Acknowledging sanity is a discipline or a pretense: you pretend to be the Buddha, you believe you are the Buddha. Again, we are not talking about buddha-nature as an embryonic state, but of the living situation of buddhahood having already happened. We adopt such a pretense at the beginning, or maybe we should call it a belief. It is a belief in the sense that our buddhahood is seemingly not real but we take it as a reality. Some element of mind’s trickery is necessary. And then we find ourselves having been tricked into enlightenment.

From ” The Lion’s Roar,” in Crazy Wisdom, page 142.