Seeing the perfection of persona through Buddha's eyes

"This that we are honors the persona equally with the eternal."  

Pamela Wilson.

There are a lot of helpers in the world.  Most of those helpers have some wisdom; some have a lot.  But there is something about the roles of helper/ helpee that has always bothered me: the assumption that someone needs "help."  

From one point of view, of course, we all need help at different times.  Some of us seem to need more than others.  But from the point of view of the eternal, no one needs any help:  we are all perfect as we are.  And somehow, when we meet someone who knows that, we are radically changed, even if the person says nothing at all about it. 

Many years ago, I saw a Kurosawa movie called, DO DES'KA DEN.  It was a commercial flop and not very many people saw it, but I've seen it three or four times.  I kept trying to figure out what it held for me, because when I saw it, it appeared that a transcendent wisdom was being transmitted, although I wasn't sure if it was in the film, or if I had just projected it.  In this film, a ragtag group of society's dregs lives in a rubbish pile on the edge of Tokyo Bay.  Their quirkiness is all in the service of survival.  And it was something about Life's pushing through, Life's just keeping on making it happen that moved me to tears.  Pamela today called it the "resilience of consciousness," and suddenly I saw why I had watched this movie so many times.

I saw for the first time how every form, everyone, not in spite of how they are but in the very being of who and what they are, is manifesting divine perfection.  Adyashanti used to call it "the Eternal in drag."  It just shines if you have eyes to see it.  And today, I have eyes to see it.

Of course, this doesn't negate that there will be people who push my buttons, people whom I don't like or who don't like me for a myriad of reasons.  All that psychological stuff is still there, but it doesn't obscure what is underneath anymore.

The nature of suffering

I'm reading a memoir by a man who went to Dharamsala seeking truth:  TURTLE FEET by Nikolai Gronzi.  He states what I think are supposed to be the Four Noble Truths in a way I hadn't heard before and that seems more accurate to me:  "that all compounds are impermanent; that all physical and mental states, born out of a misconception about the ultimate way of things, are in the nature of suffering; that all phenomena are devoid of objective reality; and that Nirvana is peace." 

I guess this seems more accurate to me because these days it's becoming clearer that suffering comes from the whole human apparatus of consciousness; not just from some mistaken view, but from the way the human psyche functions.  That is to say, the mind solidifies everything and places it outside of itself, and also tends to make things permanent when nothing lasts more than an instant.  So loss is a permanent feature of life as a human being, not because "things" die but because we imagine they were ever solid in the first place.

All of this perhaps sounds intellectual, but I think it does reflect the realization that happens when all of this gets seen through.