They weren’t just passing through. One of the kids who had grown up at Claymont, an intentional Work community, had brought a couple of friends for the weekend. They’d traveled to tend young trees along Bullskin Run which traverses the front field of Claymont’s property. Around four hundred saplings were planted a few years ago to remediate the creek’s eroding banks. The trees badly needed weeding and mulching.
An impromptu work weekend ensued with the edition of several older community members. I was one of them, showing up Saturday morning together with sunshine and delightfully warm weather for February. We worked in pairs. My partner and I decided to “stop” after tending each tree. During one of these pauses, as I sensed myself and looked up at the azure blue sky, I had a moment.
The tree I was weeding and mulching, the ground, the sky, the whole of Nature—were connected, were all the same WE. It was as if I had left my ordinary world and passed through into another. In this other world, there was no sense of You and Me, because nothing was external. We were all part of a sameness. It felt like I was inside the reality of Reciprocal Maintenance, or Reciprocal Feeding, if you prefer.
Passing Through
In my awareness, I experienced both worlds existing side by side, intermingled. A parallel Universe that is just as real as the world that we think we live in. But in that World, which I didn’t perceive as above or below, but just next door, everything was part of everything else. There was a delicious flow between everything in this reality—the feeling of “we.”
That world appeared, just waiting for me to step in. I saw that Nature lives here, the animals live here, probably native peoples live here. So why don’t I? Because I separate myself. I prefer to live in what Gurdjieff calls a state of sleep, or in one of the “lower worlds” with tons more “laws.” By seeing myself as unique, as “myself,” I separate everything into dualism. You vs me, that vs this. Right vs Wrong.
What if the great teachers were all pointing at the same thing? Trying in their different ways to get us there—nirvana, love, enlightenment, transformation—to pass through the veil of separateness into the World of Unity. Of WE, of US. Of LOVE.
If that’s the case, then it doesn’t really matter that there are different teachings, because the teaching is given to us from our own side of the veil where we’re still separate. Each separate self needs a teaching it can resonate with. Until eventually, that self “passes through” to the world where everything fits together as one whole. Where there is no separate self, no teaching, just reciprocal Being.
Nice one Roberta
I call those moments, rare as they are, a moment of grace. All life is one and everything that lives is holy. Saying it is one thing and seeing it is another. Seeing is also a gift of grace.
On the different ways. I remember from my Buddhist days that the Buddha provided 84,000 doors to enlightenment. But it is all the same in the Dharmakaya!
Yes! Thank you for the sharing/reminder. The Grace is always present, it is “we” who are missing/lost/asleep/comfortably numb…etc ad infinitum.
PS…it’s not so much
(as I understand it ; ) that there are different teachings as that there is a virtual infinity of different teachers all (at best) pointing at the same realities. We go wrong when we (or the “teacher” doesn’t connect with (or loses that connection) with the reality and succumbs to the delusion/temptation that their particular iteration is the “right” one…which then only dis-serves to deepen our subjective nature.
I’m so glad for you to make that Real connection. Good work.
Thank you Margaret. I was blest, and hope that moment serves as a bread-crumb for me to find my way back.
Yes, a nice one! Reminds me of concept of OLBOGMEK , “there are not different religions, there is only one God”.