Nonsense Sustains My Practice

There are two approaches to realisation:
life is love and light,
or
“The world is bonkers!”

Ultimately, we are love and light, but we have to wade through a world of bonkers-ness to reach that light. Those who want to go straight for the love and light are unreliable as they are not able to empathy for others with a different approach.

The Dzogchen teachings are most powerful in this day and age, precisely because we live in dark times. When everything is love and light, we won’t bother – and that lays the foundation for returning to the dark times: those beings who dwell in the samsaric god realms become so attached to their comfortable position that they end up in hell.

We can either look at the positive (desire) or negative (aversion) side of life to sustain our development. These both work but, for an individual, one may be more apparent then the other. Personally, I don’t see much evidence of true spirituality and compassion – and suggesting that our view is distorted shows, in itself, a lack of empathy and compassion 🙂 I do, however, see disharmony in corners where we wouldn’t expect to find it.

It may be that hearing and reading about spiritual matters may not do it for us – and never has. All those teachings throughout the centuries, and we are still thinking and talking nonsense! It’s nonsense because we become attracted to the form rather than the essence: if we become consumers of information, we don’t stand a chance of seeing reality. We may wave flags, offer katas, ring bells, brandish vajras and join the enthusiastic throng while never listening to one another’s problems, believing that God or the Guru will take care of us. Really?

It is meeting with a remarkable mind that affects a change.
This happens when we look behind the words.

We need to see our problem first, before we can empathise and help to solve others’ problems. Merely being told that ‘this is what we do’ is pointless when the student doesn’t see the problem they are having. Chanting a million mantras is just another thing to do, rather than facing what we need to face.

Trust pure consciousness.
Trust the senses.
Do not trust any interpretation or elaboration
– that is the nonsense.