Initiation, Guided, Trust

This may be a little hard to explain, but let me try. I am being general here in these remarks just to give you an outline of what is going on.

There are many ways to practice, and they all can lead to direct realization. However, some practices are more intrinsic with the nature of the ultimate truth. Emptiness is one of these; it is a practice that you can realize locally and ultimately.

And then, there some practices that are more appropriate only to relevant truths. This accounts for the famous saying about leaving the raft behind once you have crossed the river. It is these later practices that can become “hindrances”, as you put it.

It is the former practices that are the more interesting ones to this discussion. In realizations of highest truth these practices still prevail, but in a strange way they morph into greater understandings, and become subsumed within this greater “framework” of the highest truth. Yet strains of their eminence can still be seen in the greater fabric of truth.

When one realizes one of these eminent truths as a continuous daily reality of their lives, then sitting-meditation becomes irrelevant because that person realizes the truth without that sitting-meditation formality. (We should all be so lucky).

It is not that they have given up sitting because it was a hindrance, but because direct awareness of the truth was a part of their daily lives whether they sat or not. Whether the people that some speak about have really attained this level of awareness, I can’t say.

On a final note, yes such a person could sit in meditation and go even deeper into knowing, however this is not the middle way. It is interesting, I think, to learn about the nature of truth through deep realization, but one can only do this so much.

After you explore a bit and go “there” repeatedly, it gets to be a bit old hat because you’ve learned what it is about. And if you would like to continue in such deep realizations, then I believe that you will be opting out of the physical space-time continuum. Which is certainly all right, its just not life here.