Imagine you’re standing under a black, starless sky. For our purposes today, let’s say this is analogous to living completely unaware, unawakened, in sleepy mindlessness. You bump into something in the darkness. It falls and incurs some Rube Goldbergesque reaction in the darkness, which culminates in a hole being poked in the blackness. A starlike dot now shines brilliantly through the dark impenetrable sheet. By itself it’s beautiful and intriguing but what’s more, you’ve now developed a conviction that more holes could be poked into whatever this thing is.
The blackness was falsehood. You could never search for the truth in the darkness - you couldn’t see enough to know there was a truth to be found in the first place. Maybe you had some suspicion that something brilliant lie beyond the darkness. Maybe you were stumbling around in search of the truth. But, having never before seen the truth, how would you recognize it if you saw it?
But by this accidental discovery, something profound happened. At once you recognized the darkness itself, and in this you saw that, while you could not produce for yourself the truth, you could remove those things which were false…you could poke holes in the blackness.
Thus you began weighing those things which you’d long held as fact. You began taking them out into the night sky, examining them in the light of that single star upon which you’d so fortunately fumbled. One small truth to be held as self-evident shines bright enough to begin a conflagration, and the hunger for truth finally finds itself getting satisfaction - not by consuming truth as it seems, but by dispelling fictions!
What is that which is eternal? What is universal?
What am I? Who is me? Is it true that all is possible when the wave realizes it’s the ocean? Is our body like to the wave? A temporary expression of a permanent consciousness? It will rise and fall as though it were never there, yet it’s having existed will eternally be true. If ultimate reality is timeless, that temporary expression is as well eternal in the pinpoint moment of the ceaseless continuum called NOW. This body will rise and fall but “now” will remain wholly unaffected. Is this what Buddhists mean by walking the razor thin path? Surfing on the eternal moment of now? Often this is perceived as an instruction towards something more like stoicism, but I guess who’s to say? Thus we see the trouble that comes from varied perspectives and interpretations, no?
Why is it that, when I need to solve a problem, first the solution pops into my mind, and only then does my brain feel the need to pop in and explain it to me, as though I hadn’t already seen it firsthand for myself? That may just be me…but it may be you just haven’t noticed it yet ;)
Be wary friends, keep on the path, stay vigilant and strong. I love you.
~ Seeker-8
