Awakening (excerpts taken from various teishos)

For as it is, whole and complete, this sense world is enlightenment.
This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land, and this very body the body of Buddha.

Waking up is to see that everything from the beginning is completely OK. It is and always has been and always will be OK. This is what is meant when we chant: “From the beginning all beings are Buddha.”

Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. Awakening and happiness are the same. One comes home to one’s ultimate happiness. That does not mean to say one walks around on a pink cloud –one gets on with life, one gets involved, one works, but the working is no longer to get feedback, praise and admiration; one does it just to do it; one does things for the sheer joy of doing them; there is a natural pleasure in being able to use our abilities. One gives attention to the doing of it and not to the meaning of it or the end result of it.

There is a shift necessary. A leap from what I know, what I am, to that I am, that I know. Forget what is known, but remember that you are the knowing. Don’t be all the time immersed in and identified with your experiences. We look on experience as the cause of our suffering, but experience is the result of our suffering. Remember you are beyond the experiencer, ever unborn and deathless. It is what I am that is born and dies, and in a lifetime there are many births and deaths.

That I am has no cause, and it is opening ourselves to this no cause, no support, no foundation, no ground on which to stand, that is called for. But when we approach this no cause, when we get an inkling of this truth, we get a feeling of vertigo, panic, a sense of falling into a void. It is necessary for us to have the courage to fall into that void to find that there is no falling, there is no void. We think we are an individual – a person – when we are not an individual, we are intrinsically always and only the Absolute. All beings are Buddha.

What was your face before your parents were born? i.e. before what you are had any shape or form. That I am has no content, no shape, no beginning and no end. Take away the ‘what’ and you do not have nothing. In remembering that you are beyond experience, the quality of pure knowing will emerge, the light of unconditional awareness. The only reality is that I am.