In a Dharma talk during the April 2026 two-week meditation advance, our teacher, Soryu Forall, told a few stories about the astonishing degree to which we may hold certain dangerous erroneous beliefs about our ability to walk the path to enlightenment—the liberation of mind from suffering for the benefit of all beings.
For instance, we are deeply attached to the belief that we can’t help, can’t do good until we’re enlightened, perfect, and won’t make any mistakes. Forall said that he had been accused of saying this dozens of times. “I don’t recall ever saying this. I recall making it completely clear, thousands of times, that it’s through the integration of awakening and responsibility that one walks the path—it’s through helping that we attain enlightenment, and through enlightenment that we help. Not one time did I claim it’s impossible to help anyone until you’re enlightened. And yet we’re so attached, so stuck in that view that we hear it anyway.”
He recounted that our organization started recording such talks with the hope that it’d help with this. “There was a person who said that I said that. We found the recording. She listened to it. Nowhere did she hear me say that. Yet still, at the end, she thought I said it. She acknowledged, ‘I listened to the recording and didn’t hear you say it, but I still think you said it.’ And she meant that!”
Just in case anyone in the audience thought this was a fluke, he offered another example. When the organization first started recording interviews—one-on-one interactions with the teacher about a person’s practice—there was someone to whom Forall clearly said, “You can do it.”
Later that person went to him and said, “That was very harmful of you to say.”
Forall replied, “Oh, tell me more.”
“To tell me that I cannot walk this path is an attack on me.”
“I don’t recall saying that, but we have the recording.”
In the zendo with us, Forall recounted what happened next. “He listened to the recording—” He paused and held up his right hand, totally open. “—five times, and agreed that every word in it said that he could do it. Yet he still was angry at me for saying that he couldn’t do it. He was deeply confused by this. ‘I don’t understand why I still think you said it. It’s not in the recording, and I even know that you didn’t say it, but I still believe that you did, and I’m still mad at you for telling me that. It was wrong of you.’”
Seeing that some audience members were expressing an unusual degree of incredulity, he paused to let it sink in. “This is real. This is how deep it is. We hope that dataism, that recording things will somehow help with this deep insecurity. Obviously, it doesn’t. That has nothing to do with it. What’s happening is that we have practiced thousands, millions, countless times trying to do it and we have failed. We’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t do it, so when we are faced with a clear message that we can do it, we’re afraid. It hurts, so much.”
He said that this is just one of the reasons that the realization of emptiness, after doing the actual hard work of letting go of all concepts, is such a significant moment in a person’s life and path.
“The relief of knowing that this can be done, that there is a path to the complete realization of our highest purpose, the relief of knowing that we’ve actually walked it and no longer need to fight against our true nature—simply that changes the world. The tension, the fight stops, and we become capable of helping all the more, because we’re no longer holding onto wrong view.”
Humbled upon hearing about the depth of human confusion that I didn’t know of before, I threw myself into the practice with refreshed determination. By the end of the advance, I saw more clearly through my own efforts that the path is real. Upon realizing this, a new life surged through my body. It was real. I suddenly yelled, “There is something I can do!”