Tag: timelessness

Dissolution

After touring the grounds of Shugsep nunnery, in July, 2017, I walked inside the darkened and silent main sanctuary. Everything was completely undisturbed; no one else was present. I noticed the colors, the familiar designs, the empty seats marked by the heavy woolen robes collapsed like ghosts on the benches, the teaching throne. Everything was in its place; there was only my breathing.

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Then, in a slow wave, all the “things” in my view became one thing. All objects knit together into a single object. Everything became one teaching. Down to the smallest detail, even the fake flowers were a teaching. The decaying fresh fruit, the wooden bowls, the gold, the fading paint, it was all teaching; a single non-conceptual communication that had no words. It was entirely uniform, as if everything became tuned to a single harmonic to which I myself was becoming tuned. Everything was in its place; nothing was out of place. There was no other place for anything other than where—and what—it was. It was all an intricate code, like pieces of a puzzle suddenly, upon assembly, becoming a coherent image, conveying a single message.

All the activity outside the temple space was teaching. Everything beyond was also teaching, the weather, the mountains, the pilgrims on the way. Everything in every living moment is the same message. I was inside the space of all teachings, all schools, all teachers, all of the past and stretching into an undefined future, a vast dynamic universe of infinite nuance, the tiniest ripples part of a vast ocean, having no language, no structure, no predetermined activity.

I wasn’t expecting this.

I dissolved into all of it, again, in communion with the heart-mind of the victorious ones. “I” was a part of it, even as “I” no longer existed. The barrier between the perceiver and the perceived dissolved. There was no Other. Everything was image. Not many images; one seamless continuous image encompassing everything. Nothing I saw had any solidity, any material quality or substance whatsoever; it was none other than teachings, a uniform message available to all who would listen.

There were no words for or about anything; not the deities on the walls, the colors on the ceilings, nor the figures by the altar; neither the hands that crafted those figures, nor the statues of teachers nor the teachers themselves. Nor even the Buddha himself.

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There were no words–or thoughts, or concepts–at all. There was only a simple, unitary and direct knowing, an all-knowing that needs no words, that could not find words if it tried; without a source, a wind blowing across centuries, populated by an infinite number of beings, uncountable know-ers who didn’t (and mostly still don’t) know that they know, permeating everything and every one, “my” thoughts, all thought, my body of light, the same light from the doorway, the sky beyond. There was no differentiation between words and thought and knowing.

There was no time. The truth, the seamless image of truth lives outside of time. It permeates the construction we call time and it is not time at all. Then again, neither is it other than time. I was not standing there at that moment, not in any discrete moment—or any moments. I was standing there my entire life, from beginning to end and without beginning or end, standing in every “event,” as if discrete events ever existed, and though “in” events, also not separate from any event.

The material nature of a temple, a sutra, a speech or treatise, the perceptual apparatus that produces them all, the sky, the mountains rising to that sky,…it is all the same, a dynamic display of color for which there is no name, only nuance beyond comprehension. It is generation itself, just as I had first seen at Mount Madonna Center in 2013, rising and disappearing in every instant.

There is no longer anything I can call not-teaching, anything that stands apart from the essence of truth, anything other than a bottomless knowing that cannot be spoken. The sacred may not always be apparent. But it does not lie at the edge of or beyond or within…anything. We may imagine that reality is just beyond our grasp, that a ‘crossing over’ is necessary. But from what, into what? It is already everything….without any edges, living beyond the illusion of being separate.

It is all mandala. It is all Buddha-field. It is all Buddha. Nothing is other than Buddha, not the suffering of the lost, the greed of the wealthy, the deceit, the derangement, manipulation or ruthlessness of the powerful, the striving of the seekers, the violence of the deluded, the nobility of the compassionate, nor even the amorality of the psychopath. Every look on every face is a changing color in the ever-shifting magic mural of the living dharma. It is all Buddha. It is all perfection. There is nothing out of place. Nothing “happens” at a wrong time.

No decision we face can ever be postponed or avoided. We are always coming home and we are always at home. There is no place that is not home. There is no place to go. There is no away. We are home. There is no remote cave of feeling, perhaps blocked up for decades, generations or even lifetimes that is not worth exploring. There are no chambers of the heart to be abandoned. There is no dead-end of relationship.

There is no limit to a commitment to truth or to the invitation always present. There is no wrongdoing that cannot be faced, no darkness that can remain unseen, no search for justice to be abandoned. There may be exhaustion, but there is no sleep that cannot be interrupted. Nothing exists outside the temple. The temple is everything. Everything is the temple. The Buddha field is everything. We cannot give everything–or anything–to it. It is already everything we are. We have nothing. Our absolute poverty is our true nature. We have everything we need, we already are everything we need in every moment.

We may still retain will. Or at least that is what we imagine. We both exercise it and surrender it to realize essence nature. Not “our” essence. Essence does not belong to anyone or anything. It has no source. Yet, it is not other than everything. We exercise will to pursue what we do not yet believe we already are. Will, entwined with self, is both freeing and also a form of bondage. The exercise of will releasing bondage is the great surrender, the great paradox, the Two Truths in operation, inextricable, inexplicable, perpetual and ineffable, without condition or attribute. The Great Mandala. The Great Perfection.

Resonance: An Emerging Ethos

We are currently being driven deeply into every remote crevice of consciousness, to every hidden root of clinging to the past and into the disintegrating present. As we talk of changing the collective Story, we focus on an emerging ethos. A new ethic springs forth, outlining the features of justice and the governance we so dearly seek. The past cannot be changed. We can’t fully imagine a future that is not yet. What we can do is attend honestly and rigorously to the present. Rather than spinning a yarn about a possible future, I would look at some of the relational foundations of future scenarios, the principles and proficiencies necessary to build right now. We are familiar with some, but perhaps not all.

Rather than imagining Events or Things, we might start with the most basic process of relationship. Part of this journey is to re-envision wholeness. The terms taking center-stage in this drama increasingly center on Presence, Resonance and Inter-Being. We are talking our way into dialogic process accessing or generating inter-subjective field phenomena. The experience of Resonance is a foundational feature of Resilience. It may be applied to what is discovered in the inter-subjective field with intent to generate impulses arising from communion. Such field phenomena have been called collective intelligence, morphic resonance or energetic manifestations of increasingly intimacy characterized by courage, trust, compassion, fearlessness and love.

Inter-Being is an intrinsic portal to potentials evoked spontaneously or by deliberate group interaction. Whether it’s psychological or spiritual or evolutionary depends on whom you talk to. The full potential of Inter-Being remains unexplored and virtually unlimited. Diverging from formal hierarchies, we explore the potential of We-Space/Inter-Being to facilitate direct interactive non-conceptual experience, functioning as a matrix connecting diverse collective awakening practices or to highlight the limits of–if not overthrow–the paradigm of scientific materialism. But that is the grand design, is it not?

Such development is analogous to long-term solitary spiritual practices or parallel development of religious or sacred philosophies. Group practices are exploding out of a rapidly growing knowledge base resulting from deep and creative explorations with roots reaching back five decades, driven by an intuition that solitary practices may be leveraged to group process.

The intention and language of Deep Adaptation evokes emergence, coherence and authenticity and the attendant heart-opening practices permeating that world, driving our progress and building a durable foundation. We are struggling to comprehend what we are called upon to know and do in a world collapsing around us. Whatever excitement we have about our gains is tempered (and driven) by the torrent of grief underlying the urgency.

In short, we are learning about communion, to become agents of communion. In so doing, communion becomes a force driving us as its agent. We have already cultivated the passive arts of accepting, embracing and allowing. But we can be tourists no longer. We must move further into becoming and owning a process of forging the persona and systems of Deep Adaptation, even as we remain explorers. In this sense, we become professionals, increasingly attuned to impeccable relations—professionals deepening our embodiment of the emerging ethos. As professionals, we fully accept our obligation to drive further into the coda of presence, resonance and inter-subjectivity, evoking Inter-Being as it influences and shapes a possible future, deliberately framing our communications as a message to that future.

Buddhism says the union of appearance and reality is complete, permanent and unchanging. When we consider whether and how this view operates in relationship, we enter a new domain. We already know something happens when people come into a deep and trusting connection. We call it empathy, authenticity or synchronicity. An interactive quality of openness and exchange occurs, immersing us in a larger field; as if an altered state can envelope each one and the augmented communication within that envelope takes on an extraordinarily enhanced quality. In this realm, the object disappears. The sense of Other dissolves. Two subjects become One.

Another feature of Resonance is its timeless-ness; the future and the past fall away and all that exists is this moment. Surely there are biological markers of this condition such as a parasympathetic response. Consciousness of threat abates and defenses dissolve into an intrinsic state of mutual trust, safety and unbroken availability for more. Boundaries become mutable. In such a moment, karma falls away. There is opportunity here like no other. It’s a delicate restorative condition, but one that can be cultivated, particularly if we have a better understanding of its elements and principles. At the very least, we are reconciling the divisive influence of modern society.