Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: The contradiction part that I saw, yeah, is not that part, but
it's the part of relentlessly forcing the mind to stay still, restraining
the mind. You don't see the struggle here, do you, the restraint?
LISA CAIRNS: Well what happened here was five years of sitting
in meditation when I was a practicing Buddhist, I used to go on
very long retreats and used to restrain my mind. But the way that
it's seen here is that there's never anybody doing anything, so even
in the appearance of somebody restraining their mind, that too is
just what's happening. And it might come from prescriptions, or
from apparent prescription, it's never prescription though, it's
always description. So it might come from somebody saying to
you, you've got to restrain your mind and focus in the moment, or
see the delusion of the mind. But that’s never somebody doing it,
it's never a teacher telling a student, it's just simply what's
happening. And so then the student might meditate for five years,
and then after the meditation there might appear to be less
suffering, or less identification. It's never really because of the
meditation or the teacher, it's because that's what was written.
When I say never really, it never was because of that dynamic
going on. It's always just because that's how the story is meant to
go.
So I don't see it as a contradiction because whatever is happening
is exactly what's meant to happen. When suffering stops they will
see that all suffering was seeking, or other teachers might call it
identification with self, or the illusion of self, or living through the
intellect for the second, whatever you call it. I tend to call it
suffering is seeking. And when seeking falls away, you see that the
suffering was always the seeking energy.
WIZARD: Yes.
LISA CAIRNS: And it might appear to be in the story that you had
to go through this whole massive process, and this whole journey,
and this whole story of liberation, but then when everything falls
away it seemed that life doesn't work in that way, there's never
separation, there never is cause and effect. There never is the
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