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.

The Loveliest Trick Ever Played

Spirituality is a process of progressive realisation. It is our experience and personal realisation, rather than something that we hear or read about, and then think we know. If there was just one path, then we could learn ABC … but it’s not like that as there are many traditions with slightly varying viewpoints. Our path is to do with how we experience and not what we are supposed to experience. Spirituality is not something rigid to keep and store away in our minds: it is pure experience of the spontaneous present – whether pleasant or unpleasant – beyond concepts.

Hopefully, this blog reflects such a process – a journey with all its ups and downs, from the unknown to the certainty of knowingness itself. We have to remember that everything we consider reflects the level of our current understanding, and that is our starting point. There is much to scrutinise.

The words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ conjure up many images gathered from ideas we have been led to believe. On a basic level, we probably think, “I’m good, and those over there are bad.” Maybe we could say that good is beneficial to our understanding, whereas bad misleads our understanding. Perhaps, being reasonable people, we see ‘good’ as the truth of a constant reality that we can see, and ‘bad’ as something that is seemingly truth but which turn us aside (even subtly) from that actual truth.

There is a point when we start to see that badness is something covering up our intelligence, and in that way, it is evil. This evil may be conscious or unconscious.

I’m getting to the point! 🙂

There is the reality of our being, and there are distractions to realising that reality. These distractions – this evil, this devilment – does not actually exist. It’s all in the mind.

If all distractions create a duality, then …
… all worship is devil worship.

Subtly, it takes us off the point,
if the purity of being is not realised
in the moment
where there is no duality.

Of course, at a basic level, worship of a deity or person is comforting: we rely on something else caring for and protecting us, and looking after our spiritual welfare. But that in itself creates a duality. Me and it – I give myself up to it.

Let’s take the image of Shiva. Shiva is the “destroyer and transformer”. It is the image used at CERN, the Hadron collider. This image is being misrepresented as the “destroyer”, and implies that we should all quiver in our boots. In actuality, Shiva is the destroyer – of ignorance.

But here’s the thing. Even though Shiva is presented as the destroyer of ignorance, ignorance is still present. It is not Shiva that destroys ignorance: our realisation does! We do this. Shiva is only a symbol, a reminder.

If we simply worship a deity or person, this is merely wishful thinking; it’s a lucky charm, an excessive belief in and reverence for the supernatural. As a placebo, it might work for some as it is pleasing. There is a story of the dog’s tooth, where an Indian mother believed the tooth to be the Buddha’s, and attained great happiness. But that was then. Nowadays, we do not work that way – even though we may try to.

All spiritual practice is the experience of emptiness of our basic nature, pure awareness, pure consciousness. Anything else is but a reminder of duality returning to non-duality. If we constantly worship the reminder, we will be constantly distracted.

To put it bluntly. Earth is a planet of devil worshippers – me and my goal. We have been led astray.

Ultimately, there is no meditation, no deity, no teacher: it is all a symbolic reminder of things happening within emptiness.

We always have a choice: wake up and stay awake, or roll over and go back to sleep.

Any time taken to consider some thing is but a distraction preventing us from concentrating. It’s a diversion or recreation – a distraction almost to a state of madness: she loved him to distraction. Distract: from Latin – ‘drawn apart’

To purify or to clean, we use soap = the method.
Then we wash off the soap!

If we do not wash it off, and thereby let go of the method, we could think that being covered in soap/method is the end in itself. We have been distracted for thousands of years, thinking that worship will set us free, when in fact it imprisons. The dark age of devil consciousness created a soft hell where we do not even notice it is hell – the Kali Yuga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga

The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist *
by disguising demonic activity.

The Devil
– “The Prince of Lies” –
is our own likes and dislikes.

It has really only one job, and that is to tempt us,
thereby distancing us from truth by our worship of the truth –
when, in fact, we are the truth!

* from “The Generous Gambler” by Charles Pierre Baudelaire http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607031h.html