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

definitely form. What you see is not here; it’s not not here. It’s both and neither. Everything you hear is the echo of emptiness, yet there’s sound—it’s real—the echo of emptiness. Then Trungpa Rinpoche goes on to say, “Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.”
    This is as close as you could come to describing what it means to be a child of illusion. That’s the key point: this good and bad, happy and sad, can be allowed to dissolve into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.
    The practice and the view are supports, but the real thing—the experience of sound being like an echo of emptiness or everything you see being vividly unreal—dawns on you, like waking up out of an ancient sleep. There’s no way you can force it or fake it. The view and the practice are there to be experienced with a light touch, not to be taken as dogma.
    We have to listen to these slogans, chew on them, and wonder about them. We have to find out for ourselves what they mean. They are like challenges rather than statements of fact. If we let them, they will lead us toward the fact that facts themselves are very dubious. We can be a child of illusion through our waking and sleeping existence; through our birth and our death, we can continually remain as a child of illusion.
    Being a child of illusion also has to do with beginning to encourage yourself not to be a walking battleground. We have such strong feelings of good and evil, right and wrong. We also feel that parts of ourselves are bad or evil and parts of ourselves are good and wholesome. All these pairs of opposites—happy and sad, victory and defeat, loss and gain—are at war with each other.
    The truth is that good and bad coexist; sour and sweet coexist. They aren’t really opposed to each other. We could start to open our eyes and our hearts to that deep way of perceiving, like moving into a whole new dimension of experience: becoming a child of illusion.
    Maybe you’ve heard that the Buddha is not out there; the Buddha is within. The Buddha within is bad and good coexisting, evil and purity coexisting; the Buddha within is not just all the nice stuff. The Buddha within is messy as well as clean. The Buddha within is really sordid as well as wholesome—yucky, smelly, repulsive as well as the opposite: they coexist.
    This view is not easy to grasp, but it’s helpful to hear. At the everyday kitchen-sink level, it simply means that as you see things in yourself that you think are terrible and not worthy, maybe you could reflect that that’s Buddha. You’re proud of yourself because you just had a good meditation or because you’re having such saintly thoughts. That’s Buddha too. When we get into tonglen practice, you’ll see just how interesting this logic is. Tonglen as well as basic shamatha-vipashyana practice leads us toward realizing that opposites coexist. They aren’t at war with each other.
    In meditation practice we struggle a lot with trying to get rid of certain things, while other things come to the front. In order for the world to speak for itself, we first have to see how hard we struggle, and then we could begin to open our hearts and minds to that fact. The view and the meditation—both shamatha-vipashyana and tonglen—are meant to support a softer, more gentle approach to the whole show, the whole catastrophe. We begin to let opposites coexist, not trying to get rid of anything but just training and opening our eyes, ears, nostrils, taste buds, hearts, and minds wider and wider, nurturing the habit of opening to whatever is occurring, including our shutting down.
    We generally interpret the world so heavily in terms of good and bad, happy and sad, nice and not nice that the world doesn’t get a chance to speak for itself. When we say, “Be a child of illusion,” we’re beginning to get at this fresh way of looking when we’re not caught in our hope and fear. We