Finding the Mirror

How often have you said to yourself, “I must concentrate; I must improve”? How often have you said, “I don’t know what to do”? You think you are missing something, so you try to follow instructions; if you have none, you make some up.

But it is all so much lighter than that. Instead of trying to understand or analyze, just be the one who is asking. What does it feel like to be the one who feels? Can you expand that feeling and open it up?

Look closely: is there really a distinction between seeing and what is seen, between hearing and the sound you hear?

Look for a place before having and losing, before yes and no. Find the mirror before the image has appeared: the potential to reflect is a kind of shining.

Look for silence, a texture to experience that has the feeling of comfort, cool and balanced. Then relax into being itself. This is not something to possess, not something for “you” to enjoy. Let go of the thought that “this is happening” and “that is happening.” Instead, follow the road that has never been created.

Open completely, so that there are not dimensions left that need to be explored. Live in the Garden of Eden, with abundance everywhere.

You do not need to feel limited by the regime of mind. Hugging and kissing, laughing tears of joy, there is no separation. There never was and there never will be.

Mind moves with remarkable speed. Like the letters for ‘hello’ written on water, its presentations dissolve instantly. Like clouds in the sky, its constructions never really take form. Obstacles that manifest are not there, they do not come from or got to. Within experience, there is noticing and sensing, showing, and shining. Rhythms give rise to living experience. Seeing this, you enter a magical realm.

♦

From Gesture of Great Love: Embracing the Silent Heart of Being Now by Tarthang Tulku (Dharma Publishing, 2022). 

For more from this book, check out Dharma College’s new course, “Gesture of Great Love,” a series of three six-week courses. Learn more here.