Spiritual Challenges

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “The Bodhisattva Ideal”

A Bodhisattva attains a kind of maturity and happiness that is different perhaps from what other sentient beings attain.  Other sentient beings revolve in this kind of episodic, cyclic continuum of you’ve got this and now you react in this way, and then you lose it.  Now you have this and you react in this way, and then you lose it.  And we go up and down and up and down and ride this current of samsaric experiences in the same way that a little child simply plays with everything around them.  You know how,when little children are small enough, the world is their toy and they just want what they want, whatever attracts their eye.  They want that and they have it. They don’t understand what that wanting is or where it’s going to result.

As sentient beings that have not been matured into the Bodhicittta, we live the same way. But when we mature as spiritual beings, we begin, like spiritual adults, to see the impermanent quality of everything around us—the feeling this and feeling this and riding on this current of acquisitions and power and self-pleasing.  We realize that this kind of thing is kind of fruitless in the same way that as adults we grow up and we don’t want to play with blocks any more.  We don’t want to color anymore.  We don’t want to do those things.  We don’t want to explore the world and put everything in our mouths to see what it tastes like, and drop everything from our high chairs.  We don’t want to do that.  We move on to bigger and better things!

So as spiritual adults, we feel like we have something else that we need to do.  We have a plan.  We have goals.  We have a long-range view. That is the spiritual maturing process that each one of us must go through.  How do you go through that?    Again, this is something that I have been trying to stress.  A child will never grow up if conditions surrounding the child do not “grow them up!”  Why would a child grow up?  Why would you stop going to Toys ’R Us?  There are all kinds of fun things there.  If they are living in a bubble that does not challenge them in any way, a child will simply not grow up.   But children do grow up into adults and they do so because as they move through time, or as they believe they move through time, they meet with greater and greater challenges.  And each experience of meeting with a challenge matures that person into an adult. It is the sum total of their experience that is their actual adulthood.  It’s the same way with a spiritual being as they move into the path of practice.

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