Stories And Sutras For Timelessness And Inner Peace

From a Rinpoche's dharma talk in Bhutan, a series of Buddhist sutras, and a number of insights from various spiritual traditions, this discourse articulates the sense of urgency for realizing the truth in this lifetime. At the same time, the urgency is lessoned by the idea that we are infinite beings, with all the time in the world to spare. The rate of our awakening is the rate at which we experience more joy, love, and peace, now and in all of our lives. Will you capitalize on this precious opportunity of being human to find the truth?

Transcript

Welcome to Stories and Sutras for Timelessness and Inner Peace.

I once heard a Dharma talk from a Rinpoche while visiting the kingdom of Bhutan.

From what I have gathered,

A Rinpoche is an enlightened being that has been recognized as a teacher of Dharma for many lifetimes.

The teaching of Dharma is the relaying of timeless universal truths to any and all spiritual seekers.

In this Dharma talk,

When the Rinpoche was asked to describe himself,

He invited us to imagine a stone placed at the bottom of a stream.

And after 500 years,

When it is picked up,

The stone is still dry.

Even then,

Far from being able to see myself in such a way,

I felt like I understood the meaning of his response.

That his innermost being was the stone,

And that the external world was the stream.

For our inner being to remain dry at the bottom of a stream would mean that we would understand our true self to not only be different from the external world,

But also invulnerable to its ways.

Years later,

When a friend's father was asked what he had learned through all his years of life,

He shared the following thought.

I have learned that each person has their own private seat in the universe,

And it is a space that only they can go.

It is a space where they are safe,

And they know themselves to be love.

Finding our seat in this way creates in us a sense of invulnerability,

Because that seat is the very cord which connects us to the creator of an infinite and boundless existence.

As part of creation,

We are constantly in communication with our creator,

As if we were an extension of it.

Almost as if the center of our existence,

That seat and that cord,

Is a bridge to an altogether different dimension of reality,

Where we are held in a perfect love and unshakable peace for all of eternity.

Once we know this dimension to be available to us and choose to visit it more and more often,

The idea we were ever separate from it becomes an inconceivable impossibility.

This experience is similar to emerging out of a delusional state or waking from a dream.

It has been shared by many masters and sages that the experience of crossing that bridge and waking from this dream of separation is a gift of indescribable value,

So immensely fulfilling that it outshines any accomplishment or provision found in the world as we know it.

Indeed,

We have dreamed for a long,

Long time,

And are so convinced of the legitimacy of the dream that the traces of the cord which connects us to this amazing gift are invisible to us.

Although the reality of perfect love is seemingly lost to us,

It is still there,

Offering its hand of salvation and grace for us to take in each and every moment.

Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching,

Heaven's way does not contend,

Yet it certainly triumphs.

It does not speak,

Yet it certainly answers.

It does not summon,

Yet things come by themselves.

It seems to be at rest,

Yet it certainly has a plan.

Heaven's net is very vast,

It is sparsely meshed,

Yet nothing slips through.

There is an old story.

The angels in heaven were worried that mankind was becoming too greedy in their use of God.

They decided then to hide it,

To protect mankind from itself.

One angel proposed that God be hidden on the highest mountain peak or the deepest depth of the ocean.

No,

The other angels responded,

Mankind would surely find it there eventually.

Well,

Another angel shared,

Should we put it in a far away solar system?

No,

The other angels replied again,

Mankind will eventually reach there too.

There was silence in the heavenly courtyard until one angel said,

I've got it.

We will hide God inside of man because this is the surely place that they will never look.

The courtyard agreed.

And so for many years and many lifetimes,

Mankind has sought for God in every direction other than in.

Paradoxically,

Despite our misdirected searching,

Our relationship with God has never been tampered or strained.

In fact,

God has been waiting eagerly yet patiently for our rediscovery of its presence.

The story of the prodigal son is as such.

A son departs from home with an inheritance from his father,

And while away,

He spends inappropriately and loses his father's entire fortune.

For years,

The son suffered in the depths of despair,

Deeming himself to be guilty for this great stumble.

Yet when he returned home,

The father threw a feast and a celebration for his son and exclaimed his joy that his one true treasure,

His son,

Had come home.

All of heaven rejoiced with the father and the ripples of bliss from the celebration echoed throughout all of creation forever and ever.

It is true that the searching for the qualities of God outside of ourself has led to lifetimes of despair and guilt,

A series of lived experiences known in Buddhism as the Wheel of Samsara.

And it is also true that this endless cycle of desire and disappointment will continue until we are ready to return home.

All this being said,

We can take great comfort in that we are not the only ones longing for our return.

The great poet Rumi shares,

That which you seek is seeking you.

In A Course in Miracles,

We are encouraged to remind ourselves that even God is incomplete without me.

I have also heard that for every one step we take towards God,

God takes ten thousand steps towards us.

Where God may take the final steps to greet us,

It is still up to us to align our willpower and take the initial action.

In Buddhism,

The form that you take in your next life depends on your actions in this lifetime.

Forms vary from everything imaginable,

Including animals,

Aspects of nature,

And other human experiences.

The most capable form for breaking out of this endless cycle of birth and rebirth is the human form,

As we are capable of self-awareness and existential inquiry.

One Buddhist sutra explained the opportunity as such,

That having a human birth is as unlikely as an ancient sea turtle coming up to the surface of the ocean's expanse every 500 years,

And in this one particular instance,

When the head of the turtle emerged,

Its head gets lodged in a piece of driftwood that happened to be afloat at the same space at the exact time.

If you can imagine that for a moment,

The unlikelihood is quite unfathomable.

Knowing that it is rare to have such an experience,

The sutra continued to encourage us to capitalize.

Club the pig right on the snout,

It said.

Clean the lamp while it is still warm.

The passages from this sutra seem to point to the urgency of seeking and finding God now,

As opposed to another lifetime where you might be a shark or a deer and can only think of basic survival needs.

Alternatively,

One might say there is no sense of urgency due to the length of how long we have been playing this game of searching for God.

One sutra invited us to imagine a mountain six miles high,

Six miles wide,

And six miles long.

Every 500 years,

A dove flies across the mountaintop carrying a cloth in its beak,

Barely grazing the surface of the mountain.

The amount of time that it would take for that mountain to erode completely is the amount of time that we have been in the cycle of birth and death.

Even still,

We arrive in the here and now at an intersection of our existences where neither past nor future exist.

In this moment,

This lifetime,

All outcomes are possible,

Which creates an emphasis on our ability in this moment to make a choice.

The first choice is to search,

And in the right direction,

Because everything you seek is found in God who is not only within you,

But also actively seeking for you as well.

Knock and the door shall be opened.

Seek and you will find.

We recognize truth by the feeling of peace which accompanies it.

The irrefutability of truth runs directly contrary to the ways of the external world.

This is because the external world necessitates perception,

Which operates on the fundamental premises of evaluation and judgment.

No truth whatsoever can be found in a space that is dominated exclusively by shifting perceptions.

The byproduct of this ceaseless stream of variance is ignorance,

Which is the root of our fear and suffering.

When we accept that there is nothing to know in the external world because there is no truth there,

We have no choice but to turn to God.

The truth that God is and makes available to us is an experience of perfect love,

Completely stabilized in a timeless and boundless living.

We are not only freed from fear,

But we also awaken from the idea that we could have ever known anything other than God's perfect love.

We safely discover that the external world is and has always been without any substance or meaning,

And that it poses no real threat to us.

Our Rinpoche friend knew his being to be always dry,

Unaffected and safe from the currents that only seem to envelop us.

This Rinpoche found the seat of inner peace and discovered a truth that is as timeless as God.

I pray that we all,

Who are in this world,

May be able to find the truth that is timeless and boundless.

I pray that we all can find this seat and find it in this lifetime.

Amen.

Thank you.