All the world of the senses and the mind—including ambitions, desires and reaching —can be on some level considered an illusion. Thinking that this stuff is real as the Buddha said is “the basis for suffering.” Reconnect with the ground of all being (luminous emptiness, rigpa, prajnaparamita, dharmakaya, your True Nature/Buddha Nature, etc.) in order to attain ultimate liberation and insight into the Truth. And the truth is that all of it is empty, devoid of permanence, satisfaction, and lacking in any “self.” Thinking is what keeps us from the truth. All our notions of self are impermanent and untrue. We are not our body. We are not our self constructed social roles. We are not our ideas of who we think we are, and new ideas don’t fit the bill either. But throughout all of it is something that it permanent, timeless, vast, and spacious.
That is who we really are.
Until we awaken, everything we do in life is to avoid the void. Stop running, stop craving, stop resisting, and sink into the emptiness and you will move beyond what wasn’t really you anyway, and wake up into the real and profound truth of life as-it-is. Science, while useful, does little to help us in the personal aspect and left unchecked can even contribute to more illusion—only the science of YOUR mind can discover Reality. Visions of gods and demons are ephemeral—look deeper to find what does not change and you will find liberation in the truth.
This is a bold statement but beware of self-improvement in the traditional sense for there is no self to improve. Either meditate, or simply and directly give up seeking for anything to be different altogether.
Realities are like clothes. You have to wear something to function in the world, but once you realize you can change clothesf, you can try on some radically different realities—There’s no way to see the blind spots of your choices tunnel without stepping outside of them and looking through a different reality tunnel. So if you want to have more freedom, break out of your habitual reality and try on some grounded, focused realities of what is – We are born, we live and we die. What we do in-between those stages is the key to accepting the very gift of life and growing from within.
Peace and Love, Jim
