The Openness That Includes Everything
La Apertura Que Incluye Todo
A student shares the experience of attending a beloved cousin's funeral, and asks whether the simultaneous feeling of loss and love is a taste of the emptiness and fullness the teacher speaks about.
The Openness That Includes Everything
A student shares the experience of attending a beloved cousin's funeral, and asks whether the simultaneous feeling of loss and love is a taste of the emptiness and fullness the teacher speaks about.
I wanted to follow up on something you said. You were talking about relationships and locality. Were you saying that it doesn't matter where the locality is, that the relationship is the relationship? Was that your point?
I'm talking about a mystery, but about the experience of it. It's something in the space of the unknowable, yet there is an experiential tasting of it. There is a dimension of reality where there is relationship. There is an energetic aspect, a flow of life force that moves between us. And the absolute locality of Germany, England, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, how we understand distance, none of that applies. I mentioned physics because this is becoming really well known: locality and distance are not absolutely real. In fact, it's very much the opposite. There is no such thing as location, and there is no such thing as distance. There are ways in which those concepts function, but they are not absolute. We could share a similar intense energetic connection while being five thousand miles apart.
And even without speaking to each other. Sometimes there's an energetic communication without words. That's what I've experienced as well.
Yes, absolutely.
On grief and the fullness of love
I want to share something. On Monday I was at the funeral of my first cousin, someone so beloved by so many people. It happened to work out that I'm here in the area, four hours from where I usually am. It was such an event. I don't have words for it. I felt so much sadness and just wanted to cry my eyes out, but I wouldn't let myself because most other people were more subdued. I didn't want to steal the show. So I had a stomach ache the whole day, just holding it in. It was killing me. I finally let loose once I was back at the hotel.
But I was watching the grief. I was following his wife. My radar was just fixed on her, and it was so powerful to watch her. She is a person who is very natural, very authentic, not trying to be something she isn't. I couldn't get enough of watching her.
After feeling the grief, being with people who were feeling the heaviness of the loss, something hit me. Maybe this is what you've been referring to. It hit me that maybe this is the emptiness and the fullness: the emptiness of the loss, of his not being here with us, and the fullness of the love for him that is never lost. And then the love between all of us. There was so much love in that group of people.
Maybe it's just a metaphor for what you've been talking about, but it feels like when we grasp, when we want to hold on to it, "I don't want him to die, he shouldn't have died," there is only grasping. But when you let it be as it is, then I feel the loss, and only then can I feel the fullness of the love. I can be here and I can move on to the next moment and the next. Is this just a story I'm making up?
No, I don't think so. It is in a sense metaphorical. At the same time, it is close to that. It's not entirely that, but it is a tasting in that direction.
I felt it was a metaphor because this is about feelings, about relationships, about phenomena. And I understand that emptiness and fullness is not phenomena. It just is what it is. It's what underlies everything we can see and perceive. But it felt like it's based on that principle: that they go together, that our human experience is both.
People kept saying, "It's great to see you, but not in these circumstances." And it occurred to me: no, in these circumstances it's great. Any circumstance, it's great. There is so much love, thanks also to this wonderful person who died. He brought us together. It's all together.
A deeper tasting
I think you're speaking of a deeper tasting of that. The language of "emptiness is fullness and emptiness" is pointing to something even deeper, but it isn't that you aren't tasting it.
So it's a manifestation of it, maybe. But not a direct experience of it. Can you say anything more about the direct experience of the emptiness and the fullness, or will it just be words?
I don't want to detract from the beautiful experience you're sharing. I think you should just sink into that. In a sense, that is more beautiful than anything I could say.
Thank you. When this realization came, I felt, "Yes, yes, in these circumstances." It's the yes. It's the all of it.
Pointers and the inner calling
That's like a pointer, let's put it that way. And I find these days that maybe I don't get as excited about the experience itself. I can feel an inner calling: "Keep going, keep going." The buck doesn't stop here. That's not why I attend these groups, so that I can have a happy life or so that I can understand. That's not why I'm here.
It's about a life that is well lived. It's deep. There is a deep well-being which includes joy and pain and everything. But that is really the end: life.
The end is life, but of course it is. There's so much more than just the experience, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
That still is life.
So the point is I don't want to reject anything, but I see that it's a pointer. It's not the thing itself. I don't want to confuse the experience for the underlying reality. That's what I'm saying.
It depends on what you call experience. I'm using a very broad definition: everything, life. So it is the experience, it is the emptiness, it is spirituality, the world, consciousness, life, death, humanness.
I guess what I'm talking about is the tendency to want to grasp it, to say, "I got it."
That's just a mind thing, right?
Right. So what I'm saying is, when I see these things in context, as gifts, I love them. And these gifts feel like signs. They come sometimes more and more intensely. It's like a little pointer: you're on the right track. An inner guide, maybe.
I agree. There are signs, reflections, synchronicities of moving toward deeper and deeper openness, more wakefulness, however you want to call it. But what I'm trying to reflect is that this is the end in itself: life, this moment. Don't worry so much about getting somewhere.
I understand that. But that's exactly it. I was so there. It felt like another retreat. It was so beautiful. I don't have words for how beautiful it was. And I didn't need anymore. I guess that's really what I'm saying. But the final line for me is that it's good to see these things in context. Why did you keep searching and going further and further? Because there's something you understood. Actually, it's not even understanding. It's just an inner calling. That's all. Does that make sense?
It makes sense, yes.
Openness now is openness to everything
I guess there's this openness of being here right now, and that openness is openness to the next moment, but without thinking about the next moment. I can't be open unless I'm open right now. I guess that's really what it is.
Exactly. You can be open now and think about the next moment openly.
It's all about openness, really.
Yes, because we were talking about this earlier using different words and language, but we were talking about the balance of the world, time, projects of life, spiritual work, and inquiry in the present moment. What I call waking up, growing up, all of that. The core of it is what you said. We can be in rejection of what is of the mind, which is going to be time, evolution, the body-mind, and the future. Or we can be in rejection of what is here now at the level of what I'm feeling: if I'm anxious, in pain, or sad. What you said is that if you're open to this moment, you can also be open to thinking of tomorrow and thinking of yesterday. But it's the openness in this moment that matters. If you're open to what it feels like to feel, to imagine, to think, to remember, to plan, to conceive, that openness to all of it is so good.
That's the gift. And that's it. It's not the experience that I got. The openness is ultimately what I feel.
It's your openness. And your openness is calling you to open, and you are opening, listening to yourself.
Listening to you, too. Thank you so much.
You're welcome.