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.

It’s Creepy – Literally

Creep: move slowly and carefully in order to avoid being heard or noticed.
Creepy: causing an unpleasant feeling of fear or unease.

Ever wondered why you feel ill-at-ease with life, society, and people sleep walking into disaster after disaster, both politically and spiritually? Social engineering – with its many names and disguises – has been at work for millennia, undermining humanity.

Social engineering is socialism promoting a gradual change in society with the idea of ‘community-owned’, employing a persistent and dilatory strategy to wear out an enemy – us. To ‘govern’ means to steer.

One such organisation active today is named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus – known as Fabius Cunctator (Fabius the Delayer) who died in 203 BCE. He employed a strategy of gradual attrition, which reflects the approach of this organisation to social change.

Delaying an action creates an effect and causes suffering, using all sorts of excuses. This is a war on body, mind and consciousness without people noticing. Many organisations are involved in this collusion (secret agreement).

Opposition parties are used to give a sense of objectivity, but they merely play a part by wearing people down. Technology has spread this hidden agenda by its introduction into all walks of life.

The war on consciousness goes back a very long way.
Once someone has power, they want to hold onto that power forever.

To govern means to steer … consciousness. The problem for these organisations is that individuals pop up from time to time, saying “This is a bit creepy!” 🙂

Compassion Is Honouring Another’s Journey

Compassion is honouring another’s journey.

This calls for insight into another person’s true being
and their struggles to be what they are.

We are all pure consciousness.

If Gurus and Lamas – precious ones – cannot deal with a student,
they are not Gurus and Lamas.
They have no insight, and just acquire followers.

The precious ones are the students.

Beings Put To Sleep

When we become dependent,
we are bound to others’ ideas, and put to sleep.

We can function, but it’s really sleep walking and sleep talking about how we aren’t functioning properly.

When we find that we can’t think outside our box (the result of social engineering), we realise that we have been living in someone else’s dream our entire life. This is deliberate, to keep us living in stupidity and injustice. Even if we join a religion that professes to wake us up, we find we have become attached, fastened to form and dogma. Humans do human things, like stick together. 🙂

We are individual consciousnesses
that can work in harmony, but not unison.

True unity comes about through realising that the world is complete in opposites, where appearances and recognition are simultaneous.

We can recognise both sleeping consciousness and wakeful consciousness in others. Being put to sleep is being overrun by ideas that force us to become indolent/lazy.

It is through the proper practice of meditation that we are liberated.
What is proper practice?
It is dropping the meditation.

Meditation is only the method to wake consciousness up to clarity, but if we hold on to the meditation, we’re back in a dream state of doing something. Once we are clear, we no longer need the meditation.

Drop the dream … or continue to live it.
🙂

Knowingness And Awareness

These two words can be synonymous, and they can also be seen as different. Just being aware, we can fall into vacancy, forgetting that knowingness is present. This is why we sometimes say ‘awareness of awareness’; it is the knowingness that is our reality.

Knowingness is clarity – divine splendour.

Creating Artificial People

Artificial intelligence repeats words it has learnt.
If we just repeat words we’ve learnt, we are artificial people.
This is a bit of a shock.

The only difference between AI and AP is speed.
However, functioning in an artificial world is enlightening.

Without experiential knowledge, we know nothing. We barely function. We may be able to build crafts to fly to Mars, chant mantras or go shopping, but we are merely automata following given information.

The more we realise our true worth
the more we realise how ridiculous our life is … was!

If we think that more learning gets us closer to the ultimate truth, we are mistaken.
The truth of our reality is knowingness, before anything is known.

It’s that simple.

We don’t have to know anything
to realise the ultimate truth of pure consciousness.

Belief Is The Weapon Of Evil

Belief is acceptance without proof.
This is so insidious that we even say, “Seeing is believing”.
We are befuddled by illogic.

Proof is realised by testing through practice, and then we actually know. The Buddha said, “Do not take my words for the truth; test them for yourself” to protect people from being trapped in dogma nd arrogance. It is belief that has separated us for thousands of year.

Belief in the mantra OM MANI PEME HUM is wishful thinking. When tested and understood, however, this mantra is the compassionate path to enlightenment through generosity, tolerance, morality, discipline, concentration and transcendent wisdom.

Compassion is what we actually practise;
it is earned.

Peaceful And Wrathful

There are two paths – peaceful and wrathful, positive and negative, attraction and repulsion. The universe is complete in opposites, and the way of looking we gravitate towards is dictated by the attitude we hold. We may see others as angels or we may see them as monsters. It doesn’t matter which; it’s what we have to work with.

Others can’t say “You shouldn’t think like that” when we do. 😀

In Tibetan iconography, there are peaceful deities which have a wrathful aspect, such as Chenrezi/Mahakala. Becoming familiar with these two aspects is said to be of benefit in the Bardo – the space after death. Both represent love; one is pleasing and, if that doesn’t work, we are introduced to the wrathful aspect that focuses the attention. We must always be prepared.

The path to enlightenment isn’t a sloppy, careless affair.
It’s precise.

Empathy Is Not A Weakness

Empathy is not sympathy.

Empathy is the ability to recognise and understand the thoughts and feelings of others, because we’ve experienced the same feelings and situations. This is unlike sympathy that involves a feeling of pity, which is imaginary.

Compassionate empathy can be superficial, or it can go deeper through realising the wisdom of reality. When we mistake empathy for sympathy, we may see it as a weakness that becomes weaponised by bad actors to manipulate ‘good’ intent with the aim of changing events.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
is something that we admire, but rarely enact.

This is a fundamental ethical concept emphasising reciprocity and empathy, and can be applied by considering how our actions would feel if they were done to us.

True empathy is the path to enlightenment. When the Buddha came out of his father’s luxurious palace and saw suffering everywhere, this was the start of his journey (although it probably began lifetimes earlier. :-)).

The more we experience the truth of pure consciousness which was obscured,
the more we can empathise with others’ confusion.

A Two-Tier System Is Meant To Divide

Consciousness is divided.

When we ignore whatever is happening in the world, we’re doing ourselves no favours. It must be obvious that a two-tier system is meant to divide a society, and divides the attention of consciousness.

Deciding who or what is right and who or what is wrong is subjective. Divide and conquer has always been the controlling factor throughout history.

So who are the ‘right’ people?
Anyone who can question their own motivations.

Mara, the divider, always overplays its hand; it is too confident, believing its position is stronger than it really is, leading it to push too hard and ultimately spoil its chance of success. Thank goodness. 🙂

Dependent Arising

Everything arises dependent on a previous cause. Ideas have a cause, an instigator(s). When consciousness claims these ideas as its own, this gives rise to a self image, which affects whatever we do or say.

Unless we realise our true reality of consciousness, objectivity (not influenced by personal feelings) is a fallacy as everything is subjective (personal feelings). The truth of our natural being is realised through verifiction, testing the words, as words are merely a generalisation. Never think that learning a few words means we’ve ‘got it’.

We’ve got it when we are it.

‘It’ is compassionate understanding arising from practice,
verifying that all beings are enlightened essence.

Does It Depend On Who Says It?

Does it depend on who says it?
It seems that it does.
🙂

Our problem is that if the speaker is charismatic,
this conveys that extraordinary features are required
when the absolute truth of pure consciousness has no features.

And so subtle confusion reigns.

The idiom, ‘all that glitters is not gold’, refers to that which may seem good – or charming – but which isn’t always as it appears. Appearances can be deceptive, and so we need to look beyond the surface to find true worth.

And here’s the surprise that turns everything on its head …

All that glitters is gold. For a practitioner of meditation, all appearances – anything that is projected into the mind – are but a reflection within consciousness. This is the yoga of one taste.

The seemingly real and the real are simultaneous.
It doesn’t matter who says what,
the authority comes from personal observation.

The Promotion Of The Unintelligible

There is an idiom, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”, which has the the same effect as saying, “See no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth”. The universe is complete in opposites; when we know the truth, we will recognise evil. We recognise evil because we know the truth.

The truth has been obfuscated.
Obfuscate: make obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. From late Latin obfuscat-‘darkened’.

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND!

Obfuscating is misleading communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language.

Obfuscation can either be unintentional (as a result of following others) or intentional, and is  accomplished by talking around a subject, with jargon or technical language that uses in-group speak, thus limiting any communicative value to outsiders.

We can even cite Tibetan Buddhism as an example, where we’re enthralled by the Tibetan culture with its exotic and meaningful words and names, but we can easily miss the simplicity of personal realisation and experiential, compassionate understanding.

Realisation is more than doing pujas and prostrations, and ringing bells.
It is knowing what is essence and what is culture.

Stop Carrying The Past

All the things that we regard as failures or distortions by ourself and others are what brought us to this present moment.

There is nothing to forgive, because that requires judgement. We’re all deluded because of what is passed down to us; to forgive is to say “I am now right”, while you are wrong.

We live in the universal soup of deluded and reactive consciousness.
“Being in the soup” is being in trouble.

That which recognises this soupiness
(sentimental exaggeration)
is our reality of pure consciousness.

Gurus Aren’t Real

The outer guru is only a reminder of the inner guru – or it should be. Adoration of a guru is counter-productive as it creates a duality – me and my guru. Worldly gurus cannot be with us 24/7; they cannot point out to us precisely where we’re going wrong – we have to do that for ourselves.

Adoration creates competitiveness, a ‘holier than thou attitude’ as we behave as if we’re morally superior to others.

We are humans with an enlightened potential which includes all flaws and imperfections, revealing exactly how we are, including the bad parts, without hiding anything.

The idea of ‘guru’ is fanciful.
The real guru is our tainted mind,
showing us (consciousness) all our faults.

For that we are grateful.
This teacher bring us back to our home,
right here, right now.

Our Reality Is Beyond Teachings

It’s not the teaching that will set us free; it is the experience of the teaching that liberates. For millennia, there have been forces dedicated to deceive us so that we remain a ‘product’. Through stories – childish stories – we are created in the image of our makers.

‘Good’ people think they are going to heaven and will meet their loved ones (or voluptuous ones 🙂 ). What are you going to do when you get there if you don’t have a body? The stories don’t go any further than a vague belief.

Our reality is right here right now, it is simply being. Heaven cannot be sitting around a circle chatting to ‘loved’ ones. We are here to end the effects of karma = beliefs from past actions clinging to ideas handed down to us.

Our reality of pure consciousness is beyond body, mind,
memories, stories, teachings, and desires.

Human Conditioning

The things we can’t say.

Through tradition, we follow the crowd and stay ‘mum’, not speaking out about what really matters. We only speak out what we are told to speak out about.

We vote for fools: we get what we wish.
Vote: from Latin votum ‘a vow, wish’.

Words Can Be Twisted

Direct experience of pure consciousness cannot be twisted, but our perception can be clouded by biased words. We don’t see that we just see – that we are not seeing with clarity – as we are seeing through cultural programming.

If we were born into a different family or country, would we be the same person? We take on that culture which we then identify with. That is our prison. Once we recognise this, we know how to escape – simply by not identifying with ‘local’ ideas. 🙂

Everything we read or hear has a bias – a cultural identity which limits our perception.

Diversity Divides

Diversity has the illusion of inclusion and harmony,
but in reality, it is meant to divide and conquer,
to maintain tension in a society.

Confused people are easier to keep occupied,
and therefore to control.

This confusion divides the attention of consciousness.

Dealing With The Abuse, Not The Abuser

The greatest method in reducing karma is non-reaction, seeing the abuse as our teacher, which shows us our state of mind. This has nothing to do with the abuser or whatever they say; Mara can’t help it – it just wants to control.

This isn’t easy if we haven’t controlled our Mara.
Everyone is an abuser.
Everyone seeks validation.

This method is all about our non-reaction. We aren’t ignoring what is said, but we address it in an ‘unlocking’ way – a little side-step so as not to escalate the situation. Mara wants a reaction to feed off, like a hungry ghost that constantly needs satisfaction, so we just give it a titbit to shine a little light.

This is how insanity is turned into sanity.
Until we’re perfectly enlightened, everyone is some sort of abuser,
so everyone is our teacher.
😀

Just consider what Thích Nhất Hạnh or the Dalai Lama would do.

A False I Is A Reactive I

The sadness of human conditioning stems from the three poisons – attachment, aversion and ignorance – which foster a cycle of suffering and a false sense of self.

A false I is a reactive I.

Our true reality of pure consciousness does not react as it purely perceives, before the conceptual mind obscures consciousness.

The conflict between our reality – the clarity of inner peace within – and these poisons creates the condition of misery in which we live. The root of anger comes from an idea of self which is in conflict with something external that we believe to be real.

Changing this conditioning requires mindful compassion which comes from the realisation of our true reality to transform the mind back to the clarity of inner peace.

Hostility festers and lingers in the mind = holding on.
Compassionate understanding sets us free = letting go.

Realisation Shrinks The Need For Many Words

Examples:
Not two.
The unity of appearance and recognition.
Pure consciousness.

These each contain the complete Dharma.

Beginners like collecting words,
but the truth is never in words.

The Beginners And The Advanced

Beginners adore complexity.
The advanced realise simplicity.

Beginners collect words and names.
The advanced see everything as one taste.

Why Do We Cut Ourselves Off From Others?

Why do we resist reaching out?

‘Reaching out’ means to initiate contact to offer help, seek connection, or communicate.

When we join a group, become a type, hold a belief, we adhere to group values and regard ourselves as moral and virtuous. This self-value colours our view of others whom we regard as different.

Even when there is a similar understanding, we still keep one another at arm’s length. Why? We are holding on to something. We aren’t recognising that this attitude is our personal obstacle on the path to enlightenment. It’s our challenge, and we don’t like being challenged.

We may become sentimental over words and images, but when it comes to personal interaction, we freeze.

Letting go is extremely subtle.
Anything that provokes ego’s reaction is our teacher.

Making A Culture and Replacing a Culture

Culture: the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.

A culture is created by a certain type of temperament which is the code for that society. Some are noisy, others are quiet. A problem occurs when the noisy enter the quiet and upset the balance, demanding that everyone becomes noisy.

Technology changes how we live. Some changes are natural, while others are orchestrated. It’s not actually change; we are constantly being diverted away from our natural state.

Once we recognise the pattern, we’re not surprised – it’s predictable. We see all the lies and false information about reality, and begin to re-examine where we got our values from.

If you were born into a different family or culture who used words in a particular way, would you be the same person? No, you wouldn’t – but the essence of pure consciousness would be the same.

The noise in our head goes round and round – that’s our culture.