Returning from Peace to Pain, or from Pain to Peace? The Truth About Spiritual Practice

I. Returning from Pain to Tranquility

The painful everyday life of an ordinary person: Sure enough, happiness is always fleeting, and life is always painful, chaotic, bewildering, anxious, explosive, simmering, and grinding.

The tranquil everyday life of a happy person: Sure enough, pain is always fleeting. My true self is inherently pure and tranquil, possesses innate wholeness, neither arises nor ceases, and is neither defiled nor pure.

Has pain begun again, or has pain ended again? Has tranquility ended again, or has tranquility begun again? Is it pessimism, dejection, and despondency, or optimism, hope, and positivity?

Between pain and tranquility, which is the mind’s underlying color, true nature, and home?

In a place where it is always overcast, an occasional sunny day can bring both happiness and dejection. In a place where it is always sunny, an occasional overcast day will not make people lose hope. The mind’s situation is actually a little better: if 20% of the year is sunny, and the skies clear for 20% of each day, then the whole person has an optimistic, sunny outlook. Like sunlight and enchanting blue showing through gaps in the clouds, this weather is partly cloudy, rather than overcast. The mind needs little to begin with.

Faith in innate wholeness and the tranquility of one’s true self is the deepest kind of confidence a person can have. People like this are fortunate. I am fortunate. I live in a world of sunshine, in the company of sunshine. Dark clouds will not swallow me. The unity of humanity and nature is the butterfly and the sky, fish and people, trees and soil, tranquil and at ease.

People with deeply entrenched karmic obstructions have been unlucky. Their sunny days are too few, and their souls wither like trees.

Sunshine can restore people to health, once communism and internationalism have substantially reduced oppression and torment. That will mark the end of the barbaric era of human civilization and the era of universal slavery, and the beginning of a truly civilized era.

II. The Question of the Proportion of Tranquility

For people with relatively deep karmic obstructions, tranquility accounts for three ten-thousandths of their time, so fleeting that they have no way to take it seriously. Like people who live under overcast skies all year and have no concept of sunny weather, or an African child being told about ice-cold cola: they have no concept of it. Zhuangzi wrote a great deal about how “you cannot discuss ice with a summer insect”; this is what he was describing.

When the ratio of pain to tranquility is 98:2, people are caught in “greed, aversion, and delusion over tranquility/spiritual practice,” intensely eager to experience it again. They are like children desperate to buy ice-cold cola. Many people become absorbed in all kinds of methods of spiritual practice. The petty and micro-bourgeois classes have deeper karmic obstructions; proletarians have shallower karmic obstructions and a somewhat higher proportion of truth, goodness, beauty, and tranquility.

When the proportion of tranquility reaches 10%, people understand what “the true self,” “the tranquility of the true self,” and “innate wholeness” refer to. The self is in a state of higher dimensions and higher energy. This is commonly called “enlightenment”: seeing into the mind and understanding one’s nature. But people at this stage are often caught up in the fervor of conversion, eager to instruct others, and absorbed in saving them. These karmic obstructions push them back below 10%, preventing them from rising further.

When the proportion of tranquility reaches 20%, there is ample confidence in tranquility. It is like the “confidence” people in Yunnan have in good weather: an occasional overcast day will not drive them to despair. External stimuli and longstanding karmic obstructions will still pull them out of tranquility. But knowing that this is only a temporary state, and that they will return to tranquility, brings a profound sense of reassurance and confidence. Once in this state, they no longer fantasize about the supposed 100% tranquility of a perfect person or sage. Even Shakyamuni, Zhuangzi, Marx, and Engels themselves could not achieve that. Let alone ordinary people like us.

Most authors in the personal growth and spiritual practice market are in the 1%–15% range, so there are major problems with their content. I previously wrote “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept: Striving Is a Mistake; Let Things Take Their Natural Course.” There is simply no such thing as spiritual practice. Can this proportion and its progress be controlled? Do those masters have methods for controlling progress? Have they themselves reached 100%?

Is this passivity? No. It is a kind of acceptance and surrender. By accepting one’s inability, one becomes less eager to instruct others; one’s relationships with other people and with one’s children improve, one’s karmic obstructions grow shallower, and one actually makes “progress.”

It is normal not to know how to return to tranquility; the return happens naturally. It is like not knowing how you fell asleep: the more you try to fall asleep, the harder it becomes. It is like muddy water settling and becoming clear naturally when left undisturbed. Zhuangzi’s “An empty room fills with light” is the most fitting expression.