Some years ago on Halloween, some children came to the door and demanded ‘Trick-or-Treat’.
I smiled and said ‘Trick’ … they were so surprised they did not know what to do or say…

Our selective attention, our expectations and projections, our assumptions our beliefs… are all ingredients with which a trickster or illusionist can work to manipulate and affect how we are likely to interpret our experience.

In a projector or ‘magic lantern’ a concave mirror, placed behind the light source, is used to focus the light from a source in the lantern… through a slide – a piece of glass with an image on it – placed in front of the light source… onto a lens at the front of the lantern.
This lens can be altered to change the distance at which the magnified image became clear when focussed onto a screen.

If a slide with a suitable image is used, and the result is projected onto smoke
then the resting appearances, observed in a darkened room by gullible observers, may be assumed to be ‘spectral.’
One definition of spectral is – ‘of or like a ghost’…
another is – ‘of or concerning the spectrum, the band of colours of light’.

The second more accurate definition of what actually occurs is taken to be the first – ‘it’s a ghost!’ – when we bring all the interpretive ingredients on our side into the mix!
Illusionists who forget their own hand in creating the shapes and shadows they project, and then believe that the illusion they created is real, are deluded… and well on the way to the kind of madness prevalent in the world.

Maybe a bit interesting, but what has this to do with me?
Well, quite a lot because as the dharma explains, we live in an illusory, ungraspable world and how we actually manifest (notwithstanding our story-lines) is also illusory and ungraspable.
It’s hard to see the truth of this… it doesn’t seem like this to us because we are ignorant of the karmically coloured lenses in the glasses we wear; ignorant of the mediating filters in our ears, our noses…all our senses…
and while repeatedly singing, or sighing, the ‘song of me’ we are deaf to the truth of the way in which we and ‘others’ actually exist.

So we in samsara are illusionists…projectionists… who become delusional as we attribute a self-existence to the appearances which arise for us, imbuing them with our beliefs.
We miss-take nature of these appearances, assuming solidity continuity and reliability and in misprisioning their true nature we delude ourselves and take them to be truly real.
Lacking curiosity – the wobbly little ego seeks stability in certainty – this leads quickly to ‘I know it is so because I think so’… ‘whatever it, or they, seem to be (for me!)… has the ring of truth about it ‘….

The ‘ghosts’ of ourselves, the shadow-shades of our past confusion, patterns of relating… to which the ego-thoughts attach in insecurity… attribute solidity and give certainty of definition and value to colour shape and movement.
In low-lighting ‘this’… and high-lighting ‘that’ aspect of experience – imputing, forming a particular perspective – and then taking the resultant con-fusion… that juxtaposition, brought togetherness, or compounding… as an accurate reading giving us the truth of the arising…
we make it ‘real’ for us, although we cannot really…and believe in the products of our creativity….

and then…
Oh! No!… Snap!
We are trapped ….by our beliefs… into one of many possibilities of formation… including ghosts!

What nonsense!…you might say.
But humans have the potential to experience many different states from heavenly to hellish, for a while…which may seem like a very long time!
Can I rest, as presence, and move from that responsively?
If not maybe there is something ghostly in the way of false identity getting in the way…acting as a limited shadow of my potential.

Without the dharma we wouldn’t have a ghost (ha! ha!) of a chance of realising any of this but happily, as with card tricks and the illusionists ‘magical display’… once we know for ourselves how the trick works we’re no longer so easily taken in, no longer so certain about and believing in the truth of our earlier conditioned interpretations.

With our deep habits – reliance on our thoughts and our beliefs, the patterns with which we identify… of thinking and activity, patterns which feel so much to be the truth of ‘me’… it can take much time and application or attention, listening study and meditation, to shrug ourselves free of these limitations…or maybe not so long depending on the students desire or aspiration and the teachers realisation and capacity*.

Maybe the little ‘ego-me’ tends to take things a bit too seriously…
you must get it right! you mustn’t lose! or break or….
whatever the wraith we snag with energetically…

Spaciousness and kindness – the truth of us, can say
‘Aw c’mon, sweetie its o.k.
relax… and relax more…it’s your display…
tension, with humour, fades away…’

So ‘Welcome sweet ghosts…
Here, have a chocolate finger
… yes, have some more : ) ‘
Happily, sharing, dissolving
becoming free-er
than before….

Believe in ghosts?…

Perhaps we do unwittingly…

the thoughts that tell us how we ought to be
echoes from the past
arising presently

Believed in,
tangled with these, our lived reality
is shaped by ghosts

defining the truth for me,
and you, and all that we can take to be
‘just as it seems to us’…

and we are lost…

Happily, a chink of wisdom’s light
illuminates, reveals, explains
our own birthright

and the innate integrity
of all within
mind’s pristine reality

As the Budhha said, of experienced phenomena, ‘mind is their chief and they are mind-made’

* there’s more to this…. and much else besides… in The Collected Works of C.R. Lama by James Low.
Some audio recordings of the ‘Brief Teachings’ from this will be posted here soon.