During the day (if I am lucky) I find something that needs to be blogged about, hopefully, to push back the veil of ignorance that works to obscure the Buddha’s message. This veil—sorry to say—is our ordinary life that is always caught up in trying to feed its desires, make lots of dough, take care of the kids, and avoid the truth as much as it can.
Despite the power of this veil, behind the veil—sometimes if we are still enough—we can hear the faint beating of the Buddha’s deathless drum (amritasya dundubhim). Because some of us can faintly hear it (though not with our ears), we try to move closer to where we reckon this deathless or immortal (amrita) sound/vibration is coming from. But then, nirvana is no drum and it hardly makes a sound!
The immortal element of nirvana is certainly something we can’t hear with our ears, let alone imagine or see with our eyes. Our senses are far too limited to sense nirvana’s abode, and this goes for our reflective consciousness, also, that is bound to the senses and their objects; which doesn’t know how to turn away from them.
But then, it is not actually a matter of turning away so much as our spiritual eye is overly engaged with the mundane, sensory eye. When, for example, our sensory eyes look at a tree, the spiritual eye looks through the sensory eyes and stops at the tree. While the spiritual eye can see the element of nirvana and infallibly know, it has fallen into the bad habit of following his severely limited twin and trusting this boob.
For those who have managed to distinguish the spiritual eye from the finite body’s senses together with their objects, it sees a field or an abode that cannot be adequately described by language. The Buddha does his best to explain this mysterious field or abode with these words:
“Monks, there is that abode where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air; wherein is neither the sphere of the infinity of space, nor the sphere of the infinity of consciousness, nor of nothingness, nor of neither perception nor non-perception; where there is neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. That state, monks, I call neither coming nor going, neither appearing nor disappearing. It has no origin, no evolution, no stopping. This, in truth, is the end of suffering.
Hard is the infinite to see. Truth is no easy thing to see. Attachment is severed by him who knows. For him who sees, nothing remains” (Udana 80).
This abode is completely real—as real as any object we see with our eyes or touch with our fingers. If we could find a term to express this field or abode we might think of it as a spiritual medium in which the world we live in is composed of transverse waves of this medium arising and falling in opposition to it, like ocean waves, so that it remains hidden.
As long as we tenaciously cling to the world made up of these transverse waves we remain completely blind to this spiritual abode of which the Buddha speaks. We also limit our freedom. Moreover, living under such a limitation we bring upon ourselves and others, nothing but suffering. When we might become compassionate, instead, we become bestial. When we might pursue the way that leads to the revelation of this abode, instead, we ridicule and punish those who follow this path.
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