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Nagarjuna MAHAMUDRA VISION

 

NAGARJUNA

The nature of all things

Appears like a reflection,

Pure and naturally quiescent,

With a non-dual identity of suchness.

The common mind imagines a self

Where there is nothing at all,

And it conceives of emotional states -

Happiness, suffering, and equanimity.

The six states of being in Samsara,

The happiness of heaven,

The suffering of hell,

Are all false creations, figments of mind.

Likewise the ideas of bad action causing suffering,

Old age, disease and death,

And the idea that virtue leads to happiness,

Are mere ideas, unreal notions.

Like an artist frightened

By the devil he paints,

The sufferer in Samsara

Is terrified by his own imagination.

Like a man caught in quicksands

Thrashing and struggling about,

So beings drown

In the mess of their own thoughts.

Mistaking fantasy for reality

Causes an experience of suffering;

Mind is poisoned by interpretation

Of consciousness of form.

Dissolving figment and fantasy

With a mind of compassionate insight,

Remain in perfect awareness

In order to help all beings.

So acquiring conventional virtue

Freed from the web of interpretive thought,

Insurpassable understanding is gained

As Buddha, friend to the world.

***Excerpts from MAHAMUDRA VISION

What's Outside is Inside

Let’s step back a moment and check in to see how our so heated, and tightly held opinions and protestations could very likely be driven by nothing more than energies moving into too confined fleshy places which have been structured over a personal history of various and assorted experiences, and now by default are authoring our reality.

In other words, could it be that … "you are not upset for the reason(s) you think"?

I was once a host at a meditation introduction in a public space. Included in that duty to warmly welcome attendees as they arrived was to also be on security alert to prevent problems, or problem people. At one point a fellow walked up to me and in a face sort of way said something provocative and challenging. I took him to be hostile. 

My meditation practice bore fruit in that moment. I was dispassionate enough to simply first witness whatever energy was surging through my body. It went right to and into my arms. It felt like if I went with it my hands would come out swinging. Instead, I allowed the wave of energy to pass without acting out. Without a word or act from me, the fellow turned and walked away.

I share that so that in these heated times we go inside ourselves to see how our reactions and perceptions are merely thrown responses to fixed patterns of body and thought.

“A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.” — Carl Gustav Jung "The Philosophical Tree" (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335