from suffering is instantaneous.
If right now we recognize our fixated attachment to friends, reputation, and
possessions, our hatred for enemies, and all other emotivity as dream appearances
and understand them as nonexistent, as mere notional-conceptual products of
mind, then external, material things will not be able to disturb us. Realizing that
everything is apparent yet nonexistent—just images of emptiness—we attain the
great citadel of everlasting pure pleasure.
At present we may have neither heard nor understood Dzogchen, or perhaps we
have heard only its echo. Because of our lack of familiarity with Dzogchen, and
because of our credulous minds, we run after various good objects or run away
from bad objects of perception. Consciousness is like a dog following in his
master’s footsteps, and the objective field is like the play of the objects of the five
senses projected by a magician. When these two—consciousness and object—
coincide, that coincidence is called “attachment of pure presence to an object.”
That apparently objective aspect, flowing uninterruptedly like a deep river,
although a mentally projected delusion, may nevertheless be experienced as real
for days and months, for years and lifetimes. Thus an old man, a hundred years
old, might see his life from birth to dying as the daydream of a single day. We
experience the objective and subjective poles that never exist separately from each
other as duality, and everything we perceive becomes in this way a meaningless
distraction, a chasing after what is not there in the first place. In that way we are
inveigled by stupidity into immersing ourselves in the ongoing continuum of
samsara. In The Treasury of the Dharmadhatu, Longchenpa says,
With the mind preoccupied by different petty concerns,
A moment of inconsequential fixation becomes a habit,
And a day, a month, a year—a lifetime—goes by unheeded.
We deceive ourselves by construing the nondual as duality.So, first, absorb the excellent view and gradually become familiar with it. Until
that is done, no matter how much we listen to the teaching and accumulate
knowledge, and no matter how deep the teaching, there will be no benefit
whatsoever. The mind training is explained later in the section on meditation, but,
in short, we must first recognize the view itself, then gain conviction in it, and
finally thereby realize our potential. Until we are stabilized in our attainment, we
must meditate.
Pleasure and pain are there for all, from high officials and the rich to beggars
and small children. No matter what the degree of suffering, everyone—
intellectual, fool, even the animals that know nothing—tries to solve problems by
various methods requiring continuous struggle. Some are able to ameliorate their
suffering a little by skillful means, while others, ignorant of technique, cannot
even begin to solve their own problems. Whether it’s the frustration of getting
situations and things they don’t want, or the frustration of not getting the ones they
do want—not to mention violence, sickness, starvation, and so on—all beings are
perpetually under the heel of suffering. The antidote to all this suffering—the
single panacea or “white” medicine that cures all ills—is the understanding that no