Is there anybody out there?!

In which case, though, if everything is empty and dream-like, not really happening, only appearing to be happening, how are we supposed to communicate with others?! How can we even say hello, let alone explain anything?

Carrying on from this article: Buddhas required – apply within.

Here’s an answer from the Request to the Lord of all Lineages:

When I search with my wisdom eye,
All the things that I normally see disappear
And only their mere name remains.
With this mere name I simply accept everything for the purpose of communicating with others.

One thing I get from this brilliant verse is that we have to participate gladly in so many waking dreams in order to communicate with others. For some reason, this reminds me of Hey you by Pink Floyd:

“Hey you, out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?
Hey you, standing in the aisles
With itchy feet and fading smiles
Can you feel me?”

However, we don’t have to buy into our individual or collective dream-like appearances to do this – in the sense of believing they are real. I was WhatsApping a good friend, an Irish fella, last week:

Me: I just think we need to wake up, stay away, and wake everyone else up. Everything else is kind of irrelevant, at best a means to an end. We have to enter so many (sometimes absurd) dreams to communicate with people and try and get through to them, like Venerable Geshe-la spent his life trying to do with us. Not many people listening, at least in my case lol. But not enough people listen to Geshe-la either.
Irish fella: I’m fully with you on the waking up thing and trying our best to meet others where they are (not where we think they should be) to encourage them that waking up is a good idea 😌
Me: Haha, yes, good point about meeting them where they are and not where we think they should be; thanks for that reminder. Though a circular encounter with someone the other day also made me see that it doesn’t always work to enter too fully into people’s narratives.
Charming Irish fella: I guess that’s the thing (as you know better than me) – we listen to their narratives and then pivot to help them see beyond the stories we and society tell ourselves, and towards something more empowering and awakening! …

Talking of which, Luke the journalist was saying that all this talk of mental peace actually coming from the inside flies in the face of what society has groomed us to believe and do since we were small – that is, find happiness and achievement outside of ourselves. He said that no one at school or college ever mentioned things like this. But he is now beginning to think that they should.

What’s her face

I was just looking at a huge cloud over Cheesman Park. It was the shape of a face – two small eyes, a large nose, and a straight mouth. It “looked like a face”, we would say – which is a conventional truth that is incorrect with respect to the awareness of worldly people (as explained in the big book Ocean of Nectar) because appearance doesn’t match reality, there is obviously NO FACE there, it just looks like one.

One of the eyes disappeared, followed by the other. And, just like that, the face was gone. The nose and mouth, no longer parts of a face, just floating around as an apparent nose and mouth, went next.

Then a woman started to photograph a yellow rose feet from where I was sitting. I looked at her face. Although her face was a conventional truth that is correct with respect to the awareness of worldly people, because her face could correctly be imputed as a face and function as a face, where and what was this face, really? It appeared to be out there, floating around a few feet outside of my mind; but did this appearance of the face really match the reality of the face?

If I were to search for this face with wisdom (which was what I decided to do, sorry lady), what could I point to that is actually a face? One eye? The other? The nose or mouth? None of these parts is the face itself, either individually or collectively (as explained here) – but imagine they dissolve away like the cloud … and her face completely disappears.

There is nothing there that is a face. There is nothing behind the eyes, nose, and mouth that exists as a face. “Face” is merely labelled or imputed by mind on those parts and, as such, functions, because eyes, nose, and mouth are a suitable basis of imputation for a face that functions. However, there is still a massive discrepancy between appearance and reality – there is no real or objectively existing face there, although there appears to be, any more than there is a real face in the cloud.

(Funny how attached we are to our faces, I was also thinking, when they’re all basically the same. As a kid, I could never understand how people could look so different given we all just had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. 😆)

Point is, though, nothing is out there, outside the mind. Everything is projected or named by conceptual imputation, such as “face” labelled on apparent eyes, nose, and a mouth; and does not exist other than this in the slightest. If we realize this, we experience freedom from all mistaken appearances. We wake up. All these appearances are not out there existing from their own side, doing their own independent thing. It is the emptiness of these appearances that is appearing as these appearances. There is no depth other than emptiness.

(Possibly I lost some of you just now … sorry! In which case, if you want to have a proper explanation, please read one of the books I mention below.)

No longer sadly mistaken 

As I started saying in this last article, a Buddha has directly realized the union of appearance and reality. As directly and clearly as we can see an olive in the palm of our hand, omniscient beings see directly and simultaneously ultimate truth emptiness and all phenomena as mere appearance not other than their emptiness.

Venerable Geshe-la says that we identify ourselves correctly when we realize we are mere appearances of mind not other than the emptiness of all phenomena. As far as I can tell, this means that we are also all appearances of Buddha’s mind. And, in fact, the appearances to the mind of bliss and emptiness exist as they appear, unlike our own current mistaken appearances or perceptions of ourself. More valid, therefore, to try and see ourselves through the eyes of our Spiritual Guide, Buddha.

If that is the case, then just as a lake doesn’t go out to its reflections, enlightened beings don’t need to go “out” to all living beings because they are not separate from their minds. Everything is experienced as non-dual. Therefore, Buddhas can bless the minds of each and every living being every day. They can “send” emanations throughout non-dual space and time, which help living beings as much as their karma and mistaken appearances allow.

From Buddha’s perspective, we are all inseparable from the omniscient wisdom of bliss and emptiness – we just need to realize and then remember this. As Venerable Geshe-la once said to someone who asked if he’d remember him as he died:

If you remember me, I will remember you.

Geshe-la couldn’t forget him anyway, any more than lake-like consciousness can be unaware of its reflections; but we are in refuge when we remember.

These kinds of contemplations help me understand how it’s possible to fulfill the main wish of bodhichitta mentioned in this article – to benefit each and every living being every day. And so when I do bother to generate this wish, it feels authentic and doable.

One incisive piece of advice that Venerable Geshe-la gave us, which I try to remember as often as possible:

Please do not believe mistaken appearances are the truth.

I have fallen and continue to fall for my own mistaken appearances more than enough times to know how hard it can be to wake up and stay awake. It takes a lifetime, even longer. So I am not saying any of this to sound wise or superior; in case you thought I was. My only qualification for ever saying anything useful at all is that I met my teacher, Venerable Geshe-la, and through him the enlightened wisdom of the ages. And I’ve been trying to practice this long enough now (42 years and counting) to have developed deep confidence that it’s going to work.

Also, my own experience is with Buddhism; but I believe that enlightened beings must be appearing in all manner of faiths and traditions to lead people to this freedom – that is, after all, their job, to appear to help liberate people in accordance with their karma.

FOFO

So, finally, circling back to the beginning of this first article, Waking up and staying awake – why do some people leap on this stuff, can’t get enough of it, whereas others are not interested or lose interest? I don’t know for sure, but can hazard some guesses. Perhaps they don’t have the karma ripening for it yet, or not enough to sustain the interest. Perhaps they have the karma to find this wisdom somewhere else, in other traditions.

And most interestingly to me at the moment is the acronym I heard in March in New York City, “FOFO”, when someone was conjecturing why there might be a large turnover at the teachings at Centers everywhere, despite such initial excitement and fascination. Instead of FOMO (fear of missing out), “FOFO” means “fear of finding out”, and usually applies to people not going to the doctor. And that really resonated with me because I think a lot of people stop studying Buddhism not because they don’t believe it, but in the fear that if they dig much further they’ll have to change their lives too much. To which I’d reply – yes, our lives will change, but we do have that important saying:

Remain natural while changing your aspiration.

In other words, we’ll change far more on the inside than on the outside. Plus, not finding out seems to me to be a far riskier strategy. Have you heard of Pascal’s wager?! What if Buddha is actually right about the true nature of reality? It might be a long while and a lot of useless suffering before we stumble upon this wisdom again.

For all these and other reasons, Buddha didn’t manage to reach everyone when he was alive, nowhere close. Nor did any of his umpteen realized disciples over the last 25 centuries. Currently, Venerable Geshe-la has tens of thousands of students who are interested, but that is a tiny percentage of humankind. Given this, I, with a negligible fraction of these great beings’ realizations (if any at all), can’t and don’t expect to be able to go around waking everyone up just like that. However, with Buddha’s help and blessings, we can keep trying to find ways and means.

As I heard earlier on this song in the car:

How bad does it have to get before we decide to change?

Finding out

Finally, given the tiny portion of people interested in this subject, if you happen to be one of them, and feel up to using this life to wake up and stay awake, I really hope you do.

So, if you’d like to read more, I recommend the chapter in the free e-book How to Transform Your Life, called “Ultimate bodhichitta.” Followed by The New Heart of Wisdom. Then, if you want a really deep dive, Ocean of Nectar. And wrap it up with the short pith instructions in The Mirror of Dharma and The Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra. There, that’s your summer reading wrapped up! 😆

Your comments are very welcome. Do you agree with any of this? Disagree? Questions?