Every night in deep sleep we return to the source, the darkness from which each breath and each heartbeat arises, and every morning we come forth again into this world that appears to be divided up into infinite separate parts, one of which we identify as me, the separate self, apparently cut off from the wholeness of being, struggling to survive intact. From this position of apparent separation, we fear death and anything that resembles death—anything that threatens to overwhelm us, oppose us, defeat us or annihilate us. We are like the river terrified of returning to the sea, desperately wondering if the river will survive and still be there in the sea. Of course, the river never really ends...it merges with and dissolves into the sea, it evaporates into the air and comes down as rainwater…it soaks into the earth and rises up as flowers…this life-force is endlessly re-forming…but once it reaches the sea, it doesn’t survive as “the river.” In fact, “the river” is nothing more than an abstract concept that makes what has always been ceaseless fluidity and movement seem like a solid thing. There never really was some enduring, continuous, independent form (“the river” or “me”) that could be lost in the sea. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing here in some nihilistic sense, but rather, it means that what any apparent form is, is not fragmented or static or separate from everything else. Nothing holds still or stays the same (except in the world of concepts). So is the river still there after it dies in the sea? The question is rooted in a false idea of how things are, very much like our ancestors who worried about sailing off the edge of an earth they had misconceived as flat. And in spite of all our equally misconceived fears about death and the end of “my beingness” and “my consciousness” and “my movie of waking life” and ultimately, the end of “ME,” in spite of all these fears, every night, we return happily to the sea, the Great Darkness, the unknowable source from which we come and into which we dissolve moment by moment, breath by breath. No one remains in deep sleep to worry about the possibility of not waking up again! That phantom worrier has dissolved into the sea. The more closely we attend to the actuality of the world (rather than to our thoughts and concepts about it), and the more closely we attend to the mirage-like separate self and to what it is exactly that we are afraid of losing, the more we realize directly that no solid boundaries can actually be found, that everything is made up of everything else, that this manifestation is one seamless interdependent whole, that it is ungraspable and ever-changing, and that we are this whole dream, this unbound awaring presence, this undivided vastness of being showing up as everything imaginable. We find the whole universe in our tea cup or in the door knob that we always took for granted. Everything is brimming with this aliveness, this vibrancy, this brightness of being. If we’re not lost in the dreary story of “me and my problems,” “me and what I lack,” “me and my search for final enlightenment,” then we are free to appreciate and enjoy and praise this moment, however it is. We are free to play—not to dismiss life as “just a dream” that is best ignored or left behind—and not to take it too seriously in the wrong way either, as if it actually has some solid and enduring form that we can grasp and hold onto. In this freedom, we cherish life, we enter the dance with wonder and joy, but we no longer fear death or scare ourselves with funny stories about not being here anymore. Where would we go? Where do we begin and end? And when have we ever been able to hold on to one single moment, one single breath, one single heartbeat, one single instant of this ever-changing rivering? Isn’t this ephemeral freshness and lightness exactly what makes life so alive and so full of possibility?
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 20:20:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015