No Hope, No Fear: Sacred Wisdom

The final stage is realizing that the Buddha is everywhere

What this means, first of all, is that falling in love with a Buddha is an unending love affair. Beyond that, it is an unrequited love affair. It is not unrequited because a Buddha ever actually rejects us in any way, but simply because a Buddha's ultimate function in relating to us is to keep reminding us that we must do the work of becoming a Buddha ourselves. There will be no final confirmation of our enlightenment from our teacher. There will be no one to congratulate us at the spiritual finish line. In fact, there will be no finish line!

So a Buddha as mirror is there to remind us, again and again, that to become fully awakened we must fully embrace our utter aloneness, just as he or she has done. And paradoxically, the more alone we become, the more deeply connected become with others. This, we could say, is the enlightened significance and purpose of the unrequited love affair with a Buddha.

In fact if this does not happen, then we may very well have completely missed the point of our relationship with our teacher! Because this unrequited aspect is nothing other than the real truth of what it means to love and be loved unconditionally. We can never make the awakened state, or the Buddha, our property or territory. We are left alone, ultimately, to taste our own hearts.

At that point a Buddha hands us completely over to the world, so to speak. In other words, the whole world becomes our teacher as a mirror. This principle of the world becoming our teacher goes on long after our relationship with our personal teacher may have ended-- whether through death or other other kinds of permanent separation.

Now every life experience becomes our teacher -- reminding us to wake up, to be kind, to drop our illusory sense of self-importance, to help others, and to enjoy our lives and all our relationships without anxiety and attachment. And it seems to me that this is the endless blessing of such a love, and that its power can never be diminished.

Excerpt from the Article
By Frank Berliner