December 12, 2015
Sitting in meditation on the grass in Balboa Park with our sangha, the sun on our backs, a chilly breeze occasionally visiting our faces, I became aware in a single moment of the pressure of my buttocks against the firm zafu and the ethereal lightness of my being. The lightness was a wonderful diffuseness without definitions and boundaries, a diffuseness not of tiny particles rather of particle-less being, that was effortlessly blending with the natural diffuseness of everything else in the park or the universe. The wonder for me was that I could have such a complete experience of my own being as diaphanous at exactly the same time that I was knowing the solidity of my buttocks on the cushion. The two experiences continued simultaneously as one until the gong sounded, and remain with me even into today, blending with the revelation of December 5. The awareness feels beautiful yet very simple and ordinary, since of course it is nothing more than the awareness of reality—that form is emptiness and emptiness is form, that everything is at all times both.
December 20, 2015
With awakenings, we begin at last to love the universe and our world of forms on other terms—for what she is rather than based on our own illusions. It is a more serious love, as in the phrase new lovers use: “I’m feeling serious about her.”
To be serious about the universe is to be serious about her pockmarked face, not in spite of or because of the pustules—rather, because that face, with its pustules, is the face of God.
