View is the forerunner.
Our experiences are simply exteriorizations of inner beliefs. That’s the big lesson in this life. In Vajrayana, it’s taught as the ‘view’. Views range from utterly erroneous to partially correct to fully awakened. Checking-in with your view or belief in any moment is the key to everything. -Lama Dechen Yeshe Wangmo
Do you go through your days with an implicit belief that the world is permanent? That whenever you leave someone’s presence, it is guaranteed that you will see them again? Or do you acknowledge the miracle of interconnection, and see every arrival as a gift and every parting as a teaching? Do you laugh from the depths of your being? Is your daily awakening an ecstatic unfolding or a story of burdened necessity? Lama Dechen Yeshe Wangmo reduces all of these thoughts to the View. The way in which we see the world. The View is what motivates our actions, speech and thought patterns. Of all the elements of practice, the Buddha says:
“Right View is the forerunner” (MN 117)
So changing the View is key if we wish to change ourselves. First, how is it that our brains are so loosely tethered to reality that we can change our view on a whim. If the external world was a fixed way, you’d assume that we evolved to perceive it as such. Yet radical changes in perception are possible - how so?
“The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world” Terrence McKenna
The human animal is less a passive receiver of its world and more the designer. We project our will onto reality - and live from this viewpoint.
But how can the world be so malleable? Because Everything is deeply nested in Everything Else.
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order” -Carl Jung
Or as Eckhart Tolle writes:
“The ‘positive’ already contains within itself the as yet unmanifested ‘negative’”
Or as the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra so famously goes:
“Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form”
The unmanifest is a precondition for what is manifest. Similarly, what is left unsaid is as important as what is spoken.
The more frequently your view evolves, the more frequently you must re-imagine yourself.
“I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why” -Nina Simone
In our ever evolving lives, the less you hold onto the better. The less baggage you have, the more easily you can re-discover your deepest convictions. So hold onto your views, but not too tightly - for they too have to be let go.
And remember that it is only when you have nowhere to stand, that the earth can fully support you.
It is as it is.
-Sasha
Viewings