the small and the large

The small is as significant as the large

I don't know whether you've noticed that the human mind loves to make value judgments. We regard some things as important or significant, and others as unimportant or insignificant. And we tend to do this without even really being fully conscious, fully aware, that we are doing it. And this evaluation tends to go on in all areas of our life. 

We are evaluating our relationships with other people. Some are deemed significant and others less significant. We are judging affairs in the news: what's important what's unimportant. And objects, things around us, are also coming under this scrutiny that likes to evaluate. And often when we are caught up in our thinking mind, this evaluation is rather trivial. It's as if we are trying to reduce everything to a number. It could be money: something that's worth a lot of money is more important than something that is worth little money. Or it could be a number in some other form: a tragedy in the news is more significant, the bigger the number of people affected.

This approach to value based on a quantity means that we've lost touch with what's really important, the essence of things. We've lost touch with quality. And if we really bring our awareness to quality, then even the smallest thing can be of equal quality to the biggest thing. The briefest momentary experience can have a tremendous quality to it. It could be a smile exchanged with a stranger in the street. It could be a moment of full awareness, watching a dog lapping at water.

Right now I'm sitting by a rock and my attention is drawn to a spot of light. It must be a tiny fleck of a mineral, reflecting the sunlight. It's minuscule. And yet if I stop for a moment and allow my full awareness to rest on this tiny spot of light, the quality of the moment is sublime. I can simply disappear, so that there is no distance, no separation between me and this spot of light. There is just a spot of light. And the quality in this, the quality of the moment, cannot be surpassed.

The same effect could occur if I am looking at something vast: a mountain range, the open sky, but it's no more significant. There's nothing greater in that apparently bigger experience, than in this tiny minuscule one. If I am totally present, then the quality is the same, and those moments have the same value to me. They are of equal significance.

This doesn't just go for how we relate to our experiences of the external world. Going inside, too, the most subtle exquisite inner experience – however momentary – is of equal significance to the most vast, or perhaps the most intense, inner experience. One cannot place one higher than the other. And if we find ourselves doing that, regarding one experience as more significant than another, we have gone astray, and somewhere we have lost touch with the essence of the experience, the essence of the moment.

When we are truly resting in our being, when life is being lived from this place, every moment and every thing and every experience is of equal significance.