Manifest Love and The Unmanifest

These last few weeks of inquiry have been deeply touching. This is the reason for my using "love" in the title. It has been amazing to simply open the space for silence and then to meet the tender hearted honesty and bold courage of the people who have come forward to share their practice questions. Today I spoke very briefly about the unmanifest and the manifest; how our lives in all of their manifest complexity are complete expressions of the unmanifest, the One expression in all of its many forms. As they used to say in Sunday School, we are "the word made flesh." In the questioning it became clear that no matter what the struggle, what the personal story, the unmanifest - awareness itself - never abandons us. How could it? It is that which we truly are and is always, already present. Each person, through their willingness to be intimate with their experience, brought wisdom to the group. Dogen was very succinct when he said that the mind of awakening was "intimacy with all things." The stories were about addictions, compulsive behaviors, fears, attachments, trust, and faith. Human stories. What emerged in the inquiry was this amazing stream of teachings about how relaxing the fight with reality opens the door to freedom; how each supposed "problem" is the path to liberation; and how awareness - the unamnifest - is always awake to what is actually happening. When we are caught with the story (the manifest) we miss the vast spaciousness of the freedom (the unmanifest). As David Whyte so eloquently says in his poem "Faces at Braga," [reflcting on the work of wood carvers, delicatley fashioning the faces of Bodhisattvas in a Tibetan cave] - If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failing we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. This is the amazing thing about the inquiry groups - as people no longer "fight with their failings" but open to what is moving, what moves is liberated energy, freed from the contraction the fear, borne along by the mutual care and love of radical acceptance - the unmanifest in action. Flint