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

Try these two scenarios on for size and see which seems to fit with your goals for your life, with your vision of a life well lived. In the first, imagine working with your stuff as best you can for most of your life, never really knowing what is just needless mind noise and mental duress caused by a lack of basic clarity. In your old age you do the practices that lead to realization. The benefits of that level of understanding may then be used for yourself and others during the remaining years of your life.

In the second scenario, you take the time early in your spiritual practice to attain to realization, following the precise instructions and recommendations of a well-developed insight tradition. You then use that level of increased clarity, acceptance, intimacy with life and transcendence to work on your stuff and benefit others for the rest of 323

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

your life. The second approach seems vastly superior to me, but it is still possible that these things are a matter of taste. One way or the other, take responsibility for the choice you make.

THE “NOTHING TO DO” AND “YOU ARE ALREADY THERE” SCHOOLS

On a somewhat different note, I feel the need to address, which is to say shoot down with every bit of rhetorical force I have, the notion promoted by some teachers and even traditions that there is nothing to do, nothing to accomplish, no goal to obtain, no enlightenment other than the ordinary state of being, no practice or tradition that is of value, no technique that will help. The other side of this same coin is the point of view that you already are realized, already there, already completely accomplished, and you essentially should be able to just be told this by them to understand it for yourself, which, were it true, would have been very nice of them, except that it is complete bullshit. The Nothing To Do School and the You Are Already There School are both basically vile extremes on the same basic notion that all effort to attain to mastery is already missing the point, an error of craving and grasping. They both contradict the fundamental premise of this book, namely that there is something amazing to attain and understand and that there are specific, reproducible methods that can help you do that.

Here is a detailed analysis of what is wrong with these and related perspectives. Some defenders of these views will claim that they are the most immediate, most complete, highest and most direct teachings that one could promote, but I will claim that they do not lead to much that is good that cannot be attained by conceptual frameworks that are not nearly so problematic or easily misconstrued.

First, these notions encourage people to not practice. The defenders can say what they like, but again and again I see people who subscribe to these sorts of notions resting on their cleverness and grand posteriors and not actually getting it in the same way that my accomplished meditator friends get it. It seems so comforting, this notion that you are already something that you, in fact, are not, or that there is nothing that you could do that would be useful.

The notion that people already are something begs the question: What are they? These views tend to imply that they are already something such as perfect, enlightened, realized, awakened, or 324

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment something even worse such as Awareness, Cosmic Consciousness, The Atman, an aspect of The Divine, etc. all of which cannot actually be found. While Buddhism does sometimes go there, such as using terms such as Dharmakaya and Buddha Nature, these are very slippery, high concepts that were added later and require a ton of explanation and practice experience to keep them from becoming the monsters they nearly always become in less experienced hands.

Awakening involves clearly perceiving universal characteristics of phenomena. While one can attempt to rest comfortably in the

intellectual notion that these universal characteristics are there anyway and be comforted by teachings such as easily misconstrued statements like, “I have gained nothing by complete and un-excelled

enlightenment,” the whole, core, essential, root point of all this is that there is something to be gained by becoming one of the people that can actually directly perceive the true nature of things clearly enough to fundamentally change the way reality is perceived in real-time. The straight truth is that the vast majority of people do not start out being able to do anything even close to this, and most are lucky to be able to stay with three breaths in sequence before wandering off into their neurotic crap, much less understand anything liberating about those breaths. The notion that everyone already is someone who can perceive reality the way the masters do without effort in real-time is a fantastic falsehood, lie, untruth, and in short, one great load of apathy-creating insanity.