In Buddhism, samsara refers to a certain way of experiencing reality that involves an endless creation of mental worlds, or mental constructs, to grapple with life so that we can find peace and fulfillment.  The process evokes suffering that ranges from chronic discontent to intense anguish, because the ultimate transience of things ensures that every mental world is punctuated with loss.

Sometimes I focus on these mental worlds and try to work out a solution, but you can’t argue with samsara.  Some things can’t be resolved on their own terms. Like loneliness.  Loneliness is an experience that knows no logical resolution.  Even when loneliness is placated, circumstances will leave us solitary once again, and this knowledge makes it impossible to imagine any truly satisfying outcome.

But outcomes are not what anyone really wants anyway.  It’s hard to break out of the habit of thinking in terms of strategies for controlling experience, because any attempt to do so is often felt as a strategy for controlling experience.  The only solution is to step outside the bounds of the problem, or to quit thinking about outcomes.

Don’t fall in love with a person.  Fall in love with the Divine.  And if someone’s form can open your eyes and heart to the Divine and awaken that light within you, that’s wonderful.  The form will change, but the light will always be there.  The only reason this might sound unsatisfying at first is because we’re accustomed to focusing on the shapes in our perception and not the awareness itself which carries the shapes.  The awareness itself is more than we think.  I mean that very literally.

Loving the Divine is a very personal process.  The whole affair is entirely between you and God, or the one consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. The reason for this is obvious when you think about it.  If you wonder about how others see things and in particular, how they see you, your mind is postulating spheres of awareness outside itself, but all awareness is one awareness.  That means that you find your true connection with the minds of others not by looking outward but by looking deeper into your own.

You’re never alone.  Even at this very moment, your consciousness contains within it the whole.  You’re carrying all the love in the cosmos inside you, as though your mind contained an interdimensional portal to all existence.  Every now and then, you wander across the event horizon and glimpse the love-light of all beings, and it feels like opening the door to your back closet and discovering the light of a million galaxies… in your closet!  You were looking up into the sky, thinking you would find it there, but the whole time it was in the closet right next to you.

So the task is to pay attention to your own consciousness as though it were the only consciousness in existence, to momentarily set aside contemplation of minds separate from your own.  A bit of solipsism produces the paradoxical effect.  You turn your eyes away from the world for a moment, give it the cold shoulder and act like it doesn’t exist, and suddenly you see all of it more clearly than ever, because only then do you realize that when you look at the world, you’re looking at you.

If your mind awakens to the Divine within you, you will have found the object of your affections and every love you ever had or will have.  They all come from that light.  They are all emanations of that light.

So don’t fall in love with anyone.  First, fall in love with the presence in your heart, and then suddenly you’ll see that everyone around you is that presence.  Then you will be in love with everyone and everything, and no circumstance will be able to rob you of it.  Forms will come and go, but you’ll never feel separated from them.  You’ll sense a continuation that you can’t explain.

Yesterday, I went on a walk through the forest.  Somehow my attachment to outcomes had dissolved completely.  I felt as though I was new, as though I’d never been born, and the present moment felt like the only thing happening.  “Nothing else is happening,” I thought, somewhat dumbstruck.  Everything looked very beautiful.  I was astounded that trees were trees and plants were plants.  I couldn’t get over the feeling of complete, wordless awe that anything was in front of me at all.  I sat on a tree stump and listened to everything.  I leaned back and saw the stem of a plant in front of my face, and it was the most vivid thing I ever saw.  I held it in my hands.  I felt as though my consciousness had just been born.  I approached the massive trunk of a tree that had fallen across the trail.  I put my hands on the thick bark.  I was agog at the fact that it was there, not there across the trail, but there in reality, there at all.  What a wonder that anything exists.  I have had this as a thought, but yesterday I experienced it directly.

I can still feel it as I’m typing.  Nothing else is happening.  This moment, everything that is in front of you right now, contains everything.  The loving play of the divine mind.

OM GAM GANAPATAYEI NAMAHA