Turning confusion into clarity

27 abril 15

My father used to say, “For the yogi, sickness is a pleasure, and death is good news.” The good news is that dying provides the best opportunity for enlightenment. When the physical body loses energy, when the organs close down, and the fluids dry up, and the breathing slows, then our buddha nature becomes more prominent. The natural demise of the sensory system effortlessly uncovers naked awareness. The fixations, concepts, and dualities that have held our delusions in place dissolve—even for those who have never meditated. What’s left is a very basic form of ignorance—the inability to recognize the nature of our own awareness. Yet with the dissolution of the body, the gap between the mind of ignorance and the wisdom mind grows very, very narrow. The natural disintegration of the body magnifies the opportunity for the mind to recognize the fundamental purity of its true nature.
When breathing ceases, awareness manifests with vivid clarity, because the more coarse aspects of consciousness—such as words, concepts, and sense perceptions—are no longer present. But often this flash of pure awareness goes unrecognized. This glimpse of the true nature of mind may only last for a few moments. Most people will miss this opportunity entirely, yet those who have already recognized the true nature of mind can have a very clear experience of buddha nature. They may even be able to rest in that state of recognition for several days, which allows the process of purification and realization to continue. This means that death allows for the attainment of complete enlightenment. While we remain alive, even people who have reached a very high level of realization may have some trace of concepts, some slight trace of fixated mind. The process of physical dissolution allows the mind to be totally purified of these traces. In this sense, my father became completely enlightened after sitting in dying meditation for three days.

Turning confusion into clarity, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche