Your Great Perfection - who you are

When you take the THING-NESS out of all your experience you are not left with nothingess (which is still a THING) you are left with THIS as THIS IS.

This is not a mere play on words.

This experience right now is utterly pure - it is purity itself.

In Buddhism this is called various names such as enlightenment, nirvana, Buddhahood, Buddhaness etc....

These are just names for something that is really not nameable - although it is experience-able. This is your experience as it really is right now, YOU ARE BUDDHA!

I don't say that to be clever or sound important. Every experience you have reveals this to be the case but you (we) usually miss it.

We're entangled in our thought-THINGS, our concepts. Our mind is only partially aware of reality. We miss the significance of our experiencing.

And because of all that, we are completely given over to anxiety, to worry, to greed for some-THING that we can conceptualize into a "meaning" for our own existence.

Living like this is unrealistic and chaotic and we make a lot of unintended consequences from how we relate to others and to our environment.

All of this because we are only partially aware. In fact, we're partially aware Buddhas!

And we're pretty clever Buddhas at that.

Look at how science [specifically the field of particle physics] keeps chasing smaller and smaller particles (objects) as though they are examining real "THINGS" that are truly some existing objects "out there".

Im a big fan of science, so don't get me wrong here, I think we should be digging into the nature of objects.

But what do they keep finding? What are the patterns that emerge?

That each level of "fundamental-ness" is in fact not so fundamental after all. Every particle is arisen from other THINGS, from other particles, from other conditions.

As long as we keep developing the technical capability to dig deeper and deeper into the "objective" world, I will make the prediction that we will just keep finding more and more emptiness, more interdependence, more lack of fundamental-ness.

Reality is just this way. Our experience is just this way.

What Buddhism is telling you and me is just to..

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR EXPERIENCE

In your experience, THINGS are not found. Interdependence is found - which is what I call "voidness". You could also call it (your experience) "relationship".

But this is not the idea we might have of some kind of "nothingness" - like in the thought that all of this is meaningless. Buddhism is not existentialism, not nihilism.

PAY ATTENTION TO EXPERIENCE

All of life and death is just your experience, how could THAT not be sacred?

When we make up THINGS or a "THING-NESS" in this our ever changing experience we destroy the sacredness of our experience. Everything is sacred. you already have a sense of this. But don't grab onto it that way - as sacred - because you then destroy it by making it into a THING.

I found something online that struck me as conveying the essential point of all this - it's from a western teacher of Tibetan Buddhism named Lama Surya Das:

"This luminous View of the Natural Great Perfection transcends the dualism of perfect and imperfect. It implies that everything is primordially complete as is, and uninhibitedly, inexhaustibly, spontaneously manifesting. We don’t have to inhibit, alter, or adulterate anything in our experience; we can simply appreciate it as it as, and make more wise and informed decisions about how skillfully to work with things according to conditions and circumstances. We don’t have to try to become perfect or stop thinking and feeling--not to mention try to make others change according to our own notions of how they could or should be! The nature of the mind is primordially perfect as it is, and all its myriad manifestations are as well--thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, or whatever arises in the body-mind complex."

I'm not saying this all is easy, but I am saying it is profoundly simple.

What stops us from recognizing how all this is, from actualizing our potential is simply that we freeze our experience into THINGS. When we unfreeze our experience, when we release the THING-NESS, we can see that it has always been this way - from the very beginning.

You know, when you consider Buddhism, given all that we're up against, it's pretty amazing that people have actually realized this, don't you think?