Podcast

Taking happiness and suffering on the path (part 1)
by Lama Tsering Everest

So, I have been asked to speak on the topic of taking happiness and suffering on the path and I like that topic, it’s a very wonderful topic because, rather than approaching one’s pursuit of wisdom as a dividing kind of thing, it becomes a matter of synthesis. In general, I think we, as ordinary people, tend to divide, you know, divide and conquer, divide and understand, chop it up in smaller pieces  then we can understand a little better what it is and we can manage putting them  in order or getting them all prioritized and so we tend to divide, but synthesis is an inclusivity and so then bringing happiness and suffering to the path is a synthesis, and in order to really understand that synthesis we have to understand what we are referring to when we say path.

So, a path implies that we are going somewhere and it’s a process, or a procedure or a movement from point A to point B and so then in this terminology the path would be the movement from lack of recognition to recognition, the movement from suffering to going beyond suffering or the movement from lack of wisdom to wisdom. In a buddhist tradition wisdom actually isn’t somewhere else, ultimately every being is inseparable with wisdom, they may not know it, which is a lack of wisdom, but it isn’t actually an authentic lack, it’s just an experience of lack, like someone who is a king who for some reason got bumped on the head or something and now doesn’t remember that they are a king anymore and they may have really ordinary perspective of needs and wants and anxieties and desperation like most people have; but that doesn’t deny that he is actually a king, he just doesn’t recognize it.

So within Buddhism, specially from the category of the resultant vehicle, the nature of perfection is present in everything, in everyone, that absolute wisdom, absolute truth, is undeniable, it is unrecognizable but present in everything. And so then the task of the path is not a process of creating something, because something that is already perfect and absolute, it isn’t created, if something is created then it falls apart, so what’s absolute is not made and it isn’t destructible; if it’s absolute truth it’s true, just true, true as true can be and true and true, not that it wasn’t true and then it became true and now it’s true for a while and then it’s not going to be, that’s not what we call truth, that absolute truth from a Buddhist point of view, absolute truth permeates everything, absolute truth is uncuttable, unchangeable, indestructible and it’s unstoppable, it’s pervasive, it’s unimprovable and irreducible, it’s not born and doesn’t die, it’s simply true.

So, if you examine our world you will find that there’s not much that stands up to those criteria, most anything you look at is cuttable, changeable, improvable, reducible, it wasn’t and it is now and some day it won’t be and basically came together and will eventually separate.
So what is being referred to, what buddhists are referring to when they speak about absolute truth is the nature of the phenomena, the essence of the phenomena, that essence of phenomena is basic space; basic space permeates everything and now we know that through science, we don’t really live it but we know it; the same way that we don’t really live the fact that our world isn’t flat, we know the world is not flat but we still live with the sensation that the world is flat. So we can know from science that the essence of phenomena is emptiness or space, but we don’t live with that fact, what the buddhists came to, the great masters, the meditators, the yogis, what they came to was understanding the nature of that space through relaxing their mind; by training their mind, relaxing their mind, their mind is also permeated by the same space that permeates everything; and so they came to that realization without having to go to science to divide everything to realize it, through allowing the mind to relax they gained a direct experiential realization of the true nature of phenomena which is emptiness.

Emptiness does not mean nothing, because all this is happening, but even as it is happening it is never separated from that nature, emptiness. And Lord Buddha said: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is non other than emptiness, emptiness is non other than form”. So, we know from a spiritually wise being and we know from science but we don’t live it, we don’t experience that and so we need to go from point A to point B, to go from point A to point B means that we have to go through the process of making the movement that could produce for us the direct experience. And yet we have a sort of stance about reality, we have our sensation of reality, we have our visual experience of reality, auditory experience of reality, we have our sense of spaceal experience of reality and we are quite habitfull in these ways and basically we have assumptions in place that there is a separation between self and other.

Now, if we were to take the basic nature of phenomena and look at the space that permeates you and the space that permeates me and the space that permeates between us, they would be the same space and yet the variations, and the differences are what tend to predominate our sense of reality. And what I think of you is not necessarily what is true about you, I could look at you, you all look like you just came from the backyard, right, it’s probably not true, but from my subjective point of view, I have an opinion about you, I can see you, if you were to talk I could hear you, I have a spaceal experience of the reality between me and you and I have a subjective experience of you; my mind makes this, really doesn’t matter what you are, my mind makes this and so basically we are not really detecting the true nature of reality, we are detecting our mind’s experience of reality, not the true nature of reality; we have a subjective perspective and we call it objective, but it’s really subjective and this is what  Lord Buddha said, we don’t understand our mind and our mind is giving it’s take of reality, my take of you, your take of me; you really don’t know, you can only perceive from your eyes, your ears, your sense of smell, your sense of taste, your sense of touch, your sensations, your emotions, your perceptions and your mind is producing for itself a subjective synthesis of information that you call reality.

Basically, we are not really in touch with what the reality of the moment is, we are just seeing our mind’s habits to perceive the reality and basically in order for us to really get a handle and control of the whole movement we just cut and analyze, dissect, divide, separate, us and them, me and them, and that all goes on in our own mind. And then if I experience some kind of suffering from you, it seems like you don’t like me, seems like something like that happens, seems to me that…, then I have an emotional reaction, “Well I don’t like you either, fine, no big loss, ok.”

So then based on a subjective experience of reality confusedly we think is objectively true, then we have subjective reactions to those assumptions and we like and we don’t like and really we are caught in a house of mirrors, we don’t really know the true nature of our mind, we don’t know what our mind is really creating, but we do know that we want to be happy and we do know that we don’t want to be unhappy and we are busy, almost not a minute left in the day, because we are hunting happiness and you know, we are sidestepping suffering as fast as we can.

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