Happy Mother’s Day all!
“May all mother sentient beings, boundless as the sky,
have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May they be liberated from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May they never be separated from the happiness that is free from suffering.
May they rest in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.”
– the Four Immeasurables
It is said that all beings have at one point in time been our mothers, having cared for us with selfless beauty and having made endless sacrifices, protected us, nurtured us, and also supported and enriched us.
Through time immemorial, through the various combinations and permutations of the manifestations of karma, all beings have been, at any given point in time, our mothers. Indeed every person we meet has done this for us. Every animal. Every insect. Every friend. Every enemy. Every sentient being, seen and unseen, has done this for us- and in this way we are all inextricably linked. Should not we then view all beings as our mothers and treat them with loving kindness?
Mamo is the mother principle in Tibetan buddhism. There is the grandmother quality of the ma, somebody who presides over the space of your heritage. And there is mo, who is more like a wife, someone who puts intelligence into your life situation, someone who cares for you.
If there were no mother principle, we could not learn anything. We could not even wipe our bottoms if there had been no mother. Things would become completely wild and savage. Mothers brought us civilization. Mothers brought us magic.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: “Magic is the cause, and it is what we are creating, in the simple practice of meditation. Through meditation, we are putting that particular miracle into effect. So let us not regard meditation as a purely mechanical process that leads one to enlightenment. Instead, the essence of meditation is tuning oneself into higher truth or magic.”
That magic happens when we tap into the resting state of the mind more and more deeply. And magic is happening elsewhere – all the time.
The unconditioned truth, or dharma, has extraordinary power. Throughout the dharma there is hidden power and magic. That may sound corny but there IS some kind of magic there.
In meditation practice, we are tuning ourselves into an entirely different way of thinking, as opposed to our ordinary samsaric way of thinking.
We have decided to relate with the truth, to tune in to the dharma. Tuning ourselves in to the dharma, committing ourselves to that stream or flow, means that we are automatically entered into a kind of spiritual power. It is not particularly exciting or extraordinary, but there is power and mystical energy.
The reason the dharma is regarded as sacred is because its contents are unconditioned and outrageous. Outrageous to samsaric thinking. Dharma is in touch with the energy or cosmic flow of the Universe.
Last week, we talked about the world of ego being unreal or empty yet it’s where we’ve been living all our lives. We talked about the nature of reality – our most fundamental state of mind – that it is such that there is basic ground, basic consciousness, basic freedom, basic trust, open space. This is the natural resting state of the mind: open, calm, fresh, alert, aware, and pure (unadulterated by conditioning). This is what we’re touching into during meditation.
What would it be like to live in the reality of our most fundamental state of mind while living in samsara, in the world made by ego?
Buddhism posits that by acknowledging the emptiness of the phenomenal world – like we acknowledge thoughts in meditation by literally saying to ourselves “thinking” – we can bring ourselves to experience the clear, luminous nature of our mind and divine omnipresence of the present moment. In this experience, arise compassion and loving kindness and awareness of the sacred nature of the entire phenomenal world.
Is this ALOHA? Is this the intelligent, conscious, life-force energy of the Universe? That question deserves a future Sunday time together
