![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finishing the chapter on the 4 Maras
May. 6th, 2025 07:42 am“We think that if we just meditate it enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing and feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, with some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. During this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, someone’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we're going to arrive at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce and 700 people are coming for lunch.
“The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache and sometimes you feel 100% healthy period from an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, but because it involves rejecting a lot of your base of experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man's land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh period to live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yamara is fear of death, it's actually fear of life.... Without the maras, would the Buddha have awakened? Would he have attained enlightenment without them? Weren't they his best friends, since they showed him who he was and what was true? All the maras point the way to being completely awake and alive by letting go, by letting ourselves die moment after moment, at the end of each out breath. When we wake up, we can live fully without seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, without recreating ourselves when we fall apart. We can let ourselves feel our emotions as hot or cold, vibrating or smooth, instead of using our emotions to keep ourselves ignorant and dumb. We can give up on being perfect and experience each moment to its fullest."
“The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache and sometimes you feel 100% healthy period from an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, but because it involves rejecting a lot of your base of experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man's land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh period to live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yamara is fear of death, it's actually fear of life.... Without the maras, would the Buddha have awakened? Would he have attained enlightenment without them? Weren't they his best friends, since they showed him who he was and what was true? All the maras point the way to being completely awake and alive by letting go, by letting ourselves die moment after moment, at the end of each out breath. When we wake up, we can live fully without seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, without recreating ourselves when we fall apart. We can let ourselves feel our emotions as hot or cold, vibrating or smooth, instead of using our emotions to keep ourselves ignorant and dumb. We can give up on being perfect and experience each moment to its fullest."
