Вадим Сычевский
Absolute freedom and happiness – our true essence
Delusions about Enlightenment and Emancipation (end)[43]
Now when we have considered the state of Attainment, it is necessary to talk about the common delusions concerning Enlightenment and Emancipation.
1. «Everything is empty, everything is permitted»
The first, the most dangerous delusion, can be expressed as «if you are realized, you can do anything because everything is empty». To put it briefly, it is an oxymoron[44]. Why is it so? Because the state of perfect realization, or concentration, in other words, the state of Enlightenment, is the cessation of the workings of consciousness and thus of past experience. Therefore, an enlightened yogi cannot have any worldly desires originating from past experience because it is stopped. That is, an enlightened yogi who is in a state of perfect realization will not, for example, use alcohol, or drugs, have sex, or cause suffering to others, nor can he be seized by the taste or quantity of food, attachment to material things, and so on. Furthermore, even if objects appear in the external world that are perceived by an ordinary person as objects of worldly desires, such as a charming member of the opposite sex, delicious food, and so on, a person who has experienced even the first Enlightenment will not have any desires.
So where did such a ridiculous and wild misconception like «do anything, the main thing is to be conscious» come from? The fact is that as long as the enlightened person remains in this material world for one of the two reasons described above, he will perform actions. First, it is one's own spiritual practice. Second, and more importantly, is the transmission of the True Dharma to deluded people.
To fulfil these two points, the enlightened one will maintain his life in the World of People, that is, he will perform actions – for example, cooking meals, cleaning the meditation place, or traveling to different cities to give lectures. However, all the actions of the enlightened one come not from worldly desires, but from the true intention of the Atman, which is to realize the perfect state of Nirvana and to transmit this Teaching to others. The latter is expressed as Love (Maitri) and Compassion (Karuna).
Nevertheless, even by performing certain actions, the enlightened person does not form new experience, or karma, because his consciousness remains in the original state of Calmness and Contemplation (here we can speak of perfect awareness) and does not come into motion, i.e. remains unaffected even if an action is performed. Experience remains only as a fact of memory, not as a driving force that forms new desires that lead to new actions and new experiences. In other words, experience does not take root or begin to drive the enlightened one. As D.T. Suzuki says: «Tranquility of mind does not mean that one should cease all activity. True tranquility lies in the activity itself».
However, if an ordinary person who has built a world of fixed ideas, such as «everything is empty, nothing exists», acts according to the principle of «do whatever you want if you are conscious»; he will create nothing but negative karma and causes of new sufferings. Because as long as our consciousness is active, it is the perceived world that is a reality for us. As long as our consciousness is active, we, by performing actions, will form new experiences that will lead to new desires and actions.
Suppose a person, thinking that «everything is empty» and therefore nothing bad can happen, wants to commit some reckless act, for example, jump from the roof of a skyscraper or start using drugs. When he is flying down or dying of an overdose, will he still believe that «everything is empty»? Will the fixed idea of «everything is empty» that he has created help him at that moment? What does a person feel a second before dying from a fall from a great height or an overdose? Inner Joy and True Tranquility? Hardly. More like horrible pain and terror. And what would indicate a future reincarnation? The state before death. Pain and terror is the World of Hell. Thus, even by covering up bad or reckless deeds with the Doctrine of Emptiness, it is impossible to avoid an accumulation of bad karma, it is impossible not to feel pain, and it is impossible to avoid suffering.
«A young man named Yamaoka Tesshu, studying Zen, visited one master after another. He also came to Dokuon from Shikoku. Eager to show his accomplishments, he said:
– Both mind and Buddha and all sentient beings are ultimately non-existent. The true nature of phenomena is Emptiness. There is neither realization nor delusion, neither sage nor mediocrity. There is neither reward nor gain.
Dokuon, who had been quietly listening, remained silent. Suddenly he tapped Yamaoka hard with his bamboo stick. The young man became very angry.
– If nothing exists, Dokuon asked, – where did this anger come from?» (from the collection «One Hundred and One Stories of Zen»).
So, «do whatever you want if you are conscious because everything is empty» is the same as «a sober person with two ppm of alcohol in his blood».
2. «Effortless Enlightenment»
A second delusion that has become particularly common nowadays is to believe that there is no effort required to realize Enlightenment, but simply to «be in the natural flow or moment». This is akin to the Zen «silent insight» that Master Hakuin[45] struggled with all his life.
On the one hand, it is true that in the process of practice, we come to a state of natural presence, or a state akin to the Calmness and Contemplation I described in the previous chapter. Observing objects and phenomena while in this state, we eventually perceive the Emptiness of all that we perceive and realize the first Enlightenment. The problem, however, is that this state of natural presence is simply taken out of the context of the practice process by ignorant and lazy people and presented not as a small intermediate part of the path, but as the only means and the only goal of the entire True Dharma practice.
However, such an approach is impossible, no matter how much a person, immersed in his own vague ideas and banal laziness, dreams of realizing Enlightenment «without effort». The fact is that there is a law of inertia in this Universe. It says that if we do not impart any energy to a body at rest, it will not get acceleration and will not start moving. On the other hand, if we do not apply force to an object that is moving at a certain speed, it will continue to move at the same speed.
The law of inertia is also at work in our consciousness. The ordinary, unenlightened state of our consciousness is the consciousness of the six worlds of the World of Passion, caught up in worldly desires arising from egoism. If this consciousness is left alone and no effort is made, it will remain in the original state of the six worlds of the World of Passion, a state where there is nothing but suffering, no matter how much one engages in self-deception by being in the «natural flow, without effort». This applies not only to the current life but also to the next one. As V.Vysotsky says in his «Song about the transmigration of souls»:
Your soul aspired to the heights -
You will be born again with a dream,
But if you lived like a pig
You'll remain a pig.
Moreover, if we continue the practice of satisfying worldly desires, continue to bring in relevant worldly information, and gain relevant experience, then we will accelerate toward the three bad worlds. But if we apply the opposite force to our consciousness, giving it an acceleration in the opposite direction from the three evil worlds, we will head towards worlds superior to the World of Passion, and then realize the true original state of our consciousness, in which we will see our true nature.
Thus, we need a serious and sincere intention to realize Enlightenment and Emancipation, an intention based on a deep study of the True Dharma and Right View, not on worldly desires. This intention, or determination, will lead us to the practices of Goodness, Merit, Law, and Tranquility. If the practitioner does not have these foundations, then his life becomes one of relaxed idleness: he begins to ignore everything in the world and believes that he can only sit and «contemplate» without bothering to study the Teachings, observe the precepts, accumulate merit, make Diligent Effort, practice Patience, or engage in meaningful technical and meditative practice. In the end, this leads to the fact that in meditation, which for such «practitioners» is more like a sitting slumber, he begins to hear voices from the Lower Astral telling him: «You have attained Emancipation. You are enlightened». Experienced practitioners tell him that he has fallen into a devilish state, and he responds by calling them liars. Unfortunately, I know many such examples.
3. «Instant Enlightenment»
The third delusion is the mistaken belief that the Doctrine of Emptiness, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, or Zen practice leads one to instant Enlightenment. Indeed, when the experience of the first Enlightenment (Kensho) is experienced, the cessation of consciousness is sudden. But before experiencing this experience, the practitioner must engage in serious and long spiritual practice – it is impossible to experience Kensho simply by hearing some teaching, even a very high one: the mind of an ordinary person is simply not ready for it. When we hear stories from the past about how ordinary people experienced Kensho simply by hearing some saying of a Master, we should not be deceived. These people had certainly been practicing for a long time before that moment. This practice may have had a concrete form or may have been formless and consisted of an agonizing inner search for the answer to the vital question «Who am I?» which was a powerful unidirectional concentration. When this inner concentration of consciousness reached its peak, the Master, seeing this state of the person, uttered the words that were the answer to the question that tormented the person. At this moment, a kind of explosion takes place in the human consciousness: the walls of fixed ideas and egoistic aspirations are destroyed. The man «experiences a great death, body and consciousness completely leave him, and from the deepest filth he rises completely pure»[46]. The words of the Master at this point become only a catalyst that would be utterly useless without the prior practice of the person himself.
4. «If you are enlightened, then you are enlightened, and if you are not, then you are not»[47]
The fourth delusion is that the experience of the first Enlightenment is somehow equated with the Final Enlightenment experienced by Gautama Siddhartha, who realized the state of Buddhahood. In other words, the fact that there are many levels of Enlightenment and Emancipation is denied.
However, if one tries to express the first Enlightenment or Kensho, mathematically, it is less than one billionth (1/1 000 000 000) of the absolute Enlightenment that Shakyamuni Buddha realized. The fact is that the soul called Tathagata or Bhagavan possesses, as it is said in Abhidharma philosophy, the only value of being among a thousand in the third degree, that is, a billion universes.
Imagine a multi-storied building with one hundred apartments. You live in one of them on a long-term lease, for example. It turns out that you own 1/100 of this house. However, there is an owner who owns the whole house. Similarly, there are a billion Universes, and our World of People is one of the worlds in this billion of Universes. The consciousness with which we perceive the World of People is our actual consciousness. We have had the experience of Kensho, our actual consciousness is stopped. At that moment, the experiences we had previously had in the World of People, and the newly incoming experiences have ceased to influence us. That is, we have received the experience of one of the worlds in a billion universes and stopped it. When in the same way we receive and stop the experience of all worlds in a billion universes, we will realize the state of Buddha, Tathagata, or Bhagavan.
This is why the greatest Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku spoke of «practice after Enlightenment».
Instead of a conclusion
Meditative experience gives us confidence. It is the certainty that the spiritual world does exist, and dedicating ourselves to that world is the only thing that makes sense in this life. Buddhist, yogic, and Taoist texts provide ample evidence for this fact. These texts refer to human life as short and in order to make the most of this life, we must engage in spiritual practice. This is the conclusion I have come to after having had, albeit not fully, the meditative experiences described in the sutras. Of course, anyone can have his or her own way of thinking and his or her own way of living this life. We are free to have them. I will be happy if this essay can answer at least some of your questions about life and death, about the causes of joy and suffering, and about Enlightenment and Emancipation. I hope that my telling of the True Dharma has brought the reader at least to the edge of clarity about the Teachings handed down by the Great Teachers of the past. And having received the answers, you will begin your spiritual practice, and eventually come to know your authentic selves.
Information about the author of the essay
The author, Vadim Sychevskiy, was born in the USSR (Russia, Moscow) in 1979.
From the age of 12, after seeing movies with Bruce Lee, he began to study and practice martial arts (Karate-do Goju-ryu and Jit Kun Do), then Chinese Taoism and Japanese Zen Buddhism.
Later studied yoga at the Jawaharlal Nehru Cultural Center at the Embassy of India. He received a yoga teacher's certificate.
In 1996, he started teaching Taoist Qigong, yoga techniques, and Buddhist meditation.
Currently, in addition to yoga and Taoism, he studies and practices Buddhism of the Southern (Theravada) and Northern (Vajrayana) traditions.
He has practiced in Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka.
In the course of his spiritual practice, he has experienced the energetic process of Kundalini Yoga, from the awakening of Kundalini energy to entering Samadhi.
His spiritual experience and achievements have been validated by high Masters of different traditions.
In 2010, he received his spiritual name, Dhamma Gaveshi (Pali: ධම්ම ගවේෂී, Dhamma Gavēṣī – Dharma Explorer).
In 2021, he completed a three-volume book that had lasted over 6 years, «Dharma – The Way Things Are. Real Experiences and Realizations of a Spiritual Practitioner».
Currently, the author conducts consultations on spiritual practice, and individual and group classes, where he uses his knowledge and spiritual experience to teach:
– Taoist Qigong
– Original Indian Yoga
– Buddhist meditation
The author is happy to share his knowledge of Dharma, and lectures integrating the teachings of Buddhism, Yoga, and Taoism.
Contact the author (through the translator, Nikolai):
gaveshi.en@gmail.com
English communities and translations will be in the future. For now, Russian-speaking communities are available:
Community of spiritual practitioners «Dharma – The Way Things Are» in VK
YouTube channel of the author of «Dharma – The Way Things Are»
The electronic version of the book «Dharma – The Way Things Are. Real Experiences and Realizations of the Spiritual Practitioner», Aegitas Publishing, 2021 in Russian:
VOLUME I VOLUME II VOLUME III