Less than a week before stepping into year 82, a slogan, or motto, or maybe just a wordy bumper-sticker of common sense appeared in the night kitchen: “We have all the time we need to find God.”
That’s such a liberating notion. And at least one reason I also find it full of delight is that its wisdom is beyond the seriosity I feel emanating from the way spiritual life is considered by so many of us, me included far too much.
The humor in that realization is the irony that even seriosity is God, along with every other drop of existence, our ignorance of which being the trigger of a lot of knee-slapping humor in the realm of Oneness more commonly known as heaven, that place (state of consciousness) we’re all headed for whether we like it or not. Imagine you and your worst enemy reaching enlightenment and laughing your asses off at having been such dopes—just like everybody else.
This is among the reasons I tremble with awe at the never-ending array of gifts/blessings/kisses I have been the recipient of in this incarnation. Spectacularly flamboyant among them is being vaccinated with the intuitive sense that the spirit of the universe is playful, loving, deep.
The special humor in that understanding is, of course, the word “playful,” a notion conspicuously limited in the consciousness of the human family at this stage of our evolution. And how could it not be so given the vastness of worldly-world brutality that, to our ego nature, could never be associated with playfulness? Perhaps only as we begin to consider that our true identity is not that of perishable human but that of eternal soul on a path over many incarnations to conscious oneness with God—and that every worldly experience is, exclusively, a servant to that end—can we begin to grasp that everything related to being human, including horror, is a form of theater drawing our True Self, our soul, home to Oneness. That’s what I call playful, given how seriously we’ve been known to take that theater.
The depth of this playfulness is evidenced in my own frequent forgetfulness of who I really am, and the divine smile that, in those moments and every other, showers me, and us all, with boundless unending compassion. Not compassion from some source out there in saintland, but compassion that is our essential nature, something we’ve got all the lifetimes we need to grasp.
❤️🙏🤗
Oh, thank you! A deep and free and unbounded giggle is hovering through my heart.
Beautiful.
Perspective.
Steve, what you call God is experienced directly when the mind is not filled with conditioned thoughts and associated feelings. Many call this direct experience meditation however, the very act of meditating with the intent of experience God, is just another mental image, chasing our tail in our mental house of mirrors. If you see Buddha kill him. Because the stream of reflexive mental images is always enchanting, there is a corresponding demand to ‘always awaken.’ But – thought, will, hope, practices and methods, including effort and all their variants can never bring about this direct perception. With this insight, all effort with its implicit distortions dissolve. We give up – surrender into silence or emptiness (the absence of mental distortions – now). One learned Tibetan put it this way:
Our true nature could be compared to the sky, and the confusion of the ordinary mind to clouds. Some days the sky is completely obscured by clouds. We should always try and remember: the clouds are not the sky, and do not belong to it. They only hang there and pass by in their slightly ridiculous and non-dependent fashion. And they can never stain or mark the sky in any way.
So where exactly is this Buddha Nature? It is in the sky-like nature of our mind. Utterly open, free, and limitless, it is fun, so simple and so natural that it can never be complicated, corrupted, or stained, so pure that it is beyond even the concept of purity and impurity.
To talk of this nature of mind as sky-like, of course, is only a metaphor that helps us to begin to imagine its all-embracing boundlessness; for the Buddha Nature has a quality the sky cannot have—that of the radiant clarity of awareness. As it is said: “It is simply your flawless, present awareness, cognizant and empty, naked and awake.”
Simple presence. As Ram Dass coined the phrase; being here now, with spontaneous care and affection as the ground or sky, without names, prejudgments or clouds. Then, God is every ware and everything.
Thanks pal.
Happy birthday to my playful friend… much love to you at 82 years young!
Congrats on taking your time with god…I’m right behind you as one of the 1st boomers at 78+. We met 20 years ago at our very first Art of Convening trainings.
Thank you, Steve! Your playful, loving and deep spirit brightens my life. I’m SO grateful our paths crossed. I wish you the happiest 82nd chapter yet—you’re truly young at heart!