One Life-thread flows through everything.  This isn’t some poetic fantasy; you can find out for yourself if you go deeply into the appearance of ‘things’ – any things, including the ‘you’ thing and the ‘me’ thing.  What you find is that nothing – no thing – is a thing with independent existence.  Everything you put under your microscope turns out to be a complex web of interdependent relationships connected to every other complex web of interdependent relationships.  We paste a name on this seething mass of quantum energies and hey ho! – it becomes real.

Except, it isn’t.  It’s actually a field of infinite possibilities which we have attempted to freeze-dry by labeling.  Look closely enough and you’ll find that no objects could ever be said to exist.  Buddhists call the inherent no-thing-ness of phenomena emptiness, or void.  It doesn’t mean appearance isn’t happening and you must be a nutter because to you, it IS – it means that appearance is simply appearance.

So what can be said about the web of connections?  What’s the stuff of this web?  It’s immaterial; it can only be inferred.  This isn’t deep metaphysics, any more than Life’s presence is inferred in a body that’s up and alive.  The web, imo, is Life itself.  And that’s about all I can say because I’m a zafu-sitter not a scientist.

But as far as I’m concerned it’s the profound understanding of emptiness and the web of Life energy which animates the field of Infinite Potential (as posited by David Bohm) that constitutes self-realization.  It changes everything.  It’s a mind-shift of great subtlety and it is irreversible.

– miriam louisa

Without self-realization no virtue is genuine.
It is only when you arrive at the deepest conviction
that the same life flows through everything,
and that you ARE that life,
that you can begin to love naturally and spontaneously.
– Ramesh S. Balsekar