Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into

Apprentice Rinpoche, I know you don’t like to answer questions in letters when the answer would be the length of a book or an hour’s teaching—but is it possible to say anything brief about why it is that we are addicted to dualism?

Ngak’chang Rinpoche When the beginningless empty essence of being gives rise to the vivid display of the nature of being, we manifest physical form, the energy of being. This physical manifestation shimmers between wonderment and bewilderment. Bewilderment is brought about by the poignant poetry of Nirmanakaya in which the experience of loss can be reified. If we dwell in this reification a sense can arise in which we have strayed from the open dimension of being—and although this cannot be the case, we can imagine it to be so. If we then attempt to return from whence we came—having never moved from the spaciousness from whence we came—we create the illusion of duality. As soon as the illusion of duality appears to exist, ‘groundless anxiety’ arises, like wind from an empty sky. ‘Groundless anxiety’ is the root of paranoia; and when paranoia becomes the pattern of perception, the sense of ‘isolation’ is sparked and fanned into flames. ‘Isolation’ is the root of ‘obsession’, with foci of seductive proximity; and when ‘obsession’ becomes the pattern of our perception, we feel flooded by ‘fear’ of demise. ‘Fear’ is the root of ‘aggression’ which freezes perception, dividing form from emptiness. Experiencing this division, we evolve divisive strategies in order to align ourselves with form, and to distance ourselves from emptiness. These strategies are the root of ‘territorialism’, the need to control everything within our sense fields. Everything within our sense fields is then manipulated referentially in order to prove that we can imagine ourselves to be ‘defined’, ‘continuous’, ‘separate’, ‘permanent’ and ‘solid’. I think Oliver Hardy said it best when he said to Stanley Laurel, “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”