An enlightened person is still neurotic

Dhamma Hujja recently said that the difference between an enlightened person and an unenlightened person is not that one has no neuroses and the other doesn't, but it's in the way that they respond to those neuroses. We arrive in the world with karma. We absorb, you know, we meet external conditions, our internal conditions meet external conditions, that creates neurosis. Some of the ways we have of handling the world are less than skillful. The more the more faith we've got, the more loving kindness we can bring to ourselves, the more safe we feel, the easier it is to be able to be curious about those neuroses, to be able to be— make friends with them. The unenlightened per— the completely unenlightened person is completely in the sway of all their neuroses. They're like a pinball rushing around a machine, you know, they just bounce from one encounter to another encounter, driven by conditioning, by the unconscious mind. A lot of that's driven by fear, a lot of that's driven by greed. But if we can remember that we're called to love and that the Buddhas love us, not in return, just simply that the Buddhas love us, we can stop rushing around like that pinball and take a moment to be curious. And I think we can particularly do that when we see the effects of our actions in the world, as it says in the Tai Chi, Shi Chi prayer, "When I look into your sad eyes and see the harm my acts have done." In that moment, if we feel loved, if we feel like we're able to rest in a place of love, then that can give us the strength to be interested, "Oh, what's happened here?" And the strength to be kind to the other person and to ourselves. If our faith is shaky and we feel insecure, then we just close our eyes against that moment. And partly I noticed this piece of writing by Tāma Pitya because one of the conversations that we've been having is how we relate to our own teachers, of course, and how we might expect people to relate to us when we're in this role. And it's very easy to think, "Oh, that person's got it sorted out, this person's got it sorted out." But that can get us into all sorts of trouble because we don't really want to see the bits of them or the bits of ourselves that are still neurotic, that are still still creating turbulence in our mind and in the world. A teacher is able to receive enough love from the Buddhas. A teacher is able to dwell in a pool of love enough that they can face their own neurosis, old ones and new ones as they're created. And sometimes they can do that completely, but most of them will probably have a few things still hidden in the shadows. All of us are. In my mind's eye, when I look at what a person is Spiritually, what I see is a real mix of light and shadow, pools of darkness that we don't, where we don't really know what's getting created in them, and other areas that are flooded with light. And of those areas flooded with light have got, sometimes got pinpricks of darkness in that might expand and swell, and those areas of darkness have got seeds of lighting. That's a mixed metaphor, apologies, I don't know what a seed of light is. The pinpricks of lighting that might swell, that have got the potential to swell and cast out the darkness. And we're all this sort of cloudy mixture of both of these things, and the more deeply that we practice, the more deeply that we come into contact with the Buddha, the tendency will be for the light to increase, but realistically, in this lifetime at least, we're always going to be a sort of cloudy mixture of both of these things. And what's really important is that when we feel engulfed by the darkness, we still remember that not only are there pinpricks of light in our own darkness, but that outside this cloud that we are ourselves, there is light loving us just as we are. Namami Tabuu.