Hide Face
By Michael Erlewine
“I ran to the rock to hide my face,
The rock cried out, No hiding place,
The rock cried out, “I’m burning, too.
And want to go to Heaven the same as you.”
Samsara is no hiding place, not a place of refuge,
not a place to hide. Yet it is where we find ourselves and have for millenniums.
Samsara is a place to shield ourselves from the burning Sun of the natural mind, the blinding light we cannot face, cannot stand to look at, and have never looked at. It’s no wonder that this is an ingrown habit, according to the dharma teachings, a habit we have had not just now but for innumerable lifetimes and rebirths. We have until now never NOT been taking refuge in Samsara
I agree that we don’t know much about that, but there you have it. My own dharma teacher for 36 years the Ven Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche made it as clear as day. “In all the time there is, for all that time we are the stragglers, the ones who never got it, never recognized the true nature of the mind.”
Now that’s a hard nut to chew, in my opinion. It minces no words and offers no respite or way around it.
It just is what it is. You can’t explain it away or even look away. That’s what Samsara is, everything that obscures the true nature of the mind. And we wrap ourselves in that, tight as a tick. And always have.
I found this out big time when I had my major stroke. I was stripped in a flash of everything that I knew as a Self, stripped naked and exposed to the blinding light of my own vulnerability and nakedness. I was naked as a jaybird.
It would be wrong to say I sought cover, tried to find my Self which had been shattered into not small pieces, but into dust. Any cover was no longer there. And this went for days, weeks, and months to a degree/
All I could think of was getting back into the sheath or cover of my Self and that would be somewhere in the dark corners of samsara, and wrap myself up like a mummy in my entertainments and attachments that shielded me from that bright light of the natural mind. I could not bear to look at it. Yet, temporarily without a Self I had no filter.
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Much has been written about the bright light that appears in the bardos after death. I had my own look at that bright light and in reality, it was not actually a light like I imagined from the books. The light itself was nothing more than my complete nakedness and vulnerability desperate to find the sheath of my Self and have that around me like a shield from the light. Again: the light was the light of the natural mind and my terror of being exposed to it.
And me a dharma practitioner for many decades!
And it will be the same as we will experience in the bardos after death. My own root dharma teacher told me so. We will be desperate to dive into whatever will cover us from the light of our own nakedness. We will seek cover, but that cover is lost when we leave behind our physical body at death. And it will not be found. Period.
Against that coming scenario we best prepare, for I learned in my stroke I was NOT ready to be that kind of naked. I was not remotely ready, completely unprepared.
And my own dharma teacher of 36 years, upon hearing about my major stroke, said that he himself had had many smaller strokes. And he went on to say that my stroke, as deafening as it was, is exactly what I will experience when I leave behind my body at death.
He went on to say my major stroke was a good experience for me because that’s exactly what will happen after death when I find myself in the bardos. I now know what is waiting for me down the line and perhaps I should prepare myself for that. That is an understatement. Collectively, we are not ready.
As mentioned, after that stroke, I was in shock for days, weeks, and months while my Self worked like the devil to reanimate itself, which eventually it did, but in that gap until it did collect itself I could see and experience exactly what is waiting for each one of us at our passing.
You can believe I took this to heart and as I looked around and tried to share my stroke experience and what Rinpoche said, I could see that others had no idea what I was talking about, no clue. And this included the doctors at the hospital. In a word, collectively, we are NOT ready for this transition into the bardos. No way.
And so much depends on us transitioning to a rebirth correctly. It makes all the difference, otherwise we will just be shunted this way and that and perhaps end up in a rebirth that is very uncomfortable or worse.
A key thought to remember is that dharma is a do-it-yourself project. No one is going to do it for us. We have to do it by ourselves. We have to enlighten ourselves when we can get around to it if we can be undistracted long enough to do that.
[Midjourney AI graphic prompted by me.]
EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here are the links: SpiritGrooves.com.
As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
