Ch.18 - The Wish Fulfilling Jewel

To Make Peace With Ourselves is the Greatest Gift There Is

The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel

This is the Dharma that Points the Way Out of Suffering

Spotless, Taintless, Unshakeable, Unwavering Peace

[This chapter elucidates the key point that hen we align ourselves to the creative intelligence behind our lives we begin the process of freeing ourselves from suffering. This is how we come to enter into a state of profound and lasting peace.]

To Make Peace With Ourselves is the Greatest Gift There Is

To make peace with ourselves is the greatest gift we could have in this life. There is no material reward that has as great a value as the reward of being deeply at peace with who we are. Accepting who we are and accepting others as they are is the same thing. Behind our aversion, behind our ill-will, behind our greed, craving and attachment there is always pride.

This constant comparing of my experience with how I think it should be as better, same or worse, and the constant comparing of myself with my ideas of who I think I am as better, same or worse, is pride and it is at the root of all suffering.

Quite often it is the last aspect of the ego that we see clearly. We identify where there is craving and greed, we start to identify where there is aversion and anger, but we do not necessarily spot how fixated upon ourselves we become. We spot our greed but most often we cannot let it go because of pride. We spot our aversion but cannot let it go because of pride. It is the idea of ourself, who we think we are, that stands between us and making peace with who we actually are. It is our idea of ourself, what we think the world is, who we think others are, that maintains that sense of separation.

Of all the things that are clung to, the most doggedly clung to is the idea of me. And it is this idea of me that separates me from the experience I am actually having.

When you are looking to dismantle the three roots of suffering – ignorance, greed and aversion – understand that aversion and greed are not innate, they are conditioned states. And they are conditioned by ignorance. Ignorance is not paying attention, not seeing what is, as it is. The greatest ignorance of all is failing to recognise that this idea of ourselves is a totally illusory, dreamed-up and imagined idea of who I think I am. It is not until we dismantle that that we enter truly into the experience we are having, as it is, and start to see it for what it is.

It is not when we complete our idea of ourself but when we let it go that we start to wake up to how it is. It is an act of generosity of spirit to surrender our fixation upon ourself and allow things, ourselves and others, to be as they are.

To surrender the ego and its personal will to a deeper intelligence that is not in conflict takes courage and humility. It is not easy to do, but once you have seen for yourself the direction in which to go, never give up. If you have not enjoyed the quality of your mind in this life, and how your idea of self has made life difficult - work at it. Work at it.

There is an intelligence in the workings of this path out of suffering. To be alive is to stand upon that path, and, as I have said, which direction we head is entirely in our own hands. There is an intelligence in the whole universe, and when you look out there at all the myriad ways in which life expresses itself and how human beings express themselves, you will see only one of two things in the background behind the appearances you behold. You will either see love as the ground for the freedom from suffering, or not knowing love as the confusion that is the cause of the appearance of that suffering. When we see that, really see it, how can we have anything but compassion and love for one who, in confusion, does not see what is actually going on here?

So let us not get lost sitting round the dinner table arguing with each other about the nature of reality. Open your heart to the idea that we have not figured it all out yet, and perhaps that our faith in life is as important as our understanding of it. For every scientist who will tell you there is no divine principle at work in life because they have not yet managed to prove it, there are far more beings who have taken the time to polish the lens of their mind so that they can see. I have not yet read the testimony of any one of them telling us that this life is a dry and mechanical process devoid of any higher purpose. It cannot be a coincidence that almost everyone who has taken the time to learn to see beyond the appearance of things has come back moved beyond words by what they have beheld. If we are no longer deeply in awe of life, it can only be because we have stopped paying attention to what is really going on here.

Perhaps we have stopped paying attention to what is going on around us every day because we are so busy paying attention to ourselves. What remains when our ideas and perception of self do fade away is a unity, a single process expressing itself exquisitely, creatively and imaginatively, everywhere. If you think your ipad is a genius creation then I suggest you stop now and then and look out at nature and what it is creating endlessly and everywhere, without leaving the slightest mess behind

The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel

When we stop being intoxicated with ourselves and our creations, we awaken to the truth that we are a part of the same single process that everything that comes into being is a part of. As we come to rest within that process we experience for the first time what it is to be free from conflict, what it is to be held. And in that moment there is no remaining sense of anything lacking.

This is the experience that we call the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel. Because it transforms what we thought were our desires into what really is our desire, and always has been our hearts' deepest longing, which was to know for ourselves and come to understand what it is that is going on here, what we are a part of. When we realise for ourselves that our deepest longing has been fulfilled we will know, as the Buddha said, ‘That for which I have come here to do has been done by me.’ Whatever willingness to harm ourself or others in the pursuit of our desires there may have been will be gone and in its wake will be a deep conviction to honour and cherish life at every level as sacred.

So it is not about sitting on your cushion forty minutes a day meditating or practising mindfulness. It is not about seeing how long you can watch your breath, or feel inside your body and your gall bladder and your spleen, or tuning into the stillness of the room, and all of those things. It is about this coming home. It is about making that return journey to the basic ground of your being, and ending your sense of separation from what is around you.

So the point is this: be intelligent, but open your heart to the experience you are having and let it be your teacher, and stop trying to figure it all out in your mind. Live your life intelligently and look to your life as the ground upon which to sow the seeds for your future welfare, not just in this life but well beyond this. If you are concerned about the world we are going to leave behind for our children, then know it is and always will be a reflection of the choices we make about how to live.

It is not good enough to point the finger of blame at others any more than it is to point it at ourselves. As Jesus said, we just do not know what we are doing. But when you do, when you understand, be willing to change as completely and unconditionally as you have to in order to become part of the solution and no longer the problem. It is not enough to say, ‘I won’t make a difference’. You will. If everyone waits for everyone else to change we really are stuck.

We create our own suffering and we create our own way out of suffering. Nobody does it for us. Every liberated being, every single one who freed themselves from suffering did it by finding the courage to change, and overcoming the vanity that worried about what others might think. The work that each of us has to do is the same work that every single one of us has to do, and we have to do it for ourselves. The Buddha did not bring anyone out of suffering and nor did Jesus. They simply pointed the way, and encouraged us to live consciously and considerately in such a way as to safeguard our welfare and the welfare of others, here and in the future.

So try to create the space in your life so that when you get to the end of it you will know that what had to be done by you, for your welfare and the end of your suffering, has been done. Because that much you free yourself, that is a step towards the freeing of others. Be willing to be the first to change and do not live like sheep unwilling to take the first step until you know everyone else is coming with you.

Reflect upon the five precepts of conduct and see how far you can commit to them. Make a list of the 10 Paramis and review them regularly. Stick them on your fridge or stick them next to the mirror where you brush your teeth in the morning, and just look at them, and remind yourself regularly, 'OK, how’s it going?' And when you are finding life a bit tough, instead of thinking, ‘Oh dear, it’s all getting on top of me’ – ask yourself, ‘What can I learn here?’

And if you look down the list and think about the challenge you are facing, you will find some inspiration to work at it. It is going to take more than a little patience, generosity, or determination. But by the time you have found these 10 qualities within you, you will be most of the way home.

This is the Dharma that Points the Way Out of Suffering

This is the Heart Essence of the Dharma. It is not packaged up in bite sized chunks so you can practise it in ten minutes on the bus to work in the morning. I know it may not be convenient. But it is the Dharma that points the way. And the way that it points to is the cessation of suffering.

I do not always teach the Dharma as directly as this, and for many years I remodelled it for a modern western audience because I realised that actually people were interested in learning meditation for many reasons. They were not necessarily seeking the cessation of suffering. They were coming for some steerage in daily life and that is fair enough. So I started teaching the basis for a harmonious life and a harmonious mind. I realise that this rare and wonderful life we have is something to be lived as fully as we can, and that something that might help us get the most out of it would be a great help.

I struggled with this for some years. My first teacher taught me how to teach meditation to a lay audience, for a healthy life in the here and now. My second teacher taught the path out of suffering to its end. When I left him to come back home to teach, explaining that I had to offer a Dharma for householders, not monks and nuns, he shed a tear, saying 'Life is brief. It is unsure. We should work for the cessation of suffering at every opportunity we can, and we should help to point that way to others.'

There is of course merit in both standpoints. Perhaps you will not mind if I explain it like this.

There are may kinds of heavenly realms, more exalted than ours. Some are inhabited simply by those whose virtue is intact and to growing degrees delight in the pleasurable but harmless things we delight in, like nature, visual beauty and sounds. Beyond these purely pleasurable realms are those of ever increasing states of peace and serenity where the beings who inhabit them are ever purer and more subtle minds. Some have purified their minds through insight, others have upheld their innate purity and not lost it. Their ability to enter into, appreciate and enjoy any experience from the ordinary to the sublime is a reflection of the purity of our mind in that moment.

Some of these pure beings practise Samatha (or serenity) meditation. Others practise Vipassana (insight). The Samatha (serenity) devas have never seen eye to eye with the Vipassana (insight) devas. There is a debate that has gone on for a very long time. The Samatha Devas and the Vipassana Devas are a little bit at loggerheads with each other. The Buddha looked out upon the world with the eye of wisdom and reflected, ‘I must teach this Dharma for the welfare of beings, and the way out of suffering.' He was concerned with the tremendous capacity we have to bring ourselves to suffering. He taught what he taught out of compassion.

Now the Samatha Devas, of which Brahma is one of the most exalted, looked down at the world, at me and people like me who were teaching Dharma to a fortunate audience like you, and went, ‘Now come on. Hold on a minute. This is an awesome, extraordinary, profoundly beautiful universe and world that we are a part of. Why are you teaching the path out of suffering? Teach them how to love and how to live a life of love.’ This was the conclusion I myself came to, and so I started out teaching the path as the way to realise our full potential as beings.

And then there came a point when the Vipassana devas became concerned and said: ‘Hold on a minute. This path of delight in the sacred is practised by those Samatha devas up there in the heavenly realms. They are delighting in their good fortune because they kept their virtue. Their minds are taintless. They have not harmed another being along the way and there is no trace of selfishness in them. That is why they are delighting and revelling in their good fortune. Are you sure that the virtue of human beings is strong enough to show sufficient restraint that when given everything they could ever dream of they would not consume the planet that their life depends upon?’

So there it is, it is a very, very profound debate. Here we are in this extraordinary situation that takes eons to come about, that beings long to experience for goodness knows how long. And failing to recognise what it is and honour it, the danger of bringing ourselves to suffering rather than living it as an act of devotion, respect and gratitude, is great indeed.

This is basically the point. Here is the Dharma that teaches you how to live well and get the most out of your life, and the same Dharma that will show you the way to the causal cessation of suffering. The Samatha Devas live in hope that we as human beings can likewise keep our virtue, and live life as an expression of love without being a burden to others and the planet that we live on. And the Vipassana Devas are saying, look, the danger of beings bringing themselves to suffering is too great.

I have grappled with this since I started teaching. Each time I teach I have to reflect on who is the audience to whom I speak? What are their needs? I would love to teach that path of Samatha so you could realise what your mind was truly capable of. But right now I do not think it is the time.

So this is the path that if you follow it, will remove, dig out at the root the things that bring you to suffering. And I think that in all honesty it is for your welfare, for everyone’s welfare, for our welfare first and foremost. I still stand on the fence, I have to be honest. But this is what the Buddha taught twenty-five centuries ago. He cared so deeply about the welfare of us humans that he implored us to free ourselves from suffering rather than simply revelling in our good fortune. He was well aware of how quickly such good fortune can come to an end if it is not honoured with the utmost integrity.

So when we as humans delight more in the pursuit of pleasure than the upholding of our virtue, dancing our life is not without risk. When we are willing to let go our unwillingness to harm ourselves or others in the pursuit of our desires, it is only a matter of time before we undo ourselves and the world we depend upon. That is the reason the Buddha taught what he did. He saw that our eyes are clouded with so much lust that we advert towards our desires, our sensual desires more consistently and more strongly than to our heart's true longing. When beings advert to their heart's deepest longing, and their life stands upon that ground of harmlessness, then they can be taught how to truly dance.

Most of us in the West are of strong intellect but little faith. It is a shame. I have been teaching meditation now for twenty years and I can tell you that without fail people are moved far more by the experience of feeling touched or getting close to what they might consider to be sacred in their lives than they are by whatever insight arises in them from their practice. There are those of strong faith who just know or believe deeply, or perhaps have simply not forgotten that there is a profound goodness behind life, and whose hearts are filled with devotion to that. Such beings walk the devotional path, and through humility and gentleness free themselves of suffering far more quickly than those of us who have fallen in love with our own creations.

Of course it takes more than just faith to come into alignment with what we might call divine. It is our willingness to open towards something that is beyond our understanding that gets us in touch with that part of us that is pure, long before we really understand where it might come from. This path takes not only virtue but tremendous humility.

In a world where we are so focused upon the display of things, and in particular our own creations, there is little turning our consciousness upwards to something higher than ourselves. Instead we are folding in upon ourselves with a self-absorption. Today we take far more photos of ourselves than of others, and certainly more than of the world around us. The way we advert our attention is rarely these days towards the purification of our heart and the realising of the essence of what we are. It is towards the gratification of what we perceive ourselves to be.

The path each of us chooses in life is very personal. The process of life, as I said, is not. Nobody is judged, there is no judging, there is nothing judging. There is just an intelligence by which this life functions, and you are either living in honour of it or not. And that is all there is to it. The world always has been and always will be a reflection of the consciousness of those upon it.

It is an extraordinary world that you are a part of, it really is. It is an amazing thing. And it has rolled with this extraordinary rhythm of intelligence down through the ages.

Spotless, Taintless, Unshakeable, Unwavering Peace

Sometimes it is as simple as turning your heart towards even the idea of what a taintless mind or being would be and being moved simply by that. A mind that is free of all selfish desire, free of any trace of willingness to harm or capacity to do so. A mind that arises with nothing but boundless love, compassion and appreciative joy. It is important to know that there are such beings as this, and that the path that was walked by the Buddha has been walked by countless beings, and in time can be walked by us.

How bright is your mind as you wander on from this life will be a reflection of how bright you have made it while you are here, which means to keep it 'dust free' the best you can. It is not enough to fall prey to sloth and torpor and say: ‘Well you know what, it's all a little bit like hard work.'

It is hard work. It is hard work, but your investment in this life, in getting to this point, was huge. Make sure you invest during this life for whatever happens next. Remember the game of snakes and ladders. The longest snake is always one step before the finish line. You will never again come to a life as fortunate as this, so make it count. I am not saying this because I want to alarm you, I just want you to get what is really going on here. There are beings shedding tears of compassion for us all in our confusion, who long for us to be happy. But they cannot free us.

A prisoner when he is let out of jail is not free until he frees himself. So do not wait for things to change around you. Start to change yourself now, from the inside out, and take care of the quality of your mind, because it is your only real possession. If your heart has started to delight and open and love other people, and care deeply about others just as much or even more than you would care about yourself, keep opening it. And do not stop until you are deeply and absolutely in awe of this life and feel so unfathomably grateful, endlessly so, because when that starts to happen to you, your mind is bright and brilliant; and that is the mind of these beautiful beings that we all long to feel close to. They are not dusty, they are not messy, they are beautiful, and if that is where you want to get to then do what you need to do to make your own mind beautiful too. There are many miserable folk draped in the finest of robes, and many whose hearts fly free whom no one would ever notice were there. Remember that your real needs are few and more easily provided than you might think once you start to let go the things that do not serve your genuine welfare.

Whatever else it is that you might think you want to experience, there is nothing that you long to experience more than a spotless, taintless, boundless, unwavering, unshakeable peace within you from which you could truly delight in the simple process of being alive. So be willing to give up what you do not need, or give it to those who do.

Whatever unwillingness to let go there still might be, keep working at it and never give up. Because I know that if you do one day come to glimpse for yourself the source of what I speak of here, there will be no wavering in your conviction to be close to it. This world is such an extraordinary, rare occurrence. To come to a fortunate human life is an even more rare occurrence. Once upon a time you longed to appear here, you longed to turn up, to experience what it is to come into being in material form. And it was enough; it is enough only to enter into the creative process itself. To wake up to what it is that you are a part of is enough. But somehow, somewhere along the line we have become so intoxicated with the idea of ourselves as the creator that we have bent this world to our will and lost our connection to the creative principle that is actually governing our lives. This life is not governed by the will of man and to bend it to our will does not come without a cost. The more we bend it the greater becomes that cost. For nothing in nature can remain out of balance indefinitely, and ultimately this world is governed by natural laws infinitely more powerful than our will.

I remember one morning, sitting with one of my teachers, and he said to me, 'These spiritual teachings, the flourishing of these spiritual teachings, it’s just like a match. It will blaze brightly only for a while. But if you want to make a fire burn for a long time you need to create a heart to it.' That heart is not built on knowledge alone. It is built on conduct, and choices. We are all going to have to make choices. We are those people that the Buddha spoke of who have little dust in their eyes. We have to work this out. And we cannot expect to wait until we are shown the way or told what to do. Because if we cannot work it out with all our intelligence and our capacity to recognise these things at work within us, then who will?

What my teacher said about the match - do not let it be a match that burns brightly within in you, inspires you and then quite quickly burns out and just sits in the background of your life as an unanswered longing or sadness. You need to put fuel on your fire and you need to tend it and when it has a heart then it will burn continuously and it will always show you the way. You give it a little fuel, blow on it occasionally and it will blaze for you. But you need to put the foundations down so that it has a heart. It is not just about receiving these teachings. It is about imbibing their essence, putting them into practice and living by them so that, one day in the future, you might come to truly delight in being alive in a time when consciousness is flourishing and not on the wane. It is that for which all of us have come here. It is in our hands which way we go. Whether you feel you were born in the light or born in the darkness does not matter. What matters is the direction in which you walk.

At the age of 80, after having taught Dharma for 45 years, the Buddha was nearing the end of his life. In the moments before his final passing away he was approached by those most close to him and asked for his final piece of advice to them all.

He pointed towards the shady groves, the quiet places where nature is undisturbed and the heart could rest peacefully immersed in the way of things and said:

'Go forth and meditate lest you regret it later. Decay is inherent in all compound things. Work out your own salvation with diligence.'

While the light is still shining in your heart, while you are still able to pay heed to its calling and recognise the way home for yourself, now is the time to do what has to be done by each of you, for your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you. As the Buddha said - do it now, less you regret it later.

Araham SammasamBuddho Bhagava

Buddham Bhagavantam Abhivademi