The parable of the leprechaun
Imagine that everything is made of paper. The street you walk down, every rock, car, tree, animal, your parents, children, people on TV, the wave on the sea, the moon, the stars... even your organs, every cell, every atom, everything that makes up you and everything else... All made of a single substance, paper. However solid it appears, it's always flimsy, unstable, changeable. Everything new is then created by recycling the previous one, every growth is conditioned by extinction, every extinction carries the potential for new growth, according to the precise conditions preceding its creation. Paper, infinitely recycled, infinitely folded, folded and unfolded again, in a looping leporette, where each side is like one link in a chain of dependent emergence, each side dependent on the causes and conditions of the previous one. And the doll in the cardboard, completely preoccupied with the story of itself, tries to secure some advantage for itself at the expense of the other dolls and folders in the cardboard, and thus creates its dependence on the karmic connections with the other dolls and folders that take over and regardless, how free he thinks the doll is, his destiny is not in his own hands, he is only pulled from one page of the cardboard book to the next, from one link in the chain of dependent arising to the next, and all because of ignorance, ignorance of the true nature of the reality that lies behind all kinds and forms of paper.
Thanks to this ignorance, the little doll composes his own reality out of paper without knowing it, robotically, like an unconscious architect, according to the precise karmic conditions by which he is pulled in a web of causal relations, and into which he cannot see because he is preoccupied with playing the protagonist of the story in the cardboard book - one of an infinity of other stories, which itself has no substance, no "higher meaning" than that, to see through the story, to see through the leprosy, to see through the karmic conditioning, and to see the whole work as his own creation, his own play with himself, in which suffering is the blessing, discontent the driving force that leads to the truth about himself.
Everything in your subjective world points to you, but not to you as a dummy. To THAT in the background, who/what automatically turns the pages because he/she has fallen asleep on the story, completely absorbed in the paper world. Paper is just paper, no matter how intricately, beautifully or ugly, it is folded. Paper is just paper, whether it is just emerging, waiting to be recycled, or just recycled, waiting to be reassembled. Take any folded paper from a cardboard book, unfold it, and you will see that it was defined only by how it was folded and the relationships it created to other folded papers, but it has no substance in itself and is no different from any other paper. With the depth with which you can see the true nature of reality, the peace of mind grows, and with the peace of mind the thirst for repetition or the resistance to repetition is extinguished; with the extinction of the thirst for repetition the contact with the paper objects is extinguished, nothing touches you because you see "beyond" the objects. With the extinction of touch, the sensual craving ceases, with the extinction of sensual craving, the desire to compose new paper objects ceases, with the extinction of the desire to compose new paper objects, the process of conditioning one object by another extinguishes, and thus the chain of dependent arising is broken, and you, like a doll, emerge from the cycle of birth and death of Samsara.
As a little man, Gautama Buddha, once said, who stepped out of the Samsara cycle and passed on this experience to facilitate the crossing of other beings, for which I give him great thanks:
"With the arising of this,
...with the arising of this, comes the arising of that,
with the cessation of this,
this ceases."
Primitive as this quote may sound, there is great depth and Liberation in it.
May all beings realize their own awakening
Tomáš Merlin Ježek
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