For More on Zen Master Rama:
The pathway to enlightenment is for most of us very experiential.
While you may accept the philosophical concepts that are handed-down with meditation -a belief in the reincarnation of the soul, the stateless state of nirvana, a sense of dharma, that there is a code of right, and that when we follow the highest good we become the highest good, cycles and theories of cosmic evolution, the different lokas and planes of reality- while we may acknowledge that all of these things exist to some extent, what really brings us forward on the pathway to enlightenment is a need for spiritual experiences and visions.
Spiritual experiences fall into many different classifications. The most common type of spiritual experience is the one that you're having at the moment. We call it life. We're not apt to think of life as a spiritual experience. We feel that life as we've come to know it is flat or bland. But life for one who has not lived is a spiritual experience. It is not so much that life is flat or bland, it's just that we see it that way. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we don't 'see' it.
Life is energy, constantly moving, changing, recycling, becoming new. The energy of eternity takes on countless new forms and we experience them. We experience them through our senses, through our mind, through our reflections, through our emotions, and through our spiritual bodies. The spiritual experience of life is never ending. As you sit listening to me you're having a spiritual experience. Later, in the day or the evening, your spiritual experience will continue. Life will precisely direct you through a variety of different experiences. These experiences are not 'the experience'. The experiencer has left and gone someplace else. There are no plans to dream, no visions to keep. These experiences are the beginning and end of existence because that's all there really is.
We sit on an island in the middle of eternity, thinking to ourselves how important we are, because we sit on an island in the middle of eternity, not knowing all the while that eternity is an island. We feel we've come to know something, that as perceivers with intelligence we've developed clarity and order and form. But we're only an island, the island of eternity. We wait. We wait for our loves. We wait for our completion. We wait for the fulfillment of our desires. We wait with hope, apathy, resignation, belief. We become despondent, elated. We wait. We wait for the final experience. The vision, the dream-quest, that will lead us above the ebb and flow of this life, and will place us into that which we have not experienced, that which is new, that which will command all of our attention to the point of complete absorption.
Life is the only spiritual experience there is.
Life...and death. Death, but another part of life. There is no beginning and there is no ending. We're marvelously eternal...and our perception of existence changes as we change, which changes existence. Perception not only defines existence but it creates existence. It gives it form. Without perception there is no existence. When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams. And there is no beginning and there is no end. Some days there's not even a middle.
A person tries to understand truth. They seek to come to some kind of resolution about the meaning of life. They seek to explore their own humanity. What is it to be alive? What is it to be? Or not to be? And there are no answers. The waves crash on the beaches as they always have. The children play. The aged and the infirmed wait for death. And those in mid-life are caught-up in a cross-current somewhere between youth and old-age, somewhere between birth and death, trying amid all the cruelties and joys of life to find silence and...some kind of perfection. Perfection in their art, perfection in their work, perfection in their loves, their children, their spouses, their lovers, their disciplines, their vacations,...an endless panorama of spiritual experiences.
Now, if you're really a perceiver, of course, you have this broad-based acceptance of life. You're able to look and feel and believe and yet at the same time you're somewhat withdrawn, you stand back, behind the gateways of your eyes and quietly observe the coming and going of eternity; a witness. You allow life to do to you what it will, trusting in it always, and observe. But there's not so much a sense of action, of being an actor. Rather of quietly, watching...the spring buds emerge, the summer...with all its fruition, the beauty of death in the fall, transmigrations, in the winter the preparation for the new life. It's enough sometimes, enough to watch, to sit in front of a fireplace and listen to the crackling of the wood and stare into the flame and to contemplate immortality...without thinking about it too much. To feel that in this moment there is all that will ever be or has ever been. Alexander the Great is walking the earth, conquering. Caesar is being murdered. Bach is writing his fugues...preludes. Shakespeare...is putting on his latest play. Kennedy is being shot. The world is dissolving in the final...cosmic...flash. The world is being born...out of the molten masses of dreams. All the events of all of our lives are going-on simultaneously. There is no beginning and there is no ending. There's only this moment. And all of the eternities that have ever been or will ever be are contained in this very moment, if you will but look. If you will but look and see that at the moment you are having a spiritual experience. You are a vision. You are a dream. And we call this 'waking', waking to life. Slowly like a young fern we unfold, the fronds, unrolling, stretching ourselves...upward toward the light, feeling the atmosphere of an alien world, reaching for nourishment, for strength, feeling the winds of change, growing without knowing how or why.
And it's enough sometimes. Sometimes it's enough...just to be. To not think, to not calculate, to not triumph, to not lose, it's enough sometimes to sit in the sunshine, to watch the raindrops, to sit alone and feel...this marvelous thing...that is existence, that is our self, our body, our spirit. This is a spiritual experience.
A spiritual experience is not something that you have, it's something that you are. We're always trying to get to something, to get to the experience, to have the flash. But it's here, now. It's quiet. The most profound experience is quiet,...and fulfilling, drenching you with its life, with the knowledge and awareness of countless aeons -timelessness- all present in this moment, all futures forwarded to this address, an endless parade, a panorama of all that will ever be and never be, contained within your perception, standing behind your eyes, watching through them. Who is watching through them? Who is watching through your eyes? Who is that? The perceiver, not she who feels or thinks, not she who believes or wants or loves or hates...who is she? Who is the one? The one who has always been this moment? She is a spiritual experience. She is a dream, a vision.
Spiritual experiences are all there are. There is nothing else. There is no beginning and there is no ending. There are no crimes. There are no punishments. There are no absolutions. These are all ways of talking, games that people play, invented...to pass the time. But here with me alone, the two of us, on top of the mountain today or perhaps by the ocean, or just back from the ocean, surrounded by the spring, far from the wars and wars' alarms, far from the noise of the city, far from the newspapers, the political strife, the world of mankind has faded away, and you sit here with me today on the shores of existence. You're in no hurry to go anywhere. The world is forgotten. We seem to have lost our purpose...but it doesn't matter. We've forgotten that there was a path, that there is a future, sitting here today on the banks of existence. No thought, no mind, no belief systems, perfect stillness, the sound of the waves crashing, the birds in the distance.
Life is a spiritual experience. It is! Today we're here. Oh, you may think that you're listening to this tape in your car or...your home or...on your walk-person or wherever you may be, but you're not, you're really not. You're here today with me, sitting here, listening, watching, or perhaps...I'm...with you, listening and watching. It's just the two of us. There aren't any more you know, and there really aren't even two y'know, there's only one. There's only...the one who's listening. The one who's watching behind the eyes...and waiting.
We wait for spiritual experiences. We cause them. We dream them. We dream the self.
From a structural point of view, there are naturally different levels of spiritual experience. While everything is a spiritual experience, we can place order on what appears to be, but is not really chaos. The body is a spiritual experience, it's perceptions. The body is holy, as are the senses, as are its actions, its gestations, its movements. Desires are holy. Emotions. Everything has its own integrity...in its own time, in its own place.
But...in the world it's hard to know that...in the cities...with others...sometimes alone, with our mind raging and stampeding and thinking and analyzing and calculating and remembering and giving-birth to marvelous thoughts that trap us You see?
All methods of perception, all ways of thinking...the terrorist and the savior...they're all one. Each is a spiritual experience, an act of God.
But here we sit the two of us, today, just for a little while, for a short time, beyond within. Waiting.
There are changes. There is transition, or so it would appear, outside of this lovely garden that the two of us are in today. But here, time is forever, yet...we do note the seasons change. I suppose we could go out into the world and make forays to change the world, but...by the time we went out and changed it, the garden might've changed too and we might have missed that. Perhaps it's better to sit in the garden today, the two of us, and sip some tea.
There's a level of experience beyond experience. There's a world of dream beyond dreams-as-you-know-them. We call it the Supraconscious. It is the home of spiritual experiences of another kind, another order. The waking dreams of life as most people know them are spiritual experiences...their children, their families, their lives, are spiritual experiences, but there is another order of spiritual experience that some of us choose, that some of us are chosen by, that we choose not to choose, therefore choosing. And that's to be in the garden of the heart, in the perfect stillness where the white light of eternity meets the white light of eternity...and there's flux and stillness at the same time. This is enlightenment.
It can be yours if that's what you want. It's not so hard. People complain that enlightenment is a difficult thing to reach. I don't think so. I just don't think they want to. If you want to it's very easy. You simply set your sails on the course. There may be storms along the way. There may be people that you meet, but they're all part of it too. Y'know, the journey is. So we find ourselves looking for that
Yes? No?
I think of telephone networks, of vast interchanges, thousands of calls coming in and out on microprocessors, all on little chips. The little messages, little emotions, passing through wires, through laser-beams, crisscrossing eternity. Existence. I think of airports...of places of transition...places where the planes connect, the realities touch. Watching, the passengers leaving the plane and the relatives waiting, meeting them, hugging them, crying. The businessman who gets off the plane, no one to meet him, thinking about the length of the rental car line, holding his briefcase and his carry-on luggage for security, living a life he doesn't believe in, yet not having a choice,...so it would seem. I think of the farewells, the plane leaving, the soldier hugging his girlfriend of one night, the old woman going to her son's funeral dressed in black, the couple traveling together to New York, the young child with its mother who will cry all the way, the flight attendants moving to another city, another destination, uniforms in place, their suitcases...on the little rack with wheels, and the plane leaves...and those who came to see it off go back to their lives...and those in the plane...where do they go? Into the sky...units on a microprocessor, voices in the night, spiritual experiences, each one. Each life is a spiritual experience and you're having all of them. You're all of them. You are the old woman going to the death of her son, his funeral, and the long processions of agony that follow. You are the soldier and his young lover. You are the flight attendant thinking about getting back to her husband. And you are that endless space through which the planes fly. It's you who's listening to all of this. That's a spiritual experience. It's you who still believe in truth -- when there is nothing else and it's not necessary to even believe in it....although it's nice.
I think there might be an end to it one day...an end to this nature and this cosmos. I know there's an end to it. The cycle closes. The 'For Sale' signs go up -Last Day, Clearance Sale- and then the flash comes, the unexpected light, the radiance beyond radiance, not a physical light, this light. And all the worlds are withdrawn. Everything ends. The void. The dream ends. All that we thought was solid and substantial goes away. Not the ending everyone supposed. No super novas. Just white light. Everything just dissolves...goes away. Just as at the time of death you will watch this world disappear before your eyes. Everything will become hazy. You'll hear a high-pitched ringing sound or a buzzing sound. You'll feel light and then suddenly...the world will fade from your eyes. So when it ends, it will end that way, with white light...and beautiful colors.
I've seen the end.
It's really not a bad ending. No credits though.
Spiritual experience, the end, the beginning.
