Of course we can argue these points with the most sophisticated logic. The ego-mind is very skilled at that. I have seen the fear in the eyes of people scrambling for survival in their pre-fabricated constructed realities, fighting sometimes with anger to grasp at the realities they have been lead to believe. Only these delusions can only bring perpetual suffering.
I thought of Lisa (not her real name), a beautiful young Malaysian woman whom I met about eight years ago at a dinner in Brisbane Australia. I was there to speak about mental health. She was at the dinner with her boyfriend. She was a photographic model, successful in the height of her career. She told me about the new luxury apartment she had moved into. She had never heard much about mental illness before and found the topic quite amusing, referring to those who are challenged with illness as the “crazies”. She lived and moved in the material world and asserted her individuality in her forceful language.
It was some nine months later I was visiting a man who had been long term in a Brisbane Psychiatric hospital. As I walked along the corridor of the ward accompanied by a nurse, I passed patients room. My heart stopped as I noticed an Asian woman whose eyes met mine. She started to speak but then turned away. The nurse asked me if I knew her as this woman had only been admitted to hospital after a crisis had no known friends who visited her and was reluctant to talk to the treating staff.
As I entered her room I recognized the young Malaysian woman I had met at the dinner party. Her “boyfriend” had been married to another woman. He had been a successful business man but the stress of living a double life and the shame of eventually being found out brought him to suicide. Lisa had found him hanging at the back of his office.
Her world had come crashing down around her. Unable to work, the bills mounted up until she was evicted from her luxury apartment. Deep depression set in and she was found by police wandering the streets without shoes in the middle of the night.
It was a long journey back to recovery for Lisa. She could not have done it by herself. He rugged individuality had become smashed within an instant of time and the vulnerability of our human nature had come to the fore.
She recently shared with me how the incident had become a turning point in her life and that she saw life’s “true reality” now.
Lisa is just one person of so many I have journeyed with whose illusion had been burst like a soap bubble. Suffering is so often the soil in which the seed to enlightenment is planted.
Of course, there is no need to suffer so greatly to understand the truth. If we could only let go of the illusion and give compassionate comfort to the frightened ego that it can be transformed. In transformation there is freedom and life.
Pure Land is but one breath away. Pure Land is not just a future reality. Meditative Samadhi is not just a beautiful feeling. It is a living reality. It is a mistake to think that our practice is just for some eschatalogical event. It is now.
Practitioners of the Way ought not be tempted into the rugged individuality of worldly society. Western Buddhism is in real danger of being reduced to a Double Gem rather than the treasure of the Triple Gem. The Sangha is being diminished. Buddhism cannot just be practiced in isolation by just reading books and internet web sites. Its potency lies in the Triple Gem of which Sangha is vital. It is when we practice as a vibrant community that the Dharma comes alive and our practice takes form. Enlightenment will sadly elude us to think otherwise and we will fall prey to the fundamental assumptions of the philosophy of our times and produce much suffering.
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