One In Three Chance Of Attaining Buddhahood

Have you ever stopped to think how much of the way we each live our lives is predicated on illusions fed us by others (predecessors, parents, teachers, peers, media, advertising industry etc) about how life is and the best way to live it and about how perhaps there are better illusions to predicate it on?

Hanging out briefly yesterday with a group of elderly women who’d all come out the other end of the suburban dream looking rather jangled and worse for wear and none of it helped by their various cosmetic injections, nips and tucks which only seemed to serve to distort the features, some suffering the effects of strokes, others the effects of neural problems, I was struck with compassion, looking at their faces, by how living your life under the anaesthetic of conventional life is probably not the best way to use the time you have even if it feels safer – that perhaps risking it all on a hunch and following the dream in your heart may be a better way, even if it causes great discomfort and fear at times.

Not that I’m in a position to judge, hence why I say perhaps and in any case, better or worse are merely relative terms.

It just seems to me that we all now have a chance to awaken from the slumber of the humdrum-trance and live life for real.

A lot of it has to do with acceptance of mortality. Consider the possibility of dying in a month’s time and all of a sudden your perspective about what’s important or not shifts a bit.

Combine this with the apparently contradictory and revolutionary notion that life is long, hence each moment lasts an eternity and you find yourself all at once sitting like the Buddha in the midst of events.

Each of us has a tao, a path programmed into our DNA and the way to potentise it is to suspend disbelief, override that aspect of mind that subscribes to the version of reality inherited and adopted from others, relax your body, breathe deeply and surrender to the mysterious sub-current underpinning and informing your moment-by-moment existence. Simultaneously draw your mind back into the centre of your brain so you’re gazing out at reality from your pineal gland, as it were, and you’ll be instantaneously privy to directions from the gods: pictures and ideas will come to you and following them with action, you’ll be carried on a beneficent current not of your own making.

The danger of course, if slightly unhinged and ungrounded, as in not being in touch with your body via the breath and generalised proprioceptive sense, is that you could go nuts.

There’s an old adage, that of three seekers of enlightenment, on seeing the face of the divine, one will die, one will go nuts and the other will find enlightenment. So there’s only a one in three chance of attaining Buddhahood. It’s important to know the risks involved.

However by following the steps above in a diligent way, you’re pretty sure to find yourself enlightened rather than dead or mad.

So gird your loins and hurl yourself headlong into the mystery, the only question on your mind being, ‘whatever next?’

There’s magic in the ground and love in the air at the moment.

Expect miracles rather than the humdrum.

You won’t be disappointed.

Love, B