“our original nature is that of the enlightened Buddha”
Scottish Buddhist author and teacher Stephen Batchelor believes Buddhism has a wide appeal in both the East and more recently the West because it “points not to a single view but to a diversity of strategies and tactics that different followers of the Buddha throughout history have adopted, which are more pragmatic or, one could almost say, relativist—down to earth.”[i]
Buddhism teaches that we live in a state of unconsciousness (P-B). “Our present experience of life can be viewed as a long dream arising from our lack of understanding about whom we truly are and the actual nature of our world. What we usually refer to as a ‘dream’ is only a short-term fantasy that we wake up from every morning. The real dream we are having is our ‘waking life,’ a delusion that continues on and on. When we are in this dream and do not recognize that we are dreaming, then everything we see appears as solid and real, and we do not see any possibilities for transforming our painful experiences. However, when we recognize that we are dreaming, then everything becomes spacious, transparent and free, and all of our confusions and suffering can be easily transformed.”[ii]
Most of us, being unaware of P-A and our True Self (the enlightened Buddha Nature or Christ Consciousness), are expressing a fear-driven and self-destructive false self in a P-B worldview of dualism. The imperative, then, is to wake up!
Insight # 48 comes to us from Fritjof Capra (b. 1939). He is an Austrian-born American physicist, educator, activist, author, systems theorist, deep ecologist and a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California.
“Buddhism holds that our original nature [Buddha Nature or True Self] is that of the enlightened Buddha and that we have just forgotten it.”[iii]
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Additional Reading:
- Buddhism, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] Cohen, Andrew. “Absolutely Not!” What is Enlightenment? Lennox, Massachusetts, Fall/Winter 1998, p. 115.
[ii] Rinpoche, Dzogchen Ponlop. “What the Buddha Taught.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, May 2006, p. 53.
[iii] Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. New York: Bantam, 1975, p. 24.
