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or is the problem solved?"
Chuang Tzu said, "It is solved! Don't go -- it is too cold! You idiot, where have you been? If by chance it had been the butterfly who was dreaming, you would have killed her. Be a little sensible!"
But this is the only difference: you are asleep. A buddha becomes awakened. The difference is not categorical, the difference is relative -- you can also become awakened.
Hence, Buddha does not proclaim any superiority over those who are still asleep. It is their freedom: if they want to sleep they can sleep, life after life. But one day they will have to become tired and bored with sleeping. One day they will jump out of the bed and say "Enough!"
That much is the difference.
So there is not a question of following any practice or even speaking of realization because there is not much difference, and the difference that exists is relative.
IN OUR SCHOOL, FROM THE FIRST ENTRY, THIS POINT SHOULD BE PRACTICED WHETHER SITTING, LYING DOWN, OR WALKING AROUND. WHEN ASLEEP, JUST SLEEPING, THERE IS NO PAST OR FUTURE. WHEN YOU AWAKEN, THERE IS NO SLEEP EITHER.
THIS IS CALLED THE ABSOLUTE HOST.
If you have found your buddha within, you have found the absolute host, which never goes anywhere, which simply remains now and here.
Mitsuhiro wrote a haiku:
BEWARE OF GNAWING
THE IDEOGRAM OF NOTHINGNESS:
YOUR TEETH WILL CRACK.
SWALLOW IT WHOLE...
... Don't chew it. He's saying: don't think, just swallow it whole. Thinking about this great matter is bound to crack your teeth. Your mind is not capable; it is not meant to think about the absolute.
All the philosophers are wrong in the sense that they are trying, through mind, to figure out something about the fundamental, the absolute -- the ultimate. They don't understand that mind is an arbitrary functioning of the body.
It has come to this stage because you have to deal with reality, and the consciousness cannot deal with reality; it is simply a mirror. It can reflect; more than that it cannot do.
The body has to create an arbitrary mind to function in the world. Its function is not to think
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