Wha’ Happened?
By Michael Erlewine
Well, what was it that struck me so hard in recent weeks? It was but a glimpse but still a blinding blow. There was no doubt about the chip on my shoulder or to put it more elegantly the difference I feel and have felt for many decades that I work off of, as I like to say, like rolling a grain of sand back and forth between my thumb and forefinger. It was about all that being gone.
It’s what has fueled my excursions between Insight Meditation and duality (its reflection) all these years, that upon which I base much of my non-meditation most days.
And the gist of it was, all that is coming to an end, meaning an end to the difference I am using to clear my head. And the way that may work is that my ordinary mind is becoming more transparent and my Insight Meditation mind more ordinary. In other words, the two are coming together, merging into one process and soon (or eventually) I will be doing just that. Or am I already doing that?
Another way of saying this is I am kind of stumbling toward what in dharma is called One-Taste or simply everything is the Same and on an even plane.
Anyway, along with that going will have to go my ‘seriousness’, a lot of what I call, ‘me, myself, and I’, and that’s a good thing, only it’s not the SAME thing I have been up until now. It marks a change.
No, it’s not exactly in effect now, but my recent glimpse of reality is that is how it will turn out. Whether I am I happy or sad about that does not matter, because there is nothing I can do about it, so I might as well see it as a good thing. It’s already in motion.
I have had some kind of a flash preview concerning all that, just like a blink of an eye, and I can ignore it or experience it as like summer lightning that flashes in the distance of space and time. I see it flickering and my taking it as a warning is not a good idea, as it is a premonition of what fate has in store for me or the way things actually are.
Whatever the case, I am taking it in or putting it another way, it is imprinting me.
These sudden glimpses, much like my major stroke, this brief flash into the future, I can either shake my head and walk away or consider it. Anyway, I’m putting it on the shelf along with my major stroke and considering what, if anything I can do to prepare for this.
My guess is that we all do this in one way or another, and this happens to each of us, at least the glimpse or blink of an eye, and we usually shake it off, as I might have done. Yet before I could shake it off, it registered or imprinted, and I can choose to ignore it or, as I am doing, consider it.
There is another world out there, another universe beyond Samsara that we have not been privileged to. In my case, I tend to develop that negative-blink or glimpse into an imprint and then study it.
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And of course, I try to talk about it and that’s not socially something to do. There are no books on this and perhaps few if any accounts of it, these glimpses into the engine room of Samsara. Samsara runs a tight ship, one driven by my own attachments.
In Samsara, the wizard behind the curtain is not in the story. It is my opinion that we are so much a child of samsara, so dedicated, as to never, not ever find so much as a keyhole view out of it. The glimpse was it.
These winks and blinks when something seem to go south may be the only flags we will ever see and we put them behind us as quickly as we can. If it were not for my major stroke and the extended recovery time from that, while Samara struggled to reanimate itself, I would have thought nothing of my recent drop-out glimpse and moved on, just a bad moment.
And I AM moving on, but I hold that glimpse or view in mind and match it up to what I learned from my stroke. I’m taking notes. And I don’t know how to just bolt out of here to ‘where’ I continue to piece together a story of a landscape beyond Samsara and our concept of a Self. That does not exist.
I am and have been busy exchanging duality for non-duality through Mahamudra meditation, but I have a long way to go extending and widening my portal to invite Nirvana universally. Like the Torus, a 3-dimensional shape, whose surface has a genus of one continuous loop, I am converting Samsara, turning it inside out, a bit at a time. Have been for years.
However, I am still a resident of Samsara (I live here!) while I am converting it, so how will that work out I do not know.
When every once in a while I get a whiff of just how difficult this kind of thing is for any one of us, I’m staggered until I can get my arms around it. My dear friends, we just don’t have a clue!
And here I am, still taking refuge in Samsara, and living in its sheath of my own attachments, because there is no place I can go to other than here. If I want a change I have to change it on the spot, here and now.
Nirvana is nothing else than transformed Samsara and not some other place or country.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
