Buddhist Pancakes

A huge truck, like a concrete mixer, pulls up outside your house for a delivery. However, this one is filled with blueberry pancake batter. Since you really love pancakes and ordered the maximum load you are not surprised when the valve opens and pancake batter begins to pour out onto your front lawn. As it continues to pump the pancake batter, there is so much that it begins to creep across the lawn and eventually floods your front lawn. As it reaches the front door, you open the door. Blueberry pancake batter enters and begins to flow into your front hall. If the truck is still not empty, it will continue pumping pancake batter onto the front lawn and sidewalk, it will definitely creep down the hall toward the kitchen. Now containing the grass, sticks, and dirt accumulated in its journey it arrives to the floor in front of stove. Now is the exciting time because we are really getting hungry and love pancakes so very much! However, it is still on the floor, how will you get it into the frying pan so that you can enjoy the resultant taste!

It is like that; the delicious but preliminary effects of outer spiritual practices such as reciting mantras, visiting holy places and doing ritual are trying to go inside for actual transformation. However, the actual practice comes not from the outside but from interior through living transmission and inner meditation that is clean and free from debris of contaminated and confused outer energies. The debris of ordinary thinking, unaccomplished karma, desires, aversions, and perceptions interfere with the actual meditation. The important purpose of the outer activities is to facilitate and encourage the inner meditation without pushing a false spirituality inside. Reducing fascination by making behavioral changes and learning high thinking that provides high nutrition is a more correct relationship to the inner process.

Beyond that, if there is no authentic transmission connecting the practitioner to inner development process to begin the inner meditation there is no inner actual practice. Therefore, seek authentic transmission as though your life depended on it. This is how the sages behaved.