A few weeks ago it was really windy here and my husband and I went down to the lake to watch the waves. The light was such that the water was a particular malachite green that occurs on Lake Superior, and as the waves broke they were marbled with areas of aeration created by air trapped in the cold—shades of lighter green that appeared and dissolved. My husband called these lighter patches "footprints." Each wave was different in how it broke on the rocks—leaving a unique pattern of footprints and then subsiding into the whole.
We (we in usual terms) are the wave. A seemingly separate, frothy expression of the big "is-ness." This expression that we are is not something degraded or inferior. The wave is not something that does not exist. But it is something that, like all appearances, is temporary and does not in itself have the ability to create and sustain an identity.
Thought is a product of our experience as wave (body). All of our concepts and perceptions are the interpreting of experience from the point of view of wave. There is nothing wrong with this, but it leads to the experience of suffering when we mistakenly believe that it is somehow the body that is generating our sense of identity.
Thought belongs to the body dream—the dreaming of wave. Thoughts are a product of our attention being trapped momentarily by the wave. Believing and experiencing itself to be separate creates the sense of two-ness from which thought as an effect emerges, the way mist sprays from a breaking wave. It's a shattering and fragmenting—a spray of droplets, each a pattern in itself. Without this sense of two-ness, thought, as we experience it, does not exist.
If you believe yourself to be wave, and believe that your identity is being generated by the body, then the droplet sprays of your thoughts are tinged with the color of fear. If you understand yourself to be the lake or the ocean from which the wave emerges, your thought-spray is more an experience of temporary exultation. If you understand yourself to be the whole of being from which all ideas of ocean and wave emerge—commentary ceases.
Each day, minute to minute, we are wave, droplet, ocean, universe, nothing. Identity appears in infinite ways, always the same but always different. There is no need to try to limit the sense of "me" to one or another state. No need to try to be always one way as opposed to another way. The whole ball of wax is fine. If you find yourself suffering and wish to change that, do some inner housekeeping and look at how you are attaching to thought, and from which state of being that thought is emerging. When the dishes are dirty, we wash them. If your thoughts are giving you problems, look at them.
The looking itself is freeing. That's the miracle of attention. This is about intention, yes, the way lifting your hand to your mouth to drink some water is intention. It's about imagination the way imagining that the sensation of thirst can be quenched is about imagination.
What it is not about is any kind of permanent achievement. The idea of achievement is purely a wave-thought. You can identify wave thoughts by the fact that they have opposites. Achievement is about the wave (1.) desiring to be loved by the ocean because it has forgotten that it is the ocean, and (2.) struggling to make itself permanent (and therefore safe) as a wave (a permanent wave!), which is our sad little human adventure.
Your Post makes me think of this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
Posted by: lu | May 15, 2009 at 01:05 PM