It is our idea of what is happening in our body that brings us to the place of pain. The arising and passing away of painful sensations in our body is like a wave. We can ride these waves with our breath. As we ride these waves, we move beyond suffering, towards insight. The nearer to the source of suffering one arrives, the deeper one is able to penetrate as insight.
The Buddha arrived at the truth of the dharma, the truth of the truth as it were, by fully penetrating into the cause of suffering, our own attachment to what life is in that moment, whether pain or joy, elation or depression, ecstatic extroverted bliss or the seclusion of self-indulged introverts.
A laboring mother knows the truth of this experience.
A cancer-ridden child gains this insight.
Young or old, rich or poor, in good health or ill, we all face this truth as death arrives.
As death arrives, we approach this reality; our understanding of the nature of our existence is a fabrication, a false narrative, a story that is coming to an end, each one for myself and you and us. Our meeting with death is not a transformation, but a transience into transcendence. Transcendence into a place beyond fear, of no fear; beyond our present story, a moving into a new existence, less at war but peace, of beauty and love.
In our mind we cannot understand what limited words convey, even less in a language as young as English.
Easily heard in the song of the morning birds, at the golden hour, at the birth of a child, or the love of a family.
Moments of transcendence revealed in the eternity that exists in the present moment.
Found in a barefoot walk on the Earth, our ears filled with the wind moving through the tree’s leaves and eyes perceiving shades of light that actuates the development of the mind.
The mind in undeveloped in utero. In the days following birth, light is perceived only through the eyelids. The baby slowly wakens, in short periods, prompted by voices and sounds, the primary way the mind begins to develop, even in the womb. Once the fetus goes beyond the womb, the eyes dominate as a sense organ. The mind develops as light enters our beings, through our eyes. This perception of external light can be experienced internally, the suspension of time and space, moving beyond our known reality, what is known as Sat-chit-ananda.