Contemplations on the Mystery

All around us, the world displays its dizzying complexity of forms

through our senses;

no less vast are the thoughts, feelings, emotions and impulses

of the inner life.

Somehow, within this churning, continuous presentation rests awareness:

else how would we come to know any of it?

And if awareness is the sine qua non of experience, and is inherent in us,

how can we come to know it?

Surely, it is not a something we can reach out and touch.

Most of the great teachings I have been exposed to would say,

we know it by being it.

Being awareness—here we are tempted to imagine

that being awareness is something that we have to attain

by some kind of movement away from what we currently are,

by practice, or through grace.

And, of course, practices and praying for grace are part of our makeup as humans;

we often feel separated from the flow of life in us and around us,

alone, unseen, even unloved,

in which condition how natural it becomes to desire release

from our suffering through prayer for grace.

And yet there is a clue in our everyday experience

when we find ourselves in total communion with the natural world,

or with any activity in which we are fully engaged.

The self we believe in, with its questions and doubts,

does not exist in the here and now,

unless as the presence of everything all at once.

Here and now, we simply are.

Here and now, we don’t think of having to attain awareness;

it just is.

So we now rest in and acknowledge

that awareness lies at the root of all experience,

a kind of remembering that brings us back to our center.

What do we understand from this standpoint?

Maybe it’s that we exist at the portal through which the roar of creation—

I’m thinking Niagara Falls level roar,

or even the fusion level reactions between atoms level of power—

ceaselessly flows in us and through us

as the mystery made manifest of the quantum void,

in the language gifted us by our friend Bill.

And in this quiet space of allowing all that is,

flows gratitude to him and to all the enlightened ones

who have come before.

Quantum Source ... Quantum World ... Quantum Void ... Quantum You!