Break Free

An excerpt from a teaching called Bodhicitta by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

One thing I like about all of you is your great compassion.  You really want to help people.  I’ve always loved that about you.  There are some of you that are less interested than others, but everyone here really wants to help all sentient beings.   But you know what?   You can’t help anyone until you yourself are free of cyclic existence, because what you have there is the blind leading the blind.  While you have hatred, greed and ignorance in your mind stream, you cannot help anyone.  You can generate the deity all day long.  You can help little old ladies cross the street all you want. You can make them bliss out and have a beautiful experience and sing songs and play music, and rub their backs and wiggle their toes and everything, but you can’t help them, because you may give them a short experience of happiness, and sometimes that’s worse because you can give them hope where there is no hope.  The only hope is to break the cycle of cyclic existence and to be free of it.  Sometimes the worst thing you can do for people is to give them a lot of blissful experiences, because sometimes it causes them to be satisfied and complacent and they don’t try to grow spiritually.  Sometimes it can inspire them.  But very often it can do the opposite.

The most profoundly beautiful thing about you is that you really want to help people.  You really do.  Then doesn’t it seem logical, that you would therefore take complete responsibility for your realization?  If you can help somebody by achieving liberation in such a way that you can consciously reincarnate and come back in a form to teach others to achieve liberation, wouldn’t it seem rational that you would take profound responsibility for that and say, “I will do anything.  So I am going to eradicate this grasping from my mind.  I’m going to practice so hard and so sincerely.”  And still I see people mouthing prayers.  How do you do that?  Still I see you trying to have a powerful experience.  How can you do that?  So what if you have a powerful experience?  If you are going to be reborn as a cow, what’s the big deal? Is that what you want?

You have to have courage.  You have to say, “I’m finished.  I’m finished with all this junk that betrays me, with all of this stuff that ends up to be a bauble and nothing more with all this distraction that I’m wasting my life on.  I’ve got 20 or 30 or 40 years to live. Am I going to waste it on this kind of distraction?”  Just think about that.  Then what will you do?  You’ll have to realize the faults of cyclic existence.  You’ll have to realize how impermanent it is.  You’ll have to realize how fraught with pitfalls it is.  You’ll have to realize how completely unconscious you are.  You are tossed about. You have no control over where you are going to be born in the next incarnation.  You have no control over any of that stuff until you seriously practice Dharma in such a way that you are able to break free of dualistic mind and therefore break free of the prison of samara.  That’s what it takes.  It’s the only thing you can do.

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