Road To Here - #18 Climbing The Flat Mountain

Open up and listen.

Just listening inward.

From the vantage point of the still and clear mind,

We have a new way of approaching the big questions in life.

Disbound by the limitations of words and thoughts,

We are more receptive to learn from direct experience.

Existential questions seem to be out of fashion in modern society,

Sometimes dismissed as teenage problems or stoner talk.

We're so enchanted with the objects of experience,

Sights,

Sounds,

Flavours,

Touches.

We tend to forget the screen on which all those things happen,

The space in which life unfolds.

What is that?

In Buddhism,

And the other contemplative traditions,

We are looking for this ultimate freedom.

The ultimate reality,

The original stuff,

The substrate in which all experience happens.

It must be here all the time.

Now this might sound intellectual and philosophical,

But it's actually quite the opposite.

In order to have direct experience of reality,

To get in touch with bare naked nature,

We have to go beyond thoughts altogether.

We have to attend to that which knows thoughts,

That in which thoughts and everything else that is experienced,

Happen.

Therefore we practice listening rather than speaking,

Observing rather than thinking.

I wonder if many,

Who when they hear this kind of talk,

Feel despondent and inferior.

That the massive advances of modern science and technology has made us feel that finding answers to really deep questions is way out of our league.

I used to think like this too,

That it was way beyond me,

That I wasn't talented enough to get there.

But now I really want to encourage you to give it a go.

The most profound realizations I have had in my 20 years of meditation is how ordinary the most important things are.

In a way,

What's most special about me now is that which I have in common with each and everyone.

All I had to do was to discover that and grasp the significance of it.

InAnd That doesn't require great intelligence or genius of any kind,

But it does require being willing to look at your own direct experience with an open and questioning mind.

It requires not blindly trusting a teacher,

Teaching,

Or cultural assumption,

Including these very words,

But instead investigating reality as it presents itself to you.

This is not beyond our capability.

Looking out on the universe can make us feel small and insignificant,

But look more closely.

Look at the stars.

They are so bright,

So powerful,

So many.

One star can't see the others.

It knows neither about its own existence nor of the other stars.

What's the point of its existence?

What's the point of its existence?

In the universe though,

There are these other magic specks.

Little wrigly things with another kind of radiance.

They can see and know and understand and love.

You are one of these divine beings.

If it wasn't for you and your kind,

The whole thing would be empty,

Lifeless and meaningless.

You see,

You are conscious.

You are the real light in the world.

You are the light in the world.

The ultimate goal of Buddhism is liberation from suffering.

When wisdom arise in the mind,

One sees that suffering is nothing else than the pain of not realizing our true nature.

The Buddha left his worldly life of status and sensual pleasure that he had grown increasingly disenchanted with in order to find true happiness.

India at his time had a vibrant and varied spiritual scene and taking up the spiritual quest was a respected way of life.

Even though it meant living as a homeless mendicant.

After the Buddha had looked outside for answers for several years,

Having studied with the most reputable spiritual teachers of his time,

He eventually turned inwards relying on his own wisdom and his own experience.

And according to the Buddhist story,

He did realize the way to transcend suffering.

The Buddha was a practical man.

He didn't like suffering and looked for a way out of it.

He tried several ways before he found a solution.

He tried sensual indulgence,

But didn't find lasting satisfaction there.

Then he tried escaping from the world into deep meditative trances,

But found the world just waiting for him in the same state of mess whenever he had to log back on.

After that,

He tried battling suffering head-on through crazy acts of self-mortification,

But concluded after six years that it had gotten him nowhere.

In the end,

He turned inwards,

Relying on his own wisdom and his own experience,

And found peace in the midst of the ordinary human existence he had tried to run away from in different ways.

The ultimate goal in Buddhism,

As it is in most of the spiritual traditions,

Is to discover,

Uncover or realize the true nature of the universe and of us.

In the different religions and spiritual traditions,

This ultimate reality is called by many names.

Nirvana,

Moksha,

God,

The ground of being and so on.

To me,

It seems that in each of the great traditions,

There is a majority that hold a rather superficial,

Supernatural and fairy tale-like notion of what that is,

But also a minority that understand it in a deeper,

More accessible and more contemplative way.

Even though my entire spiritual unfolding has happened in the Buddhist context,

I often find more common ground when listening to contemplatives of other traditions than I do with more casual Buddhists.

In the end,

It's truth I'm after,

And truth is nothing other than truth.

It's not Buddhist or Christian or Hindu or New Age.

So,

It's reasonable to assume that an honest search by a Christian or by a scientist should uncover the same reality as an honest search by a Buddhist.

Nowadays,

Society is very much concerned with externals,

Appearance,

Sensual enjoyment,

Careers and so on.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with these things,

But it tends to consume all our time.

We spend all our time looking at the action on the screen,

Forgetting the screen itself.

Most people these days are not much concerned with the deep and meaningful questions,

And spend little,

If any,

Time to the pursuit of realizing the deeper meaning of existence.

I'm definitely pro-science,

But I think that the present scientific paradigm unfortunately contributes to the sense that the spiritual search is irrational,

A waste of time,

And out of touch with reality.

Human awareness,

Which used to be the undisputed supreme instrument for understanding our world,

Is now largely dismissed as just useless subjective opinion,

And in many ways seen as easily replaceable by mechanical or computational instruments.

But have we forgotten that it's still awareness that looks through the telescope,

That reads the results of the analysis,

That understands,

That truly understands,

The equations that describe the regularities of nature?

I mean,

We could wave those things in front of the eyes of a corpse,

And it wouldn't do much.

By observing the brain,

Neuroscientists can now figure out some of what's going on in a person's mind,

But it's still miles away from that person's own conscious awareness of what's going on in her mind.

This is extremely self-evident,

But I think actually a rather overlooked fact.

Nowadays,

Mainstream society seems more concerned with the meaning of emojis than with the meaning of life,

More interested in living with the Kardashians than living in the present moment.

There's a battle between fake news and the truth,

But ultimate truth,

It's not much to be talked about.

It's as if it's just assumed that it's of no use or value.

There seem to be more emphasis on what makes us different from each other than the ways in which we are interconnected.

But to me,

It also seems like people are gradually waking up.

Getting in touch with the intuition that there is something more to life,

Some deeper truth to be seen.

So you you