Instead of firsthand realizing that we are the pure body of ultimate reality (i.e., the dharmakaya) we attach, instead, to the finite, illusory body of samsara which can be likened to wave patterns of pure Mind. To employ some Zen words, we can’t see our original face. Instead, we only see the human organism; taking up its suffering unable to lay it down.
In Zen, this problem is met in advanced practice by first understanding that continual attachment to the illusory human body only further conditions us to become even more attached. The only way to stop this vicious cycle is to see another path. In order to do this we must learn to understand that our human body is really contingent on pure Mind so that by doing so we accept, more and more, a body of spiritual lucidity as being who we really are. This is what detachment really means. I hasten to mention that such a lucid body can also be thought of as a dimensionless originative body which is not at all passive. In fact, it can be characterized as sheer, lucid actuosity.
Where previously there was pain owing to attachment, we now understand—or can even sense to some degree—that the interpenetration of absolute Mind with itself (not Mind’s dependence on its illusory wave forms which constitute the physical samsaric world) is always a blissful and compassionate spiritual body.
At risk of being over simplistic, pure Mind is never other than blissful whereas its countless wave forms cause it great and terrible consternation when it does not realize that they are merely its productions. Consequently, if it cannot actualize this, it is led down a path of great error which is extremely difficult to reverse. There is, as a matter of fact, no end to error from this life to the next.
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