Awakening the Ordinary

Awakening has nothing to do with changing outward circumstances. The ordinary is still ordinary - but it is now weightless, floating in groundless silence. The empty park bench is still a park bench, but falling through the boundless abyss of wonder. The grocery store is still a grocery store. The camellia bud is still a camellia bud, beautiful and perishing. Like the old woman's face, wrinkled, lovely, and not long for this world. 

Awakening does not change the form or the content of the world whatsoever: it simply annihilates time, abolishing the notion that there is any "goal" or "purpose" in the future, or any "meaning" in the story of the past. Awakening opens the vertical dimension of Being, which has nothing to do with the horizontal dimension of time. They converge at the center of the Cross, and that center is always Now. Being can only happen in the present moment. 

In awakening, the world does not change. But the ground collapses out from underneath. Everything is suspended in the void, lighter than air. All you see is dissolving atoms pervading vast silence. They temporary forms they take don't matter so much anymore.

Then laughter erupts from your heart, because the cosmos is so marvelously absurd and whole. Things, after all, are ineluctably what they are, no more, no less. And this is a miracle that absolves you from the melodrama of needing to change things. That is when true change begins, for that is when you become truly creative, creating your cosmos from the heart of the present moment.

You are especially absolved from the the compulsion to find meaning. Freedom from meaning makes you light, and truly care-free. This lightness, this freedom from meaning, is true liberation, because it frees awareness from mind. Awareness, liberated from mind, no longer imposes concepts on the miracle of existence. A camellia is just a camellia, an ordinary miracle.

Yes, let us grok it again! In the moment of awakening, forms and circumstances do not change: they just become weightless. The world that others take so seriously appears as a mirage, a kaleidoscopic phantasm projected through the seer, shimmering in the ever-expanding stillness of the Eye itself. Now the Eye no longer looks for grace, for grace is what is looking. The Eye pours grace upon the world.

This quality of ungrounded abysmal nothingness is the most under-appreciated yet aspect of our existence. Awareness of omnipresent no-thing-ness gives infinite depth to the most insignificant event. A beetle on a blade of grass is as miraculous and stunning as the birth of a galaxy, or the resurrection of Christ. In this awareness, one can truly say, "the world is perfect, just as it is." Why? Because one sees the jewel of wholeness. 

No part is ever perfect, separate from the whole. But the whole is always perfect, just as it is. Our minds exhaust us because we keep extracting the part from the whole, and measuring it by a standard of ideals invented by our thoughts. But when we set this wounded facet back into the whole diamond of Being, it sparkles with perfection again. 

Forget the ideal standards of your philosophy and your religion. The ideal is always a cruel oppressor of the real. See the revelation of divinity in a raindrop. The final truth is ever the apotheosis of the commonplace. Finite things are simply what they Are. And their Being is infinite.