Seeing the Second Sun

During the school year the coffee shop was always crowded, but in the summer it was quiet and the outdoor seating was empty. I would go to watch the people, and fill up on coffee. I had been studying meditation, reading every book I could find on the things of the spirit. Jobless and bored I sat, empty of thought, with the heat of the summer, and my coffee. Those summer days, back when I had no cares used to last seemingly forever, and the friends of my youth I remember with a smile. For a long time I had tried to embrace the good, trying to raise the lever of positives over negative, trying and trying.


On this day however, I was not trying. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do. I was nothing, but what I saw was everything. It came into my consciousness like an orange wave full of white light. I saw up and out, over in the sky another sun, it was a dimple of entirety, everything all at once and forever. It lasted for a brief moment and filled my mind and breath with itself, a view so full and total that it was one thing, one everything…the words fall short.

 

In the past there have been terms for this experience, but modern man knows nothing of it. No longer do people have the time to seek the spirit, to allow the universe to unfold their view, to teach them the secrets of mind and being. Telling you that the world, all life including the earth and every person, including the stars and cosmos are one whole does not coincide with the reality of the modern mind, but it is so. The stars and people and the earth are not connected like we think, it is one reality, a unified reality with no separation from here to there, or any distance between space.

 

We are an organism of vast and simple unity. It may be that through life our purpose is to actually see this reality. To experience this unity may be the thing that puts in perspective what we deem so important. Since that moment searching for states of mind, and experiences in general have become like looking at the ocean all day. Everything has become blended in sameness, the highs and lows, the gradations of quality have become simple and even.


In my case it was relaxation after great effort that allowed this view to unfold. It is like studying to gain great knowledge, pouring through books, themes and words filling the mind. Then one day you turn the page and it is an empty white canvas where you were expecting paragraphs. Imagine that page being an expansive universe, but you're not just seeing it, you have the sense that you are that, the feeling that you are one unified whole. Perhaps another way of describing this is, “Tathagatagharbha”… The mind of the Buddha.


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