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.

Suffering

As long as we are governed by the emotions of hope and fear, we will suffer. We will be discontented and defensive. We are told that “being normal” is doing what is to be expected within a particular culture – fitting in. When we become caught up in our social standing, we rely on this for our happiness, and so we are conditioned and hardly notice our lack of inner peace, which is our natural state: we always have subtle tensions but these go unnoticed. We actually live in the Nirmanakaya Buddha realm, but our discursive thinking obscures this.

Our natural state is inner purity – uncontaminated, aware and knowing. Being empty of any contamination, anything that arises within the mind will be noted. This happens all the time, but is a matter of knowing this and not knowing. When an emotion arises, if we react, we will suffer. If we merely note, then we can remain in inner peace.

Mentally, we spend most of our time in the past or the future. In the present moment, there is no suffering: there is only the purity of pure awareness in the “now”. The “now” can only be experienced, and not thought about. If we try to identify this “now”, we lose the pure awareness which is “now” (our first nature), and rely on our second nature – a created I. Thus, the “now” becomes the past. And so we live in justification or expectation, and therefore we suffer because we live within the excitement that something will happen, and the fear that it won’t. In this, there is not knowing the present moment.

In the present moment, there is no duration of time.
This is timelessness.

It is ever present: timeless awareness, timeless wakefulness.

Time only exists for that which is transient,
coming and going.
Timelessness just is.

When we dwell in time, we are inside a prison.
In timelessness, we are free:
we are liberated from the confused state of not recognising our true nature.

We are so used to our reactions, and those of people around us, that we do not recognised the limited space in which we occupy ourselves.

So far, this addresses our own suffering, but many (and I include Buddhists here) forget what the Buddha realised…the suffering of others. We are princes and princesses, seated on worn-out cushions and feeling good, while others suffer. Everyone suffers: we are all discontented, dissatisfied, lonely, depressed, full of unfulfilled desire, and most surprisingly, we feel that we need to suffer in order to show how heroic we are, to gain sympathy.

Being sentient (unenlightened) we are not at ease with our true nature. We are not familiar with merely being: we have to be something.

It’s all a matter of choice as to whether we maintain the suffering, or cut through its cause. However we have also been led astray, believing that we are sinners: this creates even more suffering.

This doesn’t mean we have to lock ourselves away in a cave (unless we choose to). We can enjoy everything that passes our way, but not run after it. Enjoyment itself is not the problem – but the clinging, grasping, holding on to the enjoyment is.

Suffering comes and goes due to our karma.
This is just cause and effect,
We don’t have to hold on to it.
Just experience it, and it will go.
The pain may linger.

Without suffering, there would be no liberation.
It is our path to enlightenment.

The suffering and confusion has never existed.
It has all been in the mind.
Being born, physical occurrences will naturally arise:
old age, sickness, pain and death.

That’s life.

The cause of suffering:
Essence -Uncontaminated Awareness identification with thoughts.
The cause of liberation:
Thoughts recognised as Essence -Uncontaminated Awareness.  

(if it weren’t for uncontaminated awareness, thoughts wouldn’t be seen, but uncontaminated awareness goes unnoticed, although uncontaminated awareness is continuously present)

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