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.

Staying On The Right Path

Just because we join a ‘spiritual’ tradition doesn’t mean we are on our path. A path is the direction we need to take to transform and eliminate personal fixations, obsessions, confusions.

We have to have purpose, otherwise we’re just being entertained to feel good. This says it all.

The purpose of a right path is to realise the cause of dissatisfaction, which means that we recognise that we’re suffering enough to want change. We need a constant reminder of essence rather than form, which becomes a distraction. This means that we may have to leave so-called spiritual friends behind, as following others is no longer a good enough reason.

Seeing form being re-enacted doesn’t satisfy. It’s like sitting at a dinner table when people are only talking about the menu … and nobody is eating. The menu readers are off the path. Their spiritual persona is of a person dressed for the part and using the right buzzwords, rather than engaging in the messy work of looking at one’s own ego.

For many, the menu itself becomes the destination. People will talk for hours about mindfulness (the menu) while remaining disconnected from real life experiences, in a kind of spiritual bypassing.

The right path is transforming whatever life/karma brings from gross understanding to refined clarity.

Our Fabulous Teacher

The only thing that is new and fresh in this spontaneous moment is an unobstructive mind in which change can occur.

This openness allows Hermes / Mercury / Manas – the messengers of the mind – to bring inspiration to the fore. We ask an internal question and, if the answer does not satisfy, we ask again, allowing a deeper consideration which may join up the dots. This is seeing the bigger picture by finding relationships between seemingly unrelated pieces of information.

Just watching our mind’s reaction in a situation allows fresh intuition to arise, rather than just relying our past experiences and habitual judgements. When we interact with others, we allow them to take the stage as we don’t need it.

This new you is uncomplicated, open consciousness which is present before the me-monster arises. 🙂 This fabulous phantom creature is our teacher, showing consciousness all that it clings to habitually. In letting go, we become aware of the space that was already present before the me-monster took over.

In this way, life is simple: good heart, easy path. It’s like playing a board game when we’re not interested in winning, but just playing the best we can. There is no competitiveness present.

This is how we stop replaying our mental routine and become a non-person, ready to hear and see in a non-cluttered way.

Our work is now our play as we no longer take everything seriously, allow our usual reactions to transform into spontaneous Hermes / Mercury / Manas, the messengers who bring inspiration to the fore.

The me-monster is our fabulous teacher
showing us the fixations which prevent this intuition from arising.

Are We A Lifestyle, Or Life Itself?

‘Lifestyle’ refers to the specific way an individual, group, or culture lives and behaves. Where we live, what we eat, our job, our values beliefs, and personal outlook … all shape our lifestyle. It depends on what we think life is for. Is a lifestyle something we’ve adopted to have interesting things to do? That’s the Samsaric trap.

We walk and talk a lifestyle, secure in the way we’ve learnt to perceive life. Trying to impress others within that lifestyle is the name of the game, and we avoid anyone not playing the same game.

We are born stupid, live stupid, die stupid, while thinking how clever we are. We gauge our stupidity against the stupidity of others. One reason for writing a blog is the realisation of how stupid I was all my life. 🙂

Adopting a lifestyle obscures life itself. Life is consciousness, as occurrences cut across our habitual ways and wake us up – and we evolve. For me, change occurred by acknowledging the Buddha’s advice, “Don’t take my words for the truth … test them!” rather than just becoming a ‘Buddhist’ and adopting the Buddha’s words. The truth is between the words; it’s not the words themselves.

Truth has nothing to do with form.
Truth is pure consciousness.

If we want a no-nonsense life, we need to radically prioritise what is important, stripping away the performative, the redundant, and the insincere to make room for realising reliable truth.

The result: we find we have significantly more time and less anxiety.

The Age Of Decline – The Age Of Nonsense

In this age of decline, we have to be very careful what choices we make and follow. Living by facts can turn out to be nonsense, as this means we live through ideas and beliefs.

Making informed choices is gathering knowledge, weighing options, and taking action. These have consequences – and of course, it’s all nonsense if we don’t have all the facts.

Making a definitive judgment when crucial information is missing often leads to flawed conclusions. Friedrich Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius argued that what we often call facts are actually just interpretations or perspectives based on limited and incomplete data.

In Buddhism, we can take a cerebral approach, a ritualistic approach, or an experiential approach. All three are valid, but we have to choose which genuinely makes sense to us, rather than just following others.

It all comes down to the direct experience of realising pure consciousness. We are what we seek, which has no special name or characteristic. Those are merely the form; becoming an expert in names and rituals while having no practical experience, we are unable to be of benefit to others.

This could be wrong,
but how do you know?
🙂

Look At Your Own Mind, Rather Than Someone Else’s

If we want to realise the ultimate truth, we have to look into our own mind, rather than someone else’s, or a book. In following others’ words – even those of the Buddha – we’re merely following borrowed ideas, and therefore we do not own our mind.

Looking at our own mind requires the mental discipline of acknowledging the conscious space which is the essence of mind in order to see our thoughts in action and understand how much they influence our behaviour.

We need to see what actually drives us, which is some aspect of desire, aversion or indifference. When we realise this, we are in control. Freedom is achieved through silent meditation, silent awareness, silent consciousness – no words needed, no special teaching needed. 🙂

It’s important to realise that we exist by adopting ideas/thoughts/words that are not our own. This is our mental prison.

If we spend our life judging others – which is the thief of inner peace – it’s a life poorly spent. Constantly measuring people prevents us from building genuine connections. When we shift from criticism which causes us suffering to self-reflection, life becomes Dharma.

This is not about feeling good.
Dharma is observing clearly,
whether the view is pleasant or unpleasant.

The Dharma isn’t a self-help group to provide comfort; it’s a mirror which shows us the parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore. Dharma practice is a matter of stripping away the illusions, attachments, and the judgmental habits. It’s about clarity and truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable or painful.

The Joy Of Meeting Idiots

There aren’t many idiots around.
🙂

The word ‘idiot’ originally meant a private person, one who was not part of official affairs, someone outside the system.

It comes from ‘idiosyncrasy’, meaning one’s own ‘private mixture’ which defines an individual as not being part of the collective. 🙂

Most of us are invested in the communal, official view of life.

It’s A Massive Shock

It’s a massive shock the first time we realise we’ve been living in others’ beliefs. That shock is actually a signal that we have the ability to step back and watch our own mind at work. We realise that, since birth, we’ve been running on ideas which lack any sense of reality, and just go through a routine. Our so-called personality is actually just a set of ingrained survival patterns as we lash out, run away, or clam up. This realisation can arouse a sense of anger.

A three-second pause – look, see, drop – is enough to interrupt lifelong fixations. When we – consciousness – realise that we are the gap between words, we’re suddenly aware that we’ve been a passenger in our life, rather than the driver. 

Once we experience the gap, we understand that we have the power to choose, which is overwhelming at first because we’ve been so used to depending on others. This sudden awareness triggers a surge from the reactive survival mode to conscious reasoning. That is the path to enlightenment. The more we realise, the more frequent this surge is, and the more we transcend the levels.

This realisation feels unnerving and life-altering as we start to become familiar with openness and a sense of freedom, and move away from sentimentality.

Like opening the door of a room that’s been closed for a thousand years;
once the door is open and light pours in,
everything is revealed in one moment.

And that’s the shock.

The Tactic Hasn’t Aged

Most humans don’t know what they are.

Humans operate on default behavioural patterns – autopilot – created by their environment; this is a subconscious imprinting rather than a conscious choice, because we don’t know that we know. 

Our minds hallucinate reality, building clever illusions within the limits of our wiring rather than experiencing objective truth. Our sense of what we are is a construction shaped by outside forces. People live with a version of themselves built for survival or to meet the expectations of others, rather than one built on true self-understanding. We mistake our labels for our actual identity, focusing on the what instead of the why.

Historically, institutions have used fear of the unknown
to maintain power.
This is a tactic that hasn’t aged. 

By convincing people that they are flawed or incomplete and lack a sense of direction allows those in power to ensure a cycle of dependency. The self-help industry operates on this same ancient logic, convincing us that we are fundamentally broken so that we’ll continue to buy the cure. 

Being aware that we are pure conscious knowingness
also hasn’t aged.
🙂

Interconnectedness – Unison Or Harmony?

Has there ever been an experience of true unison or harmony that was not dictated by an agency? There’s a sharp line between the ideal of human connection, and the reality.

Unison implies moving as one single body, with total synchronisation. This is rare in human history because individual concepts and conflicting interests always create friction. If it does happen, it’s always dictated by someone’s parameters.

Harmony is the blending of different, distinct voices. It allows for many, but often becomes one-sided when a particular power or ideology dictates the tune that everyone else is forced to hum along with. 

We aren’t a unified collective. We are simply singular beings sharing space, more alone together than truly interconnected. 

With unison and harmony, we dance to someone else’s tune.
We are not all one;
we are just one.

The only beings who are at one are the enlightened.

The Curse Of The Messenger

Too few people want change;
they prefer what they’re accustomed to.

As soon as a raw truth enters human language, an organised system ensures that that truth begins to wither, and life goes back to ‘usual’. This is the trap of -isms and institutionalisation.

When someone catches a glimpse of the truth – that we are interconnected, and that the self is an illusion – they try to share it to help others. This direct insight is quickly turned into an argument over terminologies and labels, rather than a direct experience of the actual state of being. On a higher level, it becomes a religion, a philosophy, or a political movement, and the result is that this living truth transforms into yet another rigid -ism with rigid ideas and rigid people.

When ego encounters the truth – that ego doesn’t actually exist – the response is a either feeling of annoyance and hostility, or whatever is being said is ignored in favour of facts – “Well, so-and-so said this!”

The ego takes ‘truth’ and wears it like a outfit, acquiring mannerisms to feel superior to others. You know the voice, you’ve seen the look that becomes the status symbol, rather than liberation. Ego talks about liberation, but is it actually freedom?

We can describe the taste of an orange for a thousand years, but that description is not the taste itself. Ego’s reality is just looking at the menu instead of eating the meal.

The truth of being is an active experience which humans prefer to turn into a comfortable concept that they can store on a shelf with lots of other concepts. Language filters experience, and that inherently divide us.

It is almost impossible to speak about the unity of being using language that is designed to separate and categorise things. The moment we speak the truth, the words themselves divide it. It’s like trying to catch sunlight in a bucket; the moment you close the lid to keep it, you’re just sitting in the dark with a bucket.

Can humans hear the truth without twisting it?
Or does the act of ‘knowing about’ ruin it?
🙂

The Power Of Fibonacci

The power of the Fibonacci sequence is the fundamental blueprint for growth and efficiency found throughout the natural world. It’s often called ‘nature’s secret code’ – the Golden Ratio – and it’s the tool ensuring survival.

Plants arrange leaves, seeds, and petals in a way that maximises their exposure to sunlight and rain. The spiralling seeds in a sunflower and the scales of a pinecone follow these numbers to pack as much material as possible into a small area without overcrowding. The sequence even appears in the proportions of the human body and the double helix of DNA, suggesting it is a core mechanism for organic expansion. 

What is all this to do with attraction and repulsion?

While the Fibonacci sequence itself is a mathematical series, its manifestation in nature is the result of balancing attractive and repulsive forces at a physical or chemical level. The Push and Pull system.

These ratios appear at the subatomic level, where the electromagnetic force (which is the attraction of opposite charges and the repulsion of like ones) influences all structures.

Attraction, repulsion, and inertia – the three primary laws – are a common theme in esoteric traditions. These properties of matter and force explain how the universe balances itself; attraction pulls things together, repulsion keeps them apart, and inertia allows them to persist. 

The same happens in sentient minds … unless we are aware of it.

The Wonder Of Being A Late Developer

Being a late developer means one’s brain hasn’t yet fully developed. It appears that everyone else seems to know what to do and how to do it; they’ve learnt all the right words and names.

So, what’s so wonderful about being left behind?

As we’re outside it all, we see the results of bolting – growing tall quickly without flowering, thus developing no fruit. It may look impressive, but no fruit, no fruition, which is the point at which something is realised.

Being behind everyone, we can see futile diligence
– the pointless areas of worldly activities.

As the saying goes, “Better late than never.”

Wound Means Suffering

We often hear spiritual teachers laugh at modern students for being ‘wounded’. This is not only a pity, but a huge misunderstanding. The first noble truth is admitting that we are suffering … wounded. The wound is in the mind which affects the brain, and so, our longterm memories.

If we don’t understand this, we can have no empathy, no compassion and no ability to be altruistic, to be practical. Our wounds stem from a misplaced dependency.

Rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, injustice, self-blame, low self-esteem, damaged mindset, existential despair, frozen emotions, hyper-vigilance, difficulty experiencing joy or spontaneity … all create wounds.

Understanding is empathetic wisdom.

Being Buddhist Is Being Ordinary

It’s not about projecting an image.

Ordinary: with no outer special or distinctive features; normal, not interesting or exceptional; commonplace.

The extraordinary is within perception.

Being Buddhist, we should know how to be decent human beings. Unfortunately, for many years, people have been acquiring a self-image that unconsciously transfers their desires to others (which is very unsettling 🙂 ). Again unfortunately, this image comes down from the top.

When Buddhists start to behave normally, free of intellectual or religious affectations, the Dharma will be accepted as normal.

Don’t be a Buddhist.
Be the genuine thing.
Just be a good heart, emphasising the true essence of the Dharma teachings – wisdom-kindness.

Don’t use Buddhism to become a Buddhist.
The Dharma is a tool to help us be the authentic wisdom of compassionate activity that we inherently are. It’s not a special club, with a special figurehead.

Buddhism is not a label, a uniform, or a set of rigid beliefs;
it’s a sincere, inner transformation.

A good heart needs no labels.

In The Beginning Was The Word

Why do we believe this?
What do we know?

Our brains are the product of the language they consume, and therefore we become a product of inherited words. Through neuroplasticity, the words we hear and use rewire our neural pathways, and therefore the way we think.

Humanity is manipulated by words through a process called neurolinguistic programming, which exploits the way our brains process language to change our perceptions, emotions, and behaviours, without us noticing. Humans aren’t just users of words; we are deeply shaped, regulated, and defined by them.

Being products of words suggests that language, conversation, and the narratives we construct, both internally and externally, influence our realities, brains, and identities. Neuroscience supports this, indicating that words are not merely labels for things, but are forces that shape our perceptions, emotions, and even physical bodies.

When we accept words without authentication, they are merely programming.
It’s pure consciousness which knows, before any words are expressed.
We are the empty cognisant space between the words.
Is it that by which everything can be known.

Our reality is not in the words, but in the direct silent experience.

When News Is Propaganda

When news is selected to support a specific agenda while ignoring or suppressing conflicting information, it functions as news-propaganda. In this form, news is no longer a tool for independent scrutiny but a vehicle for persuasion, often packaged as credible reporting to mask its true source or motivation.

This is reflected in common speech supporting a one-sided view, while neglecting any opposing perspective. This reveals that none of us has an original thought because all thoughts are limited expressions of something which is inexpressible. Religion has the same problem …

The Buddha taught us to read between the lines.
We are the experience of the gap between words and thoughts,
rather than the audience.

“The Odds Are Stacked Against Us”

“The odds are stacked against us” is an idiom meaning that success is highly unlikely due to overwhelming obstacles and unfavourable circumstances, making the maintenance of sanity challenging.

It indicates that external factors are working against us. We can spend our entire life never realising our true reality in favour of playing a part to which we consent, and repeating the same unfavourable conditions. This can happen even in religion, when we just follow others, and achieve no direct experience.

Recognising this, the odds are now in our favour. This is why evil intent can never totally succeed, as its repercussions are echoed in ordinary conversations.

When we realise we are blessed with challenges, we know we’re on the right path. 🙂