Jun Po Roshi on Non-Dual Realization and the Work After Insight
Once the philosophical scaffolding is set, I tell the student: now flush the toilet. You have the idea in place, so stop explaining it to me. Drop the words. Use your body, your psyche, your eyes, the way you hold yourself, and let me see this witnessing intelligence actually move. Not as some abstraction you carry around in your head. Show it to me in the flesh. And what happens is that a gesture rises on its own, through the body, through the eyes, something arrives unbidden. When that gesture is real, you mirror it back. That is how we go, step by step, down the line.
Then a question comes up: does this state arrive and leave again? People ask it constantly. And my answer is to ask who, exactly, is doing the coming and going. The ego comes and goes. Ego awareness flickers in and out. But unless this clear mind is already present, there is no ground on which an ego could build anything at all. Whatever the feeling happens to be, whatever is being sensed, that sensing cannot occur apart from the open, receptive mind that receives it.
Non-dual realization does not sit around making cases for good against bad. It is non-dual; that is the whole point. It is simply the truth of life unfolding as it goes. This is the Buddha speaking again: everything is burning, everything is on fire, everything is in contact and combusting at once. So does that come and go? No. It does not.
After that recognition, the real work begins. What do you have to do to carry this into your actual life? That is the next thing to face once you have traveled that far. You make a choice. You choose this reality over your egocentric one. The perspective tilts from being centered in ego to being centered in Buddha, and the task becomes holding the integrity of the witness as experience keeps arising.
Erik asked me what moves a person to choose that reality. Insight is what opens the door, I said, but having the insight is not the same as living from it. Once you have seen, you still have to choose it. It does not install itself.
Erik thanked me for walking through the process and, as we came to the end of the call, asked whether there was anything left that people ought to hear. There is. This is your own liberation, your own freedom. If you can do this, and you can, because I did it and so can you, then there is no question it will remake your life. It transforms you, and then come the vows to save all beings, and you find yourself compassionately engaged. You reach toward others. Your relationships start to work. Nothing shakes you anymore, and your whole life takes on a different weight.
We work with five training elements. The first is sacred stewardship at arm's reach. Everything you touch, everything you are in conscious relationship with: what you buy, what you eat, how you stand with your family, your friends, your parents. Are you meeting all of it from this depth of compassion, understanding, and responsibility? The first element is the realization itself and the transformation of your life that follows from it.