Turning Toward Awareness

Chapter 1

Never hide ignorance. Never pretend knowledge. We have been fooled by others and have fooled ourselves into believing that ignorance, the cause of our fears and sufferings, should or could be hidden. All we have done is distort our thinking and pollute our feelings and undermine our gift of creativity.

“I don’t know” is the most noble sentence in our language. It is a declaration of freedom. It means “I am free to discover and to know.” Shame of ignorance is the seed of all pride, arrogance, and cockiness. Be ashamed of pretense that leads you to believe you can be all-knowing without first having grown to be all-honest and all-loving and all-trusting in the buddha nature.

Chapter 6 Relationships

We cannot be something other than what we do; to be and to do are the same thing. Everything that is amounts to some kind of action or process, like a flame exists only because there is burning. That flame is the effect of combustion. The flame has visual appearance, and for a child it would be easy to ascribe everything that happens in burning to the flame. It is light, it moves, reaches, scorches, attacks, retreats—why, it is alive. On one level of thought and convention, the flame can be said to be something, yet it is nothing but an effective byproduct of burning, which in turn is also a process, a conversion of energy.

We see in this analogy our mistaken belief that our ego is something independent—some sort of identity that is by itself. We also see that nothing we know or can think of is anything else but an action that is going on. There is a doing, and therefore there appears a being. The being describes the doing. As the doing changes, the being changes.

If I am only because I do, then what I am must be adjustable by, and only by, doing. By my conscious actions I may therefore change me. Since I am always happening—happening is what I am. My freedom lies in realizing that I may happen in more than one way, no matter how confined and set I may seem to be in this human form.

Never forget that a change is only possible through action, by doing, because each of us is action and is only what he does. I am what I do. How I act creates what I am. But I must remember that what I am is done as thinking, speaking and bodily action.

Try to grasp this: it is not you who is doing. You are the doing. But because you are a doing that is conscious of doing, you have an illusion that you and this doing are two different things. You are a happening only, but at the same time aware of your own happening, and so there arises an appearance of this happening, and that feels like you—a something all by itself. From here it is easy to reverse it all, and to say, “I am happening. I am living.” The truth, however, is: Happening is me. Living is me.

If fire were conscious as we are, it would, of course, notice the flame. It would be able to see it in the mirror, and see this flame create moving shadows. The fire could burn things by directing this flame and touching things. But the fire would be quite ignorant of the process of burning that it is. The gasses, though felt, would remain mysterious and invisible. So it would be easy for the fire to identify with the flame and believe that the flame is the fire. And the fact that both fire and flame are the same process would further confuse the issue. This is why we are such a deep secret to ourselves, but not a secret we cannot penetrate.

Chapter 7 Cowardice

Accept unawareness as an inevitable starting point; ignorance and ignorant knowledge that stem from unawareness are natural. A periodic effect of being startled into fear comes to every man—but the cowardly reaction to fear, the consequent worship of unawareness, weakness, deceit, and the denial of our buddha nature is a poison which ruins every life.

Cowardice Is a Deadly Poison. The antidote to this poison is faith. The cure to the illness and suffering that cowardice causes is Truth which brings understanding. It has been said that craving and greed and desire and clinging are the cause of suffering—they are—but ask yourselves: are these greeds and cravings and clinging not a result of deep fear that seeks safety and insurance? Cowardice is our inability to accept on faith what the entire universe describes—that it is all right to change; nothing is permanent; nothing that you seek to preserve is permanent.

Be genuine. Be free to live, to give, to accept, to die. Be all these things in everyday life in small things or great.