“Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.” Eckhart Tolle (from A New Earth)

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Buddha Teaching (or Dharma) is Alchemy. All life is suffering, is one of the basis Buddha teachings. Suffering is the base metal of our human self-reflective consciousness. Called Dukkha, this suffering is the fundamental division in our consciousness, the Wound that won’t heal.

This was the driving discontent I felt as a young man that pushed me into the spiritual quest for resolution and unity, to find the end of this being outside of myself, to always be outside the window looking in on my experience. This was the base metal of my suffering. I yearned for the gold. Yoga became my path, but no matter how much yoga I did, I still ended up with the same Dukkha.

n 2005 there was a shift in my consciousness; something was alive in me and I knew not what it was. I read the Power of Now and as became earnestly interested in the Dharma Trail, reading books on meditation and Zen. The Alchemist within was activated. I began to accept and work with the only thing I had, which was Dukkha.

ere’s the paradox: when everything is Dukkha, you can’t fix it, get out of it, avoid it or deny it. You come to the end of the Hope Road. It is only here in this absolute desolation that unity is restored to you consciousness, which is the cessation of Dukkha (separation).

Dukkha is the division of my mind between conscious and unconscious. When I SEE that my mind is divided between the Observer and the Observed, that SEEING is not divided. When you see that your operating mind is like two ends of a horseshoe, you stop trying to get rid of one end of the shoe. When you see your suffering without trying to get out of it, the suffering ceases because self division ends,—and division or separation is the cause of your suffering. It is so simple we can’t See it.