"[T]he desire for nonduality arises in wise people to save them from great fear." -from the Avadhuta Gita
I follow the basic meditation instructions: breathe in and out, while being conscious of breathing. That's great. But then one day I started imagining it backwards. What if I'm actually the air itself, being breathed out of the atmosphere into this body, and visa versa? So I tried to do that for a while…to be the air moving out from itself and into "me," and then out of "me" and back into the air.
But then I woke up to a broader understanding: what if I could get out of this dualistic thinking entirely? I would not be "me" or "the air" but both at the same time. Aha. There's that idea of "all things being connected" again.
All things are one. I've believed that for a long, long time. It's tough to stay in the mind state of believing that all the time, of course. The English language makes it so that I cannot avoid talking about "I" and "you" as separate people, and the language we use shapes our thinking.
It saddens me when I talk about people as being connected as if they were one big person, and others' respond with something like "Aw, but you have to appreciate all the unique individual differences! You don't want everyone to be the same, do you?" But that response misses the point. Sure we are all different, to the degree that we exist at all. But like a quarry full of rocks, we may all look different, but we all come from the same source. Our differences are meant to serve the larger whole.
We all play a part in this imaginary universe we create together with our own minds.
No comments:
Post a Comment