Have you ever been swimming in the ocean and had the frantic feeling you were being carried away? There is nothing to hold onto and if you behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. Water is an amazing thing. It can be so frightening, and yet so comforting. The entire universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. When swimming in the ocean, if you try to catch hold of it, you drown. This is like the waters of modern philosophy, where God is dead, and there is really nothing to hang onto because we are all just falling apart. The only way to survive under these circumstances is to learn how to swim; you relax, you let go, and you give yourself to the water. You have to know how to breathe in the right way, but then you find that the water holds you up, and in a certain way, you become the water.
It really comes down to this: in this universe there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. We try. People have tried God, Brahman, Tao, suchness, vastness.. We are all just different 'playings out' of the same delightful energy....
...and Blake said, "Energy is eternal delight."
5 comments:
A very compelling post! Thank you for giving me something to reflect upon.
i've been known to refer to this as "surfing the wave", complete with demo! keep your balance, ride the tide, and for heaven's sake, breathe!
i'll post my really bad poem on just this topic.
Oceans and zen, all captured in painting, these are a few of my faorite things.
I've had reoccuring dreams of tidal waves since 1965. Lately, they've morphed into dreams of big water, sometimes snow covering everything, including the ocean, sometimes flooding. I finally had a variation of the Great Wave tattooed on my right calf. This post is so much like my dream life it's uncanny...
Today's Tao meditation from 365 Tao Daily Meditations (November 19) says this: Tao is strangely colorless, yet intense. It grips like a tidal wave.
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