Seeing
In such a movement we may begin to discover that what is real is what we also are, here and now, source and destination, a sort of nowhere that is everywhere, where all true seeing, hearing...
Seeing (Awareness) knows that it knows, and knows its own seeing or knowing, without any need of another (an other). This seeing is NOT of the eyes, ears, or any of the bodily senses.
Metaphor, we must "move” with words such as these, allow them to carry us past (or prior) to words, and then "further," past and prior to thought, emotion, memory, imagination.
In such a movement we may begin to discover that what is real is what we also are, here and now, source and destination, a sort of nowhere that is everywhere, where all true seeing, hearing, sensing, feeling via the bodily senses is forever arising out of and forever subsiding into, without there ever being any actual coming or going.
It is in our willingness to be Here, this silent, vast, empty, timeless and dimensionless moment eternally unfolding, that we can begin to fully realize all experience, comprehension, apprehension, appearance, form and matter is in truth our very own self.
What is sometimes called Awakening is the most ordinary foundational state and activity of all manifest existence, apparent and otherwise. This forever dawning, eternally present, forever setting, entirely seamless, infinitely varied, limitless discovery and realization of what is itself, over and over, is what we also are.
Because we humans have believed ourselves separate from what can never be apart, it is now become possible for Creation to actually share and extend through and in relationship. This is the incredible gift that Creation itself, so to speak, has offered in exchange for our belief in separation and alienation, for as much as we are willing to surrender this belief and allow it to be transformed by Grace.
Awakening only becomes possible as we become truly human. And we become human when and as much as we begin to really see that we are sentience itself aware that it is sentient. And so incredibly paradoxically, all of creation awakens in every moment and through every movement of a human awakening.
The body is animal, yet life is eternal, expressing both in and as these what seem to be manifest dimensions, through form, substance, bodies, movement, change. Life is prior, beyond, and encompassing of all form. Life becomes human and sentient through our dawning awareness that we ARE life in relationship with itself, a process, or we could say a verb that is infinitely greater than mere bodies, thoughts and ideas that are lost in identities of separation.
Through each of us and all of us life itself is awakening, unfolding. It is a movement of silence rather than merely objective, relative, phenomenal. Yet life is also inclusive, of the relative, objective, phenomenal, of body, form, inclusive of each of us and all of us. All sentient expressions of life are participant in the body of what some call Christ, this ever unfolding extension, creation or Child of God without any other.
Eternal transcendence, yet also form, also body, beauty ever extending, increasing, engaging, awe inspiring, infinitely expressed and expressing, through form. In other words, God is also body, also form, always extending.
Yet always beginning, always a beginner, every moment, every movement, fresh and new.
A sort of felt sense that has only a tenuous connection with emotions and sensations, though they can be metaphors for what cannot ever be known as something other, separate. Our world, the universe and the whole of manifest existence is essentially and most fundamentally an infinite, unending, incredible, ever extending, multidimensional metaphor.
A Conversation, without any other.
All these words. another failed attempt to point to what cannot be said. A pointing finger does not know the moon. Only this Knowing itself knows what is being pointed to, and it knows because it knows that it knows. Without any agency at all.
Prior to all words, ideas, sense or sensation, is this knowing, without object or other. And still just words. Knowing simply is, and knows that it is. It is what writes these words, it is what hears these words, and it is what groks these words.
This knowing is you and I and all of life, and all of the universe. And, paradoxically, this knowing or awareness that is all of us, all of life and all of the universe is simultaneously knowing it is also, uniquely, each of us, each aspect of life, and each aspect of the universe.
What some call waking up is an ever deepening and infinitely unfolding realization of Being, through, in and as each of us, which is also simultaneously knowing itself as all of us, all of life, all sentience, and all of existence.
All of us and all aspects of existence incredibly unique, yet simultaneously the Same. The identity of separation (ego-mind-body) cannot grasp any of this. We can only allow ourselves to become what we always and already are.
Being knows itself, without any need of another, and without any need to grasp. No collection of thoughts in the beliefs of separation can "do" it. All effort to "do" merely reinforces an identity of and belief in separation.
In other words, being is knowing, prior to and beyond all grasping or understanding, yet totally inclusive (knowing, loving, accepting) of all that grasping and understanding is, seeks, and by seeking denies. This is why surrender is so important.
What some call God does not make any of this complicated or hard, instead it is we who do that. This is neither good nor bad. It simply is, an aspect of the nature of our shared journey.
What all beloveds, in their heart of hearts, yearn for most of all is actually the most simple and obvious thing of all. What is yearned for is always "hiding" in plain sight, always now, always here, and always and already what we are.
Our attachment to beliefs in identities of separation, to all these illusions we collectively call the world, ourselves, others, things, friends, enemies, is all that obscures what is most simple and most obvious.
Yet it is not about “getting rid” of anything or "going beyond" anything. Instead, we are being called to “see” and “hear” through all of this, in other words through the world, ourselves, others, and seeming things, and, most especially of all, through our own thoughts and feelings.
Seeing through in such ways becomes an embodying and embodiment of creation, for now we are beginning to turn toward what we have only imagined we could ever turn away from.
The beginning of the end of spiritual bypassing.
Such a "turning," slowly, yet also at times instantaneously (In Zen what are called the sudden and gradual schools), becomes an ever unfolding dance of transformation and transfiguration. A shift, so to speak, from what we have "made" in the beliefs of separation, into this Love that holds and accepts all, even and so seemingly paradoxically our very own beliefs in separation.
In the light of Love, darkness never was. Zen's gateless gate. Or perhaps an ever unfolding joining of Creation with a self that was never apart.
Always paradox. Seeing and hearing what is being pointed to here, through all these appearances and projections in the beliefs of separation, will actually begin to "transform" our shared world into greater and greater means of seeing and hearing through it, beyond object or subject, in more and more incredible, joyful, loving, and beautiful ways.
More and more it becomes the means of God to see and hear Herself. Transformation in this sense is really just the dissolving away of obscurations, all these long held and accumulated clouds of belief.
Seeing is the metaphor for the light that dissolves the clouds. In this dissolution we realize more and more we are the light.
In the sort of knowing we are exploring here, there is no coming, no going, no loss, no gain, no birth, no death, no destruction. Instead creation becomes what it always has been, without an opposite.
And so amazingly, through this knowing or seeing, shared with each other, the whole play of coming, going, loss, gain, birth, death, creation, destruction, is transformed into what it has never ceased to be, infinite, incredible, magnificence, creation without opposite, life beyond all these words, grandeur without the slightest impingement of grandiosity.
Simply what is…
Death and darkness were always illusions.
Creation, light, love, truth, beauty; life has always been and always will be all there is.
~ John Fridinger
Talent, OR
Winter, 2019