Meditation Class 4: You've Got it All So You're Good to Go.

Maybe you are just reading these lesson posts like a textbook or maybe you are reading them as an instruction manual and actually trying to follow along. So I need to tell you that in this endeavor, there is absolutely no substitute for experience. There are no crib notes or cheat sheets and it doesn't matter if you memorize every word I've written. You're never going to get it. Sorry. From the Buddha onward, great teachers have always insisted nothing is going to save you but yourself. Meditation is strictly DIY.

So there is no God here to call upon for help. At least no external being hiding up in some mysterious heaven. No. Not even a son who showed up once.  But...and here's the really big BUT of good news ...there is something sublime in you. And that's what we're trying to locate. That is why your personal experience of what happens during meditation is going to be all that you are going to have to go on, the only thing you can count on.. Only you will honestly know how you are doing, how far along the path to the end of suffering you have journeyed. And only you will be fooling yourself if you haven't budged for lack of effort.

So trust yourself. Give yourself a break. Buddhists don't put much stock in reading other people's ideas in books and taking tests to prove you've absorbed them, which is of course what we reflexively do in school. Buddha taught that there is a huge difference between education you acquire and experience you actually have. It's the difference perhaps between to do and to be. Somebody can tell you in excruciating detail about their trip to the Everest Base Camp and bombard you with their selfies and videos, but until you actually go there yourself, you have no absolutely certainty what and where the Everest Base Camp really is. Someone might warn you not to put your hand in the fire but that's academic, something you could have doubt about, at least until you put your hand in the fire and burn the hell out of it. That's how you learn beyond doubt. Experience is certainty. It's unimpeachable. The Buddha insisted it is the only thing we can ever wholeheartedly trust. 

That's why he maintained that he was merely a teacher, just someone who could tell us what he did to get where he got--enlightenment, and encourage us to try it for ourselves. What he said, what he is saying, is that we can be just like him and get to the end of suffering like he did because we already have everything he had when he started: a body, a mind, experiences of suffering. Those are the only tools necessary for the trek to enlightenment. 

Rinpoches-- that is a title of great respect for Tibetan gurus, sometimes refer to our Buddhanature, pointing out that every being inherently has it. What they are saying is we all have what the Buddha had within him: the ability to tame our mind and wake up, the ability to end every last shred of suffering from birth, life, old age, sickness and death. Here is how one of the earliest Tibetan Rinpoche's, Je Gampopa put it: Sentient beings possess the essence of buddhahood. . . . The actual way in which they possess it can be exemplified by the way silver is present in silver ore, the way sesame oil is present in sesame seeds or the way butter is present in milk. It is possible to obtain the silver that is in the ore. It is possible to obtain the oil that is in the sesame seeds. It is possible to obtain the butter that is in the milk and likewise it is possible to obtain the buddhahood that is in sentient beings.

So that's what we're trying to do here and why it's up to you to do it. Let the good news motivate you. You already have everything you need, everything worth having, so you're good to go. You are just perfect right now, just the way you are.  We are not embarking on a regime of self-improvement here. We are not trying to wash away some original or more likely unoriginal sin. There is nothing wrong with you, no reason to have guilt. You just don't know how fabulous you can be because until now nobody has pointed that out to you. Nobody has told you that, with right effort, meditation can bring out the sublime already in you. 

So please try to sit still at least once a day and tune into your own mind.

May all beings be freed from suffering and dwell with happiness and joy in the great equanimity



~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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