The Great Secret of Mind

mental processes, we exteriorize whatever is grasped at and apprehend an object
“out there.” The one who grasps that object, interiorized, is apprehended as a
subject, while form, sound, smell, taste, and tactile sensations are conceived as
external objects. Then a welter of concepts of desire, aversion, or disinterest arises
toward attractive, aversive, or neutral objects. Nonduality is thus apprehended as
duality, and due to our particular karmas of accumulated virtue and vice, we are
reborn in one of the six classes of beings, each with its unique environment. The
cause of our projection into samsara has nothing concrete about it, nothing
constant or substantial; the surface of the mirror showed three versions of reality
as perceived respectively by the farmer, his wife, and the yogin. The yogin reacted
with attachment, the wife with aversion, and the farmer with disinterest.
In short, out of confused thought, we believe that insubstantial, unfounded
illusion is existent: this is only delusion. So long as we do not understand that what
appears in the mirror is our own image, endless disputation arises. Until the
contrivances of magical illusion brought about by a sense of ego dissolve and so
long as there is dispute about the image in the mirror, we are stuck in samsara.
The gods, demons, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and the devils of hell, each
in their own different bodies, with their own pleasures, and in their own various
environments, experience their own peculiar happiness and suffering. As vast
varieties of images ceaselessly appear before us, just as in a movie, we all cling to
“I” and “mine,” to “my” possessions, “my” parents, “my” lover, “my” child, “my”
country, and so forth. Because of this, we become bound by what certainly seems
to be a separate subject and object and, stuck in this belief, we are like criminals
bound in chains, never to taste release and never to attain freedom from samsara.
If we think that those chains of the dualistic perception of delusive appearances
are concrete and substantial, then, of course, again we are mistaken. There is no
bondage or liberation in the moment of delusion: just like a magician’s binding an
illusory elephant to an illusory pillar, no one binds and no one is bound. The
emotional afflictions and the suffering that appear like chains, when examined by
reason, do not have any substantial existence. What is the source of this
appearance of bondage? The answer is that it is the adventitious thought of the
egoist personality that makes the illusion. For example, let us imagine a rope in
the sky in front of us into which we tie and untie knots. The rope is the nature of
our own mind, buddha-nature, pure from the beginning, like the sky. The knots
are the tangles of dualistic perception, made by the negations “no” and “is not” and
the affirmations “yes” and “is,” which create the delusive appearances of samsara,
like a vision of a vast magical country. Until the magician interrupts the magical
illusion that he creates by mantra and props, we believe it to be real, when
actually all along it has been without foundation or base. Until we abandon the
attachments of dualistic perception, we will fall for the terrific illusions of
samsara, thinking them to be real when in fact there is nothing substantial out
there at all.

1.12 PURE PRESENCE ITSELF IS BUDDHA