Beyond Mountains, More Mountains

If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.

This saying is new to me; it has come up twice in the last month. A friend of a friend, a student on the path of BuddhaDarma wrote a beautiful post on it. In essence, the expression means that you have to detach yourself from any external guide on your path to enlightenment: you have to kill that guide, because the true guide is yourself.

Let’s talk about me.

I didn’t expect that my path would be one of total involvement.

I saw monks make their choices and said to myself:
“I guess I can’t be spiritual, because there is so much love in my life, why would my path be to give it up? And if I can’t both be in the world and be spiritual, then being spiritual is not for me.”

And as I left my adolescence behind, and moved into my twenties and thirties, my love affair with the world only grew. I became polyamorous and a self-proclaimed relationship nerd, and the chance that I would become a monk only decreased.

And then, first slowly then quickly, my complete immersion in the world brought me into presence. Not just presence, a full on original religious experience.

Not the most common path, but a short one.

And so, I’ve met the Buddha. It’s the world itself. It’s the drama of God. Eye-gazing and the divinisation of self — Tantra — that was my activation.

And now the expression applies to me:

If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.

So, I must kill my connection to the world itself! How better to kill that connection than to do a Vipassana, a silent retreat—removing myself from what I love and what loves me. The world that has brought me into presence and self through connection. The relationships that allow me to see myself through my mirrors.

I love you, all that is external to me.

But I need to know the polarity of emptiness.

I need to fully disconnect from you and still feel my connection to source.

I want to spend 10 days in complete silence, completely away from the personal. I want to become the monk, now that my complete immersion in the world has come to fruition.

I want to know both poles completely: involvement and disconnection. Only by knowing the polarities can I have confidence I’m in balance.

Ram Dass’s defines faith as “the feeling of connection through self to divine source.”

I do not become a monk to find faith.

I become a monk to verify that my faith is still there even after I’ve become the monk: after I have removed everything except self. After I have killed the buddha that is my complete involvement with the world.

I become a monk to know emptiness without fear.

—

The call to silence and complete immersion in meditation is also coming to me from the Bhagavad Gita, and directly from Elizabeth Haich’s Initiation, which I’ll end by quoting:

“Now comes the most difficult task of all: concentrate on yourself. First reflect and consider what you are, then feel what you are, and finally you must be what you are!

‘For you to have become conscious here on earth, you have had to leave your true self and enter into your intellect and feelings. So far you have only been able to think and feel what you are, but you have never yet been able to be what you are! Observe the people around you and you will see that they are not their real selves. On the contrary, they are always identifying themselves with thoughts, feelings and roles they are playing here on earth. They have “fallen out” of their real selves and become pretenders, people living in a world of make-believe. Only in the eyes of very small children can you still see the sparkle, the light of real being. As its intellect awakens, the child begins to identify itself with its outward person, getting more and more removed from its divine, true self. And all the while the person, as we think about him, is only a mask through which the true self—the great invisible one—looks out at the world. The person cannot be more than an instrument for the manifestation of the self. But people get so attached to their mask that they cannot free themselves from it any more. The true self is king and master, the person is only his servant. But the sons of men abandoned their self and, descending from the throne, identified themselves with their mask, with their person. They make a king out of the servant and separate themselves from their true being. They force their higher self into exile, into the unconscious. The intellect causes this separation, and by means of concentration exercises and a purposeful effort to become conscious and aware, the intellect can be an instrument by which we get out of this separation and back to our true self.

‘In the past you have concentrated on various things. From now on, your one and only task is to concentrate on yourself, progressing through the three phases of concentration until you achieve complete identification with your own true self, until you really are your self. It is your task to reach the state of being which can only be described, in the first person, as “I am that I am“. But watch out! It’s not enough for you to think what you are, nor to feel what you are; you must be what you are in your own true inner self!

‘That is your concentration task until your initiation.’”