Since achieving the level of insight into myself and our true nature that has been summarised in previous writings here, circumstances compelled me to refocus my attention and energies back to the material concerns of life as I prepared for an overseas business trip. After a few weeks in that mindset, I suddenly realised in my travels that I had slipped back to old habits and old ways of thinking at the expense of my spiritual practice and prior awareness. I truly felt a sense of loss and reapplied myself to meditation but had lost my insight and could not regain my level of awareness. All through September I tried to re-establish my prior state, struggling to achieve the awareness of myself I had enjoyed, but for all my effort I could not rekindle the spark of my focus. Then on October 3, when changing the date on a calendar of Zen sayings, I read the words written for that day:
"The vast sky is not hindered by the floating clouds."
- Sekito Kisen
Immediately I could sense the profundity of this statement's meaning and again, as if my magic, I felt the ship of my mind begin to turn back on course. The Vast Sky was of course the Bodhi or enlightened mind, and the floating clouds were the changing desires and discriminative thoughts that float through the untamed mind. It reminded me that I was grasping at my previous awareness as if in desperation and was trapped in the discriminative thoughts of differentiating between my current and past state, in effect letting the floating clouds consume and delude me. Or to put it another way, identifying with the clouds rather than the vastness of the sky. As soon as I released that desire for prior attainments, let go of the clouds, my awareness began to rise again.
As I noted in a recent email discussing the near death experience of Dr. Eban Alexander, developing our awareness is like a game of Snakes and Ladders. Development comes in waves of great insight and periods of heightened consciousness, followed by a slide back down into more base concerns if you haven't reached a sufficient level of purification and allow the mundane concerns and material desires of the world overwhelm you. The world is a classroom full of the Snakes that would tempt you on the game board of life, but equally full of the Ladders that will lift you up and propel you forward. It is an easy proposition to understand in these terms, you just can't climb the Ladders to enlightenment without shedding the weight of material desires and concerns. That's not to say one should neglect their responsibilities, on the contrary, it is good to be diligent, but without grasping at the outcome and without letting the floating clouds hinder the vast sky of your risen mind.
May we all attain the supreme enlightenment and leave this training ground behind.
