Insight

Amazing how suddenly insight bubbles up from seemingly nowhere and enters into consciousnesses on the most fragile and diaphanous wings imaginable to float along from flower to flower until,  just as suddenly, it disappears leaving hardly a trace. How many times I have had original, even profound thoughts,  only to find they have utterly disappeared when I get around to thinking about them again. Maybe that is the key; insight does not arise so much from thinking as from grace. Somehow the thinking process is too opaque to allow the light to shine through.

So today while walking on the Biltmore Estate which is only minutes away from my home I found myself thinking about the nature of reality and had the following thoughts or maybe even insights after listening to Thich Nhat Hanh speaking about the nature of duality and how energy and matter are one; sometimes particle and sometimes wave but never destroyed only transformed.

Many of our fears or perhaps our most primordial fear is the fear of cessation or death. Our thoughts and ego or personality can not quite release their grip on the illusion of separateness and strive to maintain this separateness at all cost and through all manner of defense. We just can't quite accept that holding onto the ego will lead to the opposite of what we seek, which is the absence of suffering.

And the idea of dropping the ego seems suicidal, especially in our very deluded society. So we are trapped in a cage (our own very specially constructed even guided cage) pacing from end to end alternately embracing or rejecting the self and all its complex delusions. Feeling pleasure we are temporarily mollified, feeling pain we flee.

So to be free of the cage we have to be free from the self. Another way of saying this is to become the cage. If their are no frontiers, no separateness, then the cage is just an illusion. And this is something that science in its limited way is beginning to understand.

So to abandon the ego is to be free of the illusion of duality. The Buddhist have the idea of dependant arising. Nothing has any fundamental concrete identity because everything depends on everything else. Without this than not that. Reality exists because we think it exists. If there is no thinking, no perception or mind construct, than there can be no separate reality since duality is an illusion. What else is there? There is the "glue" that always was and will be without birth or death. We could replace the word "glue" with spirit or God or God realization or truth, whatever word that conveys essentially the mysterious and unknowable force that unifies and supports all phenomenon. This is the essence of Thich Nhat Hanh's idea of interbeing. There are fundamentally no boundaries.

So where does fear, in all of its related forms, come from? They all arise from the same place, they have the same origination, and that is mind which is the seat of dualitstic thinking. And according to Buddhist philosophy, dualism is an illusion. If one could eliminate dualistic thinking then fear would be replaced with liberation.