Dalai Lama Foundation Study Circle Montreal

Dharma Quote of the Week

What is very important for us to recognise is our own falsity. This is not a judgement that sometimes we are authentic and sometimes we are false. It means that everything about us in our ordinary sense of self is false because it is grounded on a misapprehension of the nature of reality…. It is like somebody in University who is having their final examinations. They go into the wrong examination room and not reading the questions very clearly they write very long answers on their own subject that is unfortunately not the one they are being examined on. It does not matter how good the answer is they will fail, for they are not addressing the question.

The basic question is always: “Who are you?”, “Who am I?” but we do not understand it and so we answer with a ceaseless narrative of self definition. This covers over the freshness of the question, the possibility of looking and seeing, and so all our answers are stale, the reworking of self-protective versions constructed out of unexamined elements. We have many, many, many answers and all of them are false. That’s why it is very important when you do meditations, to put your full energy one-pointedly into the practice, to try to repair the initial basic fault that has torn subject and object apart.

It is very important to stop being ashamed of being false. For we have to see how falsity arises, how obscuration develops. We want to look directly at our falsity and learn its tricks so that we will not be caught by them. This helps to open the space in which we can recognise our own nature.

“When you understand the falsity of your confusion remain unartificially, effortlessly in the natural mode (dharmakaya).”(p.90)

–from Being Right Here: A Dzogchen Treasure Text of Nuden Dorje entitled ‘The Mirror of Clear Meaning’ with commentary by James Low, published by Snow Lion Publications

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