Sometimes, We Feel We Are Wrong

Sometimes, we experience doubt, worry and anxiety taking place in our mind. We might equally experience joy, happiness and confidence. Either way, we might feel wrong, confused, or even guilty.
How wonderful!
How wonderful?
How wonderful to wake up and find the pillow is clean and fresh – or very smelly. It doesn’t matter which, as long as we wake up!

The very fact that these experiences are taking place in the mind and being observed reveals awareness of all these doings.

We don’t have to wait until we are Buddhas to recognise wakefulness, as it is happening now.

At the end of a meditation session, some say the dedication prayer of merit by Nagajuna:
By this merit may we obtain omniscience.
Having defeated the enemies, wrongdoings,
May we liberate all beings from the ocean of existence,
With its stormy waves of birth, old age, sickness and death.

Sounds quite high falutin’, doesn’t it? Some future event that’s not taking place now.

But consider:
If we exchange the words ‘omniscience’ for ’empty essence’ and ‘wrongdoings’ for ‘an identification with anything arising within empty essence’ – and if we understand ‘liberate all beings’ as ‘clarify for all beings the difference between the thinking mind and the empty essence of mind’ (including the unity of these two), then we experience the cessation of suffering. Birth, old age, sickness and death are merely the body moving through its natural stages while the mind remains clear.

We don’t have to live in hope of benefitting others: we can do something right now. We can even be positive about the negative, and in doing this, we transcend suffering.
That’s why we are here … to learn.