Paradigm Shift 2: Mask vs Buddhahood

I have always felt a need to meditate but didn’t for many years because I couldn’t get myself to adhere to the practice with any consistency.  I felt that it was necessary but didn’t really know why.  I knew what others have said about calming the mind and all the rest but it was all belief and no knowing.

Then one day my wife and I discussed something or other and whatever it was brought up to me again the whole question of the mask and the realization, (again), that we can’t make the mask a part of our perfected being.  Even if our mask, our outer personality, comes to a correct conclusion about something that will forward us on our path it won’t be really pure if we are still functioning from that place.

Imagine for a moment that you are heading from Chicago to Denver and you are a plane.  Now imagine that you have your wheels removed and replaced with train wheels and you are set on railroad tracks.  You are on the right tracks to get from Chicago to Denver but you are taking the wrong transportation.  You are going to get the clickety clack of the tracks.  It is far noisier than it needs to be and there is no station at the end of your journey that is constructed in a fashion that will allow your plane in.  The problem is that you belong in the air.  You are going to have to take off from the tracks eventually or you can’t get there because you need to land at the air field. Those tracks, that environment, is your personality, your mask.  When you are making your journey, you can’t take counsel of your mask.  Your mask will always have its’ own survival as a major part of its’ agenda.  You must leave it behind.

How can you do that?

One issue I have faced on my path has been that when I try to see clearly it is usually still me, the mask, that is trying to see. Of course, it does that from within the mask and that means I am, by necessity, seeing through the clutter of that mask.  We need to let go of the demands of the desire body.  How often have I heard that in one way or another from one teacher or another in one organization or another.  But how do I do it? How do I stop desiring, being attached to things, results, relationships, etc.?

It will help to understand what is happening in order to see our way out of that mental channel.

We tend to be goal oriented in our lives.  We do things with the end in mind as though it is through our efforts that things come to us in a cause/effect relationship.  We treat life like a football game. Every action is taken in order to create some future result and we are always striving for that result to bring us some manifest objective which will bring us some reward.  It might be a real, monetary reward or a simple positive feeling.  Regardless, that is how we view the way things work when we are always focusing on the past and the future and we are always in a state of desire and non-fulfillment. We are thinking about what our present activity will bring and regretting our past actions that have not brought us to where we want to be.

One thing we can do about this is to strive to take each action as though we were dancing a ballet rather than playing football.  It takes concentration, of course.  In ballet, it is not the  ‘goal’ that matters.  What matters is the quality of the dance at that given moment.  When the moment is gone there is no focus on what was.  Before the moment comes there is no focus on the coming moment.  Ballet is focused on doing the dance in the now with as much grace, as much perfection as possible.  When you are doing anything, strive to focus on the action of the moment.  Of course, it is most likely an action that is meant to bring about some result but it will bring about that result whether you are concentrating on the result or the action of the moment.

The way to solve this is meditation. Meditation can help us to step back from the mask and talk to our own real selves. That is where the best counsel comes from.