Movies to Learn From

Excerpts from a Teaching by Wisdom Master Maticintin

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In the spiritual life, it is very much the same way. The Spiritual Master is always testing in that manner. How strong is your commitment? What’s important in your life? If you are willing to put your pride aside, because of your love of spirituality, then there is something inside of you that moves to Bodhisattva Level Two. In other words, you have developed enough satiety with worldly life…to know the difference between superficiality and quality.

You want quality, and the quality is more important than the superficiality. That doesn’t mean that you are not going to be tempted by the superficiality. It simply means that you make a decision. You will give up some of the superficiality to make sure that you keep your spirituality in your life. When you do that, you begin to realize all the habitual ways you have been operating from all your life.

This knight had to overcome all his memories of feeling that he wasn’t good enough….and take the stance, “I can change my stars.” He wasn’t going to turn his back on who he truly was, even if he got arrested.  He had already given himself to Jocelyn, but he knew that to run off with her would be wrong. He felt authentic; he knew who he was. He knew inside of himself that he was a knight. He was so sure of that, that he allowed himself to be captured and ridiculed.

Just as Jocelyn released him from the stigma by saying, “Yes, now go win…,”   this time, because William was so centered in who he was, the crown prince…set him free, and made him a knight officially. He made him publicly authentic. Whether or not that had happened wouldn’t have mattered; William was still a knight. He had that brilliance inside of himself to know who he was.

So, this movie is really a bodhisattva story. You can see that taking a bodhisattva vow sets you on that journey. When you first take the vow, it is just a feeling of joyousness, filled with anticipation of awakening, which is wonderful. Out of that anticipation and excitement of awakening, you begin to live differently. Eventually, you pull out of that place where you are always looking at yourself, and your needs. Instead, you function for the good of the whole. That place where you stop functioning for self, and begin to function for the good of the whole, that’s the first bodhisattva level. Powerful!

Even if a person never gets beyond the first bodhisattva level, if they are really living that level, they are enlarging their wakefulness greatly.

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