged in stories.

Rather than fighting to prove that one story is superior, the focus should be on evaluating the purpose of stories that promote confusion rather than unification.

Meditation is reading our own story and how it came about, and bringing it to a conclusion.

What Are We A Produce Of?

Family, environment, media, religion, books, the internet, God … ? As long as our minds are full of something, we are influenced, and we become the product.

In the ordinary run of things, we are the ultimate culmination of what we consume and experience. Our minds act as a sponge, absorbing everything from our upbringing and family dynamics to the digital age of social media algorithms and the internet.

Our earliest blueprint of family traditions, socioeconomic status, and childhood environment wire our initial belief systems, emotional responses, and survival instincts. The human mind is highly suggestible. It constantly absorbs, processes, and replicates the information it receives.

A full mind is an influenced mind, an infected mind. This physically rewires the brain based on repetitive thoughts and stimuli. If we don’t consciously choose what fills our mind, the external world will choose for us. Look around – people are absorbed in their invention.

Just be aware of your mental status. Ask, “Why am I bound to these ideas?” The reason we meditate is to identify these fixations. This is why we’re here. Even if they’re good ideas, words are not our reality. The observation is.

Thinking There Must Be More To Life

Thinking there must be more to life
is what’s causing us problems.
There’s actually less to life.
🙂

Life is pure consciousness; it’s all we need to know.
That is our purpose.

Life is simply pure consciousness. This realisation shifts focus away from external searching to the realisation that awareness is the ultimate foundation of reality. And we ignore this.

The mind has been conditioned to believe that fulfilment requires adding elements to our lives.

We accumulate possessions, status, relationships and achievements, creating a never-ending story, but still, we never feel complete. This constant chasing is based on the assumption that our current state is inherently lacking.

Enlightenment arrives by stripping away mental clutter, labels and unnecessary desires – “I want to know everything!”

Our purpose is to eliminate the effects of past actions and desires so that we no longer go round in circles, being governed by the same old thoughts that trap us into believing whatever others believe.

Pure consciousness is life without attachments.
We just deal spontaneously with whatever is in front of us, and let it go.

Our Greatest Personal Achievement

Our greatest personal achievement is having the ability to change, not through knowing about lots of things, but by understanding, which goes much deeper. Profound understanding transforms our being, while mere information only fills our memory. When we understand, we become a different person, while learning to live with our old brain, our old self.

The problem is that, if we don’t change, we’re stuck with the old ideas that we carry around. To truly understand, we have to drop these concepts and see afresh in the spontaneous now. Isn’t solving a problem satisfying?

Through realisation, wisdom rewires the way in which we perceive the world, effectively growing beyond our old selves, while still appreciating where we began.

And so we start again, reincarnating moment by moment, with a little residue from our past. Every single breath is a clean slate, yet we always carry the echoes of where we’ve been, and our accumulated wisdom shapes how we step into the next moment.

That echo, that residue, is the foundation of empathy.

Pride Stops Us Evolving

Pride is a major barrier to both personal and collective growth. When pride turns into stubbornness or arrogance, it closes the mind to feedback, learning, and necessary change. All because we ‘think’ we know …

To keep evolving, we must replace rigid pride with intellectual humility and curiosity. This means accepting that our knowledge is limited, and that we can learn from anyone, at any time, which allows us to pivot and change direction when we’re wrong, making room for genuine progress.

Whatever we think we know, others will know in their own good time. We are nothing special. This realisation is actually the ultimate gateway to freedom and growth. Acknowledging that humans as individuals are not the centre of the universe destroys the very pride that keeps us stuck.

Shifting from pride to connection:

When we let go of the need to be special, we replace fragile arrogance with grounded resilience. We stop fighting to prove our worth, and focus on simply contributing, learning, and experiencing the essence of life which is pure consciousness.

This is our common purpose

The Buddha Said, “I See You Mara”

The problem with all institutions is an exaggeration of form over essence. Humans are clever creatures who turn essential nature into a form which becomes more important than the essence – with the help of Mara, the lord of illusion.

This the process of formalism, where the outer shell of an institution replaces its inner soul, and the original mission dies. When we spend our lives serving the form, we’re trapped in a maze of our own making, thinking we’re doing good while our spiritual and moral nature slowly starves.

Mara’s ultimate goal is not to cause blatant, fiery evil, but to keep consciousness trapped in samsara (the cycle of mundane existence). By shifting an institution’s focus from substance to form, Mara performs the ultimate trick of making people believe that they are serving virtue when they are actually serving an empty ritual.

The only way to defeat Mara, as the Buddha showed, is simply to recognise it.
When the Buddha said, “I see you, Mara”, the illusion lost its power.

By recognising that form has overtaken substance,
we are doing exactly the same as the Buddha.

Testing Mara and Guru

Both use the same teachings.

If we’re guided by Mara, we feel superior, depend on a name, lack empathy, and have an inflated ego.

If we’re guided by a Guru, ego diminishes and empathy increases; we’re less reactive and more independent.

The test of Mara or Guru isn’t out there;
it’s in our behaviour.

The Buddha, Jesus, Socrates And Others Were Rebels

These beings completely upended the religious, social and political orthodoxies of their eras. Rather than leading armed political revolutions, these figures rebelled by rejecting rigid dogmas, dismantling strict social hierarchies and advocating for direct personal insight over blind ritualism.

If we join the club, we too have to dismantle through insight, following the same process according to our ability and era.

If, however, we turn these teachings of insight into a club with its own exclusive membership, rigid dogmas and different hierarchies, we’ve just rebuilt the same structures against which they all rebelled.

To truly follow their path, that new club must also be dismantled through insight.

The self-dismantling nature of true insight is precisely why these figures were so radical. They didn’t want to start clubs; they wanted to wake people up.

The Buddha explicitly warned against clinging to his own teachings. He compared his Dharma to a raft used to cross a dangerous river; once you reach the other side, you don’t carry the raft on your back. You leave it behind. Even the teachings are just tools – they’re not dogmas to worship.

True insight is not a set of beliefs to be accepted in order to gain entry into a group. It is an ongoing, internal flame that burns away all illusions – including the illusion that any religion, philosophy or club has a monopoly on the truth.

Finding What We’re Looking For

It’s always been there. It’s not polished or well-to-do. It’s not proper, not the acceptable face of social conformity as there is nothing to conform to, and no one to impress. It recognises the foolishness we all go through.

Everything is in a constant state of flux. From the cells in our body to cosmic galaxies, nothing remains static for two consecutive moments. Nothing exists independently or possesses an isolated, permanent core. We don’t have a fixed, unchangeable consciousness which is separate from the environment.

Because everything changes and nothing is fully within our control, any attempt to find permanent, lasting satisfaction in external things will create friction.

The relief, when we understand this, is simply marvellous! No more sucking up – being overly nice in order to please – which is merely the continuity of the dream state.

Finding what we’re looking for is recognising that which is looking, dropping any attachment so that the looking and seeing is a continuity of free consciousness.

We All Live In Different Echo Chambers

Echo chambers are an inevitable part of how society is structured. Humans seek comfort by gravitating towards groups that confirm what they already believe.

Because everyone’s digital feed is entirely unique, two people can live in the same town – or even the same house – and experience two completely different versions of reality. It becomes incredibly difficult to sustain friendships or conversations when people no longer share a common baseline of values.

Watching online groups constantly argue or behave aggressively within their echo chambers can easily make a person lose faith in human connection altogether. Social media platforms track our watch time, clicks, and pauses. They actively feed us more of what we already agree with to keep us online longer = the great distraction of vacancy.

Human psychology prefers to encounter information that proves them right. It’s mentally exhausting to have to constantly process viewpoints that challenge our core reality.

Spending time inside an echo chamber slowly warps our perspective. It makes outside viewpoints seem completely irrational, malicious, or intentionally wrong.

Mara knows our weaknesses before we do. Evil intent rarely looks ugly at first sight. Mara relies on superficial delights to entice us into giving up our goals for short-term pleasure.

When temptation fails, Mara switches to intimidation, throwing psychological storms, inner darkness, and terrifying visions our way, using doubt to scare us off the path.

Even if we win a major battle or achieve a breakthrough, Mara’s final trick is a quiet whispered suggestion of imposter syndrome, trying to convince us that we aren’t worthy or that our efforts are pointless.

Buddha defeated Mara’s evil intent not by fighting back with anger, but with absolute mindfulness and unshakeable calm. When we see through the illusion calmly, Mara loses all leverage, and moves on.

A Hard Lesson To Learn

People believe in words, rather than experiencing their meaning. Even if they’re good words, we argue about their interpretation. Words are not reality.

There are lots of words, but only one constant truth, which is that which is reading or hearing the words. Pure consciousness.

If words are not reality, they cannot be the ultimate truth and so, from this perspective, they are a lie – a trap. Polishing a fake version and thinking it’s real is the oldest deception in the world; in modern language, the term ‘golden calf’ is a metaphor for materialism and false priorities that people blindly obsess over at the expense of absolute truth.

When the public perception of life is completely disconnected from actual reality, we have to be careful, as anything we say will come into conflict with people’s polished version of themselves.

People judge life based on a staged production, while being completely unaware of the dull confusion this causes. All we can do is to point out how the mind works, and how easily the consumer is consumed.

The world exists in an illusion of reality, and realising this arouses the compassion needed to maintain the healing process on the path to enlightenment. Constant connection to the illusion of suffering maintains the path.

Our actual path is beyond religion and rituals,
shifting from external compliance
to internal transformation and direct experience.

When it says “Let go”, let go.

Buddhist Forums Create Conflict

Reality Is Beyond Words

Reality is beyond words.
Thank goodness.
🙂

Our reality beyond words is pure, unmediated experience. The moment we name something, we replace the infinite experience of what is with a rigid human label.

Language is a filter of symbols designed for survival, rather than to realise absolute truth. A description of water will never quench your thirst; the words are never the actual thing.

Words separate the inherent unity of existence. Reality is a fluid, ever-changing happening, but words freeze it into static objects.

How to access the wordless reality, the silent gap:
Notice the brief space of pure awareness between your thoughts, before the mind labels the next moment. Look at a tree or listen to a sound without naming it, letting it exist exactly as it is.

Drop “I am awareness”. Drop your name, history and roles, and rest entirely in the raw experience of being. Embracing paradox allows contradictory truths to exist together without forcing our logical mind to resolve them.

The no “I am” is Shunyata.
There is truly nowhere left for a concept to land
– and no one left to hold it.

Humanity: Seeking Validation Of A Self

Our greatest problem is that we crave recognition.

People shun or distance themselves from anyone who doesn’t validate their views. We attach our self-esteem directly to our belief systems, and when someone doesn’t endorse our opinions, it can feel like a personal rejection of who we are.

Humans naturally group together based on shared information. Validation acts as a form of social glue – birds of a feather stick together. When it’s missing, relationships fracture as individuals seek out environments where they feel understood and affirmed. We’re wired to be tribal. 🙂

Interacting with opposing viewpoints forces the mind to process conflicting information, and this causes mental discomfort. Shunning is often an easy way to avoid that stress; excluding those who don’t affirm our norms helps to solidify cohesion within a group.

Social media creates a low tolerance for nuance, making political, social, or personal disagreements feel like irreconcilable moral failures. Arrogance and hostility usually hide a deep self-doubt. Many people are easily triggered as they lack the skills to handle negative emotions. Consequently, cutting people off has become a normalised boundary-setting tactic, even for minor differences.

Human psychology is incredibly fragile when it comes to social belonging and self-worth. The brain treats social rejection in the same way as actual physical pain; our discomfort can be extremely subtle, but it’s still felt.

When someone encounters a contradictory view, their nervous system often interprets it as dangerous. Some people seem scary when they appear to be able to see through us, and this triggers a fight-or-flight response, causing us to lash out or shut down completely rather than engage in rational debate.

Ego – which is consciousness clinging to ideas – is the reason why true communication is rare. So what can we do when we’re shunned for seeing things differently? Realise that there is no external approval.

This is the blessing of realisation
– seeing is not believing.