Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

Transcendence Models. These essentially promise that you will have the best of both worlds: you will get to be in the world while not of the world, be able to enjoy all pleasant things while being immune to pain and difficulty, and thus live in a protected state of partial, selective transcendence. A lot of people try to emulate such a state in their practice: when presented with suffering they either look away from it or try to make their attention so wide or vague that they don’t notice it, and when pleasant things arise they try to hang on to those experiences and expand them. While such a perfectly natural thing to do, this is the exact reverse of insight practice, and yet they may deeply feel that this is practicing for the transcendence they have been promised.

As stated earlier, the predictable and obvious truth is that transcendence is bought at the price of a very deep, direct intimacy with life, all of life, both good and bad. Similarly, this deep intimacy with life is bought at the price of transcendence. While everyone nearly automatically looks to the good side of both, few consider that realization brings a deep, direct experience of all that is painful and also the reluctant understanding of how empty and ephemeral pleasure is.

One must be careful here, and I don’t advocate buying into either extreme. Our ordinary lives have all this already, so don’t look for something that is different from what is going on. Instead, look into your 315

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

life as it is and see the Three Characteristics of it directly, instant by instant. This is the gateway to the answer to the strange paradox that all this is pointing to.

THE EXTINCTION MODELS

On the flip side of the Immortality Models, and somewhat contrary to the Transcendence Models, we have the Extinction Models. These are essentially a promise that insight practices will either have you never be reborn again or will make you non-existent somehow in some ordinary sense. The first basic flaw in these models is that they presume an entity to which these things can occur, which from an insight point of view is already a problem. Insight practices at their best presume emptiness as always having been the case, and so to posit that there is something that was reborn flies directly against their root premises.

Thus, the notion that there is someone who either will not be reborn again or will somehow cease to be (assuming they were “being” before), is absurd and doesn’t belong in the language of ultimate wisdom.

However, page after page, Buddhism promises that there will be no more coming into any state of being, no more rebirth, no more self, and that somehow this will get someone off of the wheel of suffering.

Here we get into as gray an area as it gets in spiritual language.

Between the weird promises of the Immortality Models and the weird promises of the Extinction Models, we can really get into paradigmatic trouble. Somehow we are sure that one of these must be right, or maybe both are, or perhaps neither are, or some other combination we currently can’t conceive of must be the correct one. However, all of these models are based upon a fundamental flaw, the misperception of sensations and the conclusion based on this misperception that there was some separate, permanent us that all these dualistic concepts can apply to. There is not, nor has their ever been, though sensations occur anyway. It is a convenient, practical, working assumption, a convention, a way of speaking, but nothing more. Thus, all of these curious notions simply do not apply. Simply practicing and perceiving sensations clearly reveals the way out of these paradoxes.

316

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment THE LOVE MODELS

On a completely different note, there are the Love Models. These are hard to relate to any previous category except perhaps the Emotional Models, but they essentially involve some combination of us loving everyone, feeling love all the time, becoming Love itself, being loved by everyone, or some combination of these. The first two are commonly found in various references, such as Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s famous quote, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these two my life flows.”

This is really not a bad quote as quotes go, as it tries to encompass the apparent paradoxes of spiritual understanding. It is basically a restatement of the Tibetan concept of balancing emptiness and compassion, and I like it for this reason. However, lots of people think that enlightened beings will be radiating love all the time, walking around saying loving things, feel profound love for all things at all times, and the like. Unfortunately, things couldn’t be further from the truth.

While it does get sometimes easier to take the wider world of beings into consideration as the center point is seen through, this is very different from walking around in a state of continuous love.