Learning to Wake Up

We are hungry for knowledge and want to get results immediately and automatically, but unless we give up that speed and urgency, we are not going to learn anything. The problem seems to be basically one of laziness. We are so lazy that we do not even want to bother eating our food; we would prefer to be satisfied just from reading the menu. And that laziness reaches the extreme when it comes to going further into relating with reality. The process of learning to wake up takes time and painful measures of all kinds. The learning process is not an easy matter. It is not easy, because we do not want to surrender our basic security. The teachings of Buddhism are not a source of security, such as “the freedom of nirvana” or something of that nature. The teachings do not present another form of security at all, but bring the absence of any kind of security. Enlightenment is the complete absence of any kind of promises.