Timely Teaching

There are certain teachings that happen at precisely the right moment. On a blog, one cannot create that sort of atmosphere as it is a matter of tuning in, so this may not have the same effect!

Once, after a two week retreat, we embarked on an intensive month-long retreat with 10 hours of meditation a day plus 3-4 hours of teaching of a text, and something was said that totally floored all of 120 of us.

The lama merely stated, “Awareness is relative truth.” There was silence…but you could feel our brains ticking away, thinking, “What did he just say?”… and then … “Oh, of course!” None of us had made this connection until that moment, which showed that half our minds were still working on an academic level.

Truth has two aspects: relative and absolute.
Our nature has two aspects: emptiness and awareness.
Emptiness is the still, silent, luminous ingredient.
Awareness is the active ingredient.
Realising this (which is clarity), compassion for one’s relative side and that of everyone else naturally arises … with no exceptions.

To understand the truth, we need to appreciate the unity of our being.
In deep meditation there is only emptiness aware of emptiness…nothing doing. These are inseparable.
This may loosen slightly to awareness, aware of awareness.
Then we become aware of the mind and the world we inhabit, which includes a slight or ‘mere’ I, in order to function and be of benefit to others. This is enlightened activity – or we are inspired towards enlightened activity. Anything else is sentient activity, with a big dollop of I.

When we understand the relative and absolute aspects of all sentient beings, without condemning them, then we just love. However, this love may take many forms, by pacifying, magnetising, enriching or destroying ego’s games. This is a matter of loosening the grip of fear and hope.

Fear is obvious. Hope is not. We may hope to do the right thing – it is our intention – and we may even hope for recognition, but this is still desire. We have to do it – recognise it – for ourselves, and then we know, without anyone else giving us the recognition. It is only then that we have true confidence and are our own teacher, in addition to the whole universe being our symbolic teacher.

Once we know, even if a thousand Buddhas confronted us and told us we were wrong, we would still know – it is that unshakeable, and no longer ego-activity. It is pure recognition, although maybe not totally stable.

The symbolic teacher is impermanent phenomena: everything is a reminder of its true nature of emptiness, illusory in reality and lacking true existence.