Imitating Samsara
By Michael Erlewine
IMITATING SAMSARA
Perhaps for me the hardest part of dharma training was not the many hundreds of thousands of prostrations, mantras, mandalas, and ceremonies, not to mention I had to do all those twice.
It was coming to terms with the discrepancies between what I read in the dharma texts should be my dharma experiences and what my actual experiences were like. It was not mix and match, but widely divergent right on down the line. I never got a break when I tried that on.
And by that I mean here is what I read my dharma-experience was supposed to be like and how that experience actually was like; they were almost a right-angle to one another.
And there was no one around to actually talk about this with and it even seemed like we should not talk about it either because it is about me, myself, and I, not about helping others. Trying to help myself.
I had enough trouble trying to compare written descriptions from the dharma scriptures and my actual experience, when what I needed was some clarity, and for me that did not come easily. I seemed always divergent.
Oddly enough what it took, of all things, was daring to own or even allow myself to have my own dharma experience, instead of trying to hold it up to the light and see how it compared to what the teachings say it should be. Needless to say, at that time I did not have faith in my own inner dharma experience.
In fact, over time, the only thing that shielded me from what tradition seemed to say I should be like, was a slowly increasing confidence in my own dharma experience until that actual experience blew away the clouds of doubt. Whatever it was my experience amounted to, there was no denying it.
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Or a better way to say this is that the joy and certainty of what I call non-meditation, like Mahamudra and Dzogchen which I was learning eclipsed what I thought and read in the scriptures. What I did not understand then, but I do now, is how absolutely unique each of our experiences of dharma can and usually is.
Trying to think or imagine what the future would be as concerns my dharma practice was a total waste of time. I had no idea! I had to give up thinking about it, comparisons, or what people told me dharma realization had to be like and just get caught up in the actual experience I began to have. We have to create our own dharma experience. There is no other way and no other person but ourselves to do it.
In other words, we have to work with and shape our own actual dharma experience and not compare it to what the books say or other tell us. We have no real choice.
It’s all about that magic dharma term ‘yidam’. I never understood what our yidam was until I did. And perhaps we all do it the hard way, by finding our own meager bit of dharma experience and building and expanding that until it blocks out all of the meaningless thinking and imagining as to what we ought to be experiencing as required by the teachings and scriptures and began paying attention to what I was actually experiencing. Because that was the particular dharma experience and yidam that my karma and fate handed me.
And so, my experience is go with what you have, not with what you imagine or read you should have.
[Midjourney AI graphic prompted by me.]
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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.
