Rebel Buddha
Who
is more radical than the Buddha, who overthrows all the conventional
ways we see ourselves and our world? We have a rebel buddha inside us
too, says Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. It’s the innate wakefulness that subverts our
illusions and fights for our liberation. According
to the Buddha, our freedom is never in question. We’re born free. The
true nature of the mind is enlightened wisdom and compassion. Our mind
is always brilliantly awake and aware. Nevertheless, we’re often plagued
by painful thoughts and the emotional unrest that goes with them. We
live in states of confusion and fear from which we see no escape. Our
problem is that we don’t see who we truly are at the deepest level. We
don’t recognize the power of our enlightened nature. We trust the
reality we see before our eyes and accept its validity until something
comes along—an illness, accident, or disappointment—to disillusion us.
Then we might be ready to question our beliefs and start searching for a
more meaningful and lasting truth. Once we take that step, we’re
starting off on the road to freedom.
On
this road, what we free ourselves from is illusion, and what frees us
from illusion is the discovery of truth. To make that discovery, we need
to enlist the powerful intelligence of our own awake mind and turn it
toward our goal of exposing, opposing, and overcoming deception. That is
the essence and mission of “rebel buddha”: to free us from the
illusions we create by ourselves, about ourselves, and from those that
masquerade as reality in our cultural and religious institutions.
The word buddha
simply means “awake” or “awakened.” It does not refer to a particular
historical person or to a philosophy or religion. It refers to your own
mind. You know you have a mind, but what’s it like? It’s awake. I don’t
just mean “not asleep.” I mean your mind is really
awake, beyond your imagination. Your mind is brilliantly clear, open,
spacious, and full of excellent qualities: unconditional love,
compassion, and wisdom that sees things as they truly are. In other
words, your awakened mind is always a good mind; it’s never dull or
confused. It’s never distressed by the doubts, fears, and emotions that
so often torture us. Instead, your true mind is a mind of joy, free from
all suffering. That is who you really are. That is the true nature of
your mind and the mind of everyone. But your mind doesn’t just sit there
being perfect, doing nothing. It’s at play all the time, creating your
world.
If
this is true, then why isn’t your life, and the whole world, perfect?
Why aren’t you happy all the time? How could you be laughing one minute
and in despair the next? And why would “awakened” people argue, fight,
lie, cheat, steal, and go to war? The reason is that, even though the
awakened state is the true nature of the mind, most of us don’t see it.
Why? Something is in the way. Something is blocking our view of it.
Sure, we see bits of it here and there. But the moment we see it,
something else pops into our mind—“What time is it? Is it time for
lunch? Oh, look, a butterfly!”—and our insight is gone.
Ironically,
what blocks your view of your mind’s true nature—your buddha mind—is
also your own mind, the part of your mind that is always busy,
constantly involved in a steady stream of thoughts, emotions, and
concepts. This busy mind is who you think you are. It is easier to see,
like the face of the person standing right in front of you. For example,
the thought you’re thinking right now is more obvious to you than your
awareness of that thought. When you get angry, you pay more attention to
what you’re
angry about than to the actual source of your anger, where your anger
is coming from. In other words, you notice what your mind is doing, but
you don’t see the mind itself. You identify yourself with the contents
of this busy mind—your thoughts, emotions, ideas—and end up thinking
that all of this stuff is “me” and “how I am.”
When
you do that, it’s like being asleep and dreaming, and believing that
your dream images are true. If, for example, you dream that you’re being
chased by a menacing stranger, it’s very scary and real. However, as
soon as you wake up, both the stranger and your feelings of terror are
simply gone, and you feel great relief. Furthermore, if you had known
you were dreaming in the first place, then you wouldn’t have experienced
any fear.
In
a similar way, in our ordinary life, we’re like dreamers believing that
the dream we’re having is real. We think we’re awake, but we’re not. We
think that this busy mind of thoughts and emotions is who we truly are.
But when we actually wake up, our misunderstanding about who we are—and
the suffering that confusion brings—is gone.
 A Rebel Within
If
we could, we would probably all sink completely into this dream that
passes for our waking life, but something keeps rousing us from our
sleep. No matter how dazed and confused it gets, our drowsy self is
always linked to complete wakefulness. That wakefulness has a sharp and
penetrating quality. It’s our own intelligence and clear awareness that
have the ability to see through whatever blocks our view of our true
self—the true nature of our mind. On the one hand, we’re used to our
sleep and content with its dreams; on the other hand, our wakeful self
is always shaking us up and turning on the lights, so to speak. This
wakeful self, the true mind that is awake, wants out of the confines of
sleep, out of illusion-like reality. While we’re locked away in our
dream, it sees the potential for freedom. So it provokes, arouses,
prods, and instigates until we’re inspired to take action. You could say
we are living with a rebel within.
This
rebel is the voice of your own awakened mind. It is the sharp, clear
intelligence that resists the status quo of your confusion and
suffering. What is this rebel buddha like? A troublemaker of heroic
proportions. Rebel buddha is the renegade that gets you to switch your
allegiance from sleep to the awakened state. This means you have the
power to wake up your dreaming self, the impostor that is pretending to
be the real you. You have the means to break loose from whatever binds
you to suffering and locks you in confusion. You are the champion of
your own freedom. Ultimately, the mission of rebel buddha is to
instigate a revolution of mind.
Getting to Know Your Mind
All
the teachings of the Buddha have one clear message, which is that there
is nothing more important than getting to know your own mind. The
reason is simple—the source of our every suffering is discovered within
this mind. If we’re feeling anxious, that stress and worry are produced
by this mind. If we’re overwrought by despair, that misery originates
within our mind. On the other hand, if we’re madly in love and walking
on air, that joy also arises from our mind. Pleasure and pain, simple
and extreme, are experiences of mind. Mind is the experiencer of each
moment of our life and all that we perceive, think, and feel. Therefore,
the better we know our mind and how it works, the greater the
possibility that we can free ourselves from the mental states that weigh
us down, invisibly wound us, and destroy our ability to be happy.
Knowing our mind not only leads to a happy life; it transforms every
trace of confusion and wakes us up completely.
To
experience that awakened state is to know freedom in its purest sense.
This state of freedom is not dependent on external circumstances. It
does not change with the ups and downs of life. It’s the same whether we
experience gain or loss, praise or blame, pleasant or unpleasant
conditions. In the beginning, we only glimpse this state, but those
glimpses become increasingly more familiar and stable. In the end, the
state of freedom becomes our home ground.
Two Aspects of the Mind
Buddhism
talks about mind in different ways. There is the mind that is confused
or asleep, and the mind that is enlightened or awake. Another way to
describe the mind is to talk about its relative and ultimate aspects.
The relative aspect refers to confused mind; the ultimate aspect is its
enlightened nature. Relative mind is our ordinary consciousness, our
commonplace dualistic perception of the world. “I” am separate from
“you,” and “this” is separate from “that.” There appears to be a
fundamental division within all of our experiences. We take for granted
that good exists apart from bad, right apart from wrong, and so forth.
This way of seeing tends to breed misunderstanding and conflict more
often than harmony. The ultimate aspect of mind is simply the true
nature of our mind, which is beyond any polarities. It is our
fundamental being, our basic, open, and spacious awareness. Imagine a
clear blue sky filled with light.
Stuck in the Conceptual World
When
we don’t pay attention, the conceptual world takes over our whole
being. That’s a pretty sad thing. We can’t even enjoy a beautiful sunny
day, watching leaves blowing in the wind. We have to label it all so
that we live in a concept of sun, a concept of wind, and a concept of
moving leaves. If we could leave it there, it wouldn’t be too bad, but
that never happens. Then it’s “Oh yeah, it’s good to be here. It’s
beautiful, but it would be better if the sun were shining from another
angle.” When we’re walking, we’re not really walking; a concept is
walking. When we’re eating, we’re not really eating; a concept is
eating. When we’re drinking, we’re not really drinking; a concept is
drinking. At some point, our whole world dissolves into concepts.
As
the external world is reduced to a conceptual world, we not only lose a
wholesome part of our being, we lose all the beautiful things in the
natural world: forests, flowers, birds, lakes. Nothing can bring us any
genuine experience. Then our emotions come into play, supercharging our
thoughts with their energy; we find there are “good” things that bring
“good” emotions, and there are “bad” things that bring “bad” emotions.
When we live our life like this every day, it becomes very tiresome; we
begin to feel a sense of exhaustion and heaviness. We may think that our
exhaustion comes from our job or our family, but in many cases, it’s
not the job or family itself—it’s our mind. What’s exhausting us is how
we relate to our life conceptually and emotionally. We risk becoming so
stuck in the realm of concepts that nothing we do feels fresh, inspired,
or natural.
Perceptual
mind, conceptual mind, and emotional mind are three aspects of relative
mind, our mundane consciousness, which we usually experience as a
continuous stream. But in reality, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions
last only for an instant. They’re impermanent. They come and go so
quickly that we’re unaware of the discontinuity within this stream, of
the space between each mental event. It’s like watching a
thirty-five-millimeter film. We know it’s made up of many single frames,
but due to the speed at which it moves, we never notice the end of one
frame and the beginning of the next. We never see the imageless space
between the frames, just as we never see the space of awareness between
one thought and another.
We
end up living in a fabricated world made up of these three aspects of
relative mind. Layer by layer, we have constructed a solid reality that
has become a burden, locked us into a small space, a corner of our
being, and locked out much of who we really are. Usually, we think of a
prison as something made of walls and prisoners as people locked inside,
removed from the world for their crimes. Such inmates have basic
routines that get them through the day, but the possibilities for a full
experience and enjoyment of life are severely limited.
We
are confined in a similar way, locked inside the prison walls of our
conceptual world. The Buddha taught that what lies at the bottom of all
this is ignorance: the state of not knowing who we truly are, of not
recognizing our natural state of freedom and our potential for
happiness, fulfillment, and enjoyment of life.
Adapted from Rebel Buddha: On the Road to Freedom,
by Dzogchen Ponlop. © 2010 by Dzogchen Ponlop. Published by arrangement
with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston. For discussion and events
around the themes of this book, go to www.rebelbuddha.com.
From the January 2011 issue of the Shambhala Sun.
RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:
Teacher and Rebel Buddha
author Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche has been a frequent contributor to the
the Shambhala Sun's magazine and blog. View all his pieces in this
collection.
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