Epilogues: Discussions Around the Fire

Written By Burgs

The Bliss of Dukkha

Burgs: So what are you doing in your meditation?

Student: I am trying to develop upekkhā...

Burgs: Yes, I think you should now just start to develop equanimity, and to rest in equanimity and look out for the point at which the equanimity is disturbed. We can now start to do this without deliberately averting the mind to one thing or another. This now becomes close to the way of abiding we use in Dzogchen.


So what causes our equanimity to be disturbed? When we see this, we see the cause of suffering. When we see our equanimity undisturbed we see the cessation of suffering. In the end the whole of the path, the whole Dhamma comes down to this point. The moment at which the universe is disturbed from its innate state of rest.

Actually the universe is never disturbed. It is only our mind that feels disturbed. It is the clarity and spaciousness of awareness itself that is disturbed by the arising of the mind.


And if we look deeply enough we can see that actually the arising of the mind itself does not disturb. It is our inability to leave everything alone that is the disturbance. This is the shaking of bhavaṅga that brings about the whole illusion of self and the mass of friction and suffering that comes with it. It is our reaction to what we experience that disturbs bhavaṅga. Nothing more. The experience itself does not disturb.

Look for this moment in your meditation until you can see it clearly. It is this, as some impulsion, some reaction, some saṅkhārā impinges upon bhavaṅga and the chain of dependent origination begins again.

So I want to suggest you add a new dimension into the practice at this point. Stop all the reviewing of states and investigate now how great is your capacity to leave them as they are. To leave them alone. In a way all of our investigating eventually becomes just a sign of our inability to leave everything to be as it is. It’s a paradox if you like. We started this whole journey of investigating reality so that what we come to see will prompt us to be able to leave it alone, to leave it to be as it is. Now you have come to the point of testing how far your practice has served its purpose. This vipassanā I have asked you to do is not meditation. It is a mental exercise that teaches us how to meditate. Now it is time to start meditating. And meditating is nothing more than allowing everything to be as it is. To rest within yourself as you witness everything resting within itself, until these two things become one.

That’s meditation. The complete state. The awake state. Awake to the ‘suchness’ of things as they are. Undisturbed and at peace with things as they are.

So now I want you to start to spot the exact moment this impingement starts to arise. I want you to watch the moment bhavaṅga becomes disturbed the same way you would notice the exact moment that a pebble is thrown into the pond by the fact that it instantly stops being mirror-like. As soon as it is disturbed, each disturbance you witness, go into this friction, deeply. Completely immerse yourself in the pure experience of this friction, feel it and rest with it at it’s most fundamental level. Feel this friction as an embodied experience and know that this is the friction of clinging. The affliction that is caused by not being able to leave things as they are.

This oppression that clinging produces is dukkha itself, that is what suffering is. Feel the misery of this clinging, feel the deep affliction of this clinging, know this tension at the most basic level and recognise the suffering that comes with clinging. Feel this deep sense of affliction within the whole of your being. This clinging is your suffering, the energy of this clinging is painful, it is wretched, it is relentless, and it is to be let go. Enter deeply into this experience and feel the clinging throughout every aspect of your being at the deepest level you can and then reflect on what it would be like to be free of this.

As you enter more deeply into this experience you will find that the mind automatically seeks to be free of this friction and will start to be willing to let go. Reflect on the disturbance you cause to the universe through your clinging, the deep inconvenience you and your clinging is to the universe and everything in it. Reflect on the racket you make upsetting the peace of the world by your dogged attachment to self. Look at the unbelievable state of disorder you hold things in, in your attempts to uphold your vain ideas of self. Our ego is a gross disruption, our ego is an utter commotion, our ego is to be relinquished so that the universe can rest within itself as it would if we were not disturbing it. Think of the peace there would be if we were not constantly churning things up. Feel this friction in the depths of your mind and experience the unbelievable tension that clinging is producing. Keep reflecting on the fact that your clinging is an utter inconvenience to the universe.

So this might seem a bit much but this is the direct path, this is the way to the remainderless cessation, this is the way to the complete relinquishing of self and whilst it may offend some people I would suggest, in truth, anything else falls short if real liberation is what you want. The only way to total peace is to let go your ideas of yourself completely. Real freedom comes when there is no self left to cling.

Yes, I suppose up to now you may have let go this and that idea, you may have let go some of your more vain and grandiose complexes about who you thought you might be, you may have relinquished the grossest aspects of yourself and started to restrain your conduct. But at the deepest level you remain utterly conditioned, totally bound by instinct and deep habitual tendencies, you behave in a way that is entirely predictable prone to reaction no differently to anyone else.

So keep going, enter deeply into this netherworld of the human psyche and feel the friction of these deep kammic potentials, see that in fact we are all slaves to impersonal forces, deep universal movements of kamma, who are totally thrown about bound and shackled at the mercy of this kamma. Be with this at it’s most fundamental level knowing completely what the affliction of being bound by kamma is. Remain in this state for days, for weeks for months, keep going and don’t give up. If your body starts to fall apart find bliss in your dukkha, come to know the bliss of dukkha as you allow the equanimity that comes from this deep practice to pervade your being. Don’t give up until you don’t need to do anything at all. Stay in your dukkha with unmovable upekkhā, knowing it completely until to move from your cushion is totally unnecessary. Don’t stop until even suffering is no longer suffering.

Surrender totally to the process, trust it utterly. Become totally stable in your instability, let go any clinging to blissful and well organised states, become completely stable as you fall apart, abandon any concerns and let the universe carry you, trust totally in life, you no longer have to hold yourself together. Just sit and wait as your unconscious reorganises into the highest state possible. This is the way to the real cessation of suffering.

After some time the student came back having meditated in this way and said:

Student: I went and practised in this way and really felt like until now I hadn’t really been meditating at all. Reviewing the five aggregates and all of that seemed to be totally peripheral, almost like faffing about, dry and lacking the wet depth of this meditation. Kamma in my body was releasing in a much deeper way than it ever had been before and what seems like at a much deeper level.

Burgs: Yes, this is because of the way in which the mind was working before, smothering everything. It is because now there is no mental reflection in the way of the experience, so the mind knows directly what it apprehends. It is just pure perception and pure awareness that is engaged at this level, it is no longer the mind that is meditating, it is no longer a mental exercise, it is simply the unadulterated direct experience of friction produced by clinging. In this way you know and feel completely what the cause of your suffering is so you let go as a matter of course. So keep going, this is the process working now at a very deep level beyond the mental exercises of the systematic reviewing of states, it is a deep knowing that occurs as awareness itself touches these deeply clung to states. You should keep going with this now.

A Brief Chat on the Dhamma Being Complete Within Itself – A Student Asks Burgs About Experiencing What is Beyond Self

Student: It seems when reviewing the experience of awareness that something beyond me is experiencing me, but in a way that is not entirely complete and in a sense this leaves the impression that in the absence of me as a witness there would still be something that experiences.

Burgs: This sense that something beyond you is experiencing you is because there is still self. Bhavaṅga perceives something apart from itself and there is still a gap between the perceiver and the perceived. The mind is not unified with its experience yet. When the mind becomes one there is nothing left to wonder about and the experience becomes complete within itself. At this point there is nothing to add with the mind.

Student: I do experience a point of completion when there is no sense of self but this is only for as long as I am in that state.

Burgs: Yes, because the sense of dualistic perception arises when bhavaṅga arises as you are not in that state all the time. But even when we emerge back into habitual dualistic state of perception the habit of accepting or rejecting is gradually left behind. Even your attention is not placed directly on the true nature of reality at these times, the lower mind is now pacified and no longer seeks to impose its old habit patterns. This is how we gradually bring equanimity back from the extraordinary experience of reality in its true nature, to our ordinary waking moment that may even stop short of wise attention. This is the effect of our maturity in insight and equanimity rolling out into all our ordinary experiences.

Student: I feel like I have been looking for some kind of unified experience that is a resolution. I have been trying to come to a decisive experience of unification that translates back into every day reality. I was doing this by looking for a completely satisfied experience within my meditation and then watching for what is the cause for the loss of that experience.

Burgs: The thing is no amount of contemplation of this will bear fruit. The only thing that brings fruit is meditative stability. You just keep going and going, keep meditating and the experience will show you. Eventually you will find the mind that keeps trying to work stuff out as vexing and you will let it go. The more you enter into the experience the more complete it becomes. Eventually it becomes the oneness of all things and there is no separation. The Dhamma is contained in all things and there are no more questions to be asked.

I understand what you are talking about when you say something beyond you is experiencing you and it is this gap that leads to all the libraries of the world being filled with books on ideas about God, all this poetry and mysticism comes from this sense of something beyond us that is experiencing us. This sense of something beyond us and the separation always leaves the feeling there is something more to be discovered. But this does not go far enough to unify and complete the experience and we are left with the idea that there is something else to be revealed.

But there isn’t, there is only this moment and it is complete within itself. Eventually you will realise that it is not awareness experiencing you and other things as separate, awareness is experiencing itself. There is no separation between the experiencer and the experienced. Whilst there is still bhavaṅga arising there is the potential to experience things. When there is no bhavaṅga the potential for awareness to reflect remains un-manifest and you cannot testify as to the existence or non-existence of awareness in the absence of the witness.

It is only through meditative stability that this question of whether there is anything beyond our perception of self as witness comes to an end. It is meditative stability alone that ends the sense of self and other. Until that point the question will remain and the mind will continue to seek to answer it. These things are all testimony to our as yet unrealised ability to leave things as they are and see that they are complete within themselves.

Student: So that suggests that because I can’t see my yurt I cannot testify as to its existence or non-existence, so I cannot say whether it exists or not...

Burgs: This is not the point. This need to accept or reject is still just a mental exercise, arising within the mind. It is still a reflection of an inability to leave everything as it is. It doesn’t matter to anything but your mind whether your yurt exists dependent upon your experience of it or not. The truth lies only in what we experience. And it always lies in what we are experiencing. Its display, its causes and the basic ground are all revealed spontaneously within the experience itself when we allow ourselves to simply enter completely into it. The lower mind plays no part in the knowing of these things, there is nothing to fathom or think about or to come to conclusion on. They are simply known in their suchness. This is the ineffable nature of things.

But all these questions fade away with meditative stability and the experience reveals itself. When the mind unifies then there is a complete experience without the sense that there remains something still to be revealed. There are no questions to be asked and everything is left alone. When you rest on the mountain-like presence of your being then awareness becomes that which it experiences, it is totally with it, when you rest on the stillness of the heart you are totally with it, or even any of the four elements you are totally there. Whenever you are totally there with your experience, we see that the Dhamma is contained and expressed perfectly within all things, there is no separation, this is how the awakened mind experiences itself.

The meditation on Mountain Lake Sky is a meditation on the complete state. It is the practice that reveals the self-perfecting nature of the universe. It is what convinces us to leave everything alone as we watch the Three Kayas perfect themselves. Finally we can let go and allow the universe to perfect itself. The point is to utterly trust this process we are a part of. Awareness comes into being to experience the process of coming into being. There is nothing left to do but to abide within it. It is totally complete. There is nowhere we can go and nothing that we could do that would make this moment more complete than it already is.

Question on the Development of Deep Equanimity

There is a part of me that is still not equanimous to what I experience, I know I’m not equanimous enough but I don’t really know what to do? I don’t think I know how to get to equanimity from a lack of it.

The point is Uppekhā. It is a moment to moment abiding where you are not supposed to do anything. There’s a very deep practice which cultivates an un-contrived equanimity at a profound level. You just rest deeply allowing ever deeper layers of your unconscious to become more and more stable and equanimous. Until the experience becomes so complete that there is nothing more to do and in fact to do anything would make everything less complete.

This becomes an equanimity that is so deep that nothing at all needs to be done. Everything is left alone because it is already perfect as it is. So the gross that you are averse to becomes perfect. You don’t need to change it, you are happy to be with it as it is. Any resolution that you need to come to about things is actually in your mind. So your not being able to be with this or that and needing to do something or act on something to try and sort it out is in fact only changing conditions so you are okay with them in your mind rather than being deeply equanimous to them.

But the real point is you don’t need to keep trying to change the universe. It is already perfect and self-perfecting, it is only your not seeing it as such that prompts in you a need to do something to it. You can’t keep on trying to re-organise things so they fit your narrow bandwidth of wants and needs. So enter more deeply into the experience of everything being okay with it as it is. That’s what equanimity is. That’s all it is. Nothing more and nothing less.

Be okay with everything, profoundly deeply okay with everything, seeing the perfection of all things as they are. I sit in my room and things need to be put away but I don’t put them away, not because of sloth and torpor but because they are okay as they are, they are resting perfectly where they are and they don’t need to be moved. Everything is complete as it is and everything can stay as it is not because of sloth and torpor but because of equanimity.

I talk about a state in my book ‘Beyond the Veil’ where I woke up one morning and realised I was already in deep samadhi. I sort of half got out of my bed and then just stopped on the floor between my bed and the meditation cushion. Before I knew it, it was lunch and I hadn’t even made it onto my cushion. Just one continuous moment of samadhi. This is a profoundly deep practice where everything is just left alone and you abide in a state of deep immersion in the moment.

So just enter more and more deeply into the moment, you don’t need to work anything out, the more in the moment you become the less anything will need to be resolved.

Question on Developing More Meditative Stability

Student: So I have got to a point where things reliably happen in my meditation but I am not sure where to go with them?

Burgs: Well give me an example.


Student: So let’s say meditation on mountain-like presence of the body. Depending upon how I pay attention to my body different experience arise. If I meditate on the experience of earth element within the body then over time a nimitta starts to appear.

Burgs: What does it look like?

Student: It doesn’t really look like anything, it’s just a deep, stable, inspiring, felt experience of earth as earth?

Burgs: Yes, so it’s a felt experience produced by the stability of attention. It is becoming satisfying because you are beginning to allow it just to be to the point where you are starting to enter deeply into it. This is the key; we cannot enter deeply into our experience until we allow it just to be. So you can start to see why equanimity comes first and then real samadhi follows in its path.

Student: Yes, just a stable sense of earth. But at that point I’m not really sure what to do. I can extend the felt impression but what happens is I’m not sure where to go with it, what to do, should I extend the sign or what?

Burgs: You’re not supposed to do anything, the point is to be with it. You could extend the sign but really you should just be with it and watch the restlessness that needs to do something with it. That is the next hindrance that needs to be surmounted; this subtle sense of needing to do something. This is still restlessness. We need to just allow the stability of attention to develop. So watch for the mind that needs to do something. So there’s something to work on for the next few months! Ha ha... Look for the subtle restlessness that stops the meditative stability deepening within itself

Student: Yes! Okay, thank you.

Burgs: And what was the next experience?

Student: So if I pay attention to the mountain-like sense of presence of my being, according to your instructions on the mountain lake sky meditation, slowly my body starts to feel like crystal and bright and then it’s like my mind starts to produce a nimitta of rainbows. And I suppose I have been trying to trust the insight that comes from the experience.

Burgs: Like what insight?

Student: Well I might be thinking rubbish but it seems like if my mind is producing rainbows that all of this display is in fact a display of a rainbow-like quality of awareness...

Burgs: The thing to look at is the fact that your mind is now seeking to explain it’s experience when actually the wisdom is contained within the experience itself. Your mind is trying to fill in the gaps. The point is to be with the experience so that it informs itself, rather than you filling in the gaps with your ideas about what you are experiencing. So try and just be with the experience and wait for your meditative stability to reveal to you what is going on. Always the answer, whenever these kind of effects are observed within our practice, is to leave them alone. The moment we follow them with the mind, the mind becomes entangled in the process and it stops being a spontaneous display. Once that starts we can really get lost in impressions because the mind is capable of producing almost any display we can dream up.

Student: Ok, I see thank you. The other thing that seems to arise within my meditation across the various states is that there is a point at which there is no sense of self which is an amazing relief. When my mind realises that it feels so happy and it is a momentary cessation of suffering. It feels like a state of samadhi of sorts that has the tone of a different state of consciousness, and as an experience it is such a relief.

Burgs: Yes this is because your mind is not there adding or taking from the experience. This is equanimity, not necessarily samadhi. It can arise with and without becoming unified to a point of samadhi. But the thing is, across all of these things that you have just explained what you need to recognise is that it is your mind that is breaking up the continuity of these experiences. Whether it’s the crystal light that you speak of, your mind is arising and you are thinking, “Wow so does this mean that everything is just a display of rainbow light?” All of this is still the habit of coming back to the mind to seek resolution there rather than being with the experience and waiting for it to reveal itself. The innate wisdom that is contained within the experience will not be revealed in any other way than by continuing to deepen into the experience itself. This will not happen as long as the mind seeks to add something to the experience, even by way of seeking understanding.

Take what you have just described to me for example. Look closely at where the relief is currently coming from. The relief you are describing to me now is the relief you are feeling at reaching a resolution in your mind, ie. being able to convince your mind that the absence of self is the complete experience. Now you should practice just leaving the experience as it is so that the relief comes from within the experience itself. This is the real point of resolution, of completeness and of unification. This is where we finally see that there is nothing to add or take from the experience, and nothing to accept or reject. So when you describe the relief of there being no sense of self, what you are actually describing is your mind reflecting on the experience and then being relieved that it is not there. Your mind is still the reference point as it is the thing that is relieved that it is not there.

So you have an experience of the relief of no-self which is then related back through your mind. So you can see in both instances you are still looking to resolve your experience in your mind rather than let the experience develop. So try and leave the mind alone. Try and develop your practice so you do not review the experience. Get into the discipline of not reviewing your practice, just come out of your meditation and leave the meditation where it was, leave the experience where it is. Do not bring your mind into your practice. This is how you should practice so that your mind falls away and is no longer the reference point. With meditative stability your meditation becomes complete within itself and you do not need to bring your mind into the practice. So try and get into the habit of not reviewing your experience, just immerse yourself in it in an ever deepening way, so that the experience can deepen and emerge without constantly being interrupted by your mind trying to resolve it.

So wait, wait for everything to complete itself and emerge. This is where the real meditative stability will come from. Trying to understand your experience in the mind is clinging to self. Eventually you will get to a stage where the idea of reviewing your experience is tiresome. The energy associated with reviewing is vexing – try and see it as this. Gradually you will not need to constantly review what is going on; try and see the energy that wants to understand its experience as disagreeable, unnecessary, a faff, not adding anything, just clinging to self and its need to understand. Abide beyond this scrutinizing of your experience. Abide in a deeper state beyond constant reference and commentary from your mind, so that the experience can complete itself. This is where you want to get to.

To Be Human – A Talk in the Woods One Night

Burgs: In a way I think it’s important to recognise why we have come to earth and this gross material realm of experience. You look to these subtle material beings, you feel them around us in these woods and think perhaps you would like to be one of them, or you see that state as more desirable than this gross material state; but you have been such beings before and you have waited and waited just to incarnate on this planet. This human life so so rare and so precious.


You came here to imbibe and complete the human experience, not to constantly inhabit subtle states. And this is what it is about, around a fire, maybe feeling a bit cold, maybe a bit hungry, having eaten all that we have but really feeling alive. Surrounded by trees in this wood, totally here. You maybe think how amazing it would be to abide only in subtle states, but the Deva cannot taste the food here, they cannot drink the water and feel it in the embodied state of a physical body. They cannot feel the wind or the sun on their faces. There are countless Devas who long for this opportunity to experience this. You can feel these things in the depth of your being as a profoundly embodied experience. This is what the human experience is about.

To me the human experience is infinite in its potential, not only can you experience the exalted and subtle states of being of the Deva and Brahma realms or call them what you wish, but you can experience the depth of what it is to be physical in this material realm. You can experience what it is to be human. Humanity is our shared experience of trying to make sense of what it is to be here alive on this planet. And that itself is truly amazing. Here we are, a part of the most exquisite display of the creative principle and it is right here to wake up to, in this dimension right in front of you. This experience of being alive is enough and it is right in front of you. Everything you ever did and everything you ever sought was really only in an attempt to wake up to this experience of being alive right now.

Questions and Answers on Our Precious Existence

Q. How does kamma affect what beings experience?

A. Kamma is one of the conditions for the way things are. That kamma that’s fruiting conditions the way things are. The way things are now, and the way things have been for the last hundred years, is the fruiting of a large group of people’s good kamma. The way that they behave and the things they might choose to do will become the conditions for what fruits in the future. For a small group of us it is our kamma to be born on the planet in conditions where it is not a struggle to get by, it is our kamma to be born on a planet where we do not have to fight for the requisites to support our life, it is even our kamma to be born on a planet where we can indulge in the enjoyment of our sensual desires.

Most beings just have this sensual desire, but now in this rare time we have the opportunity to go out and indulge in the enjoyment of these desires. That is why for a while we have stopped fighting amongst ourselves. Normally beings who have desire but no way of satisfying them, endlessly fight amongst themselves out of jealously and frustration.

But this time now is incredibly rare kamma. It hasn’t happened historically for large groups of people in the whole history of humanity. So what we have now upon our planet is an ever increasing group of people with that much good fortune with an ever increasing desire to indulge in their good fortune. But this is in a way the most dangerous time of all as well because it means that we have got an ever increasing appetite for consumption. As these kinds of beings become more numerous, the desire to consume in this domain becomes ever greater and that’s why we are so quickly running out of resources.

It’s our good kamma to be here. But what is the good kamma for our being here? It is our previous merit. Where is our good kamma for our future good fortune being accumulated? Well sadly, it’s not. You can see, if you understand Dependent Origination, even at quite a surface level, that there is no future cause for these present conditions to sustain themselves as we consume our planet without making merit. So we, as human beings, won’t have this good fortune again. Maybe other groups of human beings will have. But we will not.

If you look at where we are at in the world cycle, we are the most fortunate of beings to incarnate as humans. We haven’t seen any more fortunate than us. Historically, going into the past, human beings were generally much less fortunate than us. So we are appearing on the earth as the most fortunate group of beings in this whole world cycle.

So now you have a situation where not only is our good kamma being used up by us, but we are not creating the merit for such conditions to appear again in the future. So slowly the conditions are becoming such where one can no longer experience so easily the fruiting of good kamma, the enjoyment of one’s pleasures and the gratification of one’s desires.

Our good fortune gave us the most rare opportunity to enjoy being alive, much more easily than any of our predecessors. But with that, our thirst for that experience is what has consumed our good fortune so quickly. It is like coming into this life with a very healthy bank balance but spending so recklessly that we are now running on overdraft. It is a very unskilful way to be.

The security that we have grown used to while we had a healthy positive kammic bank balance means that we have grown accustomed to getting and having what we want. It is a shock for one who has grown used to such things to find themselves no longer able to have them, much more of a shock than it is for one who has not grown used to them.

The extremely fortunate kamma that we have squandered could have kept us going for a whole world cycle, aeons, lifetimes. And for many beings it does, because they haven’t got the same thirst, the same desire for gratification. Those beings for whom the appreciation of what is actually already there in this human realm, is enough for them – those generations of beings do not consume the planet. They haven’t got the thirst for it. It is greed that consumes beings and causes them to consume their good fortune until it is not enough to support them. Those who are touched by and thereafter consumed by the desire to consume are the ones who end up without enough merit to support their desires.

Historically, there have only been a few very fortunate people in positions of extreme privilege, who do consume vast amounts, but their impact is not enough alone to bring the natural order out of balance. In a way their presence is part of the natural order. When we see Dependent Origination we see this. But they do not consume their planet, just a part of it maybe: they only consume their own good kamma. But many of them also find ways to renew their good kamma by living a life of merit.

But this time now is a one-off period of time. We could, with our good fortune, have decided to spend countless lifetimes enjoying a balanced existence but because our needs are so great we get swiftly tired of that. We are always wanting more.


So kamma never comes to an end. It is changing. That kamma which is fruiting, having the condition for it to fruit, that’s the order of things, that’s the world cycle. Where we are, at the moment, is our place in that world cycle. If you were born in England a thousand years ago, it would either have not been you or different kamma was fruiting for you.

Q. So does the state of beings’ minds experiencing all of this eventually affect and impact the material dimension?

A. Eventually, yes. It even filters down to affect the physical world around us. The mental plane is already very low vibration. The etheric energy plane is greatly affected by the quality of consciousness. In certain places the mental energy proliferates and smothers out all, what shall we call it, higher consciousness or natural energy, natural intelligence. If you go into a city, it is only the noise of the mental energy of mind. There is none of the ordering principle of nature there because the mental energy has smothered it out, swamped it. So it does affect this realm at that level.

You can see that plants grow well in the right vibration and that they don’t grow as well in the wrong vibration. So at that level consciousness does affect the physical plane. But it is the actual consuming of things physically, our consumption that is the using up of the planet’s kamma, if you want to see it like that. We have spent the investment of our capital, ten billion years, thirty billion years, however many years it has taken this planet to produce this field of opportunity in the universe.


The appearance of the world itself is the blind turtle surfacing in the vast ocean and placing its head within the yoke. It happens occasionally and rarely and affords the opportunity for beings to incarnate and engage in this physical experience of being.

Like I have said all along, spending nine months in the womb, just for the purposes of opening your eyes and beholding this, even just for a minute, is actually enough. It really is enough. That there is no appreciation of that – of the coming into being in this physical plane in the first place – is the tragedy, because it truly is the miracle. It’s unfathomable that consciousness can incarnate in this physical form. That’s the unfathomable, the rare opportunity. It’s hard to be here consciously because of the demands of holding consciousness and keeping consciousness expressed in the physical form: such a delicate, extraordinary process – the conditions for it. And this is the fruiting of such good kamma.

That Devas of good fortune seek the opportunity to experience this physical dimension, this material dimension, and that they have to wait aeons for this opportunity, shows its rarity. When there is the desire for human life but a lack of merit, one also has to experience the hardships of being incarnated physically, without the good kamma to be well supported. But the desire to experience this at all is so great that beings have tolerated no end of suffering just to do so.


And the saddest thing of all, is that, in that process of coming into being, we have come to forget what it was that we came here for. We are a handful, a small group of fortunate people, among the masses of people who are already experiencing hardships in this dimension.


Nobody seems to understand how pure the essence of human life is. This exquisite, miraculous event in the universe, this profound mechanism by which consciousness can enter into physical form and express itself, rather than witnessing it from afar. That’s the thing. The coming into being is what beings long for. And the opportunity to do it, to find that way through, in this universe, happens rarely and for a brief period of time, while the conditions for it are sustained on this planet, by universal laws and by us as guardians of it while we are here.

The world undoes itself by natural law and then the opportunity for this experience doesn’t present itself any more to beings, until by natural law it appears again. For aeons beings long for and wait for that opportunity. And that is the tragedy, isn’t it? Not to recognise this precious opportunity and to love it and cherish it while you are here, having waited so long for it; that opportunity just to see an oak tree coming from an acorn, to see the blueness of the sky and the redness of the sun and feel its warmth.

Just these simple experiences are so utterly profound. The difference between witnessing these things as separate and embodying them deeply as one with them, this is what beings accumulate good kamma and merits for and keep their purity for so long for, in the hope that they can be pure enough and fortunate enough to be sustained in that, naturally. It’s very special, very precious and very rare.

Now they have the capacity to exercise their will over that order. And the higher the intelligence of those beings who incarnate, the more their desire to become the creator, rather than an expression of that creative principle. Because no matter how high their intelligence is, it is not even close to fathoming that innate creative principle that is the orchestrator of all life. And this desire to be the creator, to delight in our own creations becomes the final consumption. The exercising of this capacity to create, that breaks the delicate balance that exists in the natural order, is in the end the very cause for the undoing of it all. In a way you could say that, in our self-obsession, we seek to become God.

For millions of years the earth goes through its thing but it is still so delicate that if one asteroid hits it in that time and it gets moved another hundred thousand miles from the sun it would probably no longer support life. It is delicately poised in this vast universe with these conditions. It is just resting there for that brief moment when it can be there and then it is gone. And for all of us beings to just experience this is what we wait for, long for – for this opportunity.


So humanity is initially Deva consciousness, experiencing itself incarnated. And the loss of that virtue is saṁsāra, dukkha and suffering, not realising that virtue is the basis of that rare opportunity. When you look now at the misery that beings are experiencing, that’s the kamma of not honouring historically that delicate extraordinary, exquisite invitation or opportunity to come into being.

So maybe it is through that gnashing of teeth and wailing and struggling that people start to realise the virtue that it takes to be guardians of something as rare and as beautiful as this planet, or even just to be participants in it.



You know, the oak tree out there rests within itself and beholds the coming and going of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun every day without interfering. The only thing is that it doesn’t have the same capacity to appreciate it like we do. It’s just experiencing the suchness of its own being, whereas we have this capacity to take it all in.

I keep telling people that, so that they can start to realise what they are in the middle of, which is so amazing. And then when you awaken to that, there isn’t anything that you would do to harm it, you couldn’t bring yourself to do something to harm it. So it is the awakening to that which is the key. It is the ignorance that is the undoing. The ignorance which is to not awaken to what it is that we are involved in.

People are waking up, of course they are. At one level or another they are looking out at their world and going, “This is too beautiful to destroy. This has to stop.” People are waking up, maybe not necessarily fully realising what is actually unfolding but enough to be moved to a point of wanting change. The challenge though, is are we willing to initiate sufficient change to redress the balance and justify our position here, or is that change going to be thrust upon us as an expression of Dependent Origination, an expression of the conditions we have created? Because that is how nature is. Nature is Dependent Origination in its purest form.

Burgs https://www.theartofmeditation.org
Previous

Ch.36 - The Pride of the Sage and the Wisdom of the Fool