Where does suffering originate, and how does one eliminate it?
A psychiatrist is someone who, seeing an unusually sad character on television, opens up the television set and fucks with the cathode ray tube and the flourescent screen in an effort to make the character adopt a more appealing form.
A psychologist rewrites the script for the episode and sends it to the director insisting all characters fall within a certain range of emotion.
A Buddhist looks at the other two and says, “It’s just a show!”
The television set is not broken, and there is nothing wrong with the script. The television is displaying what was fed into it, and the character is just a projection of light.
The psychiatrist, the psychologist, and the Buddhist are all concerned with the issue of human suffering. They all want to eliminate it. The difference lies in where each locates the source or cause of suffering. For the psychiatrist, the suffering is in the machinery. For the psychologist, the suffering is in the programming. For the Buddhist, suffering arises when we mistakenly identify ourselves with the characters and experience the world through them. For the Buddhist, the suffering is in the psychiatrist and the psychologist within each of us looking to correct and hone a phenomenon, the egoic self, that has no real existence.
Suffering arises in awareness, but even then, there is nothing there but awareness. Awareness is the substrate of experience, but experience adds nothing to the substrate. In that way, we have a choice. We can identify with experience, or we can be the awareness.
The television set, analogous to the brain, can either be the characters it displays or it can be a television set with all its displays of light. To be the televsion set, it does not think, “I am a TV.” That is no realization at all. That is akin to a TV playing a show about TVs. That would make awareness of being a TV more difficult, because the TV thinks it has already done it. Instead, the television discovers what it’s like to be a television. What is it like to be a cathode ray tube? What is it like to be electrons shooting out from your center? What is it like to be a flourescent screen? What is it like to be all of these things at the same time?
Nothing about the programming needs to change in order for this to happen, although it may naturally change when it does. We’re accustomed to knowing what the world is like, what it is like to see red or taste something sweet, but what is IT like to BE?
If you just wonder about it, you enter it. What is it like to be an awareness? This is like asking, what do your taste buds taste like? Sit in a quiet place for five minutes and just be the awareness with all its various displays of light and sound passing through. This awareness never changes, and suffering does not touch it.
In BEING, there is no show and no one watching the show. There is no audience. The “witness” is just another character. In being, observer and observed are one.
What is awareness like when it is not awareness of? For some reason, the answer is: PURE LOVE AND BLISS. There is no logical explanation and no scientific defense for it. Yet, that is apparently what is. This pure awareness can last minutes or days until “awareness of” something particularly convincing lures you once again into the story on the screen. Over time, these lures lose their power, and the love and bliss become brighter and stronger than the story.
When I first returned home from a seven day meditation retreat in the hills of Northern California last year, I was immediately struck by what it was like to type on a computer. When I looked at the monitor, I did not see words and objects and places to go or stories. I just saw a monitor. Look at these words on your monitor and realize that the only thing in front of you is a monitor with pixels of light and dark.
oaasd foi alskdjf q lksd loqpc clka slw mx.vpa woeir .xkcvoia wer.
Everything else is a part of your own mental world, a three dimensional model of your supposed reality recreated in your own mind. That mental model of the world is where you spend the vast majority of your time. What if it was gone?
Then there is another twist. The television set itself, the brain-mind, is also just an illusion of light. There is no television set learning how to be. There is only being. What is the brain outside of your concepts of the brain? What would the brain really look like if you could see it without using a retina and a visual cortex and a system of mental imagery to play with the results? The television set, as it has thus far known itself, is just another element in a show. But the knowing itself has always been there.
So what is real, and what is not real? In Star Trek: The Next Generation, characters entertain themselves on a holodeck, a three-dimensional virtual reality. The holodeck is controlled by a computer that responds to voice commands. If the characters ask the holodeck to create a landscape, the computer manifests a landscape made to order.
A character might say, “Computer, create a mountain in the distance,” and one appears. Another character might say, “Computer, place a village on the hilltop,” and one appears.
Finally, a character says, “Computer, end program.” Everything manifest dissolves and leaves only the grid of light, the underlying structure of the holodeck itself. What was real, and what was not? It was all real–except for the person who didn’t know it was a holodeck until the final command.
From Old Man Basking in the Sun: Longchenpa’s Treasury of Natural Perfection:
All is one–all is unitary spaciousness;
unity cannot be contrived–spaciousness is unborn:
the illusions created within this unborn spaciousness,
utterly equivocal, are nowhere confined.
The commentary by Keith Dowman:
In perceptual openness, everything appears fully saturated by pure-light energy. Everything is made of light. The sanctity implicit in timeless splendor is displayed in space-shifting holistic patterns of sublime inspiration, a constant stream of holographic information emanating from the motionless center of the natural perfection opening up to infinity like a fractal.
When you discover the intrinsic nature of your awareness, independent of the conditions that pass over its surface, you discover that it is not in fact YOUR awareness. It is THE awareness.
A few nights ago I dreamed that the universe was a movie playing in multiple dimensions, but just as you can only watch a 3-D movie by wearing glasses with blue and red lenses (or polarized vertical and horizontal) that allow you to integrate two slightly different images, the universe could only be perceived in multiple dimensions by watching through multiple brains or individual egoic minds.
I was a glowing red light, and my old Buddhist friend was a glowing blue light. In my dream I knew this symbolized the red and blue lenses of 3-D glasses. Our minds were connected at the very center by a cord of light. I could only see red, and my friend could only see blue, but together we formed a consciousness capable of viewing the universe in its multiple dimensions. Fascinating.
Computer, end program.
