One great traditional analogy goes as follows: If you lit a candle, then lit another candle with that candle and then blew out the first one, what is transmitted? This is causality without a permanent entity, resonance without continuity, an artificial but useful recognition of a pattern, and nothing more.
THE TRANSCENDENCE MODELS
Related to the Immortality and Bliss Models, we have the
Transcendence Models. These essentially promise that you will have the best of both worlds: you will get to be in the world while not of the world, be able to enjoy all pleasant things while being immune to pain and difficulty, and thus live in a protected state of partial, selective transcendence. A lot of people try to emulate such a state in their practice: when presented with suffering they either look away from it or try to make their attention so wide or vague that they don’t notice it, and when pleasant things arise they try to hang on to those experiences and expand them. While such a perfectly natural thing to do, this is the exact reverse of insight practice, and yet they may deeply feel that this is practicing for the transcendence they have been promised.
As stated earlier, the predictable and obvious truth is that transcendence is bought at the price of a very deep, direct intimacy with life, all of life, both good and bad. Similarly, this deep intimacy with life is bought at the price of transcendence. While everyone nearly automatically looks to the good side of both, few consider that realization brings a deep, direct experience of all that is painful and also the reluctant understanding of how empty and ephemeral pleasure is.
One must be careful here, and I don’t advocate buying into either extreme. Our ordinary lives have all this already, so don’t look for something that is different from what is going on. Instead, look into your 315
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life as it is and see the Three Characteristics of it directly, instant by instant. This is the gateway to the answer to the strange paradox that all this is pointing to.
THE EXTINCTION MODELS
On the flip side of the Immortality Models, and somewhat contrary to the Transcendence Models, we have the Extinction Models. These are essentially a promise that insight practices will either have you never be reborn again or will make you non-existent somehow in some ordinary sense. The first basic flaw in these models is that they presume an entity to which these things can occur, which from an insight point of view is already a problem. Insight practices at their best presume emptiness as always having been the case, and so to posit that there is something that was reborn flies directly against their root premises.
Thus, the notion that there is someone who either will not be reborn again or will somehow cease to be (assuming they were “being” before), is absurd and doesn’t belong in the language of ultimate wisdom.
However, page after page, Buddhism promises that there will be no more coming into any state of being, no more rebirth, no more self, and that somehow this will get someone off of the wheel of suffering.
Here we get into as gray an area as it gets in spiritual language.
Between the weird promises of the Immortality Models and the weird promises of the Extinction Models, we can really get into paradigmatic trouble. Somehow we are sure that one of these must be right, or maybe both are, or perhaps neither are, or some other combination we currently can’t conceive of must be the correct one. However, all of these models are based upon a fundamental flaw, the misperception of sensations and the conclusion based on this misperception that there was some separate, permanent us that all these dualistic concepts can apply to. There is not, nor has their ever been, though sensations occur anyway. It is a convenient, practical, working assumption, a convention, a way of speaking, but nothing more. Thus, all of these curious notions simply do not apply. Simply practicing and perceiving sensations clearly reveals the way out of these paradoxes.
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On a completely different note, there are the Love Models. These are hard to relate to any previous category except perhaps the Emotional Models, but they essentially involve some combination of us loving everyone, feeling love all the time, becoming Love itself, being loved by everyone, or some combination of these. The first two are commonly found in various references, such as Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s famous quote, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these two my life flows.”
This is really not a bad quote as quotes go, as it tries to encompass the apparent paradoxes of spiritual understanding. It is basically a restatement of the Tibetan concept of balancing emptiness and compassion, and I like it for this reason. However, lots of people think that enlightened beings will be radiating love all the time, walking around saying loving things, feel profound love for all things at all times, and the like. Unfortunately, things couldn’t be further from the truth.
While it does get sometimes easier to take the wider world of beings into consideration as the center point is seen through, this is very different from walking around in a state of continuous love.
More sinister, deep, rarely articulated and yet compelling is the notion that somehow we will get enlightened and then people will not just like us, they will love us. Wow, does that one not withstand reality testing. Take the history of any of your favorite spiritual superheroes, the Buddha, Jesus Christ, St. John of the Cross, Rumi, etc. and notice the reactions people had to them. The notion that somehow you will be embraced, accepted, appreciated, respected, adored, cared for, or even liked by anyone just because of realization is, tragically, just another beautiful, delusional dream. In short, think twice before quitting your day job or walking down the middle of the street in your guru outfit proclaiming your realization for all to love.
Now, it is true that you can borrow a lot of pre-programmed respect from some people just by ordaining, which, viewed another way, means that ordination might get you the respect that your realization should, in some idealized universe, provide for you. However, this will be to a strangely select audience, and the games you have to participate in to be a part of that group are significant. You can also get a lot of respect by 317
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getting on some senior teacher list, but there are subtle forces that then come to bear that will have you denying a lot of your own humanity when in public, thus leading to the shadow sides I mentioned above.
These points also hint at the Social Models that will follow in a bit.
THE UNITY MODELS
Related to the Love Models are the Unity Models, those that
promise a palpable sense of your connection to everything else. This is another one of those models that contains some sort of truth, but is in fact one far extreme side of the unity/extinction paradox. What we generally imagine is that we will stay an agent, a separate, conscious, in-control being and yet will be part of everything in some mysterious way, such as either feeling everything else at all times or even more ludicrous, being in control of everything else at all times. I have already spent a lot of time on this model in the section called No-Self vs. True Self and in previous models, so will move on with the simple statement that those that believe in unitive models are missing something fundamental.
THE SOCIAL MODELS