Calling the absolute or the hypostasis either Mind, or True Mind, or Buddha-nature, is all the same. There are many other terms we can use. Still, no matter what we think, imagine or believe, we haven’t really comprehended anything profound in the way of the absolute. We haven’t become a Buddha in other words. Far from it.
Many have called it quits with all religions choosing instead to become radical skeptics rather than risk another fool’s errand. We are familiar with this kind. Atheists, agnostics, humanists, they are all pretty much the same. There are, of course, the phenomenalists, or if you prefer the naïve realists, who believe there is nothing ultimate. What you see is all there is.
Turning to the religious, most are still drinking the Kool-Aid of imagination, convinced that what their imagination provides them with in the way of an absolute is real. This is why they have to believe. They just don’t know. It’s a form of self delusion. Most religious people fall into this category.
For those of us who want to become Buddhas or fully awake to true reality—let’s call it Mind—a different path is required. We can’t become skeptics because that leads to nihilism; nor can we allow ourselves to become religious in the modern sense of the word. That path has failed miserably although no religionist will admit it.
The path of those who want to become Buddhas is essentially a mystic’s path which runs vertical to our horizontal, all-too-human world. From our horizontal perspective, no matter how we choose to engage with the vertical, we are debarred from it. What distinguishes the mystic from the rest is the mystic, to borrow a line from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, likes to aim at a target no one else can see. Other than the mystic, no one else gets close because no one else is willing to take the risk.
A good way to describe the mystic’s talent for going vertical is using the analogy of transverse waves (the kind we see on the ocean’s surface) and longitudinal waves in the example of sound waves or striking a metal rod.
Believe it or not, the body we inhabit and the universe in which it is born and dies, is all transverse wave phenomena. There is not a cell in our body which is not included. What we cannot see is the longitudinal universe. It remains hidden. However, there is a clue as to the presence of the longitudinal. It lies with respect to our awareness. Our awareness, we could say, is the place of interaction between the longitudinal order and the transverse wave world we inhabit with our body. This awareness, figuratively speaking, faces in only one direction, it faces towards transverse wave phenomena. It is chiefly by desire and ignorance that awareness interfaces with the body this way. Unless awareness can find a way to interface with the longitudinal order, if only for a brief moment, it is all but doomed.
Siddhartha, before he became fully awake as the Buddha, experimented with different ways of accessing the longitudinal world. His experiments almost proved fatal until he found a way by dhyana or contemplation to turn his awareness around, in a manner of speaking, to be able to recognize the longitudinal Bodhi-tree (a symbol of the One Mind). The Bodhi-tree is a fit image for the longitudinal world because it is vertical. In the Mahavastu it is called “the monarch of all that grows, irradiating the ten quarters around it like a temple post made of Jambunada gold.”
It is from the longitudinal order that Siddhartha becomes fully awake (buddha) and defeats Mara the demon who is a personification of the transverse, temporal order.
“Here at the Bodhi tree I won preeminence after seven days, woke up to enlightenment, and reached the end of the jungle and wilderness of birth, old-age and death. Here I have broken the demon who was my unskilled states of mind. Here I have broken the Demon who was my limited personality. Here I have broken the Demon who is the spirit of malevolence. Here, it is done, at the foot of the Bodhi tree” (Mahavastu).