In Praise of True Endeavour
Spiritual awakening is not a fantasy, its activity is not conceptual. Awakening to the fullness in life, is realizing that there are no obstacles and no fundamental difficulties. Every day is an opportunity to study this in detail and to ease into the enjoyment of existence. With the slightest avoidance of anything, awakening becomes no more than an idea.
We need to be quick to see how it is that we lock body and mind into suffering. Labelling something in ourselves as too difficult to face, is a good way to do just that. There are countless other ways to imprison body and mind and most of them are equally innocuous seeming or normalized behaviours, though the effects are inescapably steely all the same. Effects are teaching, no-escape is compassion-wisdom, not imprisonment.
With acceptance, both hard and easy times are liberated. There is no need to be concerned about either, no need to label either. Both are equally the unbounded treasure of reality. With attachment to a discriminative mind, hard times and easy times become opposites and both will equally make the body suffer as it is forced into complying with projections.
Reactive thinking such as labelling something as too difficult, instantly shuts the door to the boundlessness of this life and then we may wonder why we feel isolated. Mostly, habitual reactivity is attempting to avoid what is seen to be painful or threatening. In creating avoidant views, forms of memory and sensation are probably chief among the components of mind that are being misappropriated. Investing in views leads to strengthening the power of subliminal habit energies, which in turn encourages actions that reinforce restriction, rather than liberation.
In trying to assert that all that our nature has to offer, is within the grasp of our discriminative thinking mind, we are denying the end of suffering and choosing instead to instil hesitancy and doubt. It’s as if we have come to really believe that with our thinking, we can grant or deny things existence. Because of the limitations created through this misusing of thought, we then end up on a treadmill of trying to make ourselves happy by denying consequences.
Spiritual truth is hard won, to neglect awakening is to treat it as a vague and remote idea that has nothing to do with ourselves – ‘no birth, no death, buddha nature, nirvana, whatever….’ – whereas awakening requires our full involvement. There’s no room for ‘whatev’s’ when we are actively engaged with the responsible Zen of life and living. By excluding ourselves, we may as well regard the teachings of generations of practitioners as if they are words left by dilettantes sitting in ivory buildings, perhaps amused with their own impenetrable cleverness. Whereas they are words of people like us, people who gave everything and sometimes risked their lives, in order to experience and realize what is true and so help others to do the same. That they didn’t think it a big deal to do so and that they were willing to even give up truth, makes their voices ring all the more true, at least to me.
We shouldn’t seek out extremities in order to wake up, it would be a false step and awakening has nothing to do with ease or difficulty. If extremes come to us, then that would be our ground of training. In no way do we need to give up our relatively comfortable living circumstances in order to realize hard won spiritual fulfilment. Whether things are easy or not, we can unwittingly fall into the illusion of objectifying our lives and so live as if watching ourselves in a dream. When challenges to our mental constructions come, as they will, if we are not really grounded in unborn nature, we will likely lose our minds and either collapse into resignation or scramble around for resolution, both would be versions of looking for answers outside of ourselves. Fine words about training and enlightenment being one, quickly go out of the window as latent fears and desires take over. Challenges may be compassionate invitations to face our fears, delusions and desires. To do so, is to longer be dragged around by these parts of ourselves and to help transform them into wisdom. Practice like this is the active discipline of the true kindness of non-avoidance.
I’m pretty sure that if we haven’t seen it before, there will be a good chance to see it as we take our last breaths – this world of pain is also a world of bliss – nothing is wrong, there are no absolute difficulties and there is joy in existence. Better to look deeply now and give up gambling on the imagined self and its coping strategies. The nature of everything is unborn, what use has it for coping strategies? Realization doesn’t require rejecting learned wisdoms, it makes use of them even as it is leaving them, it certainly doesn’t need to look to knowledge for completion.
To say that there are no difficulties, is not to dismiss our life experience or our pain. It is to let go of all of it and realize that there is nothing from the first.
Willard Lee April 2025