Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [9]
The timeless wisdom of Tibet assures us that when you are able to hear the Buddha’s wisdom, when you are willing to ponder his insightful lessons, and when you are genuinely committed to practicing these lessons by doing your best to lead an impeccable life, you can actualize this ground luminosity. You will reach the heart of awakening; you will know where you have been, and you will see where you are going. Your own inner light and truth—the clear light by which we see and are seen—will guide you. This is total awareness; this is perfect enlightenment. Enlightenment means an end to directionless wandering through the dreamlike passageways of life and death. It means that you have found your own home Buddha. How does the Buddha feel? Completely comfortable, at peace, and at ease in every situation and every circumstance with a sense of true inner freedom, independent of both outer circumstances and internal emotions.
Waking up your inner Buddha and staying awake requires extraordinary self-knowledge and presence of mind. It means paying close attention to how you think and how you act, and it means making an ongoing commitment to searching inward for answers. Inward. Deeper. Beneath the surface of things, not just inside yourself.
As Westerners, this isn’t how we have been conditioned to think. We keep looking outside for answers. We look for lovers, friends, parents, authorities, and even children to answer needs that they can’t possibly fulfill. We have fantasies about career, romance, friendship, and intimacy. We are so full of fantasies about the past and the future. Often we don’t want to let go of these fantasies because we fear that doing so means giving up on life. But that’s not how it works. In truth, unrealistic expectations tarnish our appreciation of life and weigh down the buoyancy of the present moment.
Don’t we all tend to think mainly in terms of the gratification of our desires and securing our place in the world? Haven’t we all been conditioned to place primary emphasis on persona, or how we appear? Our common languages abound with phrases about projecting a good image. The emphasis is on how you appear to yourself as well as how you appear to others—in order to get what you want. Don’t we all seek security, safety, and reassurance?
We’re often told, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” And we do. We do many somethings. When we are involved in unsatisfying relationships, we believe that our solutions will be found in different relationships; when we have jobs that make us angry and resentful, we believe that new jobs will give us what we want; when we’re unhappy with our surroundings, we believe we can resolve our unhappiness by changing locales. Then when our problems refuse to go away, we complain that we’re stuck and look for ways to get moving.
We take this kind of logic even further when we reduce life to an ongoing competition. Trained and conditioned to believe that life is about achievement, about winning, losing, and self-assertion, we put much of our energy into momentary solutions. It’s no wonder so many of us feel alienated, alone, exhausted, cynical, and disheartened.
Buddhism turns these attitudes about winning and achieving upside down and inside out. Buddhist emphasis is not on new ways to conquer outer space, cyberspace—or, for that matter, Manhattan Island. The wisdom traditions tell us that we can afford to slow down, take a breather, and turn inward. To master ourselves is to arrive home at the center of being—the universal mandala. What we seek, we already are. “Everything is available in the natural state,” as a lama of old once said. So why should we look anywhere else?