Saturday, September 20 Early morning, Emptiness shines, the bodymind is the smallest ripple on this infinitely beautiful sea, the sea of just this. And now the sun, usurper of the throne of Luminosity, rises to shine its derivative light on a pitiful little Gaia, a small green speck on an infinite sea of unending tranquillity. The great Zen Master Yasutani: “Now look. The whole phenomenal world is entirely oneself. Therefore the clouds, the mountains, and the flowers; the sound of a fart and the smell of urine; earthquakes, thunder, and fire are all the Original Self. Reading sutras and holding services, telling a pack of lies, slander and idle talk, ugliness and cuteness, everything altogether is supreme enlightenment. Everything is your Original Self that is perfectly without lack and is completely fulfilled in itself. Don’t be surprised.” There is One Taste. There is the Big Self, and it includes “farts, the smell of urine, a pack of lies and slander.” And likewise, until the ecologists understand that the ozone hole, pollution, and toxic wastes are all completely part of the Original Self, they will never gain enlightened awareness, which alone knows how to proceed with these pressing problems. At the same time, the entire world can disappear—which it does in nirvikalpa—and the Original Self is still itself, full and complete, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal. This is not a doctrine of popular pantheism, which simply equates the manifest world with Spirit. The manifest world is not Spirit, it is a gesture of Spirit, as the waves are a gesture of the ocean. But the wetness of individual waves is identical to the wetness of the entire ocean—there is only One Taste to every wave, and that taste is Spirit itself. Spirit is the wetness of every wave in the entire universe, including, as Yasutani said, farts and lies and everything else, ozone hole and all. We want to fix the ozone hole, not because it is hurting Spirit (or the Goddess), but because it is killing us. A true spiritual ecology does not equate the biosphere with Spirit—a horrible confusion of relative and absolute, finite and infinite, temporal and timeless (and itself just another version of bodyism)—but it does see the biosphere as a glorious manifestation of Spirit, and thus treats it with the respect that all God’s children deserve, knowing, too, that these children are the manifestation of one’s own deepest Self. You weep at the destruction of the biosphere, not because your God is dying, but because your children are. Sunday, September 21 There is such a strange and radically paradoxical thing about One Taste: you never really enter or leave it. You have always known One Taste—literally, for fifteen billion years you have known this, and one day, sooner or later, you will admit it, and the Great Search will be undone. And then you will see that any state that can be entered is not One Taste. Emptiness through all eternity, Fullness to all infinity. And it’s just this, only this. It cannot be any more obvious, which is why it usually takes lifetimes to see. Too close to be grasped, too effortless to be reached, too present to be attained. The Buddhas never attained this; sentient beings never lost it. Who will believe this? One Taste, The Journals of Ken Wilber. #Integral
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 17:55:06 +0000
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