Dragon’s Fire Discourse

As you practice this precept, it allows you to live with the inner meditation that everything is more fluid than we think. This awareness helps you to live life largely and with gratitude for the smallest and most simple nature of your life. If you assume nothing, you take nothing for granted. Everything becomes a gift that is given. These gifts are yours only for a short, precious, time. This consciousness creates a soft sweetness to the emotional and mental places within that feel hard, judgmental and ungrateful. Having no assumptions helps you to appreciate your families, friends, and even your struggles and challenges. It helps you to connect to the mystery of life: breathing in the sweetness of the air, contemplating the beauty of nature, feeling the love, that loves through you. This fluid awareness also helps you to let go of outcomes of which you have no control over: challenges in personal relationship, work and community. You cannot know another’s unconscious motives or karmic forces that are at work. The conclusions you draw are distilled from your own unconscious motives and karmic forces which are then, projected onto people and situations around you.

In assuming nothing, one does not draw hard-lined conclusions. The mind and heart stay open. An open heart and an open mind have the ability to receive what cannot be perceived by the limited mind. The limited mind wants to construct conclusions to justify one’s actions.

Assuming nothing allows one to be simple and authentic in life. There is no pretense, nothing to fake, nothing to pretend to have or to be and nothing to hold on to. The door opens and the light comes in. There are no masks to wear or facades to hold up. We lighten our load.

Assumptions are the accumulated patterns that we each possess. These patterns are unique to your individual experiences and your karmic pattern. As we meet each new experience we project these unconscious “conclusions” on to the present moment. Essentially, you take your past experiences and carry them forward on to the present moment. When that happens, your projections distort the clarity of the present moment. As you practice “assume nothing”, you allow your consciousness to remain open and receptive. Making assumptions influences your consciousness to reject what is purely presenting itself. In this way, you allow yourself to be controlled by your own past experiences.

Held within the center of “assume nothing” is the heart of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which a victim undergoes a change in feelings and attitude regarding an offense. As you let go of your negative emotions and do not indulge in repetitive, destructive patterns, you release the bondage of karma and become free to live in the present moment. In the present moment, stand neither for or against what is presenting itself. In this way, no assumptions are made, all is forgiven and you may realize healing and peace.