There can be a subtle assumption in spiritual practice that our true nature is present when experience feels clear, open, peaceful, or awakened, and somehow obscured when experience becomes confused, painful, mundane, or contracted.
But what if nothing that happened today placed you outside of Buddha nature?
Not for a second. Not for a tenth of a second.
The sounds, thoughts, emotions, confusion, understanding, ordinary activity, and constant fluctuation of experience are not interruptions to awake nature. The pointing is far more immediate than that.
You Were Never Apart From Your Buddha Nature
Not for one single moment, one second, or one tenth of a second today, at any time, were you apart from your Buddha nature, your awake nature, your true nature.
It is literally everything.
What I’m pointing to, what I’m talking about, I call all kinds of things.
I call it realization.
I call it the Dharma.
I call it awake nature.
These are all words, of course, and they’re just pointing.
Sometimes they’re pointing to aspects. But even if they’re pointing to aspects, every aspect is the whole.
Every part is the whole.
Every moment is eternity.
Every flavor is the flavor of no flavor.
Every taste is every taste.
Every single taste is every possible taste.
Every sound is the hum of the entire universe.
Every color is the color of no color and the color of every color.
Buddha Nature Includes Every Texture of Experience
What I’m pointing to is everything that’s happening right now.
Every single point of experience.
Every single texture of experience.
The thoughts moving through the mind.
The doubt.
The frustration.
The feeling of triumph.
The feeling of understanding.
The feeling of confusion.
The thoughts, the emotions, the sensations, the movement of the body.
Everything that has happened to you all day long.
Every single thing, with no exceptions at all, was perfectly functioning Buddha nature, perfectly functioning empty awake nature.
And it continues endlessly and timelessly because this is not happening in time.
This Is Not Happening on a Timeline
This is not happening on a timeline.
A timeline is too limited.
A timeline is a limiting instrument that structures things in such a way that we can think about them.
But eternity means not within time. Not within the framework of time.
Everything is here now.
And this isn’t a now that is based on a past and a future.
It is everything just as it is, exactly as it is.
Buddha Nature Includes the Relative and the Absolute
It’s the conventional.
It’s the conventional textures.
It’s the relative textures.
It’s the absolute aspect, awareness.
It’s consciousness.
It’s miscommunication.
It’s frustration.
It’s mental confusion.
It’s emotional dysregulation.
It’s birth.
It’s death.
It’s everything in between.
Nothing is being excluded from what is being pointed to.
The Absolute Ordinary Moment
And it is the absolute ordinary, exact, mundane moment right now, with all of its fluctuations and features.
It is endlessly changing.
Even when I said “right now,” and I say “right now,” and I say “right now,” it is always endlessly fluctuating and changing.
Never grasping.
Never fully forming.
Never becoming.
And also never not being here.
Buddha Nature Is Everything, and Nothing at All
It is literally everything.
And it is also nothing at all.
This is what is being pointed to.