The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

INTRINSIC RADIANCE 285So the five negative emotions arise as the direct result of ournot recognizing their true nature. When truly recognized, theyare purified and liberated, and arise themselves as none otherthan the display of the five wisdoms.In the bardo of dharmata, when you fail to recognize thebrilliant lights of these wisdoms, then self-grasping enters your"perception," just as, one master says, a person who is seriouslyill with a high fever will begin to hallucinate and see allkinds of delusions. So, for example, if you fail to recognize thered, ruby light of the wisdom of discernment, it arises as fire,for it is the pure essence of the fire element; if you fail to recognizethe true nature of the golden radiance of the equalizingwisdom, then it arises as the element earth, because it is thepure essence of the earth element; and so on.This is how, when self-grasping enters into the "perception"of the appearances of the bardo of dharmata, they are transformed,you could almost say solidified, through that into thevarious bases of delusion of samsara.One Dzogchen master uses the example of ice and waterto show how this lack of recognition and self-grasping unfold:Water is usually liquid, an element with wonderful qualities,that purifies and quenches thirst. But when it freezes, it solidifiesinto ice. In a similar way, whenever self-grasping arises itsolidifies both our inner experience and the way we perceivethe world around us. Yet just as in the heat of the sun ice willmelt into water, so in the light of recognition, our unboundwisdom nature is revealed.Now we can see exactly how, after the dawning of theGround Luminosity and the bardo of dharmata, samsaraactually arises as a result of two successive failures to recognizethe essential nature of mind. In the first the GroundLuminosity, the ground of the nature of mind, is not recognized;if it had been, liberation would have been attained. Inthe second the energy nature of the nature of mind manifests,and a second chance for liberation presents itself; ifthat is not recognized, arising negative emotions start tosolidify into different false perceptions, which together go onto create the illusory realms we call samsara, and whichimprison us in the cycle of birth and death. The whole ofspiritual practice, then, is dedicated to directly reversing whatI would call this progress of ignorance, and so of de-creating,de-solidifying those interlinked and interdependent false perceptionsthat have led to our entrapment in the illusory realityof our own invention.