Awake in This Life

Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions; they have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.

—Eihei Dogen

The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character.

—Yamada Roshi

When clarity and commitment create enough cracks in the walls of ego’s defenses, Spirit starts to shine through each of us as Enlightenment. Our practice becomes a simple, continual, and intentional study of our own small self, and through this work we begin to see how trivial the small self’s wants and needs actually are. Knowing this triviality first hand allows us to let go of our attachments to the entire system that our small self has established over time. In this Divine disaster, we begin to expand spiritually into an embodiment of being that is enlightened by all things. This confluence of the manifest with the Unmanifest, this merging of form and Emptiness, is our True Nature realizing itself through us as all things. And in this creative confluence of Spirit in the world, our Original Face wears an infinite smile.

Why the smile? Because there is a deep acceptance and recognition of the paradox that we are an Emptiness that lacks nothing. We are neither One, nor many, nor both of these, but an Awakened space that extends beyond all labels and boundaries. Yet the One and the many are not absent. Rather, they are engaged in a constant emergence with each other as One Big Flow, where dance partnerships of form with Emptiness, conventional truth with Ultimate Truth, manifest with Unmanifest, small self with Big Self, begin a process of a conscious co-creation of a beautiful cosmic tango. At this stage of Awakening, our participation in life means that we freely move from the valley of separation that got us to climb up the Path in the first place, to the top of the Mountain of Spirit, where our realization compels us to bring our Knowing of the Infinite back home into the world.

This all-inclusive spiritual homecoming is what shows us how to walk the Path in the world from a grounded and eternally unmoving openness, no matter where or how we might find things. From here, we find ourselves in the world without being caught by the world. This is Freedom. It arises because we Know that there is nothing for any of us outside our immediate experience of this very Awareness. This mystical insight reminds us again and again that since nothing is outside this Awareness, all things arise within the divinity that is at the core of each of us. In this way, we actually realize that the Universe is within us as much as we are within the Universe. We, fundamentally, are the Universe and exist as nothing other than a conscious, creatively flowing Infinity. Put another way, we are nothing other than the Awareness of the arising creativity within each moment, in all of its timeless, unbounded fullness. The big change in those of us who practice coming home from the mountaintop is that we move through the world, intentionally sourced from the present moment, and are thus no longer only identified with our thoughts, feelings, and time. The thoughts are still there, as are the feelings, along with past and future, and we can still work with them as needed. But after Awakening, we not only have these aspects of mind with which to work, but we also find that there is an infinite potential for conscious creativity in each and every situation. Every person we meet, every circumstance we uncover, every opening we find, is recognized as an invitation to live and love more deeply.

This process never ends. While the journey might have started out as something we wanted personally, the enlightened perspective shows us that there is fundamentally nothing for us to keep for ourselves. All of us are inextricably connected as the One. We are the One and we are the Many, all at the same Now, and yet we are also totally Empty of even these concepts and labels. As we Awaken to this reality, the painful dualism that dominates experience gives way to a brilliant unity that continually shows us that there is nothing lacking, that we are all things, that all things are us, and that there is an imperative that comes with all of this: we must share this Knowing through everything that we do. Awakening for one is Awakening for all. Keeping Awakening personal, as we’ve discussed, is not Awakening, but rather an egoically driven spiritual indulgence. Greed for personal Awakening will radically diminish our ability to affect any kind of authentic shift in awareness for every being. Every moment, on the other hand, that we choose to let deep, intentional surrender guide our practice of stillness, wisdom, and compassion at the levels of body, mind, and soul moves us past this trap. This freedom lets us to build a new home that shows itself to be nothing less than the majestic and infinite openness that is in every way a coming together, a confluence, of all things through us. Our new home is one that in every way is without walls, flowing open to the whole Universe as the Universe.