LIVING A THOUSAND LITTLE MOMENTS

There is an old saying:”A thousand little moments make one dance!” That particular Zen saying expresses what it means to be truly alive – to be alertly aware, and aware of that awareness. Indeed that is the dance! And as the dance of spirit finds form in this writing, so too we may discover a grace in small things.

In truth we could say that grace is small things – those many, many small things that constitute our perception at any given moment. Of course this includes not only our perceptions of mind activity, but also the ground of our being – love! Here we use the word “love” not really knowing what in truth it is! That is to say we cannot measure or quantify or qualify in any way, what love is, just as we cannot know what truth is. What we can know is that we don’t know – that words represent underlying realities which our mind can never fully comprehend.

That’s because our mind is a binary mechanism which is capable only of sorting data by comparing and contrasting it. It can never actually come to a conclusion even though it would appear that the mind presents conclusions. For example, our minds can seek to understand something by comparing and contrasting what it thinks it knows about a given subject. When we “think” about something, we start with certain “conclusions” or beliefs, don’t we? But our mind can only ultimately arrive at two possible further conclusions – an endless looping in duality.

These apparent conclusions – when further examined – bifurcate into more conclusions… And so it goes, on and on with a constant pairing without actually arriving at any ultimate and total oneness of comprehension. In sum then, duality can never know nonduality.

This limitation of the mind is part of the dance! Once we recognize that the mind is not ours – is not who we are – we are freed from that identity which we misplaced in our childhood innocence. We are freed to see not only are we not our mind and its ideas and ideals, but also that we are not their associated feelings. A kind of wholeness emerges in which we see a much fuller spectrum of our being. A being which includes mind, feelings and body, and adds to that the far vaster dimension of spirit. For it is within this infinitely vast spirit that all creation dances! We discover that who we are and what this is, is spirit, dancing! And that is love.