I may attain the Great Perfection in this lifetime,
But if not, at least I’ll have been happy! Wah!1.28 CREATIVITY IS NECESSARILY RELEASED IN PURE PRESENCE
In the pellucid mirrorlike pure presence that is free of all conceptual intrusion,
when suddenly a vivid thought arises, it is called “creativity.” This creativity arises
out of basic pure presence. It is the shifting nature of pure presence. Abiding
naturally in that supreme cognition, creativity and display are rootless and
baseless. When we awaken from a dream, both the objective field and the
subjective knower vanish into their own space. So too from our own bed of
unchangeable intrinsically aware dharmakaya, from where they cannot move
even a hair’s breadth, the concepts of materiality and specific characteristics
dissolve in release.
If we fail to realize that the vivid thoughts, which arise in mirrorlike basic pure
presence, are the natural creativity of pure presence itself, from that point onward
delusive samsara, as an apparently true objective stream, beguiles us, as illustrated
by the story of father Dawa Drakpa.
Once Dawa Drakpa went to work in another man’s house, and by the time he
returned home, he had earned a ten-kilo bag of barley. Concerned that it might be
eaten by mice, he hung the heavy bag up on a beam just above his bed. Then he
stretched out on the bed and began to think, “I will sell the barley and buy a hen.
The hen will give many eggs, and from them many chicks will hatch. When the
chicks grow up, they will also give many eggs. When I sell all those eggs, I will
become rich and take a woman and get married. She will bear me a son, and
when he is delivered, I will give him an honest name.” Lying on his bed, thinking
of a name for his son, he saw the moon rise and decided to name his son “Famous
Moon.” At that very moment a mouse finished nibbling through the thread that
held the barley bag to the beam, and the bag fell upon Dawa Drakpa’s head, killing
him.
Each and every being’s thoughts, chasing each other along, are delusory at the
beginning, in the middle, and through to this very moment, and no one can
measure the delusion, not even the noble ones. Even a magician, who can perform
innumerable illusions and sleights of hand, when he investigates where the
illusory objects come from, where they abide, and where they vanish, must
remain unconvinced of the objects’ reality when the nature of the illusion itself is
emptiness.
A man dreamt so vividly that a very handsome son was born to him that, in the
dream, when the son fell sick, he grieved, and when the son died, he was so sad
that he cried aloud. When he awoke, he realized that he did not have a wife, so he
could not possibly have fathered a son, and thus there was no way he could be
happy at the son’s birth, sad at his sickness, or grief-stricken at his death. In the
dream, at the beginning, the son’s birth seemed real, in the middle, the son’s
sickness seemed real, and at the end, his death seemed real. The circumstances of