If you rely on the unreliable, you are asleep.
You are not paying attention.
Everything in the world is unreliable.
The Buddha’s last words -
“All conditioned things are transient. Work diligently for your salvation.”
Then he died.
Whether Buddha said this on his deathbed no one can say with certainty – but we know with certainty that the TRUTH is: All conditioned things are indeed transient!
The Buddha’s last words -
"All conditioned things are transient. Work diligently for your salvation."
Then he died.
Whether Buddha said this on his deathbed no one can say with certainty – but we know with certainty that the TRUTH is: All conditioned things are indeed transient!
We know this Truth from experience which is our strong carrier of Truth. Even a small child knows experience is Truth. When they put their little fingers on something HOT, their response is to withdraw the finger and cry out, OUCH! Experience is a strong truth-telling vehicle because experience is available to all existence. Experience is the arbiter between fantasy and the present moment. We can and do daydream the what-abouts. We know all our plans and schemes we are blown away by the wind of time.
We know the Truth: Everything is impermanent. BUT we ignore it.
We might ask why the repetition of pointing at everything is impermanent. It is simple. We forget…because we ignore the changing world and keep our focus on our ego-self of desire, greed, hate and just about every feeling, perception and impulse known to mankind (or humankind if that suits your taste). But we must remember all things experience change. We go so far as to believe we can change this changing world. We are conditioned to think and believe that our ego-self can make the world different than it is.
History tells us otherwise. Existence is cyclical. We have a compulsion to repeat it.
We may think it is impossible that all things experience change – but here are simple examples to remind us that all things experience change. If we leave a fudgesicle out in the Sun’s heat – it melts and changes. Think about more complex things – such as medicine or food or a new car. Each one undergoes change.
Medicine and food have “Use-by-Dates” declaring these two categories as not only changing but expired. We might think new cars, a highly constructed thing, might be an exception – but think again. Cars get old and get dumped in junk yards. It is universal and pervasive.
All conditioned things are transient.
Conditioned things are - living things, produced and manufactured things, things built of other things and the list goes on and on whereby we can see for ourselves all conditioned things are transient.
Our ignorance, however, shrouds our awareness in such a way we ignore the fact that everyday living things die but we, ourselves, live as though we are immortal. This is a telling phenomenon. It tells us that we have a sense of eternity, a sense of infinite existence. Yet, this sense is eclipsed by our focus on the material-mechanistic world. We ignore the transcendent.
The Thread of the Great Vehicle of Wisdom tells us otherwise.
Gone, Gone, Gone beyond. Gone completely beyond.
Beyond what?
Beyond the material-mechanistic world of the self-ego.
Beyond selfishness and a myriad of all our self-interest and attachments.
We ignore wisdom and focus on the transient stuff of the things in the worldly realm because we do not know the Truth of birth and death of the material-mechanistic things. These things are unreliable.
Let me put it clearly. The material-mechanistic world offers us a dingy that leaks. We get into it and begin to row out into the ocean of change only to find ourselves in a sinking boat. Everything in the world is a sinking boat in the ocean of suffering (samsara).
Our tendency is to grab the sense of infinite existence and use it to ignore the reality of birth and death of everything and pursue the gains, prizes, and pleasures of the fleeting, material world. In essence, we remain oblivious to our true nature.
We lack the knowledge and fortitude to follow:
a diligent effort to remove the shroud of ignorance and find our true nature.
If we rely on the unreliable, we are asleep. We are not paying attention. BUT…we can learn to pay attention - we can learn to rely on the immutable.
DON’T GIVE UP.
AWAKEN. STUDY YOURSELF, FORGET YOUR CONDITIONED SELF.