An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo from the Vow of Love Series
Look at a cup. Find cup in there. Take it apart. Grind it up, find cup. Cup is the idea of cup. And you can continue with everything – your house, your family. Let’s take your house and examine it. Let’s take your house apart. We’ll put it all under the microscope. Then find family. We’ll examine the people that you are calling family. Which one of them is family? We’re going take them all apart, just the way we took you apart. Where are we going to find family? Family is a concept. Who made it up? You did. Where are you? I haven’t found me yet!
It’s crazy, but it’s a good way to start practicing, because we’re going to find that everything we live by – the things that make us suffer, the things that we bust our tails trying to do, everything that we do – is based upon an idea that we made up. We did! We made it up, and it has affected us for all this time. We can begin there. It’s true that it would take some time to achieve realization by meditating in that way, but it’s a good place to start. Meditating on the emptiness of self and phenomena can give us the foundation and the strength to live the extraordinary life of compassion that I have been talking about. It’s that kind of extraordinary life of compassion, coupled with profound prayers, which will allow us to return in whatever form necessary in order to benefit beings. Even now, we will be able to benefit beings if we consider this is the most important thing in our entire lives, and we yearn for it.
We will have a little side benefit if we do this. The side benefit is that, in the process, we will be purifying our mind of the garbage associated with self and desire we have gathered around it. We will move closer to successfully meditating on and knowing that profound, uncontrived, natural state of mind, just through the virtue of considering ourselves to be only important in as much as we can benefit beings, and beginning to function in that way.
But, I tell you, the more we get on an ego trip about this, the more we are creating the causes of suffering and the further away we get from perceiving the natural state. Because the natural state is, as it is – unpolluted, untarnished, untainted. The only thing that makes us perceive something else is that we have stuck blue in the back of the crystal, and the blue, symbolically, is conceptualization. The way to liberate the mind from the belief in the phenomena of blueness as being inherently real is to meditate on the emptiness of phenomena, the emptiness of self-nature, and to live a life that causes the purification of the mind and actually cleanses discursive thought. That is the ticket.
No matter who your teacher is, if you really could talk heart to heart with any profoundly realized teacher of any religion – and I’m willing to say this publicly, any teacher, any time if they are profoundly realized, no matter what religion they started – will tell you that the answer is the end of ego, all of its desire, and the conceptual proliferations that come with it. The realization of the natural state is the answer. That state is uncontrived, unchanging, unborn and infinite.
That’s your Kellogg’s cereal box-top, nature of mind teaching for today. Whether you go the traditional Buddhist route, or whether you want to continue in a more general, yet profound route, I hope you will consider the tremendous opportunity and rewards of an extraordinary life. For you to even have the karma to come to this point where you might consider such a thing is tremendous. I urge you not waste this precious human rebirth. It’s an extraordinary opportunity. You have the opportunity to see things and to hear teachings that will change your mind forever, so that in some future time, you will surely be able to benefit beings in some extraordinary way.
I urge you to continue, and don’t waste your time. The expression, ‘don’t throw your pearls before swine,’ really does apply here. This is an extraordinary life, and if you were to spend it on ordinary things, it would be a shame. I hope that you will cultivate your excellent qualities and let them grow so that they will nurture all beings.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
Amazing teaching, Jetsunma! Thank you!
Thank you again for posting another precious teaching, Lama.
As I do not have a teacher at the moment i just wanted to say a big Thank You for this and your other teachings, they are so helpful and inspirational and I am very grateful.