“Zenfully Quool Quotes”
“The Art of Living” By Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh
There is a deep connection between all our different bodies.
Our physical body, our buddha body, our spiritual practice body,
our body outside the body, our continuation body, and
our cosmic body…
Inter-are.
Our human body contains both our cosmic body and
the true nature of the cosmos—reality itself,
beyond all words, labels, and perceptions.
Our cosmic body is the universe, creation, the masterpiece of “God”.
Looking deeply into the cosmos,
we see its true nature. And
we can say that the true nature of the cosmos is “God”.
Looking deeply into creation, we see the creator.
At first it seems as though things exist outside one another.
The sun is not the moon.
This galaxy is not another galaxy.
You are outside me.
The father is outside the son.
But
looking deeply, we see that things are interwoven.
We cannot take the rain out of the flower
or the oxygen out of the tree.
We cannot take the father out of the son
or the son out of the father.
We cannot take anything out of anything else.
We are the mountains and rivers; we are the sun and stars.
Everything inter-is.
This is what the physicist David Bohm called
“the implicate order.”
At first we see only “the explicate order,”
but
as soon as we realize that things do not exist outside one another,
we touch the deepest level of the cosmic.
We realize that we cannot take the water out of the wave.
And
we cannot take the wave out of the water.
Just as the wave is the water itself,
we are the ultimate.
Many still believe that “God” can exist separately from the cosmos …
his creation.
But you cannot remove God from yourself;
you cannot remove the ultimate from yourself.
Nirvana is there within you.
If we want to touch the ultimate,
we have to look within our own body and not outside.
Contemplating deeply the body from within,
we can touch reality in itself.
If your mindfulness and concentration are deep
as you practice walking meditation in nature, or
as you contemplate a beautiful sunset or your own human body,
you can touch the true nature of the cosmos.
When we practice mindfulness,
we can get many kinds of relief.
But the greatest relief and peace comes when we are able
to touch our nature of no birth and no death.
This is something doable.
It’s something possible.
And it gives us a lot of freedom.
If we are in touch with our cosmic body, our God body, our nirvana body,
then we are no longer afraid of dying.
This is the cream of the Buddha’s teaching and practice.
There are those who can die happily, in peace, because
they have touched this insight.
