Integration of the Enlightened Realisation
When you reach the top of the mountain, you keep going. Even if you put your bags down along the way, the path keeps unfolding. Where you began, what you picked up, where you will end, what you will put down––it is all the same path. It is the path that never began. The path that has no end.
Walking the pathless path or the wayless way is a realisation of the true nature of reality. It is an awakening or enlightenment of sorts to stop seeking and rest in the as it is.
For everyone may seek enlightenment, yet enlightenment is free from seeking.
So what to do? It's like this: enlightenment—so what? The world still turns. The question remains: what do you do with it all? For integration and assimilation to occur, one must rest in the realisation. Relaxing into the realisation, increasingly, the world and the path cease being separate.
As long as there is your mundane life on one side, and then your spiritual idea or practice on the other, there is a separation that needs to be bridged, digested and assimilated in order to realise that the mundane is not other than your spiritual practice.
When they leave our retreats, many ask, "How can I take this into the world?" This is the world, and the world exists in this. There is no separation between retreat and the world. How do you integrate it into your life? It is your life. It could never be unintegrated, just as the sun could never be devoid of its own light.
The highest peak and most profound experience we can have is not atop the mountain, in some silent cave, or illustrated with divine visions fractalling an infinity. Instead, the most pristine vision we can have is what is right here before us.
We search the highest mountains for what is right under our noses, isn’t it true? The truth is, the truth has never left us. It is eternally present. It is in the ordinary that we encounter the extraordinary. The extra-ordinary is only more ordinary, and, therefore, so simple that we have a sort of blind spot to it. We overlook it and seek something significant to move us. Yet, what is profound is the basic interface of reality here and now.
There is no escaping it either. If you find yourself in misery or doubt, go there and make them your companions. When you stand next to anxiety and uncertainty, open your arms and embrace them. For isn’t it a wonder to feel such sensations at all? When you embrace what is with you, you welcome it home and into your heart.
Befriend everything. Smile at fear. Give consolation and light a lamp for your inner darkness. Nothing in this world stands alone, and I am not even sure it has a ground to stand on at all.
You are not the one with a life; rather, it is this life that has you. Isn’t it the same life that we all share? Isn’t life but a single Life, living fluidly—a process, constantly changing, like the shimmer on the surface of the sea? This is the Life I praise, the one upon which I set my heart and gaze, seeking to know it intimately within my own being. To be guided upon its sea, to know myself in the reflection of its waters.
The presence that you are is the depth and totality of the ocean, not just a mere wave or reflection. When we hold both and all deeply, we unify what is seemingly opposite or estranged, and this is enough to take one to the awakened realisation. But when there, what is it that knows? What is there to know? It is here, like salt into the sea, that you dissolve. The task is to rest there periodically and allow nature to take its course.
Don't try to be spiritual; don't try to be this or that. Just be. Be in that being, and see that it is enough. It is an integrated type of openness, of embodied presence. And when you fully immerse into being, there is the strange realisation that you have been here before, that you have never left—that you have never been separate or anything other than its being.
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Everything that arrives today will quickly become like mist on a morning lake or fog on a mirror, dreamlike and intangible, carried away by the wind, like ash from a dying fire.
The future holds a similar appearance, ungraspable and fleeting, like trying to hold onto space through your fingers or a ripple in a river.
Therefore, what is present here and now is the most permanent reality, yet it also appears fleeting and impermanent. Like the crest of a wave on the ocean, we stand at an edge that is continually unfurling.
We may feel like we have the freedom to move in any direction, yet upon closer inspection, we realise we are standing on the edge of a fine razor with no more space than the prick of a needle.
Each moment folds and unfolds, and in this way, we see that even the ground we stand on is groundless, impermanent, and ever-changing.
Embracing this dreamlike quality of reality, our awareness becomes lucid and crystalline, and like the sun catching the corner of a diamond, we pierce the monochrome veil with effervescent rainbow light.
