Brutal awareness

Hey, awake yourself to the true reality of your life!

Your body is becoming older and older day by day, no matter you are now twenty, thirty or fourty years old. Some of you are already fifty or sixty. Look at yourself in a mirror! Look at yourself in your old pictures and you will notice the differences. How your body has changed. Your body is becoming uglier and uglier day by day, and will soon resemble more like a corpse than a living body. Look how your hair becomes white, ..... the signs of death are there, in your own body.

Your parents are even older than you. They will become a corpse, and you will also become a corpse. The body of your own wife or husband, which you now love and feel sexual attraction to it, will become a corpse. It will stink, it will have a smell so bad, that you will not be able to stay near it for a few days.

Your own body will rot, your body is only flesh and bones, the same flesh you see in the meat store. Open your belly and you will find intestines filled with excrements. This is what you are, this is what your body is!

This is life: birth of this body, the decaying of this body and death of this body.

Are you afraid, are you scared when you realize all these truths? Then it means that you walk the right path. The more you realize how ugly you are, how death is becoming the master of your body, the more you are prepared for the Dharma.

And, what do you really want to gain in this life, in this present body composed of flesh and bones which soon will become a corpse and rot in a forgotten grave?

You are only a moving skeleton, a prisoner awaiting execution. Awake yourself and immerse in this brutal awareness! It is the only true action you can do, everything else is an illusion.

This brutal awareness is not poetry… stop making poetry about death! Just writing poems about death is nothing! You have to be shocked by death in order to awake yourself! Death is not something about the future, on the contrary, death is working now in your own body and the bodies of your loved ones, just look at you and look at them! They look like shit and you look like shit, we all look like shit, we become uglier and older day by day. And if we have the chance to survive until old age, then we’ll look exactly like ghosts in horror movies.

Awake your self to this brutal reality, to the true reality. Stop lying yourself, escape your own illusion that keeps telling you what beautiful you are. Just examine your own body and you’ll find the truth, the bitter truth. 

What can be truly done with this life like a prison in which everything you have now will surely be lost one day? 

All these hungry ghosts we call human beings, attached to their deformed bodies and minds, ready to devour you and to take everything from you in order to satisfy their own hunger and thirst…. what do you still want or expect from them? Do you want to be loved by them? Can you really love them? Aren’t you the same like them when you wish to satisfy your own desires? Don’t you see that this place becomes more and more like hell? Is this the place in which you want to build a house, make a career, have a family, children and friends? Do you wish to find fulfillment here? And for how long do you think your satisfaction will last?

I repeat, these words are not poetry, but brutal awareness. I am not a poet, a good blogger or a priest who wants to write something interesting. I am just a hungry ghost, writing to other hungry ghosts in this world like hell in which I know we all hate each other, or profit from each other, using each other, abandoning each other, thinking we are beautiful and have long lasting bodies.

Just look at yourself, you ugly human being, walking corpse that you are! All that is waiting for you is a grave, all will remain from you and your loved ones is a stinking corpse and a skeleton. Even now you look more and more like a corpse.

Stop arranging your grey hair, monkey man!

You will be born again and again, repeating the same misery, until your stupid mind will finally understand that this life is only a prison from which you must escape at all costs and the only way of escaping is through the nembutsu of faith in Amida Buddha:

“….in this fleeting world- this burning house- all matters without exception are empty and false, totally without truth and sincerity. The nembutsu alone is true and real(1).”

Namo Amida Butsu

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(1) Shinran Shonin, Tannisho