Photo by David Filippone
ABIDING IN THOUGHT…
I can ponder and perpend what is immediate and beautiful in my life… right here, this instant… the bright sunlight filtering through the trees touches a candle at the window… it’s shaped like a pear, now lit up in glorious peach… it catches my eye, and thumps right into my heart. I appreciate the vision, the moment, the light breeze, the feel of my life right now… full and available and lit from within. …. I notice my ensuing thinking seems unburdened by the usual sameness, the need for substance and judgments about what is good or not good for me, my conceptual self-centered worlding… but now, without that… there is a delicious lightness…
Rinpoche points out: “Meditating on beauty, we can realize beauty… we can catch a glimpse of our own beauty reflected—if we can take the time to acknowledge our relationship, and reflect on this reflection… beauty is recognized. Our love of what is beautiful is a reflection; it emerges from deep within, and sees its face in the rose [or the sunlit candle]. If what we love is part of us, then we, too, are worthy of love.
That line of recognition sent forth by our sense faculties—if we could appreciate it, challenge it, transform it, then the recognition of beauty could become a path of beauty, a path of self-appreciation and self-contentment, and ultimately, a path of freedom.
… ‘Love of Beauty’, by Tarthang Tulku, p.1“At first, you will experience abiding [in thought] as a special event, something like ‘stopping’ time. As you grow more familiar with it, however, you will realize that you can abide within the flow of linear time. The two temporal dynamics can unfold simultaneously. p.262
[We can see in] a new light. We discover this knowledge by relaxing into it, letting go of our perpetual concern that we are somehow at fault or at risk. The feeling is liberating, like warm sunlight after a fierce winter storm. At home in a zeroless space abiding, we recognize that we have the power to shape the universe instead of simply inhabiting it, to become the architects of a knowledge that does not depend on our constructs or determine our reactions. p. 66
….’Dynamics of Time and Space’, by Tarthang Tulku
