Ch.17 - The Boundless Power of Life
The Vast Expanse of Endless Blue Sky
Why Does Nature Express Itself so Beautifully?
There is Only Love and Not Knowing It
[This profound chapter develops Burgs teaching; ‘There is only love and not knowing it.’]
The Vast Expanse of Endless Blue Sky
Have a look outside, or even better, go outside. Why do you think I have asked you to come out here? Hopefully it is a beautiful day with a clear blue sky. Yes, the sky. That vast, cloudless expanse of clear blue sky. Take it in. Because that is what the real essence of your mind is; exactly like that. Endless, cloudless, spacious clarity. There is a clear light that appears when our mind comes to cessation and our awareness remains, and it is as clear and spacious and expansive as an endless blue sky, and as luminous as the sun without being in the slightest bit blinding. Transparent, not opaque and clouded, and it is pure luminosity. On a cloudless day, the sky is like awareness itself.
Go out on a cloudless day and gaze into the sky and immerse yourself in the expansive, spacious clarity of it, because that is the closest thing you will find to how your mind becomes when it is empty. It is not a barren vacuous space of ignorance and blankness, it is pure and mirror-like, and whatever stillness you have ever beheld, it is stiller by far than that.
So go out into nature on a clear bright day and try to tune in to the stillness behind the movement of things. Rest in the stillness behind the arising and passing of the sounds, the birds flying by and everything else; rest undisturbed by what arises and passes within it. Try for yourself when you are next in nature to tune into it and get a sense of how everything is resting effortlessly within itself. As you look out there at nature, try to get the sense of how that which does appear within the vast expanse of awareness itself has a natural tendency to rest effortlessly within itself. There is no friction in that coming into being and passing away.
So take that to your heart. Take an impression of it deep into your heart and reflect upon what I mean when I say to you, ‘Rest effortlessly within yourself. Leave everything as it is.' And see if you can feel what it does to your heart when you turn up and tune in like that. I am not asking you what it does to your mind, I am asking you to leave your mind empty and just tune in as it is, taking nothing, adding nothing to the moment, but just resting in it.
There is nothing to be added. What the Buddha was pointing at was not a complex world view for us to subscribe to or reject, but an experience that he hoped each of us in time would come to have for ourselves. It was an experience which freed him from suffering, not a view. And it is an experience that frees all of us in time. And that is the experience of the vast, spacious clarity of the awareness that remains when our mind fades away, and it is the experience of innate stillness that rests behind the coming and going of things that is the basis for their very arising. If you could read between the lines and glimpse the essence of what the Buddha is teaching us, that is what he is pointing to.
Why Does Nature Express Itself so Beautifully?
So here is a question for you. If emptiness is the ground of all things, and if it really is just emptiness, why do you suppose ice crystals are so beautiful? Why is everything in nature so beautiful?
They are not just unique each time they appear, they are beautiful. Why would they express themselves so beautifully, so effortlessly? Why does nature express itself so beautifully and so effortlessly? Why did it manage to do such a thing for billions of years before our arrival here? On a beautiful day like this, when nature is in order and the elements are balanced, there is a conscious living intelligence that is very close to us that is extremely sublime, that rests in the background. And it is never not there.
Well, nature everywhere forms ordered and beautiful structures, and it is not just awareness that rests in the background supporting this vast array of life. Awareness itself does not create anything. Dependent Origination is the creative principle, and volition is the cause of the coming into being. Why then does nature express itself so beautifully? Why do snow crystals express themselves so beautifully? Why, do you suppose, are they not just arbitrary frozen lumps as they would be if you just exposed them to an ordinary state of mind?
The Buddha does not teach this explicitly, he merely hints at it. But if you do one day really touch that stillness that rests in the background, you will find there is something there, also resting in the background, that holds all of this endlessly. And it is pure, and it is boundless, and it is love, and this planet in its absence would be a barren place.
We have become so intoxicated with the idea of ourselves as the creator that we have lost our connection to the creative process itself. Well I am going to tell you a little story about why I left my monastery. One day, one beautiful day, when the air was still crisp and the ground was dewy, I got up very early from my bed to meditate. I cast my mind out across the forest and everything was still at rest, and I realised it was more peaceful at that time than at any other time.
There is Only Love and Not Knowing It
I had been practising Samādhi for many months and yet there was a stillness present in that morning that was beyond anything that my mind entered into through its own efforts. Although sublimely peaceful, I was never endlessly so in the way that everything around me felt to be that morning. And I sat and meditated and entered into a state of Samādhi that was so unlike anything I had experienced before. It was no creation of my own mind as the Jhanas I had been practising were, it was simply a spontaneously present state that sustained itself, that rested effortlessly within itself.
After some time, I found myself looking down upon what I thought at first was a great temple. I was so amazed by it. I moved closer with my mind to observe it and I realised that it was the head piece of an extraordinary being, so vast that I was terrified, deeply terrified just to behold it. I experienced an awe that I cannot begin to describe, and I could not bring myself to behold it for more than a moment. I moved away, what felt like far away, so that I could see without being terrified, and that was all that I could do, just witness it. This being sat in a state of Samādhi so unfathomably deep and profound that the state that I was in paled into nothing and I thought I was just going to expire or be absorbed completely into it. And in the moment that I was touched by that consciousness, I knew that it was everywhere. And I knew that it was love, the purest kind of love imaginable.
One thing I knew, I knew absolutely in that moment, was that the quality of this being's mind was something that so far surpassed anything I could previously even have imagined or contemplated. I knew in that moment that it is everywhere, all the time, and it is endless, boundless love. It is love that is the intelligence that supports life. It is not an active intelligence like the one we seek to impose upon our world, but it is pure intelligence.
It is that intelligence that we are separated from in our efforts to become the creator ourselves. We have become so delighted in our own creations that we have lost our connection to that boundless loving intelligence that is the basis of our lives.
Now the jury is out on how successful we have been in our efforts to become the creator. For all the genius behind our ipads, our smartphones and the software they run, not one of them has come close to expressing anything even resembling love, compassion, gratitude or joy. Not one of them has come close to creating in us anything that comes close to the feeling of joy when we see life itself expressed as nature, as a beautiful sunset, or a lightning storm, or the smile of a baby or the play of a puppy.
The Buddha spoke of a heavenly realm in which beings delighted in their own creations and the creations of others. It is in truth one of the higher heavenly realms. Below it are the realms in which beings delight in virtue and love, and the beauty of nature and creation itself, where they lack the vanity to become intoxicated with themselves, and still appreciate what they are blessed to be a part of.
Each time I gaze upon the heavenly worlds and their display, they are all without exception beautiful beyond words. All of them, that is, except one. The highest one, beyond which is only Brahma.
When first I beheld it I was also left in awe, but not one of wonder but of shock, for that realm, the highest of realms, where beings come close to being able to express themselves perfectly, that realm was a barren and desolate place. It was a wasteland. It took me many years to console myself from the experience of witnessing it. Where I had expected to behold the pinnacle of wonder and beauty, instead I found nothing but a barren wasteland. So intoxicated with themselves had these beings become that they had cut themselves off from the very source that sustained them and consumed the very ground that their existence depended upon. Gradually they had become obsessed with themselves and had lost their lustre and ceased to be, leaving behind them nothing but desolation.
So I suggest we forget all our ideas about some kind of personal achievement or enlightenment. I suggest we get over our vanity just as soon as we can. The world could do without creators such as us, but we most certainly could not do without it. Perhaps instead of becoming intoxicated with ourselves, we might come to understand or perhaps start to reflect upon what might be there, in the background, holding us while we flounder around delighting in ourselves. Because life itself does not, when it is left alone, degenerate into chaos. Far from it, it flourishes.
It degenerates when it is interfered with but when left to express itself naturally it organises itself naturally into a state of balance. And it does not need us controlling it or managing it. We humans are the interference, our intelligent human minds that we are so proud of, with all our great ideas about ourselves, we are what is in the way of something that is so perfect. The opportunity to be alive is the opportunity to turn up and witness what it is to be a part of it. That is the reason for our coming into being. To realise this is the longing that sits in the heart of every single one of us as the deepest of longings, and to come to the conclusion that life is just suffering would be a shame. If it is suffering it is because we make it so.
On a beautiful morning right after dawn you might be able to feel that sublime consciousness of which I speak very close to you. All too often these days we have crowded it out. But try to learn to recognise it when you are close to it. And when you recognise it, learn to rest in it, because when you do, it will become your teacher.
The conclusion that I have come to is not that life is just suffering, but that there is only love and not knowing it. That is all you will see going on everywhere, if you really pay attention. Expressions of love or expressions of not knowing it. When the Buddha spoke of ignorance as the start of the causal chain from which greed, anger, ill-will and the mass of suffering that follows arise, what he meant was this. It is by not knowing love that beings bring themselves to suffering, and by coming to know love that they free themselves.
