Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

“The purpose is life itself. This is what life is for, this education of the spirit inside you. Everyone says this. Every teacher in all religions. Life is for to learn, to make a progress, to make a movement toward—”

enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition—by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention—and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes.

anyway, exactly same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part, what you do.”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the . . . cart. . . . If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves.”

seemed to me that Rinpoche was making the opposite point: that I was in control of my spiritual situation, not God; that we had been given the tools for an expanded consciousness and it was up to us to use them, not simply wait around for death and salvation.

“Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is. You do not make it too much, Otto.”

“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger. That is your work on this earth, do you see? Every experience here is to teach you to do that. Living, dying, every experience.”

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.”