The sixth paramita
Can we have perfect understanding when our brains and minds are limited in so many ways — not least our species-centric way of looking at the planet and life itself? There-in lies the problem.
Right Understanding is free from mental constructs and ego-based attitudes, free from all forms of discrimination. Everything just is. It has the ability to carry us from human understanding into universal understanding, beyond all beliefs, concepts, ideas, and opinions. The problem with this, from experience, is that the more you seek this quality, the more elusive it truly is. You must simply practice and allow it to come to you.
BUT there are exercises and behaviours which will lead us towards this goal, and they all require great compassion and humility.
If we start with the people we love, look deeply into their hearts and minds, their histories, can we not find deep compassion for all the suffering they have gone through, theirs not ours? Can we not develop true understanding of the person without adding judgments onto it? I am lucky I have a soulmate who truly understands me, who has worked very hard to understand me with my PTSD and ADHD. HE is rewarded by my total acceptance of him in equal measure, as well as my profound respect and gratitude. He is the first person to treat me like this. As a result we have both been able to blossom in ways neither of us knew possible. This is looking at the reality of one person. Can we then do this for everything — and I mean everything and everyone else? That is the challenge. It may be easier, though not easy, to do this for those we love, but to extend that out to everything, all plants, animals (including humans) and the universe, then we are starting to understand right view.
The other dimension is to recognise that nothing is finite in itself. The wave is part of the ocean, and is made up of water. When the wave dissolves back into the ocean the water has not ended being, and neither has the ocean. There are always waves on the ocean coming and going and the ocean continues as it is, evaporating and dissolving back into rain again — being resourced by rivers and becoming rivers. Nothing here is permanent, but it is apparently constant. That is the illusion.
We are the same. I am not the same women who married my husband 24 years ago, no single cell in my body is the same. I am not the same age, and I have grown and changed enormously as a person. My character perhaps you would call it may have some continuity but that also evolves over time. When I die, all the elements that make up me in that moment will then return to the earth in one form or another. I have not ceased but I never began either. I am eternal and so is everything. We destroy the resources of this planet constantly with our material greed and belief in ownership and self. We are destroying the planet as we know it. The planet will evolve without us, but the elements of us will be used elsewhere. Our belief in the existence of self is the deepest delusion we can hold onto.
If we can shift our perceptions away from ‘human self’ and into ‘universal consciousness’, we start to achieve right understanding. I have experienced times of complete perceptual clarity, then purely human comes back. The need is to understand we function in the human realm and we can perceive in the ultimate realm. This way we live in harmony with self and our experience of this small human life. But the ultimate didn’t come because I was looking for it. It arrived unexpectedly after some very intensive practise. It lasted for four months and then it ended.
Since then I get glimpses of this alternative view of life. It feels very calm and tranquil. But I must continue to work to keep that perception going, keeping it running alongside any human perceptions. If I lived in a monastery it would be easier to maintain it constantly, but negotiating a world in which most people do not have this perception, I have learned to navigate it. It is not a goal, it is a development of our practice, but we can start by exploring the suggested approaches to see how they sit with us and remember them when faced with challenging situations. That is the tough one.
IF you like this piece the other five are found here, here, here, here, here, here