We have a common bond of understanding in our spiritual aspiration; those who are actually realizing that truth and getting beyond the conventions that define and describe the conventional world find the religious experience as being very much the same thing. It’s not like the Buddhist ultimate truth is something different from the others. We are pointing to an ultimate reality that is with us all the time; it’s not cultural, it’s not Buddhist or Christian, it’s not Asian or European, it’s not male or female. We’re transcending this conditioned realm – not rejecting it, but seeing through it to that ultimate truth which, in Buddhist terms, we call the amatadhamma (deathless Dhamma).
The gates to the Deathless are open, and the deathless reality is realized through paying attention to life. We realize it; we can actually know the deathless Dhamma directly, through awakening our mind and paying attention to whatever is happening within us or outside us. So we are learning to look at ourselves in a different way rather than the highly personal way of ‘I’m this person, I’m this nationality, I’m this class, I’m this gender, I have achieved or not achieved, I have attained or not attained’, or ‘I’m a good person or a bad one’, or good-looking or ugly or whatever. We can no longer use these terms to describe experience in this highly personal way because awareness is bringing us to a universal reality that’s transcending the conditions, the conventions.
Ajahn Sumedho
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