January 19, 2025
I don’t know why but this seems to be the week of teachers appearing during my meditations. Today, I was sitting and, as always, not seeking an experience. I became aware of a black flame arising from a fractured rock. It was not a pretty place, a burned-out and hellish landscape. A figure coalesced from the smoke, rising above me. Even though it looked evil, I didn’t feel any reaction to it and didn’t feel threatened. As you know, nothing is quite as it seems in the Imaginal and yet everything is knowable. Maybe not completely knowable but knowable to the extent of our capacity at the time.
This figure had burning yellow-gold eyes. I was drawn to the light in them and soon found myself transported into a golden realm. I was at the bottom of a long, golden staircase with bodhisattavas sitting across from each other on each step. A golden figure stood before me, inviting me to ascend the stairway.
I climbed and climbed, seeing a seated figure on a lotus throne (or at least what I took to be a lotus). He was familiar to me, although I could scarcely credit it. As I neared him, he stood and appeared to be a young man with brown skin and wearing simple but rich garments of white and gold. He held a lotus blossom in his hand.
“My Lord Gautama,” I said, kneeling. “Why did you call me here?”
I remembered the statues of the laughing Buddha and he was very much like those, although he wasn’t fat. He was slim and young and exuded joy. In fact, he was laughing merrily. His laughter was infectious and my heart lifted at the sound of it. I noticed that he held the lotus blossom before his heart, something that seemed significant. It drew attention to his heart, glowing like a lotus blossom in his chest.
When he answered me, he called me by my name in this lifetime. I think this was a wry joke on his part because I had called him by his name in his last human lifetime. “I’ve called you here to show you something,” he said, extending a hand. “Come with me.”
He led me into another realm, one of moonlight and silver. There was a tree on a hill before us. The Bodhi Tree. Gesturing toward the tree, whose leaves were made of clear light, he said, “I believe you know this place.”
Of course, I did! His experience under the Bodhi Tree has made a deep impression on my soul because it is so beautiful and poignant. I know I’m no Buddha but I can relate to his experience under the Tree.
“Sit.”
It was order.
I sat.
“Let us see what you need to see.”
As soon as my butt touched the ground, the incredible, unfathomable blackness of the Absolute swallowed my consciousness. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it arose from the depths of my consciousness? Both I and the Buddha disappeared and I knew nothing else.
When we emerged from the blackness, I was back in another familiar ‘place’. It’s the place I have found myself every day for the last several months while I have been pretending that I am dead during my meditations. (I start my meditations imagining that I no longer have a physical body to return to after I’m done. In other words, there is no world, no physical ground, no teacher, no company. Just my experience.)
Meditations like these are paradoxical. They are completely devoid of hope and yet very hopeful. They are cluttered with my unresolved baggage and yet also pristinely empty of everything. This is the Absolute, full of paradoxes. It is both the birth of everything and the absence of all. As such, as the human soul begins to know its nature as the Absolute, so, too, does it embody its paradoxes.
The Buddha was only with me implicitly; he did not follow me after we disappeared into the Absolute. And yet I could feel his teaching and it was the teaching of illumination. We tend to think of Enlightenment as the cessation of suffering, a state of pure bliss; however, I think this is a materialistic view. Enlightenment in my experience is simply that: Illuminating what is present. When we are enlightened, we are radiant but this radiance is not a reward or something to cling to, it is simply our state. We can use it as a tool but this radiance does not require any effort on our part. We don’t have to do anything with it. In fact, that’s the very essence of nondoing, right?
Another paradox: Our souls are empty and yet full, completely bare of everything and yet radiant, completely empty and yet uniquely us. The same is true of our soul’s radiance once it knows itself as the Absolute: You don’t do anything and yet everything is done. You just simply allow whatever is present to be present and you can see it with increasing clarity due to your soul’s natural radiance. It casts light on everything.
This was the Buddha’s teaching. I sat with my ‘stuff’ and didn’t do anything. I felt sort of sick, like I was nauseous. Gradually, I perceived a confusion of sickly green stuff. It looked sort of like a small storm or a crackling fuzzball. It is the wound-up stuff of my unresolved, unmetabolized history…or part of it, at least. The presence of it along with the radiance of Being/Nonbeing was sort of sickening and yet it felt important to stay with the experience.
Being able to hang out in ‘ickiness’ is sort of my thing these days. I feel like everything in my daily life makes me feel somewhat ill. In the past, I would dissociate from this ickiness. Now, I just hang out with it, inviting it to be present and reveal more of itself. This could be fate after my body dies. I could be ‘stuck’ for a very long time, hanging out with a bunch of my unresolved baggage.
Here’s the thing, though. The less I resist it, the closer I am to my true nature, the nature of all being, the Absolute. I’m also closer to my essential identity, the unique expression of the Absolute as my soul. This is important. I want to live and die with my eyes open, not flinching, not turning away, not rejecting anything.
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