Good
and bad devotion
Devotion
is important. Devotion can be understood in several ways. I like to
think of devotion as something that has to do with the opening of the
heart, like loving devotion. Devotion is essential in many kinds of
spiritual approaches, both buddhist and otherwise.
We
can use loving devotion, in the form of feeling love in our hearts or
by praying to God, guru or our own essence, both in good and bad
ways. A good or spiritually valid way is to use that emotional
surrender as a stepping stone, use it and then discard it, not
dragging it along. Just say the prayer, feel it having the effect of
your biased mind opening up from the heart-region and then forgetting
it. A bad way to use the same technique would be to keep the attitude
of surrendering our egos, limited minds or dualistic problems and
never let go of it. The point is not to remain inferior to whatever
it is that you are praying or surrendering towards. The point is not
to stay below or separate of your spiritual ideal. If you do, you end
up being caught in the dichotomy of self and other, ”me” and the
chosen ideal. Were you to keep this view, you only end up being as
miserable as before.
When
we pray, ”Heart, heart, heart... Love, love, love... Master,
master, master...” or however it is that you pray, it is done
because loving surrender is perhaps the most powerful way to bypass
the self-based mind and with the help of that mechanism to go beyond
the dualistic mind and enter rigpa. Now, if we insist and stubbornly
stick with the idea, with the conceptual thought of ”heart”,
”Love”, ”guru” or ”God”, this will not happen. The point
is to use a concept to go beyond it by applying loving surrender
which is emotion. For a beginner, it is possible to experience bliss
and overwhelming love, and this can be good because this can heal a
lot of hurts, but from the point of view of our true self, rigpa or
home awareness, this is not really the point. The point is, by
applying the emotion of loving surrender, to reveal our true nature
and become it, instead of becoming a self-biased fool. Rigpa is
subtle, transparent, and there is no one there. There is no God or
buddha there. You are not there either. Home or rigpa is nonspatial,
non-dimensional and entityless. Just the openness, brimming with
subtle power and life. You don't ”feel” rigpa. You don't and
cannot ”recognise” it. Our home is beyond our self, beyond our
minds. Home knows itself, it is self-cognisant. So, I feel, that
loving surrender is correctly applied when it transcends itself and
our knowing awareness (rigpa) is recognised. This is not rocket
science. This is not ”highly spiritual” or something ”very
evolved meant only for experienced meditators”. No, no. You don't
have to create this barrier of difficulty and then pursue to go
beyond it. Anyway, loving surrender or devotion can be useful.
Something
important. The thing is that if you have never tried this, it is
likely that you aren't aware of the emotional aspect of yourself,
i.e. you can have a great of territory in your bodymind that you've
never even become aware of. One can become a very skilled meditator,
like a surgeon's scalpel, that can follow the breath for hours on end
and perform analytical meditation like a machine but this doesn't
mean that one has recognised one's truen nature, or arrived home even
for a moment. Don't become a ”skilled meditator”. Open up.
Lighten up!
What
can be discovered with this application is that as our minds become
clear and transparent, and we really see with the eyes, hear with the
ears, feel with the bodymind, is that our problem is self-caused and
the solution is never away. The solution is sort of ”here and now”
but if you look for something that is ”here” or something that is
in the ”now”, you are again playing with concepts and getting
caught by them. Our home is beyond concepts. That's the thing. Pray
and open your heart and see for yourself.
Loving
devotion is as handy a technique as the diamond cutter mantra phet
is. The first uses our emotional aspect to access rigpa and the
latter applies our power of concentration brought to a momentary
maximum combined with energetic power to access rigpa. It would be
idiotic to keep shouting ”Phet! Phet! Phet!” on the top of your
lungs all the time. You'd only end up exhausted. A few phets will do
to cut through. It's the same thing with prayer. And ultimately it's
the same thing with all techniques. Praying is enough when the heart
and our whole being opens up. Opening up means becoming subsumed by
rigpa. That is our home, our true nature, us as buddhas. This is not
radical. This is how it actually is. Be practical. Don't romantisize.
Try.
-
Kim Katami, 10.9.2016
Open
Heart,
