Seeing Brings Liberation

Sādhana is the intent of freedom that transforms confused understanding into wisdom, contraction into openness, judgement into insight, and mind into heart. All hesitation is incinerated in the fire of commitment.

In the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, the term “liberation upon seeing” has two meanings. One is that liberation comes when we truly see our misunderstanding and limited perception — and our willingness to live in and defend that confused state. But it can also mean that liberation occurs upon seeing the guru as Awareness.

What is so powerful about those two statements is that they are not actually different. In fact, the entire interaction with a teacher is to create a mirror that reflects back to us our own misunderstanding so that we can know it for what it is. Left to our own devices, we don’t have such a mirror and remain trapped in our opinions, confused state, and contracted heart. We are unable to see beyond that.

The Relationship with Pure Awareness

Within most Buddhist traditions, the relationship with the teacher is understood as being with the very Pure Awareness that is always available and working to free us. If we let that Awareness bring us to ultimate freedom, all our hesitation is incinerated in the fire of our commitment to liberation, which cannot be divorced from our absolute, unwavering commitment to the guru who is freeing us.

There will be times when you as a student might have an impulse to feel frustrated or angry with your teacher. Even if some of your criticisms are true — for example, if your guru is in some ways unprofessional — look through the criticism and ask: Where in me is that judgment coming from? This presents you with a test of your ability to stay open inside instead of getting tense and contracted. It is the rare individual who can face that initial impulse toward negative emotion without letting it close them.

Look very carefully when you have any urge to attack someone. Asking to know the source of our judgment is the mirror that reveals our own misunderstanding. This perpetual feedback loop between us and our thoughts, emotions, and urges, is called vimarśa, “self-reflective capacity.” If you are sincere about seeing yourself as God and reaching liberation, have the honesty to suspect your own perceptions and to inspect them. Are they really the truth or is your opinion, judgement, or closedness preventing you from liberation upon seeing?

Facing the Mirror with Courage and Honesty

Whether you are dealing with the person you lie in bed with at night, work with every day, or bump into in the street, be courageous enough to recognize that perhaps your reaction to them — while it may be right in terms of the circumstances — is closing you. You might even find that you’re using it as a justification to close.

Recognize your own resistance to your life. You have been given this life for the purpose of finding your freedom. The Vajrayana tradition has caves filled with depictions of the entire process of liberation, from being incarnated as an animal to being free. The images include those of the bardo, the hell we pass through when we lose sight of the purpose of life and start to close, reject, and judge.

Imagine an upward force that’s rising and carrying us along, and that it has little escape hatches all along the side. If we are not totally focused on that ascending freedom, the energy just pops us out and we are lost in space, in the bardo. When that happens, we might remain lost until we find another human body to inhabit so we can start all over again!

Hold your guru to a high standard of openness and willingness to serve. Just be sure to hold yourself to the same standard. Liberation upon seeing requires us to see Pure Awareness not only in our guru but also in our own life. The God-given mirror is a precious gift that enables us to recognize our contractions, unwillingness, and resistance. Use it for the purpose of deepening your sādhana and working to attain freedom.

Our ability to become distracted from our spiritual intent is monumental. In my fifty years of teaching, I’ve observed the common result of sādhana is that students lose sight of its intent and therefore of its result.

I would add a third interpretation of liberation upon seeing: that liberation is knowing that there is no path to freedom because freedom is the path. Only by working from the deepest part of ourselves can we discover freedom, and our sādhana is then the technology we employ. It is the intent for freedom that is the path, and that comes from divine grace. It is God who gives us that longing. In other words, the free, unlimited Pure Awareness that is inside you begins to reveal Itself to you, and in so doing evokes in you the desire for the same freedom. That is the greatest, most extraordinary gift any of us will ever be given in this or any lifetime. Don’t lose sight of it.