There are images for it. The box of treasure you sit on, extending your hand in begging. Though the box belongs to you, it never occurs to you there could be something inside it. Or this one: the jewel you know to be in a teacher’s pocket, and you’re so busy following the teacher, trying to get your hand in there, that you’ve never thought to reach Inside your own pocket, the one that goes everywhere you go. The geode, what it seems to be on its uninteresting surface, the amazement of what turns out to be concealed beneath the grime and dust.
When something cracks the homely rock that an ordinary, imperfect life seems to be, and the person whose life it’s been is dazzled by the preciousness that’s revealed, the feeling is always this: I knew all along. I didn’t realize I knew, but now I see somewhere in me I did.
The revealed thing is deeply familiar, like a part of your body.
The revealed thing is deeply familiar, like a part of your body. You have come home. You’ve been carrying home with you all your life, through all the troubles. All the time you thought you needed to recover, to patch together a life, to process, build self-esteem, make amends — all that time, there was something in you that had never been hurt. That had never harmed anyone else. All that time: heaven in your pocket, in that threadbare thing that is your life.
Your story.
* * *
This is what people report, when they wake up: they say, Oh my God! It could have been this way all along! They also want to know how on earth they missed it. What blinded them to something so obvious, so right-in-their-face. How can they have failed to see, all those years, what’s as ever-present and abundant as air, as light, wind?
How come everybody else doesn’t feel it, sense it, taste it? How can anyone not realize what they’re positively slathered in?
But the person who’s just mysteriously slipped out of the deep sleep knows how that can be. How every one of us misses this thing that’s just now become so obvious it’s like the light of a thousand suns: the only truth there is. Anybody who has (you might say) come to can remember what it was like before. Before: when the ebb and flow of life was cause for distress, or reason for satisfaction, relief. When all of that seemed to be what constituted a life, or what broke it. When hope and memory and longing were the fuel that kept the movement going.
A person who has “come to” looks around at others, recognizes herself, himself. Suddenly we are all the same — are all truly alike, whatever the particulars. We are kindred in our entanglement with event and circumstance. We wish things were different. But what is now known (more significant by far) is that we are also the same on the deep interior, the essence so sweet, so free, so utterly unburdened. So unworried about time, about loss and having.
* * *
When the essence comes to the surface — is known, felt, worn like the most luscious garment — when that happens, and there is the recognition that others have this same deliciousness within and yet do not feel it, there can be a little sadness, and bewilderment. (This happened for me.)
Or somebody may try to get their hand into this one’s pocket, now spilling with riches, as if this thing weren’t everywhere, always — as it if were possible to escape heaven.
This has been the way for millennia, this misunderstanding about who “had” it, about its being a kind of property, an achievement, a prize. Something to earn. The teacher (or the acquaintance, whoever it may be) says no, the kingdom of heaven is within. But who is willing to believe it? Who’s ready to set aside everything else, for this?
It is plain, it is bare, undecorated. It has no features. It is the beginning, what we start with. It’s like saying there could be a human body, a life, without carbon atoms in it, without electrons and a nucleus. This is not an achievement. It is about existence.
One teacher called it the ground of being. It is not about virtue, about wisdom or compassion or creativity, though surely these can be among its outward expressions. They ripen inevitably from it. But the ground of being does not have to work at kindness, at love. It needs to cultivate nothing. And being kind as a way to get to the elemental — as a route to what you fundamentally are — is roundabout.
And all the talking, all the writing, the head-scratching — it may be of little use. Open your eyes, just open them, the ground of being would say, if it had a mouth. If it had a mouth it would sing.
It would weep — with gratitude. And with aching that everyone, before long, would know the thing for what it is.