To be grateful is to be open to the mystery
We could say we are all searching for something. We sometimes receive a glimpse of a something which seems to be very much like the something we are looking for, but this something initally doesn’t act in a way we have been led to believe the something we are searching for would behave. This something seems to be always available, yet we cannot grasp it.
Perhaps this something flows like fluids and electrolytes between the extracellular and intracellular compartments in cells by passive diffusion. Could it be that this something, like water, flows from an area of high concentration to an area of less concentration?
The fullness of awareness, of presence, of joy flows into us to the degree we become empty.
T.S. Elliot put it this way:
In order to possess what you do not possess,
you must go by way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
you must go by the way in which you are not.
Aren’t there moments when seemingly out of the blue we get a glimpse of the ground of our being?
Perhaps the experience, however fleeting, leave us somehow knowing intuitively that we are both at home here and now and yet somehow on the way to this here and now.
This is not about either or but rather and.
Could this be the starting point and the end of the spiritual journey?
Again, T. S. Elliot:
….the end precedes the beginning,
and the end and the beginning we always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now….
We seem to have two aspects of the experience of the something we are searching for–it’s here and it isn’t.
It’s here when we are open and empty to it, as if simply flows in like water from a place of greater concentration to a quiet heart.
But while there it can’t be grasped.
This is where the experience of the Christian mystics is so illuminating–they speak in all the world’s languages of God’s immanence (being closer to me than I am to myself) and Her transcendence—(beyond the beyond, beyond time, space, birth, death).
Let’s hear what the the Rinzai Master Hakuin said about this in 18th century Japan:
Living beings originally are Buddha.
It is the same with water and ice.
There is no ice separate from water;
Outside of living beings, no Buddha.
Because living beings are unconscious of the intimate,
They seek it far away. Alas how pitiful!
It is like the examples of someone sitting in the middle of water
But crying out in thirst; and,
While still being the son of a millionaire’s family,
As a strange good-for-nothing he loses his way in the countryside living in poverty.
The causes and conditions of the revolving wheel of the six appearances
Are but one’s own road through the darkness of ignorance;
The several perfections such as charity, morality, and such;
Chanting Buddha’s name, confession and repentance, austerities, and the like;
The many good deeds and various virtuous pilgrimages;
All these are coming from within it.
