Steven Glazer:
Sacredness is not understood within a particular religious
framework but instead as growing out of two basic qualities of our
experience: awareness and wholeness. Awareness is a natural,
self-manifesting quality: it is our ability to perceive,
experience, and know. A sense of awareness can be cultivated (or
enhanced) through mindfulness or attentiveness. The development of
awareness enables us to bring a greater and greater sense of
presence to the repercussions and meaning of our lives.
Wholeness is the inherent, seamless, interdependent quality of the
world. Wholeness, indeed, is the fact of the matter: the things of
this world (including us) are already connected, are already in
relationship, are already in union. Wholeness, however, can be
cultivated within us by experiencing this nondual quality of the
world. Through experiences of awareness and wholeness, we begin to
establish the view of the sacred.
Sogyal Rinpoche, from Glimpse of the Day
A wave in the sea, seen in one way, seems to have a distinct
identity, an end and a beginning, a birth and a death. Seen in
another way, the wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the
behavior of water, “empty” of any separate identity but “full” of
water. So when you really think about the wave, you come to realize
that it is something that has been made temporarily possible by
wind and water, and is dependent on a set of constantly changing
circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every
other wave.
I often think of the great masters and imagine beings who have
their depth of realization as magnificent mountain eagles, who soar
above both life and death and see them for what they are, in all
their mysterious, intricate interrelation.
To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of
realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries
that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each
other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality
as being “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.”
What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly and with total
understanding, is that flowing movement and that unbroken
wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call “life” and what we, in
our ignorance, call “death” are merely different aspects of that
wholeness and that movement.
If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our
smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real
consequences throughout the universe. Throw a pebble into a pond.
It sends a shiver across the surface of the water. Ripples merge
into one another and create new ones. Everything is inextricably
interrelated: We come to realize that we are responsible for
everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves,
everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.
