Stop
clinging to peak moments and open to true
realization.
By Traleg
Kyabgon Rinpoche
Spiritual
Experiences and Realizations
There will be all sorts of experiences on the spiritual path.
Positive periods of development—those that are reassuring and
comforting—are an important part of the process. It is important to
realize, however, that even positive experiences will fluctuate. We
will rarely, if ever, perceive a steady development of them,
precisely because experiences are fickle by nature. Enjoying a
series of good experiences does not ensure that they will continue
indefinitely; they may stop suddenly. Even so, they remain an
important part of spiritual practice, not least because they help
to maintain our motivation to continue practicing.
The way in
which these positive experiences arise also varies enormously. You
may have some amazingly moving experiences, something like a
spiritual awakening that appears to arise out of the blue. In fact,
such experiences do not really come from nowhere; psychic
conditions will always precede them, although they appear to our
conscious experience as independent. They can also vanish just as
quickly as they appear. At other times, certain experiences will
grow over a period of time, peak, and then gradually fade away
again.
As
spiritual practitioners, we are instructed not to attach too much
significance to these experiences. The advice is to resist the
temptation to become fixated on the experiences themselves.
Experiences will come and go. Each experience has to be let go of,
or the mind will simply close down in its fixation on that
experience, leaving little or no room for new experiences to arise.
This is because your fixation will encourage worries and doubts to
arise in the mind and interfere with the development process. If
there is no fixation involved in the process, positive spiritual
experiences will start to lead you to spiritual
realizations.
In
Buddhism, we distinguish between spiritual experiences and
spiritual realizations. Spiritual experiences are usually more
vivid and intense than realizations because they are generally
accompanied by physiological and psychological changes.
Realizations, on the other hand, may be felt, but the experience is
less pronounced. Realization is about acquiring insight. Therefore,
while realizations arise out of our spiritual experiences, they are
not identical to them. Spiritual realizations are considered vastly
more important because they cannot fluctuate.
The
distinction between spiritual experiences and realizations is
continually emphasized in Buddhist thought. If we avoid excessively
fixating on our experiences, we will be under less stress in our
practice. Without that stress, we will be better able to cope with
whatever arises, the possibility of suffering from psychic
disturbances will be greatly reduced, and we will notice a
significant shift in the fundamental texture of our
experience.
There are
many accounts in Tibetan Buddhist literature of how spiritual
disturbances may arise, but all point to fixation on experiences as
the cause. Fixation on our experiences is seen as another variation
of fixation on the self.
In the
overall context of the spiritual journey, it is important to
remember that self-transformation is a continuous process, not a
onetime event. One cannot say, "I used to be a nonspiritual person,
but now I have been transformed into a spiritual person. My old
self is dead." We are constantly being transformed when we travel
on the path. While we may be the same individual on one level, on
another level we are different. There is always continuity, and yet
at each major turning point on the journey we have become
transformed because certain habits have dropped away. The spiritual
journey is dynamic and always tends forward because we are not
fixating on things.
Letting
Go
The spiritual journey, then, is a journey of detachment, a process
of learning how to let go. All of our problems, miseries, and
unhappiness are caused by fixation—latching onto things and not
being able to release them. First we have to let go of fixation on
material things. This does not necessarily mean jettisoning all our
material possessions, but it implies that we should not look to
material things for lasting happiness. Normally, our position in
life, our family, our standing in the community, and so forth, are
perceived to be the source of our happiness. This perspective has
to be reversed, according to spiritual teachings, by relinquishing
our fixation on material things.
Letting go
of fixation is effectively a process of learning to be free,
because every time we let go of something, we become free of it.
Whatever we fixate upon limits us because fixation makes us
dependent upon something other than ourselves. Each time we let go
of something, we experience another level of freedom.
Eventually,
in order to be totally free, we learn to let go of concepts.
Ultimately, we need to relinquish our fixation on the reification
of concepts, of things being "this" or "that." Thinking of this and
that binds us to a particular way of experiencing things. Even
spiritual experiences will not be given complete, spontaneous,
unmediated expression as long as the subtlest kind of conceptual
distinction is present. Experience will still be mediated,
adulterated, and tainted by all kinds of psychic content when we
make discriminations. Therefore, it will remain impossible ever to
be truly free.
The final
step in the process of letting go is relinquishing the idea that
material corruption and spiritual freedom are unequivocally opposed
to one another and that we have to give up the former to attain the
latter. While this is an important distinction to observe at the
beginning of the spiritual journey, we have to overcome that
duality. We have to transcend both the seduction of samsaric
pleasure that turns out to be so illusory and the seduction of our
spiritual goal that appears to be offering eternal happiness. Once
the pull between these two poles is harmonized and transcended, we
are ready to return home.
The
Fruition of the Spiritual Path
The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to realize the union
of your mind and ultimate reality. You discover eventually that not
only are you in reality, but that you also
embody that
reality. Your ordinary body becomes the body of a buddha, your
ordinary speech becomes the speech of a buddha, and your ordinary
mind becomes the mind of a buddha. This is the great transition
that you have to make, relinquishing your fixation on the
separation of samsaric beings and buddhas. When we can talk about
them as ultimately the same, when this actual transformation occurs
within an individual, it is a truly great occurrence. It is
remarkable because an ordinary, confused being still retains that
preexisting continuity between an ordinary being and an enlightened
being, in the sense that what you become is what you have always
been. At the end of the journey, you are simply returning
home.
Yet the
journey itself was absolutely necessary. It was necessary to leave
your familiar environment and venture through various trials and
tribulations. It was necessary to deal with many unexpected things,
to grapple with your inner demonic forces. It was necessary to go
through the spiritual struggle and engage in vigorous disciplines.
Spiritual struggle is valuable for the purification of the mind.
Your mind has to be cleansed of the delusions and conflicting
emotions that are the product of your karma, the product of the
negative thoughts and actions that have accumulated in your
mindstream over a long period of time.
After a
point, however, you have to ease away from that struggle. As
progress is made on the path, the positive qualities required for
further advancement will become part of you, and you will gradually
learn how to assimilate and become these positive qualities, rather
than regarding them as something to be attained and possessed. So
after the initial focus on learning how to replace vices with
virtues, we must learn to let go of our fixation on virtues. We
have to stop thinking about accumulating virtues, spiritual
qualities, experiences, and realizations as if they were a form of
wealth. We do not require spiritual wealth; moreover, spiritual
wealth can only be accumulated by not fixating on it. All fixations
lead only to all manner of trouble—envy, possessiveness, and
egotism, for example. It is then that we really go astray and
wander from the spiritual path.
As our
virtuous qualities of love, compassion, joy, courage,
determination, resolve, mindfulness, awareness, and wisdom develop,
we progress further along the path. At some point, we have to
accomplish one final act of detachment, which is to let go of
reifying concepts altogether. Even the concepts of virtue and vice,
redemption, karma, and liberation have to be relinquished. By way
of illustration, I’d like to share a story from the Zen
tradition.
It is not
uncommon for Zen meditation students to keep in regular contact
with their teachers concerning their spiritual progress. In this
particular story, a Zen student has a penchant for writing to his
teacher monthly with an account of his development. His letters
began to take a mystical turn when he wrote, "I am experiencing a
oneness with the universe." When his teacher received this letter,
he merely glanced at it and threw it away. The next month the
student wrote, "I have discovered that the divine is present in
everything." His teacher used this letter to start his fire. A
month later, the student had become even more ecstatic and wrote,
"The mystery of the one and many has revealed itself to my
wonderment," at which his teacher yawned. The following month,
another letter arrived, which simply said, "There is no self, no
one is born, and no one dies." At this his teacher threw his hands
up in despair. After the fourth letter, the student stopped writing
to his teacher, and after a year had passed, the teacher began to
feel concerned and wrote to his student, asking to be kept informed
of his spiritual progress. The student wrote back with the words
"Who cares?" When the teacher read this, he smiled and said, "At
last! He’s finally got it!"
At the end
of the journey, you will be able to engage in everything on both
the material and the spiritual planes without being tainted by
them, because a spiritually realized being is no longer affected by
the world in the same way an ordinary person is. Without going
through the trials and tribulations of this journey, however, you
will never find your home. You cannot simply stay at home and say,
"I am already where I want to be." It is only the journey that
makes you realize your true potential, and only at the end of the
journey will you understand that the goal is not to separate from
the starting point. That is the attainment of buddhahood, the
natural state of your own mind.
Traleg
Kyabgon Rinpoche is the
president and spiritual director of Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute,
headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. From Mind At Ease: Self-Liberation Through
Mahamudra Meditation, © 2004 by Traleg Kyabgon.
Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.
Taken from
http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/letting-go-spiritual-experience?offer=dharma