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.

Are We Fresh Or Frozen?

Fresh is raw experience in this moment.
Frozen is imported baggage imposed on this moment.

We are subject to both, but one will dominate.
Are we a positive person, or do we worry?

Whether we like it or not, it’s obvious that we live in the “age of strife”, so most raw experiences are unpleasant. This is why the real Dharma teachings are so potent; when life is pleasant, we don’t bother.

In the age of strife, evil hasn’t a clue that it can actually wake people up – inadvertently. 😀 It is in this very unpleasantness that we experience the raw deal of life that creates fresh emotions which are, in fact, wisdom. We are never totally negative as our essence is raw, pure consciousness.

Even though there are dark clouds over us, there is always an element of light, an aura, a distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person.

One might think that pleasant situations would wake us up, but do they? From an semi-enlightened point of view (and we are all semi-enlightened :-)), everything is frozen, imported baggage that we think is fresh.

If things are pleasant, we swoon and drift along, overcome with admiration and adoration – “Isn’t my package nice?” In focusing on the pleasant, we try to maintain it but end up freezing it.

If things are unpleasant, our wits sharpen. Having sharpened our wits/consciousness, the pleasant is taken in our stride. We arrive at one taste, bothered neither by the pleasant nor the unpleasant. If we only want the pleasant, we will never be able to deal with the unpleasant – the raw deal.

The raw deal is anything outside our comfort zone.

Frozen Dharma packages charm us into believing that we are awake.
Fresh Dharma is the beautiful rawness of life that awakens.

Better to be awake than to be a clever scholar
😀

Do We Know What Normal Is?

Normal: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.
Conforming to whose standard?

Normal is the set standard of a carpenter’s-square to which everyone agrees; 90 degrees is 90 degrees.
Consciousness is a set standard as it applies to everyone.
Space is a set standard of infinity.
These three principles are normal.

When it comes to humans, however, what is normal?
Each of us has different norms – unless we rest in our original state of pure consciousness.

Normal for an busy person is busyness.
Normal for an lazy person is laziness.
Normal for a narcissist is a lack of empathy.
Human normals = our individual quirks that obscure pure consciousness.

Quirk: a peculiar aspect of a person’s character or behaviour.

Seeing The Same Way, Or Seeing More

We (consciousness) look out and see – just see. This is pure seeing. This is pure consciousness. There is nothing exotic; it’s natural. But oh, how we miss this altogether … altogether.

We see, but we miss that first moment of just seeing. Because of that, we begin to relate to whatever we see back to memory, and we superimpose on to the situation. We then judge from these old memories, and react in the same old tired way. That keeps our world ours, and we see no further.

This makes life pretty dull and predictable, and limits our understanding, imprisoning us in the same old assumptions. It’s vertical thinking – we do this and this and this because that’s what we always do.

Lateral thinking is standing back and taking another look, being open to all possibilities. That’s just seeing, without judgements or prejudice.

Seeing afresh is illuminating and inspiring.
Just seeing is Dharma practice.
Anything more exotic is a deviation.

Clear Consciousness = Clear Mind = Clear Conscience

When we feel uncomfortable, or that something isn’t right, that is conscience at work. There is a conflict between consciousness and the mind.

Conscience is the messenger between consciousness and the mind, and the quality of both consciousness and the mind will dictate what conscience comes up with.

Just saying, “I have a conscience”, only means we have a conscience at our level of understanding: there isn’t one conscience about which we will all agree.

What we thought was right or wrong a few years ago may not be the same today. It all depends on our level of experiential understanding of ultimate truth and convenient truth.

Am I Deluding Myself Or …

is my self deluding me?
Deluded = make believe.

My self is a projection of ideas in the mind, and I think that this is what I am.

Who am I really?
I am consciousness, pure and simple. The idea of a self doesn’t like the inconvenient truth that it has no existence: consciousness witnesses this – and that is the muddle we Buddhas are in.

This consciousness cannot be found as it is that which is seeing. If we ever find consciousness, we are deluded. We’ve been caught in this mental trap for so long that we never notice consciousness. We think it’s a thing that we have, but it cannot be found. It’s that idiotic because we don’t know what we are, and so we remain confused and thus, upset.

It is this idiot-self that keeps distracting consciousness. This idiot-self can do and say all sorts of clever things, but it can never know what it is. For this reason, a computer/robot can never be conscious, even though the gods of earth think that it can.

Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche 1846-1912

“To elaborate or investigate adds concepts.
To make effort or to cultivate is pointless
To meditate is to become involved.
Cut all effort from within.

“Beyond thought and expression, nothing remains.
This the profound resolving of one’s mind;
difficult to describe, but realised as spontaneously present.”

A perfect way of being.

.

.

In this modern age of technology and science that turn everything into politics and unquestioning beliefs, isn’t it a relief to know there is a reality that has been within all beings since before time?

Some Things Are Difficult To Talk About

Some things are difficult to talk about as they have to be timely, but as you’ve found your way here through favourable curiosity, we might as well continue :-). Some things can only be spoken about when the listener has received the pointing-out instruction on the nature of mind, but if you have read this blog, you sort of get it. 😀

In non-dual meditation, we realise that we are pure consciousness – aware, but inactive. This can be upsetting for some people as they want to be up and doing, re-creating themselves and their situation. 🙂 Anyway, pure consciousness does nothing, but be aware.

Now for the tricky part. Depending on the level of enlightenment or realisation – and from this position – action only takes place to be of benefit to a situation, rather than of benefit to us. Having realised our true nature, we don’t need or rely on anything.

Some practitioners withdraw from worldly activities, while others engage.
It’s a personal choice.

We aren’t here to change the world; even a Buddha can’t do that. We are here to realise what we truly are, rather than become attached to everything.

The pull to change the world and other people is great, but that will depend on how many can work together. There is far too much division for that to happen, just yet.

The ‘dividers’ are very clever, and idiotically divided from reality.
They’re all busy trying to re-create themselves and us.Daft creatures!
😀

Reality Isn’t Cultivated

What we do cultivate, however, is our likes and dislikes, while ignoring our true reality of pure consciousness = a good heart that acts unconditionally, expecting nothing in return.

We cannot truly love if our feelings come first
– my family, my talents, my life …
That is love which is conditional.

Reality is uncultivated love,
uncontaminated by any conditions.

Do You Focus On The Puppets Or The Strings?

Everyone has attachments.

If we attach ourselves to others,
we get tangled up in their strings as well.

How many people are without attachments?

This Blog Isn’t About My View

This blog isn’t about my view;
it’s about your view.

It’s not about what you think of the view;
|it’s about the moment of direct seeing,
which is pure consciousness.

Who’s Telling The Truth?

Not the truth of an effect,
but the truth of the cause.

Puppet Masters

They are the influencers behind the scenes.
We are the puppets who dance to their tunes/news/films/games …

Switch Off Your Ego

If you are easily offended,
you are easily manipulated.

The Search Box At The Bottom Of This Page

To date, there are three thousand six hundred articles on this blog (goodness knows how that happened! 😀 ).

Type a word that comes to mind in the search box at the bottom of this page, and see what comes up.

You never know … it might be a spark in the darkness.

PS to get the bottom of the page on a Mac, it’s command + down arrow, and on Windows, it’s End.

Flawless Consciousness

Consciousness is without imperfections. It is very alive and very sensitive, but is easily distracted by ideas and emotions. It is precisely because of being so readily distracted that it is easier to spot – if we are looking. This is why ‘immoral intent’ constantly plies us with ‘exciting news’. It knows us; it knows our bias, and feeds it.

All the while, flawless consciousness looks on, but it has become an audience wanting to be entertained, instead of refining realisation. Flawless consciousness knows that it has been distracted but ignores this because it’s become so used to following others that it is constantly being “RESET” to ignore its original nature.

Once realised, flawless consciousness is pure consciousness,
unaffected by ‘exciting news’.

We can reset our reality by remembering what we are at any moment.

What’s Eating You?

Emotions – brought on by strong association with thoughts and feelings of hopes, fears, pride, jealousy – stir up our mental state, and eat away at us. We become distressed, anxious and disappointed, and we suffer. This saps away our energy, and has an effect on our health.

The world will never change as everyone is full of thoughts and emotions. It’s the world in which we all live … well, not everyone. 😀

These very emotions are wisdoms. When we recognise them, they no longer eat us, but we become nourished by them. Sounds ridiculous, right?

Just before the very first instant when an emotion arises, something is noted. The mind brightens – it lights up! We all see this moment, but we ignore it. That is pure consciousness taking the scene in, but not being taken in by the scene.

Recognition and realisation are simultaneous. First, we have to know what we are looking for! It is only due to old habits that we give in to emotions, reacting and becoming eaten up by conflict, and spreading bad breath. 😀

Eat subtleties; it refines digestion.

Religion: The Beginning Or End Of Our Journey?

Is religion the beginning or the end of our journey?

Religion can be a magical home, where we meet like-minded people who accept the same given answers to happiness.

Conversely, religion can be a stepping stone that brings us to the beginning of our own personal and curious journey, where we are the magic.

Why Use The Word ‘Emptiness’?

The word ’empty’ is the opposite of the word ‘full’.

The mind and consciousness are, by nature, clear.
We recognise this in the very first empty instant of seeing,
before we start judging and filling up.

Our minds are full of opinions, fixations and obsessions that we cling to, and which distract consciousness. This is why we become anxious and confused about our actual reality, being unaware that we are pure, bright consciousness.

When the mind is free of stress, it returns to emptiness, and consciousness finds peace. We find peace. This is where our true intelligence lies – seeing directly, rather than through a cluttered mind.

If we ignore pure consciousness, we become pseudo-intellectuals, always ready to try and impress; by thinking we are right, we use knowledge as a weapon. Constantly judging, we sentence ourselves through misunderstanding the nature of reality.

If we fixate on phenomena, we suffer, as all phenomena cannot be said to truly exist. It is impermanent and only exists in time; being a temporary arrangement of elements, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and is thus empty of any true existence.

Know emptiness, know perfect peace.

‘I’ Blindness

The ‘I’ is blind to reality.
What we think of as our selves is blind to reality.
The result: the blind leading the blind.

All of us, like silly sheep, have gone astray from our true reality because we are led by the blind, and we are therefore confused about our reality. Even meditation can maintain this blindness if all we are doing is doing meditation.

Don’t be blind to the purpose of meditation.
Look for the meditator.

Not finding a meditator,
we arrive at total exhaustion,
pure awareness wide open.

We are not a thing; we are a presence.

Whatever Someone Says Doesn’t Matter

It doesn’t matter what people say;
what matters is what’s happening in our mind – our reactions.

Ideas placed in the mind make us think that we ‘know’, when this information is having opposite effect of actually knowing. “Don’t take my word for it”, said the Buddha.

Ordinary people react;
practitioners note.

We weaponise information that then lies in ambush in the mind as memory. At a given stimulus, we judge and react, causing conflict. Information works like brand awareness, where the brain lights up and the mind responds before a person even knows it. This is how we lack mental control.

Mind training is giving space to our reactions, holding off by being generous, patient and disciplined. Without this, our reaction are just self-preservation.

Look at yourself and gain confidence in the seeing of that self.
That which sees our self in action is pure consciousness.