In contemplating the nature of Rigpa and nondualistic awareness I began to consider the similarities to so many popular games these days and their virtual universes. In these worlds we imagine self as an avatar going about our day in an imaginary world collecting coins, interacting with others, and fighting the occasional battle. You are not the avatar, and though you are aware of this, you observe and direct the avatars movements. When the avatar engages in battle you do not have fear of dying because you know it is not you. The you that directs the avatar is, by comparison, impermanent. You can always start over again. The avatar is a reflection of you, the avatars experience is a reflection of experience. But it is not you, you are the observer.
Through the view that the avatar is an extension, and ultimately an illusion you recognize that the suffering of the avatar is an illusion and the relationship between avatar and world is nondualistic, as inseparable as the pixels from the image they compose. Opening to the expansiveness of the world of the avatars you see that to believe self is the avatar would be a delusion. Most of us do not identify so strongly with the avatar and the world of the avatar that we confuse it for our true nature. However, for the few who do, this is a delusion, a confusion of the true nature of our being.
In delusion the confused experience a perceptual shift that obscures the mirror like quality of true experience. However, shifting our perception beyond self, beyond the avatar, frees us from attachment. From this perspective we see impermanence and recognize the nature of the material. The material world of the avatar is woven into samsara, the suffering of the avatar. It provides objects and people that can become attachments, but only when we forget these attachments only exist as a part of samsara. They are no more a part of our primordial nature than a blade of grass or a window pane in our avatar world. However all things in the avatar world come from the same source and spring from the same ground. This rendered world is the world of illusions. These programed traits and events are our karmic inertia. The ground is the same for samsara and nirvana. What determines its samsaric nature is the strength of our attachment and our confusion over the nature of mind and our primordial nature. The primordial nature exists beyond ground. When the world of the avatar ends our primordial nature does not end. We return again with a new avatar and a new life and collect our coins and find new battles. In this virtual world we are always awakened relative to our avatar. Except in rare cases of mental illness, we are never confused about the distinction between the avatar and our true nature. If we do loose this distinction we recognize it as delusion.
However, though the world we accept to be real is very similar, most have not awakened to its true nature. We do not see our karma as a challenge to be overcome, we perceive it as all there is. We trap ourselves with attachments and cling to this world and all its things. We fear an end to this existence, and ask for answers to ease our suffering, some means to pacify our fear. But usually we ask for the wrong things. We don't recognize samsara so we ask for solutions that feed our attachment. And even if we do recognize samsara we may feel bound by our Karma. We feel bound, and feel we must first unbind to move forward. This can seem like an impossible task, but what binds us? What holds us back? This too is illusion. If we recognize our true nature then we recognize there was never anything to unbind. The more we are bound the more we our shown the essence of samasara, and the more we are provoked by our karma to finally awaken. Our path to awakening is not lengthened, it's shortened. The nature of our suffering brings us closer to allowing our confusion to dawn as wisdom. This occurs through a perceptual shift in our awareness and a recognition that this game serves a purpose. In this moment we recognize we are already free and may awaken from our slumber.
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