Find a glimpse of immortality in this very life
Most of the material today is taken either from the Far Eastern sources where the representation of the Buddha is, by preference, given to the manifestations in ordinary life, and the Indian tradition where the direction is on to going into the depths and finding something new there. To sum it up in one phrase, the Japanese tradition, you can think of it like this: it’s a stream. On that stream is a ball floating, never sinking, floating. As the stream moves along, it becomes waterfalls, whirlpools but calm the ball always remains because it doesn’t attach itself to anything. It doesn’t try to hang on to anything, it turns freely. In the Indian tradition, it’s not so much the moving surface as the depth. Those traditions speak of masks. There are masks in the world, and we ourselves have masks. It’s important to recognise the falsity of the masks of the world. The most important thing is to pierce through our own mask and find out what we really are underneath the mask of the devil. Underneath the devil mask, perhaps there’s a mask of a bodhisattva. Underneath that, through that, the world, it says, goes by masks, by unrealities.
There’s a story, it may be historical, it may not be, but it’s worth considering. Catherine the Great of Russia, the base soul of the Russian people – she was a German actually. A bit like Lizst. If ever there was a man who symbolised and represented in himself the spirit of Hungary, that was Lizst. He left Hungary when he was seven years old, and he couldn’t speak Hungarian. Edvard Grieg – Norway. He had Scottish ancestry. His great-great grandfather was Scottish Greig, and his father Alexander was the British Vice-Consul. These are masks, but we rather like them. Provided we know they’re masks, it may not do any particular harm.
Catherine, when she was at the height of her power, the minister, Potemkin used to supervise her coach drives of inspection across the country. The villages she passed, the better off peasants were made to stand in front of her cleanly dressed. The poor were hidden behind the houses. Potemkin also, on fine days, along the route, would put on a hilltop gaily painted red and white, little chalets, most attractive, new, a sign of prosperity. Actually, they were made of cardboard. There was nothing there. Red, yellow, bright colours. She would pass below and see them from the road. “Oh, yes!” Well, a courtier who didn’t like Potemkin bribed the coachman.
One time the story goes, she was driving along, and the coachman then left the road and went across the fields, up to one of these little gaily painted cottages, and drove right through it. It was only cardboard. Catherine sat there grimly for the rest of the journey. When they got back, she ordered the coachmen to be whipped. She said furiously to the courtier, “How dare you think I did not know!” Of course, she knew. It was all an elaborate charade, so to speak, of masks. The point a particular teacher was making was that we must find our own mask, turning within, in meditation.
We shall find a mask of thoughts, and fears, and little trivial memories of the past day, and look through that mask. It’s moving all the time. To look steadily through, and we shall come to something deeper. Long-held ideas, prejudices, anxieties, ambitions, loves and hates, long-held: we think, ‘That’s me.’ No, to look through, that too is moving. To look through so that it becomes thinner and thinner. We can look through as it becomes thinner, and we can catch a glimpse of what is beyond. The [enlightened] teachers want us to practise these things ourselves. Not just to believe there is something there, but to practise something which, underneath the fast-moving, underneath the slow, thinned out, a glimpse of immortality. Everything is dying, all this is dying. This is dying slowly. There is something undying, which doesn’t change. To catch a glimpse of immortality in this very life. People say, “Oh, we can’t know about immortality because nobody ever comes back to tell you.” No, but there can be a glimpse of immortality in this very life. When a person’s had even a glimpse, then when death comes: ‘I have been here before.’
This is what one of the teachers tells us. You see, it’s experimental. He doesn’t say, “Believe, believe.” Perform the experiment
© Trevor Leggett
The full talk is Getting beneath the mask