Why wouldn’t anyone relax and float in the river of light that is our home? Alas, from the standpoint of our ordinary experience that sounds like a rhetorical question from someone whose head is in the clouds. But when we awake to that river of light, it is a most obvious, genuine, and compassionate question. It was the obvious question for me at the time of this poem, although the obvious answer was: because we rarely experience it.
Yet how obvious at such miraculous moments is the one light of presence shining through us all—as if the molecules of our being are the merest suggestion of a lattice work flowed through and carried along with light. It is light not only in the sense of “luminous,” but also in the sense of “weightless,” insubstantial, open, non-binding, yet playfully unfolding, an activity that is not an activity at all, an empty river of delight. It is our true self and our true home, expressing as us and already complete in its own activity. It requires nothing more from us, no need to acquire, accomplish, contrive, justify, or sustain. How easy it was to recognize my separated selfhood and all its issues as a moment of distraction within the light itself, like pixie dust in the eyes, hypnotized by the mirage of a separate identity to dramatize and defend. The fact that the whole world as we know it is animated by, and suffers through, this mirage of pixie dust, makes it no more real or substantial; nor does it separate us in truth or change our nature as that light.
The habits of attachment to this mirage are strong, leaving the sense that we need to manage the molecules of our own appearance (just as if a rainbow believed that it was its own separate solid thing, needing to manage the play of photons and molecules that display as a rainbow). But when we relax the illusion of needing to manage the light, and release our imaginary hold, the underlying radiance reveals itself as our pervading nature, all creative, all sustaining, and all complete. The very same was revealed to Dame Julian of Norwich, when she wrote, in a different poetry, “God maketh it; God keepeth it; God loveth it.” And the question arises, “Why wouldn’t anyone relax?”
The illusion of self is sustained by a subtle activity of contraction, contraction within and away from the light, away from the openness of being; and by the activity of control, the need to manage all of this illusory appearance. As we allow our attention to become subtle and honest, we may begin to notice our ongoing and pervasive activity of contraction from being that seems to override the activity, and the experience, of the natural radiance of being simply expressing as us. That subtle contraction reinforces our way of seeing, and that seeing reinforces the contraction, as our self-experience seems to congeal and separate out of the light. As such, it seems we must fight our own battles, argue our own case, and manage our own appearance on our own behalf. This is not to be flippant about our human condition; and not to dishonor our most noble attempts as human beings to be true to ourselves and to each other. But can we hold the features of our own appearance here as more dear than the light of universal love already holds us in entirety? Is there anything we can do to enhance ourselves more than we will be enhanced by our own surrender to love; our own acts of loving? Can we argue our case, and be more eloquent on our own behalf than that light, which by nature is already translating us, and revealing us to be none other than itself?
The great fourteenth-century Tibetan Nyingma master Longchenpa (close to the time of Dame Julian) speaks of the clear light of pure and total presence that creates and sustains everything, in which there is nothing more “to objectify, seek, or contrive” with body, speech, or mind. “Just relax in the reality of this blissful, self-generating pristine awareness … so that your pure and total presence may actually shine forth.”
Though awareness is turned from itself by force of deep habit, there is a diligent path of relaxation and recognition, and a shift of awareness, that is naturally available to us. It is not at a distance from us, and it is not the province of any other time, person, or institution. It is a path of no path, and a shift of no shift, because that pure and total presence is already the radiant truth of us. Each time it gifts us and reveals itself in our awareness, shines through the very formative structures of our being, and briefly carries us downriver on its broad, flowing shoulders, it enables relaxation and recognition at ever deeper levels.
Why wouldn’t anyone relax and radiate as that uncontrived and loving presence, the already light of our own being? We trust instead to our fearful clinging, to our control, to the logic and strategies of our personal and desperate dream of salvation or sorrow, of triumph or tragedy. Yet the dream itself is just a trick of light, made of that inherent awakeness that is already singing our true song, that from the beginning outshines the illusions of darkness and the illusions of time. Like the prodigal son, returning home with the dream of our own sin—darkness, distraction, and separation—hanging over our heads, we are amazed to find ourselves fully embraced and restored to what we have never lost, and to what has never rejected us: to our full and empty place in the generosity of being. Why wouldn’t anyone relax there? I don’t know.