Practice like Your Hair’s on Fire / Gelek Rimpoche / (4)

In old Tibet, we had to keep reminding ourselves that human beings can do anything. These days we don’t have to, because science clearly shows us what human beings are capable of. Human beings alone are responsible for tremendous scientific achievements, not the ghosts and samsaric gods. Those achievements are because of the extraordinary capabilities of our human minds. We really have brilliant minds. As human beings, we all have tremendous capacity. But if we don’t utilize it, then it remains weak.

  If you have a car and you leave it sitting outside for two years, it won’t work when you try to start it. You can push it and bang it, but nothing works. Then you have to tow it to a garage and pay a mechanic a fortune to fix it, if you’re lucky. Otherwise you have to send it to the junkyard, and it’s wasted. If we don’t use the capacity of our minds, that’s what we can expect. If we make the effort to develop ourselves, our capacity will be limitless. That is the example that the Buddha and all the other enlightened beings have provided for us.

  In short, our human life, with the limitless capacity of our minds, is capable of producing any result we wish. If your goal is to get rich, your human life is capable of producing it. If you want to become famous, your life is capable of doing it. Hollywood is full of such people. It’s the same with anything else you choose to do. Whether you are satisfied with the results or not is a different story, but human life is capable of delivering the goods. If you want to be fully enlightened, if your ultimate spiritual goal is to achieve enlightenment, then this life is capable of delivering that as well. From our point of view we may fail, but it won’t be because our human life lacked the capacity for total enlightenment. It’ll be because we didn’t take advantage of it.