Extract from: LIGHT ON ENLIGHTENMENT

One would be hard pressed to find anywhere the Buddha proclaiming a peaceful state of mind as the fulfilment of the practice. Realisation of Liberation from all manner of suffering, anguish and unsatisfactoriness may seem inconceivable to the ordinary, everyday mind unexposed to the Dharma. That does not put it out of reach. Even those who practice the Dharma may harbour the view that the task lies beyond human capacity. It is not unusual for profound teachings to get watered down to popularise them. There are a few sins in teaching the Dharma and one of them must surely be reducing teachings to a psychotherapeutic view of existence. A life totally dedicated to the Dharma embraces more than meditation and mindful exercises for coping calmly with daily life. While appreciating calmness and clarity of mind – features of the last two links of the Noble Eightfold Path - they can never serve as a substitute for Liberation.

The Third Noble Truth speaks of an authentically enlightened existence, not a cool response to it. We should never forget that discovering a truly liberated life is much harder than we think. In these teachings, those who have realised Liberation are called Noble Ones. They have found the way out of problematic existence. They have not generated a new construction but simply have ceased believing in and giving substance to the modes of the constructed self and its various standpoints. They have realised Liberation. This is Nirvana. It is unformed, unmade, and not dependent on conditions for its presence. The realised ones know Liberation as the way out of the jungle of discontent and lack of fulfilment. Nirvana does not belong to an unconscious state arising in meditation that fluctuates. Nor is it a condition of absolute detachment from the world or a state of annihilation.

In consummation, Liberation is the realisation of the end of suffering, the full emancipation of the human spirit and the joyful understanding of the nature of things. Cessation of suffering removes the struggle born of greed, hate and self-delusion. It eradicates that compelling need to pursue or gain things as an ultimately satisfying way of life. The emptiness of the ego, of any substance to “I” and “my,” is obvious.

Dharma teachings encourage us to resolve the force of wanting, to extinguish the problems, confusions and conflicts associated with it. This reveals the completion of the Path to Enlightenment. The cessation of unsatisfactoriness around wanting and not wanting points to the essence of the Third Noble Truth. This might seem an impossible undertaking. We think that our mind expresses only wanting or not wanting, and every action would appear to confirm this expression. All this is true for ordinary mind with ordinary consciousness but it cannot be said that this is how it is for everybody. We are then closing the door to enlightenment, preferring to take shelter within our fixed views.
Nirvana is knowing an emancipated life; it is not merely a clarity of mind. There is a danger that in making Nirvana into clarity of mind we substitute the Unconditioned, Unborn, Unmade for the conditioned, born and made. All states of mind, pleasant and unpleasant, shallow and deep, calm or confused, arise owing to the presence of causes and conditions for them to arise. The world of cause and effect contains no inherent truth but depends upon the interpretation of one thing compared to another. We use our perceptions and experiences to fix cause and effect. We live in a world that assumes the relationship and impact of things and events upon each other and the truth of our perceptions. It is not through piling one effort onto another, nor through acts of will, that our natural freedom shines through.

The Noble Ones know that this remarkable Liberation shines through states of mind - without dependency upon them. Knowing this releases much joy for the Noble Ones and also releases much love for others caught up in states of mind. This liberating discovery takes the grip of events out of one’s life - not through detachment but through clarity, insight and an incomprehensible intimacy. The grip of the perception that we were born and that we die also loses substantiality. The relevance of birth and death only has real significance for those who identify the activities of I and my with mind and body.

In enlightenment there is no notion of wandering from one thing to another, there is nothing for the self to gain or achieve. There is no further evolution for the self, and desire and becoming have lost all relevance. Liberated people neither cherish self existence nor withdraw from it, neither cling to others, nor reject them. They have done what has to be done. They have reached the top of the mountain that was always there in front of them. They know that the path is not the condition for the mountain. The mountain, that is the nature of things, stands firm and steady whether there is a path to it or not.

The ‘world’s’ inter-actions with our ‘perceptions’ deceive us into thinking we live in touch with reality. We invest substance and reality in our perceptions even though our experience of the world keeps changing. It is these changing experiences and views that naturally refute any standpoint that the mind makes. We have persuaded each other that we exist as unique, separated from all else. We assume that we are an agent who acts upon the world and a recipient of other peoples actions, who also act as agents. Infatuated with this way of thinking, we can’t see a way out of it. It seems as though we keep switching our identities. One minute we are the agent, next minute others are. We live in a kind of bubble that produces suffering and unsatisfactoriness. The final delusion is believing that this is the way things really are.

Morality, depths of meditation and wisdom shake out of us the complacency of such a view. It opens out our whole field of awareness. The constructions of the self collapse. Everything is in place without beginning, middle or end. Wanting and not wanting, existence and non-existence produce a distorted world upon which all anguish comes to rely. There is nothing to own, nor possess, claim nor refute. An enlightened life breaks us out of the spell of self-deception.
We are free. Utterly free.