Peony

Knowing gets in the way. Just surrender conceptual thinking, but very gently, with tender affection for this useless mind. Then rest in the surge of energy that comes with being merely awake, free from thought. Countless invisible suns fill your blue sky. You don't need energy, you Are energy. You are the vast energy you wasted in trying to know something. Now all that energy is available as wonder.

Past and future dissolve in the silent explosion of Being, because they were only thoughts. Now, waves of delight vibrate from your body into each blade of grass and lump of soil, causing microbes to shiver with grace and galaxies to tremble with joy. Yet you haven't actually "done" anything. You simply surrendered the effort to know. Even if it only happens for an instant at dawn, the whole day will vibrate with the energy released by your awakening – when you open your eyes at first light and simply see, just before yesterday’s mind pounces on you out of a lingering wisp of the dream...

This precious state of naked awakening is called Turiya, which means "the fourth state." It is neither dream, nor sleep, nor conceptual thinking, but the cloudless blue essence of I Am. How can one express the astonishing simplicity of this miracle except by smiling at heaven and earth from every cell of your body? Did you know that each atom in your flesh contains an unborn smile? Your bones are packed with infinitesimal grains of bliss. Your no-thingness tingles in the most distant stars. How humbling to become nothing, raptured into the essence of all! Angels, ancestors, and ascended masters bow in gratitude the moment your forehead touches the ground, for you are bowing to them.

We say "God" because we have no other word for this mutual genuflection of myriad creatures. God is our bow to all that bows to us. God is the bow itself. We practiced this bow when we were babies. I remember when it happened to me in my Mother's flower garden at about the age of six months old, my earliest memory, yet it is still the stamp of eternity at the center of every Now.

Of course, when you're six months old, you don't have words to describe your experience, so there is no conceptual thought. Just astonishment. Gazing into a peony, I saw the cosmos silently roil out of the golden void, a boundless genuflection of no one to no-thing, bubbling up into its opposite, the bow of everyone to everything. That flower, I tell you, contained all the galaxies, swirling in the very capillaries of my eye. And this miracle of intimacy, the intimacy of All in All, happened through the grace of emptiness, the dark energy of love.

The peony I saw when I was six months old is still my mandala, at the heart of every perception, the tonic chord in all my songs. I am a fool, but I am hopelessly blessed. Even if I were the most liberated Buddha, I would still return to this world of bruises and tears. I would still take a human body just to gaze into this peony once more, its pollen grail without circumference, and breathe again the sticky amber sweetness of matter.

Listen to this reflection HERE. Photo by Kristy Thompson