Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living Read Online Free PDF Page A

that’s one trap, and if you change that for a different belief system, that’s another trap. We have to pull the rug out from our belief systems altogether. We can do that by letting go of our beliefs, and also our sense of what is right and wrong, by just going back to the simplicity and the immediacy of our present experience, resting in the nature of alaya.

Let the World Speak for Itself
     
    T HE LAST of the absolute bodhichitta slogans is “In postmeditation, be a child of illusion.” This slogan says that when you’re not formally practicing meditation—which is basically the whole rest of your life—you should be a child of illusion. This is a haunting and poetic image, not all that easy to define. The way it’s phrased tends to encourage you to not define it. The idea is that your experience after you finish sitting practice could be a fresh take, an ongoing opportunity to let go and lighten up.
    This slogan has a lot to do with looking out and connecting with the atmosphere, with the environment that you’re in, with the quality of your experience. You realize that it’s not all that solid. There’s always something happening that you can’t pin down with words or thoughts. It’s like the first day of spring. There’s a special quality about that day; it is what it is, no matter what opinion you may have of it.
    When we study Buddhism, we learn about the view and the meditation as supports for encouraging us to let go of ego and just be with things as they are. These absolute bodhichitta slogans present the view. “In postmeditation, be a child of illusion” or “Regard all dharmas as dreams” for example, are pithy reminders of an underlying way of looking at the world. You don’t exactly have to be able to grasp this view, but it points you in a certain direction. The suggestion that you view the world this way—as less than solid—sows seeds and wakes up certain aspects of your being.
    Both the view and the meditation are great supports. They give you something to hold on to, even though all of the teachings are about not holding on to anything. We don’t just talk, we actually get down to it. That’s the practice, that’s the meditation. You can talk about lightening up till you’re purple in the face, but then you have the opportunity to practice lightening up with the outbreath, lightening up with the labeling. There is actual practice, a method that you’re given, a discipline.
    The view and the meditation are encouragements to relax enough so that finally the atmosphere of your experience just begins to come to you. How things really are can’t be taught; no one can give you a formula: A + B + C = enlightenment.
    These supports are often likened to a raft. You need the raft to cross the river, to get to the other side; when you get over there, you leave the raft behind. That’s an interesting image, but in experience it’s more like the raft gives out on you in the middle of the river and you never really get to solid ground. This is what is meant by becoming a child of illusion.
    The “child of illusion” image seems apt because young children seem to live in a world in which things are not so solid. You see a sense of wonder in all young children, which they later lose. This slogan encourages us to be that way again.
    I read a book called The Holographic Universe, which is about science making the same discoveries that we make sitting in meditation. The room that we sit in is solid and very vivid; it would be ridiculous to say that it wasn’t there. But what science is finding out is that the material world isn’t as solid as it seems; it’s more like a hologram—vivid, but empty at the same time. In fact, the more you realize the lack of solidity of things, the more vivid things appear.
    Trungpa Rinpoche expresses this paradox in poetic and haunting language. To paraphrase The Sadhana of Mahamudra: everything you see is vividly unreal in emptiness, yet there’s