THE EXPLORERS CLUB
Welcome to the Club! Everybody’s in the Explorers Club. Every person, plant, thing and entity no matter how cohered, is an active Club member, with or without knowing it, it seems!
Natures’ nature is to explore itself. In truth, it’s all about this simple recognition: reality is being perceived by reality, naturally. Take, for example, a female lion on the prowl for lunch with her cubs. She’ll stalk according to all her inborn instincts, like a lady shopping! She’ll circle and circle, now keeping an acquisitive eye on the prey, now feigning indifference. Animal and human males on the hunt do the same thing, only exactly so!
Now the lion, as we’ve said, can only move according to its being. That is to say, it is what it is, and it does what it does instinctively, without thought. Unlike our man or lady shopping, of course, but let’s leave him at the car dealers and her grazing at Macys’, and focus for the moment on the lion in nature.
The lions prey – a specific critter we’ll call a “deer” – is , like the lion, exclusively engaged in reality; in sum, let’s just say that dearness is instinctively aware of lioness, and vice versa. Now at this point, because there is no perceived danger, no threat exists. That’s because nature, while it has an inborn impulse to survive, it has no capacity for worrying about it! So both animals are only awareness in form and action. This action does not concern itself overly with tomorrow; it naturally attends to life as it happens…now.
“Lion stalking deer” is simple, natural awaring: it naturally accepts its nature to eat and be eaten. Still, this nature is alive and kicking! It ensures its perpetuity through its inbred need to survive and thrive. So there are no “natural threats” specifically fore-shadowed unless and until something threatening happens.
In the meantime ( of course, nature has no use for “time” and no concept of it ) our Lion and Deer are living in a sort of disinterested interest. They have no concept – no thought of being furry, four legged critters grazing in a space called the Serengeti, or wherever!
There interest is natures’ interest – marvelous existence! Nature kind of marvels, doesn’t it? All life forms encompass the pure marvelousness of existence. Only natures Human form thinks and feels and thereby obscures its marvelous Self from being all of life, living! But never mind, we humans can bring that little extra ability to think to the banquet with our pondering and wondering and musings. But lets not be too quick to assume that nature and animals and plants are less than divinely amused simply by their existence! An existence which is not “owned” because there is no entity to own anything; no mind to create a “self”. Only humans, endowed with thoughts that create desire and feelings that create fear, can seek what is not evidently present Now in this “ grazing” moment!
We humans begin seeking the instant that thoughts of “me” and “mine” are innocently activated in our peopled habitat. And thought breeds more thought; it continuously and compulsively re-creates nothing but itself, spinning comparisons into knowledge, attractions into compulsions, distractions into entertainment…life into thoughts about life.
A “person” becomes a bundle of opinions and arrogant assumptions of what is thought to be .
All of which is fine and good simply because it happens. It is the nature of all things to seek their fullest expression – plants in plantness, animals in animalness and humans in humanness. In other words, it is the nature of Awareness or Source, or God or Buddha, to fully express it’s Self. And the marvel of it all for us humans is that we can simultaneously formulate beliefs about our nature and – this is a big “and” – we can actually know our divine nature beyond those “beliefs.” Beyond this conceived me and my ideas about what’s going on here.
Welcome to the club! – where all life is constantly exploring its nature.