3.4 MEDITATION EXPERIENCE ARISES NATURALLY IN THE MINDSTREAM
The crucial manner of release, like a snake uncoiling its knots, is not something to
be achieved in a handful of energetic meditation sessions. We need to relax into it
in order to come to experience it as a constant. In that way it becomes familiar, and
there is no need for any purposeful or fruitful application of antidotes because the
counteraction is applied automatically, just as a potter who applies a strong push to
the wheel does not need to apply force again before the pot is complete. Once we
are accustomed to such an automatic process of release, whatever thoughts of
happiness or sorrow arise simply dissolve by themselves, and, unaffected by them,
we experience confidence arising automatically. When strong hatred or pain arises
adventitiously and we recognize the immediate release of the thought, a laugh or
some other extraordinary expression of joy may suddenly escape us.
Whether significant or trivial, no matter what activity we perform in samsara,
there is nothing that is not mixed with suffering. All experience is of the nature of
all-pervasive suffering since it is derived from impulsive habit. Take the dream
birth of a son. First, we are happy at his birth; later, we worry about his health;
and at the end, there is the grievous suffering of his death. If we think about it
closely, these three aspects are all unreal, although in the dream we perceived
them to be real, and we did actually suffer. Dreamers who dreamt the experience
never moved from their bed for a moment, so there was no way they could have
experienced the suffering, yet until they awoke, they felt that the experience was
real. When we are in dreamland and we understand that we are asleep and that
we are dreaming, then even though the dream continues, the suffering dissolves
like mist in sky. In The Thirty-Seven Practices of the Bodhisattva, Ngulchu Tokme
says,
All suffering is like a son’s death in a dream,
And we are sick of believing delusion to be true!
When we encounter untoward circumstances,
The bodhisattva sees them all as illusion.No matter what happy, sad, or neutral thoughts arise, for ordinary beings, the
manner in which they appear is the same. But for the yogin who is relaxed in the
nature of mind, the manner of release is special since, for such a one, arising and
release occur simultaneously. Just like a drawing on water, appearances vanish.
This is a crucial point of practice.
3.5 WHEN CONDUCT CONSISTS OF SIMULTANEOUS ARISING AND RELEASING, IT IS FREE OF KARMA
AND ITS EFFECTS
In the yoga of crucial simultaneous arising and release, the mere arising of desire
and anger does not generate bad karma. To take a single thought as an example—
the thought has gone as soon as it arises. Until it is created, it exists only in the
future. In the present, it has no time to rest, and since the object, agent, and action