“Behind the Beyond”

By Michael Erlewine

I love the image of “luge” or “Bobsled” where a team or a person runs, pushing the sled as hard as possible, then jumps on, tucks their head in, and coasts down the track. It’s the coasting or flow that I am pointing at.

Have you ever reached a point where you could just slide in life, slide on by? And what direction we slide makes no difference. They all feel the same. In other words, we have run out of directions to go. What is there to do then?

Perhaps nothing, yet how comfortable are we doing nothing? And what does that even mean?

NOTHING IS THE SAME

Doing nothing is the same as everything that we do means the same. It makes no difference. How do we live with that?

As Chuck Berry put it “No Particular Place to Go.”

Well, to me, when I feel like that, what I seem to do is slow down, and take each step not only more deliberately, but enunciating each move and action, because there is no place I’m going or going to get to. It’s very Zen, in my opinion.

In other words, the goal becomes the process itself rather than any state or destination I will get to other than whatever is at hand and in the moment. This sounds very dharmic to me.

Every second becomes grist for the mill and there is no hurry to get anywhere because the process itself has become the point of it all, where we are going.

Certainly, this slows us down because of ‘what’s the point’, and I just defined it. Perhaps this is dharmic or is this a new form of retirement. Where do we go from here?

We don’t ‘go’ or ‘get’ anywhere because we are already here and now. My guess is that we relax and get comfortable in the present moment and, as the Mahasiddha Tilopa said, don’t alter the present moment. Just rest in it.

If you have nowhere to go, you are already there, because the tip of the top is a level plane. As to what’s behind the beyond, we have a torus, so nothing is lost. Or as William Blake said “Nothing of equal value is lost.”

Of great interest to me is how does dharma as elucidated in the sacred scriptures occurs naturally in the world in general as you and I live it. In other words, we can’t all be expert dharma practitioners (I wish), so how can we look inward at our life to see if we naturally are already doing, each in our own way, what the dharma textbooks profess.

The dharma existed before the historical Buddha in India and has to be everywhere in the world. It’s not like the truth for us was ever not just as it is right now, and this from beginningless time. And so, IMO it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to realizing that the truth of dharma was and is always right there, meaning right here. Even the word ‘Buddha’ means awareness, so apparently all that we are missing is to develop the awareness of the truth, of what is.

In other words, I can’t believe we are all completely unaware of the dharma, but rather we have not developed our awareness or perhaps even tried. What if we try? This is called ‘dharma practice’.

[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]

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As Bodhicitta is so precious,

May those without it now create it,

May those who have it not destroy it,

And may it ever grow and flourish.