Awakening

2024, August, Issue 108

When suddenly

Brightness everlasting, this infinite moment

Timeless Luminosity, eternal now

Beyond time and space, beyond confusion

Awareness with no beginning, beyond appearances

Beyond fabrication, beyond imagination,

Love and compassion everlasting, intensely brilliant,

Brilliant open expansiveness,

Expansive beyond worlds, beyond universe

Beyond an infinite array of multiverses, beyond,

Beyond beyond, all this energetic turbulence, these storms,

Turbulence exploding with dynamic

Infinite possibilities beyond self,

Beyond reason, beyond,

Beyond thought and concept

And all these petty little things

Humans create, ideas beyond ideas of

Awakening, beyond limited ideas of

Source, beyond egotistical ideas of

God, beyond ideas of sleepiness, beyond

Belief or theory or philosophy, or being right,

Beyond beyond beyond;

Awakening is beyond this or that notion

Or those notions or any notion,

Beyond subject and object,

Beyond extremes,

Beyond any constraint;

We awaken to reality,

Complete infinite loving

Compassionate awareness,

Unconstrained by self or

Other, or notions of self or other,

Or anything else that can be

Imagined;

It’s Bodhicitta, the same Bodhicitta

As that tiny bright sphere

Where you started, the same

As that aspiration to awaken, when

When you definitively decided to awaken

Once and for all, in that commitment, that

Tiny seed of loving compassion,

That kernel of bright clarity

That you’ve been playing with

For far too long, in this illusion

Where time does not exist, where, where

There is no place to reify, no where,

Where everything changes in every

Fraction of a moment, in this expansive

Now reality that has eluded us;

It’s that simple.

A poem by Robert Aho © 2024

Our shared reality is not one that we can ever escape, we can only awaken to what that ineffable condition really is, beyond all belief, beyond thought, beyond concepts.  Anything else is simply delusional existence, one where we fantasize about being separate, creating a self and all the pantheon of our imagined existence.  None of that is real, even though we try our best to make it seem that way.

When I instantly became fully integrated with the bright condition of Dharmakaya, I didn’t worry about self or memories of a life not fully lived.  I could see with great compassion that this old self was nothing more than a figment of my own imagination.  That life, so quickly fleeting, was just a mirage.  It would soon be forgotten by everyone it had ever touched in any way.

Being instantly present, as the light of Dharmakaya, meant that I was not clinging to a life that could never really have existed in any permanent way.  It existed as an appearance, nothing more than that.  All the energy that can be had anywhere at any time came together to make it so.  The dream of life is nothing more than a manifestation of a reflection, created by passing thoughts, within consciousness that cannot be located as it transmigrates.

I wasn’t under the delusion that my old self was separate.  It never was that way.  From the moment that I was born, I could see the interconnectedness and the oneness of existence.  I remembered my transmigration from my last lifetime in a rather vivid way.  I was fortunate to have been utterly destroyed in war, blown up in the worst way while having the presence of mind to navigate all those explosive endings, which were, of course, my beginnings in this lifetime.  This, it seems only natural to conclude, led to the most rewarding memory of a death experience that one could ever have.  Nothing about the energetic dimension disturbed me in any way, even though an untrained mind would find sufficient cause to utterly break down in that.

We take all misfortune as an opportunity, when we are a Spiritual Practitioner.  We don’t differentiate between good and bad.  We simply take what we have and transform that into whatever we need.

I’ve been trying my best to explain that you will need this power as well, if you wish to navigate the death bardo, as well as the bardos of life and dreams.  I didn’t come back in order to tell you what something is, I came back in order to give you some hope, some opportunity that you will be able to have power when you need it.  You don’t need to absolutely freak out the next time that you die, letting yourself to be hurtled into disastrous lifetime after lifetime, with no hope of ever being able to navigate this dream.  I’m saying to all who will listen that you must begin your Spiritual Practice at once.  Here is the key of Bodhicitta.  Here is the opportunity to awaken at once.  Such power cannot be exceeded by anyone.  Here, it’s yours for the taking.

When we awaken, all things are possible.  We no longer need to be this pathetic being who does not know what is going on here.  We can find instant bright awareness, with no boundaries anywhere.  Our own awakening annihilates every obstacle.  Our only need to be here is in helping all these sleeping Buddhas who have forgotten that they are not separate. 

This is not a personal quest.  Your awakening liberates all beings.  We can look for peace or happiness, only to find turbulent disappointment, or we can awaken.  This is up to us.

Blessings in Light,               

Robert Aho