dappled light

I am sitting in woodland and a dappled light is filtering through the leaves. Nearby, I notice a spider’s web and yet it is only visible when the sunlight falls directly upon it. The rest of the time I cannot see it at all. And this is true of so much of life. We think we know things, we think we understand things, and yet with all this knowledge, we end up missing most of life, at least the important things. There is so much that is not accessible to rational thinking, to our logical mind. There is so much which can be experienced directly, which can be felt, but cannot be captured in words and thoughts, theories, concepts, ideas. Only when we drop all that and shine the sunlight of our unwavering awareness on what is, then we can see it for ourself. We can feel the mystery of existence all around us and inside us too. This is the real beauty of life, to feel this vibrant mystery, to live it, to be it.

For this we have to put down our rational mind, set aside knowledge, and from to time at least, live in direct perception. Then our own awareness will have the intensity of the sunlight. All manner of wonders, hitherto unseen, will come into our vision, into our world, into our life. They are there all along but we lose sight of them. As always on the spiritual journey, we are not just seeing things on the outside that were hitherto unseen, but on the inside too. Our inner being is full of mystery. It is divine in its nature, beautiful beyond compare. All this can only be seen, felt, lived, appreciated when the rational mind is set aside for a while.

Thoughts have a role to play. Knowledge, ideas, have a certain utility but they are not fundamental to life. They are a small part of it, a secondary thing, and we have become too wedded to them. Let us instead allow the light of our awareness to become as strong as the sunlight, at least from time to time, like the dappled light in this wood. We too can come to appreciate the great mystery of life. We can live that mystery. We can be that mystery. In fact, we are that mystery and have always been so and the spiritual journey is about recognising that fact and coming to appreciate life to the full.