Our ideas about Buddhism, in particular enlightenment, in which we awaken to ultimate reality are, in the beginning, never other than abstract and hazy which puts us into a state of alienation from it. In this state, what we are is far from being awakened. Carrying this troublesome burden of spiritual blindness forward, somehow we have to overcome it in which alienation is finally overcome. As we have painfully learned we are our own adversary. The unawakened person who is trying to awaken is constantly being self-deceived.
This means there is a kind of beginning internal dialectic going on in us at all times in which we are our own victim and experiencer of alienation and contradiction which always seems to fall short of the right path in the highest sense. We can think of this dialectic as also capable of being therapeutic. As a therapy, it is a spiritual healing process in which our emotions and thinking are adjusted in such a way so as to allow us to escape setting up our own clever and cunning traps in which truth remains abstract and hazy—and alienation continues unabated.
We have to allow our ideas about the awakened nature to be confronted as part of the therapeutic dialectic. Also, we must not allow ourselves to assume an already awakened state. This, also, must be confronted since, at this point, we are still deceiving ourselves. While all this is going on the power of self-deception does not wane. More and more our old monsters are at work trapping us. We talk our self into believing time is on our side. Or youth is also on our side. We have years ahead of us before we have to get serious. But the true dialectic will not permit us to accept this. We have to be Aesop's ant—not the careless grasshopper.
Reading the Buddha's discourses and the sermons of the Zen masters and great Lamas can help to show us our own inadequate understanding—something like a painful slap on the chops or a Zen beating. We must break our self of our bad habits. We must tell our self that it is not awakened and then say to it again, "You must directly see this pure nature in yourself. It isn't found in your stupid ideas or opinions about what the Buddha taught. What do you think these thoughts of yours are made of. Look deeper right here my friend, here does the stream of nirvana begin."
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