Thursday, November 15, 2007

Underneath the layers of conditioning...

Once all of our conditioning is stripped away,
the true self is as clear as the brilliant sun.
Underneath the layers and layers of conditioning
accumulated over the course of a lifetime is a Buddha
whose light shines throughout the whole universe.
Inside the ego shell of conditioning,
a glimmer of that light is actually
what brings us to practice to begin with.
It is the bodhicitta, the bodhi mind,
the mind that says it does't make sense
that there should be all this pain and suffering,
or that it should be so difficult to just be ourselves
the way a tree can just be a tree or a dog can just be a dog.
We humans seem to have a complicated time
with just simply being human. We fight with each other,
kill each other; we bang heads all the time,
even with the ones we love.