Samsara is not a place, she is a Goddess and you are her!
Warning: These Dharma essays are for Westerners and Smart-phone addicts. They don’t conflict with traditional understanding. They do leave out some of the traditional ideas that drive Westerners nuts, and they introduce a few modern ideas.
Having two separate natures is pretty mysterious. I’m going to try and unravel the mystery. To do that I need a word to be the counterpoint of ‘Buddha Nature’, so I’m going to use the term ‘Samsara Nature’.
Buddha Nature versus Samsara Nature, what the heck are we talking about?
Sentient beings have two corresponding natures: a Buddha Nature and a Samsara Nature. The natures are as different as night and day, but they’re joined at the hip. They’re like two sides of a coin. (Incomprehensible!)
Actually, it is difficult to talk about the two natures. Talking is at the very heart of Samsara Nature, but it's alien to Buddha Nature. Samsara Nature is all about words, and things, and MAKING SENSE. When we use words to try and make sense of Buddha Nature, the result is poetry, strange metaphors or gibberish.
Samsara Nature is where we eat, walk, talk, think and interact. It's the source of all things: both the things in the physical world, and also the things in our inner world, like feelings and thoughts.
Every single thing in existence has a name and a definition. Right? Samsara Nature keeps track of all those names and definitions in a gigantic dictionary, hidden in your brain. If you turn your head, and look around, Samsara Nature instantly tags every thing you see, with its name, its definition, associations, histories, judgements, and even more. (It’s quite amazing.)
Dictionaries are cool but they are very abstract. A dictionary is a collection of black and white squiggles. It is information; it’s not alive and tangible. If you burn up a dictionary it doesn't destroy the world. A dictionary full of squiggles doesn’t come to life until we illuminate it with our rich life-experience. That illumination is our other nature, our Buddha Nature.
Imagine walking into a familiar room, in the dark. You know what's there, you could describe it, but it’s not alive and real until you flip on the light. That fire of color and light which explodes when we flip the light switch, is our Buddha Nature.
Buddha Nature is all richness, ecstasy and radiance, but we can't interact or talk about Buddha Nature without using our Samsara Nature.
The two natures work together; they can’t exist independently. Without Samsara Nature everything is meaningless glorious gibberish. Without Buddha Nature everything is lifeless information. Our perception automatically merges the two.
Here’s a cool practice for checking out Buddha Nature.
Touch a thing with your finger. Say a table.
Concentrate on your finger touching the table and the table touching your finger, back and forth.
Now close your eyes, and forget that there’s a table and a finger.
Concentrate on the rich formless and ever-changing essence of the sensation. That’s Buddha Nature.
(This practice is difficult to do with things you can see, but not touch. Eyesight is deeply bound to Samsara. Open your eyes, and Samsara grabs hold of your psyche. It's like when you wake up in the morning and the real world comes crashing down like a ton of bricks. Half-closing the eyes makes everything blurry, causing Samsara to loosen it’s grip.)
Samsara Nature is an evolutionary adaptation (at least according to my Western 'scientific' mind). It evolved millions of years ago in tiny bugs squirming around in the primordial ooze, craving food and procreation. We have inherited this adaptation. It helps us eat breakfast, avoid predators, turn door knobs, take off our pants and when having sex. (”Look, there’s a wiener, and a there’s a vag!”)
But as far as compassion, happiness and spirituality is concerned, Samsara Nature is a disaster. It’s antiquated, clunky, and makes mistakes which cause terrible suffering. And, to make matters worse, Samsara Nature naturally takes a big sh#t on the ecstasy and radiance of Buddha Nature. Yes, it does!
If the two natures are in balance it’s like Nirvana. If the two natures are out of balance, we SUFFER. And they ARE out of balance!
To be continued…