The True Body of the Buddha
How did the Buddha describe his awakening?
No perceiver apart from perceptions, everything constantly changing, every thing a part of all others — not off in some metaphysical or spiritual realm, but right here in our space-time-energy-matter multiverse, as a fundamental reality of it. Any way we devise to examine ourselves and the world, from neuroscience to physics, this view continues to be useful.
Up close, the billiard-ball universe of the Enlightenment dissolves into seafoam, uncountable bubbles forming and vanishing into one another forever. And somehow because of that, conscious percepts start and shift and stop, then start again, then one day don’t start again.
Because my mind would be different if the world around me were different, my mind is as inseparable from the world as a lake from its bed or lightning from the atmosphere. The body’s the same. We and the world are constantly turning into one another. We are all intermelting forms taken by the stuff of the universe, like rippling folds on an infinite robe.
All the “stuff” that existed any time in the past is still here, it’s just taken a different shape. Time is change is time. The past isn’t behind us, it’s all around us — it is us!
Each of us is non-distinct from everything. The Buddha’s true body was the known universe and all else. So is mine, so is yours. It’s the only model made.
Yet here we are thinking about it. How does the stuff of the universe do that?
When it first arose, how was mind an option? How so when I woke up this morning?
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