Someone recently asked me this question: “There is an obvious difference between a living body and a dead body. The living body has something enlivening it that the dead body lacks. What do you suppose that is? What do you suppose happens to that ‘energy’ once the body dies?” When the bubble pops, what happens to the space inside the bubble? What do we see and love most deeply when we look into the eyes of someone else? Are we inside the body looking out at the world, or are the body and the world both appearing inside this space of awareness? Why did Ramana say, as he was dying, that he wasn’t going anywhere? What happens to the flame when the candle is blown out? Could it be that “consciousness” and “matter” are two words for the same undivided energy? Energy or consciousness is always changing shape, ever in flux, always moving—and yet, it is always Here / Now, ever-present. In the end, both movement and stillness lose their meaning for they depend on each other to be. Another word for “Here / Now” is primordial awareness. Everything appears in this vast space of awareness—the living body, the dead body, the trees, the clouds, the whole earth, the planets, the distant galaxies, the sunlight—all of it divided only by words. Even words such as “awareness” or “consciousness” or “energy” or space or “totality” must eventually be dropped. The confusion is always in the words, the thought-concepts, the mental ideas, the abstractions with which we try to grasp and understand and control everything. The living reality simply IS—inconceivable, ungraspable, unattainable because it is unavoidable—most intimate, as they say in Zen—this very presence right here, right now, this very beingness, this aliveness—just this. What is this? This question isn’t asking for an answer in the form of a word-concept, but rather, it is a koan that invites the mind to give up, to relax, to open, to fall into the living wonder of being here now.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 17:22:59 +0000
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