Greasy Glasses

It’s strange how an idea for a blog pings into existence. This one is made up of three elements: a rather strict Buddhist teaching I recently attended, a conversation with a friend, (she will smile when she reads this), and Philippa’s broken and rather besmirched glasses. So here we go!

Strict Buddhist teaching first. What struck me was the emphasis on the “purification of our obscurations” - namely emotions driven by wanting and not wanting and the delusion that any of this is going to make us feel better. Now, I of course have heard and read this innumerable times, and it makes sense. If our buddha-nature already exists but is covered over by obscurations - conflicted emotions and misperceptions - then “purifying” them, ie: removing them, is the way to go. However, I realised that this word purification was setting up a resistance in the back of my mind. I discovered that it evoked feelings of resentment, because it implied I was impure and by extension somehow wrong and bad, and at the same time guilt and shame because, despite being so wrong and bad, I wasn’t really taking it seriously and doing something about it. So effectively a combination of my Catholic background and my narcissism was being triggered.

Now, we teach that when we find an emotional reaction occurring within us, rather than simply identifying with it and acting it out, we do something different and become present with it as a felt sense. Tsoknye Rinpoche’s ‘Hand Shake Practice’ by another name. So this is what I did and doing it a realisation emerged that it was absolutely nonsense that I was not involved in ‘purifying my obscurations’ because this was exactly what I was doing in this very moment. Rather than getting all muddled up and hoity-toity about what I liked and didn’t like about the perfectly reasonable teaching I had received, I had turned towards the emotional reaction mindfully. What do we say? Try not to identify with the emotion, nor push it away using the method as an antidote to change it or get rid of it, do not think about, seeking explanations, just hold it in a kindly presence and relax. Doing this the conflict will dissolve of its own accord.

So what about Philippa’s glasses? Well, this is just a metaphor for how our perception is obscured. Emotional reactions don’t come from no where. They are individual to each of us even when others share them. Most of our really big triggers come from painful and overwhelming experiences in the past, experiences that we are not even aware of - which explains why being triggered is often such a surprise to even ourselves. Why am I reacting like this, it seems disproportionate to the situation? However, every time we catch our emotional reactivity, and choose to be present with the felt sense, we are weakening the habit of identification. I think of it like a slippery slope that we learn to avoid slipping down or a hole we learn how not to fall into. And as we weaken the habit of identification, removing the greasy finger marks that cloud our glasses, then our ability to see things more clearly grows. Or to use the strict Buddhist lingo - our karma is purified.

And there is one more twist - a really big one. The biggest means for breaking the bad habit of putting our fingers on our glasses is not using mindfulness to remember not to do it - though this is our main method, the one we need to practice all the time. The biggest and best means is resting within the non-dual awareness that is our buddha-nature - in those few moments that we may achieve this it becomes instantly apparent that it is not grease on the lens but, change of metaphor, images on a mirror and that means that the images and the mirror are one and the same thing. The biggest, deepest obscuration is the failure to recognise this. How’s that for far out!

NW. 21 March 2025 and with thanks to C.A.G. for her inspiration (and Philippa’s glasses).