[From a teaching on Songs of Barway Dorje, Part 8, by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]
When the sun rises into the sky in the morning, it does not need to get rid of the darkness. The darkness is not some kind of solid thing or commodity that needs to be drained out of the sky or swept away from the earth or buried under the ground. The darkness, in that sense, isn’t a thing. It’s an absence. And when the light of the sun fills the sky, fills the world, that itself is the ending for that day of the darkness.
So we think that our state of darkness is a thing, a possession, some thing that we have and it’s all we’ve ever known. So we fear the illumination of awakening as some kind of loss. But just as the rising and the shining of the sun in the sky is not a loss of darkness, it’s not as though the world has lost its capacity for shadow, in the same way we have nothing to lose.
What happens is when you pray to the Three Jewels and Three Roots, when you pray to your guru, then your mind becomes brighter, clearer, more luminous. And as you get brighter, the darkness naturally diminishes, but it’s not diminishing in the sense of a thing being drained out of you. It’s not a thing. It’s just like the darkness at night.
