(From the Sayings of Old Ch’eng)
Having heard that to see original mind you have to calm original mind, here you are, sitting on your asses stiff as bamboo, staring at the wall with your tongues jammed against your palates as you try to bring thinking to a halt. You arrive at some void like cotton wadding, take it for openness of original mind and out bursts your mind-blather again as of wakening from sleep.
What possible value can there be in the absence of thought?
Thought or no-thought, one is still thought-ridden.
And if a flash of enlightenment does shake you, you leap about like young foals, bellowing about how you’ve seen original mind and been through some extraordinary experience.
What value could there possibly be in being struck by lightning? This sort of thing is only good for the circus.
Like circus-clowns frolicking-about, so is the one obsessed with some personal flash of enlightenment. The experience in itself is not Mind. Equating Mind with experiential forays into the labyrinthine corridors of one’s fertile imagination will land you flat on your rump—like that foolish clown collapsing in a whirlpool of arms and legs after a great fall.
It is in your very mania and your need to attain and possess that you are lost.
Seeing the original mind means seeing it whether there are thoughts in your heads or not, whether you are moving about or still, whether babbling away like me or cleaning out the shit-house, whether you be emperors, monks, or homeless vagabonds. What sort of importance could such things have?
Skandhamania is the inability to break-free from the chains that bind you whenever you are in movement or perfectly still. Right Release entails breaking free and seeing Reality AS IT IS, devoid of any internal struggling or external settings or positions of status. Mind Is AS IT IS regardless of whether you’re flushing the toilet or working on the factory floor or running for office or sitting homeless beneath the underpass. No-thing is attainable or possessable when it comes to the Clear-Eyed purview of the Dhamadhatu: All IS AT IT ALWAYS IS in a pure-position of Actuosity.