Knowing by Mind

Whenever you think that you know something by mind, it’s actually a sign that you aren’t aware by heart; when you aware by heart, you don’t use your brain to think. When your heart is aware, you don’t have to use your brain anymore; you just do it, perfectly, by intuition. Your heart has intuition power.

(In this case, “heart” does not refer to the organ in your chest, but to the part of your consciousness that drives you to achieve a goal. A teacher has a heart to educate children, a politician has a heart to wield power, and a compassionate person has a heart to help others.)

Intuition power is when your hidden consciousness, subconsciousness, and brain consciousness are united. You are directly aware. For example, when you do Tai Chi or Chi Gong, at the moment you are doing it the best, are you thinking about what you’re doing or are you just doing it?

You use your mind when you want to understand what is going on; it is the first step to analysing the situation. The next step is to absorb the information. The third step is to make it your ability, which will only happen after a long period of time (depending on the difficulty of the subject).

If I tell you to do a one-handed handstand by putting all your power into one hand and using it to hold your entire body off the ground, everyone understands what I’m describing, but can you do it? Of course not; it will take a lot of training to develop muscle strength, learn how to balance, and understand the technique.

So understanding by mind is simply the first step; it doesn’t make you truly aware. If you only understand by mind you will doubt whether you can do it, can follow the idea, can answer any question about it. If you understand by heart, you welcome questions.

Now I will give you a word and you tell me if you know what it is: energy. What is energy?

Red Bull: All the appearing form, or Illusion Being.

Asian Ben: Anything you can sense.

Sifu: What about you, Simon? You put your hand up only after the others gave their answers.

Simon: Movement.

Sifu: When I asked the question, you didn’t know, but now you have an answer. If it takes you this long to figure out your answer, then you don’t know it from heart.

Red Bull, explain why energy is equal to all the appearing form.

Red Bull: Energy is equal to all the appearing form, or Illusion Being, because it is constantly changing and can be registered by the six senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and thought).

Sifu: Is empty space energy?

Red Bull: Yes.

Sifu: But empty space is not part of all the appearing form, so it’s not included in your definition. Therefore, your definition must be wrong.

What about you, Ben?

Asian Ben: Energy is everything you can sense.

Sifu: Is consciousness part of it?

Asian Ben: Yes.

Sifu: You said, “Energy is everything you can sense”. Can consciousness sense itself? What does your Eyes Consciousness look like?

Asian Ben: There are some things you can’t describe.

Sifu: If you can’t describe it, then you don’t understand it. So, what does it look like?

Asian Ben: Consciousness has no form.

Sifu: Something with no form cannot be sensed. You can only sense form, including energy forms and empty space forms.

Also, if consciousness were energy, then your consciousness would be travelling at the speed of light right now. Your consciousness would be on the other side of the room already.

Asian Ben: What if consciousness is aware of the light…?

Sifu: If A is aware of B, then A can never be B. If consciousness is aware of energy, then consciousness is not energy. Your answer shows that, deep down, you don’t know what energy is.

Red Bull and Asian Ben have demonstrated what I was speaking about in the beginning of the class: if you think “I know”, then truly, you don’t know.

So, who knows what energy is?

Simon: I still have an answer.

Sifu: You have already shown that you don’t know. At the beginning, you didn’t raise your hand right away, so your heart doesn’t know the answer.

Simon: It was the other way around for me. I had the feeling that I wanted to say it, but my mind doubted it.

Sifu: If your mind doubted your answer, then surely you don’t know. When your heart knows something, all three consciousness are united: hidden consciousness, subconsciousness, and brain consciousness (mind).

So why did I show you all to be wrong? Just to teach you a lesson: you are fooled by your blindness. Your brain thinks you know, and you feel you know, but truly you don’t know. If you know a little bit and think you know the truth, then you are doubly blind.

What is Energy?

Energy is a common word; everybody has heard of it. Now I will use spontaneous power from heart to make a philosophy poem.

Energy is not energy: energy is what we call energy.

Energy is a mystery, a mystery we can be aware of.

Energy exists, but is truly empty.

Energy is a creation, but not a true phenomenon.

Energy is not energy because it is not what you think of as energy. Whatever you think energy is: that is not energy. We all agree that light is energy. We all agree that light is bright. We all think that this mat is blue. But that is all wrong.

If light is energy, and light is bright, then energy is bright. But light is not bright, it is dark. If you think the mat is blue, then you are wrong; blue is the only colour that is not in the mat, that’s why you see it as blue. When light touches something, it reflects as brightness. So brightness only comes from reflection. When there is nothing for light to reflect from, then light is dark.

If I turn all the lights off, can you see that the mat is blue? No. It is only blue because it has the ability to absorb every colour except blue. Blue is reflected and travels to your eyes, so you see the mat as being blue. Any time you see a colour, it means that colour is not part of the object.

You are living in illusions of illusions. Everything you think you know is incorrect. Life is a mystery, a trick of tricks. Light is not bright. Materials have no colour. This shows that energy is not bright. It is not what we call “energy”. This is just the word we use to name it.

If you truly understand energy, you are already free from life because if you understand any part of life, you have already become bodhisattva or Buddha.

All energy has the same essence. In Buddhism, energy is Illusion Being. One hair on your arm contains millions of atoms. If you break just one atom, you will release enough energy to destroy the whole city. The only difference between the hair on your arm and the toes on your feet is the organisation of the atoms.

What is Illusion Being?

Sifu: What is the definition of Illusion Being?

Scott: Everything that is temporary and changing.

Sifu: Yes. Illusion Being is all the appearing form that is constantly changing. Everything that is changing is moving. Everything that is moving is energy.

Red Bull: How does empty space fit into the definition that “all the appearing form is constantly changing”?

Sifu: Because the constantly changing appearing form is the same as empty space. It’s just that one is moving and the other is not.

When I light a fireball on the end of a chain and I spin it around, there’s a circle of fire. When I don’t move, it’s only fire burning on the end of a chain. But these two are the same thing. One is moving; one is not. When it moves, you see a circle. When it doesn’t move, you see only fire. The circle is the illusion part, and the fire represents the empty part. When empty space moves, it creates illusion. So, empty space and moving energy are the same thing.

We are living in our blindness. Life is tricks of tricks. We take all these tricks so seriously and fall into them so deeply that it creates a lot of suffering in our lives. Wise people are able to see through all these tricks, so they don’t create suffering for themselves anymore.

I used energy as an example to help you analyse your life.

You haven’t deeply tried to observe anything completely. If you choose one small subject and observe it completely, you will see that connects to everything. If you understand one, you understand all. The whole universe is one complete but complicated system; any part of it is the same as all of it.

Sit down, choose a subject, concentrate, and talk to your heart. “Do I really know this? What is it?” Make a clear definition and explanation. If you practise that, you can increase your wisdom.

Amitabha Buddha

What does “energy” have to do with Amitabha’s Pure Land? The Pure Land is built from energy, just like this universe, so how is it different? If it is always changing power, will it one day be damaged and destroyed or not?

Giant Dog: It’s constantly changing, but in a perfect way.

Sifu: Yes. Do you know why everyone on Earth will die?

Sean Pig: Because our technique for changing wears our body down rather than keeping it alive and making it stronger.

Sifu: Yes. Amitabha’s universe is built by energy, so it’s called “Unlimited Light”. Our universe is also called unlimited light, but it’s not being used properly. Instead of using that light to connect in a harmonious way or avoid damage, we do the opposite. We use energy to damage the Earth. We use energy to damage our body. We use energy to damage everything.

Death doesn’t really exist, but we create death by damaging our body. The truth is that life is eternal, but we don’t have enough wisdom, so our blindness creates damage.

Damage doesn’t have to exist. In the olden days, no-one knew how to build cars very well, so they were slow and always breaking down. Now they can build a car that travels at hundreds of kilometres an hour and lasts for years. What happened between then and now? The engineers learned how to use that creation in a proper way: one with much more protection, and more perfect wisdom to keep it running in a way that it doesn’t get damaged.

This universe cannot be a pure land because we don’t have the wisdom to keep our life perfect. Yet, the Buddhas’ Pure Lands, the Earth, and Hell are the same: they are all built from energy. Energy is like a knife: it is neither good nor bad, but it can be either good or bad.

Your life can become spiritual, your life can become suffering, and your life can become devilish: it all depends on how deeply you understand the truth of life.

The Amitabha Buddha System has a really, really clear link to understanding the truth of life.

The First Condition: Hold nothing

·        When you have enough wisdom, you will not try to hold anything. You will enjoy life properly without holding anything. When you do that, life is perfect. When you don’t know how to enjoy life and try to hold everything, then life has suffering.

The Second Condition: Create no bad karma

·        When you have the wisdom to understand the truth of life, you will not want to create bad karma because you know that anything you do will come back to you.

The Third Condition: Bow sincerely ten times

·        When you understand the first two, you ask Amitabha Buddha to accept you as his student. It is that easy, although he won’t accept you if you haven’t purified yourself with the first two conditions.

You have to wake up all the spiritual energy inside you by learning and understanding the truth of life, by controlling your ego, by knowing how to live correctly and handle your life correctly. That’s simple when you understand that “hold nothing” doesn’t mean not to own anything, just that whatever you own is a constantly changing power so there’s no way that you can hold it. It’s a fact. If you want to go against a fact, then you are doubly stupid.

If someone who is blind touches an elephant’s tail and thinks it’s a rope, that’s understandable. If someone who can see touches the elephant’s tail and says it’s a rope; that’s doubly stupid. Your ego will sometimes make you become double-stupid. Be careful with that.

This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 21 October 2011 at the Sydney dojo.